Just a Fluke?: Republican and religious opposition to women’s reproductive healthcare laws

The waves of ire are still rolling in over American radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke. For three straight days on his show he unleashed a diatribe defiling her name by mixing it with vernacular gems like “whore”, “slut”, “prostitute”, and statements like “she’s having so much sex she’s going broke.” This was all one man’s supposed “opinion” voiced in response to Fluke’s attempt to speak about women’s access to healthcare-provided contraception in a special legislative panel before the House of Representatives. The panel was comprised of all men, most having an affiliation with religious organizations—bishops, imams and the like. She was denied permission to speak on this panel, prompting several Democratic members of the House to walk out in protest during the discussion.

The fact that Sandra Fluke’s testimony didn’t contain anything about her personal need for contraceptives, but was rather a story about a friend of hers whose health insurance didn’t provide the birth-control pills that would have saved her from the disastrous effects of a hormone-related disorder, is interesting but not essential. Also, the fact that Rush Limbaugh, as Rachel Maddow and others pointed out, seemingly doesn’t understand how hormonal birth control works (he seemed to be under the impression that a woman takes a pill EVERY TIME she has sex, which explains to some degree his exasperation that she was running out so quickly) isn’t quite the main problem here either.

The religious institutions who are standing up in opposition to measures which force them to pay for their employees to get contraception through their insurance argue that this is a violation of the rights of religious conscience, of the rights for religious bodies to abstain (so to speak) from going against their own moral teachings. How they have decided which biblical laws to follow and which to ignore is another matter. But the argument is thus: The State cannot impose upon them any requirements which are not in accordance with their morality.

Now before we go any further, let’s just make sure we are on the same page; these are churches we are talking about. They get several allowances from the government, most famous among these being the right to pay zero taxes. However, religious organizations play a huge role in funding and mobilizing political movements and weighing in on hot-button issues. In many cases they go so far as to pour church coffers into one side or the other of a political battle, as many Christian churches did during the Proposition 8 referendum in California which abolished gay marriage.

But that same allowance of not paying any taxes comes with a catch—churches are not to be actively influential in politics. However, it seems that these days this is the primary function of religious organizations. They act as God’s lobbying firm, reaching across all borders to spread theology (and dollars) and concentrate the religious-minded into a single- and simple-minded army of values voters. These pious zombies have in fact congregated in such numbers in one party, the GOP, that some scholars such as Howard Fineman have even suggested that the current Republican Party is the first Religious Party in America.

There is common ground between the religious faithful and the economic libertarian factions in America—they don’t want the fruits of their labors to fund the welfare of others. It’s a classic “what’s mine is mine” mentality. The religious argument is thus: “Our morality forbids us to use condoms and birth-control. Therefore the government is coercing us and infringing on our morals by forcing us to provide contraception for our employees. This is unconstitutional and immoral.”

The economic libertarian argument is more familiar: “The money I make is mine and I don’t want to spend taxes on helping someone with life choices I didn’t sign off on.”

Both of these arguments concern the legality of forced participation. Of course, we are forced to pay taxes of all kinds all the time to fund things we didn’t PERSONALLY sign off on or condone. This is a basic aspect of a representative government. But the heat of the argument has been cranked up (at least recently) on the issue of women’s reproductive health. For the Church it is as if this return to the womb is a never-ending saga; and seeing sexuality as sinful and bad is a theme in American history and in our social makeup that just won’t die.

To me at least it seems strange how little respect the churches have for the vaunted notion of freewill, which is what makes sin possible in the first place. The rule of Law in the U.S. can decree any number of things, horrible or wonderful or banal. The Church will always exist in this sphere of worldliness and both influence it and be influenced by its goings on. In some ways there is an implicit cooperation with any and all laws that exist in the secular society surrounding it. For example, if Congress wages a very unjust war, the congregation will almost certainly (unless they are Quakers or Jains) be made up by people who in some way support the war by tax dollars or even by soldiers who will go to fight and kill innocents in that war. Is this war a direct moral imposition on the Church? If so, then EVERYTHING must be considered as such. However, the members of the churches will acknowledge that they have the freewill to participate directly or not to. That is, they can CHOOSE to go to war or object to it; choose to help politicians who sponsored the war or protest against them, etc. Freewill is at the heart of a moral decision, at least theologically, according to Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. Can’t they apply this distinction to the contraception issue as well? Even if churches are forced to provide their employees with insurance covering birth control pills (I know, it’s SUCH an immoral idea, right?) the women with coverage don’t HAVE to use the pills if they see it as sinful. The temptations of the world abound. Jesus talked about rich and selfish people not getting into heaven, but I don’t see Christians burning money and raging on soapboxes against wealth disparity.

Religious factions seem to be vying to have more public power, to return America to some bygone days where Christianity was the law of the land, even though such a time never existed in American history. At the same time they want exemption from following the laws. In essence, they only want to follow the laws that are Christian, that have been created by them in their image. It is the same as asking for a parallel system of laws, similar to some European societies that tolerate Sharia Law alongside Common Law and Parliamentary Law.

It becomes a huge matter of sovereignty though when crucial issues such as women’s reproductive health are at stake. Who has to follow the rules and who gets to make up their own? And to return to the connection between the “don’t tread on me” libertarians and the “lead us not into temptation” religious folks, the common denominator is about excluding their respective groups from participation in the experiment of social togetherness.

Lest it seem that this essay is a call for everyone to cover everyone else for all their problems, I want to end with some questions and not a call to action. I believe that questions of entitlement programs, welfare, healthcare, wealth disparity, fairness, independence, and the like are all issues that exist for a reason. People do disagree on them vehemently. I DO wish that we could embrace or at least look to other economic models such as those in Canada and Europe regarding government programs. But I will save those arguments for another time. The issues are complex and bear analyzing—to be sure, there are also enormous problems that can arise out of a rampant welfare state.

But the hot-button issue I started with was with Rush Limbaugh, who figures squarely into the “don’t tread on me” camp. Aside from his hateful, intimidating misogynistic language (which though it shouldn’t be ignored doesn’t in itself provide the other side with valid REASONS to put across-the-board coverage of contraception into insurance plans) his ignorance about healthcare and women’s health highlights the more general issue an issue of providing services to people in our society who aren’t like us and whose needs are hard for us to see as worthy of our tax dollars.

Here are some questions and thoughts that come to my mind:

- Regarding socialized medicine and other government initiatives, is it the principle of the thing or the pragmatic value of the policy that’s more important? If offering contraceptives turns out to save our economy money and help fix some aspects of our healthcare system, are the moral objectives valid? Does the end justify the means?

-Rush Limbaugh later compared his buying contraceptives for women to buying running shoes for aspiring athletes. Is this an absurd comparison? Where does entitlement stop and personal obligation begin?

-Do women need to be included among the panel of religious leaders discussing religious objections to birth control? Do these leaders have some kind of authority over what IS religious, or rather just what their particular dogma says about religious precepts?

-Are the extreme conservatives like Rick Santorum straight up crazy when it comes to their views about abortion and contraception?

-Do you think “life begins at conception”? If so, does this necessarily impact laws about abortion? If a fetus is a “life” then isn’t aborting even a rape baby a form of murder? (This is the logical extension that has led Santorum to his outrageous conclusions.)

-Is it part of the definition of a “good society” to create better social welfare laws? Or is society better served by enforcing laws and letting markets be? Can you see any detriments to welfare policies? Examples of systemic welfare state failures? Examples of truly free market societies?

-Are all of these issues moot because the Federal Reserve and a small handful of elite world tycoons control the apparatuses of power and pull the puppet strings to control every negative aspect of domestic and foreign policy we see around us? *painful grimace*

Please weigh in with any thoughts.

Austerity for Prosperity: are we all Greeks?

Injustice, swift, erect, and unconfin’d,
Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind -Homer, The Illiad

In these first few busy weeks of an especially busy new year, there is much domestic news to occupy our attention. The Giants won the Superbowl, a big-time celebrity passed away, the Republican primary season is getting less weird but much more contentious, and as I write this the Grammy’s are still being awarded to musicians whose collective ego and star quality has its own gravitational pull. How can we afford to look away from these things?

But it bears keeping in mind there are other events in the wider world that have implications everywhere, even in the United States. If you have been watching the international news or visiting any major news website then you will have seen the pictures of an Athens aflame, streets full of protesters (some media estimating 80,000 people in Athens alone) and vandals taking out their anger against the newly-passed austerity measures. Some of these measures include cutting 15,000 jobs and lowering the minimum wage for workers in the public sector 20% to 600 Euro per month. You can find more details about the figures the Greek people are upset about here.

Greek lawmakers have threatened their country with austerity measures for the last couple of years, suggesting it as a fix to a financial crisis that has hit Greece harder than any other European nation except for Iceland. The Greeks are deep in debt, to the tune of some 330 billion Euro, which is over 10% of its gross domestic product. That’s a lot of gyros to pay back, my friend. In order to receive additional bailouts and keep Greece afloat for a little while longer so that it can make changes in its economy, the eurozone bloc banks have demanded that parliament enact some kind of measures to ensure that these loans can be repaid. But Greece’s solution to this demand is a negative sum game; cutting programs that support workers and unemployed citizens—the lifeblood and treasure of all nations—will not spur growth, which will be the only actual solution to Greece’s problem.

The sad economic state of affairs in this small European country is made worse by the fact that citizens are well used to minimum standards of social services. I can see that if you have internalized your given wage as a right and not a contingent benefit, you would be as enraged as a petulant Greek deity if the government, in one fell swoop, came and took that right away from you. Such feelings of entitlement make spending cuts tricky because a large portion of taxes go towards social welfare and standards policies. And when the citizens of Greece turn around and see that there are still many among them, including lawmakers, who enjoy great wealth and luxury despite the purported lack of funds, perhaps throwing a Molotov cocktail at a movie theatre seems like something you should put on your CV.

Adding more fuel to the fire (pun intended) is the fact that the country must also cut 325 million Euro in “structural expenditure”. As if infrastructure weren’t crumbling enough, now there seems little hope for any kinds of massive projects of the sort that could spur on the economic growth that the nation needs to get out of the slump.

Because the stakes here are very high (if Greece doesn’t take these measures and defaults on the debt owed to eurozone banks, they risk being ousted from the monetary union, potentially going back to using Drachmas instead of Euros) the lawmakers are not happy with taking such measures. But there seems to be a lack of creativity here as well. Maybe the inertia is due to this panicked situation, where we just freeze like deer in the headlights and fail to make a radical decision because it seems “too risky”. Maybe it has just been too long since this European nation had to kick-start its economy with so little gas left in the tank. Maybe there are no ideas to implement because there are no resources to implement them.

Greece’s decision to make such austerity cuts does have an impact in the U.S. and around the world. It is not so much that Greece’s economic woes will affect the globe, but that their method of dealing with inflated debt-to-GDP ratio will invite similar kinds of cuts in other, much more productive countries. Some politicians in America fear inflation like the plague (cue the Ron Paul circus calliope) and maybe for good reason. The U.S. actually has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece at around 10.6%! However, the status of America on the world stage, the extremely high level of productivity and the potential for future recovery and stabilization sets it apart from Greece. It pays to be a behemoth when negotiating loan repayments. (By the way, you can find a lot of information about the differences between the U.S. and European/Greek situations on this excellent website.)

At any rate, the key to getting back in the game, to competing with growing Asian markets and with the world does not lie in cutting programs. Although they cost money, social programs (many of the ones that are perennially on the chopping block for some members of Congress) allow citizens to continue functioning financially so that they can contribute to the economy. Endowments and grants for the Arts and for education are crucial to allowing those creative individuals with new and innovative ideas to build something and change the market, a market that often has little room for radical change because of the undue leverage they currently wield in the political sphere, and frankly because of their enormity. Cutting health care or, god forbid, social security would just leave hospitals to foot the bill and any preventive care, which is much cheaper to implement, would be replaced with emergency procedures because patients didn’t have to money to see a doctor. These costs will be incumbent on the taxpayers.

The markets are wonderful and lead to growth through competition in normal times. But we are in difficult times, deep down in that valley of despair. When you have bitten off much more than you can chew, the solution is to drink something, not to pull out some of your teeth. If you will pardon that bizarre metaphor, I’m saying that austerity measures, unless absolutely necessary (as perhaps they are now in the case of under-the-gun Greece), are no anodyne for the economic problems we face. We need more jobs. What about government projects like bridges, roads and railways? We need those things badly and the auxiliary benefits, the centrifugal effects on growth and innovation, are probably more than we imagine.

How might we afford to begin some of those projects? Well, if we can juuuuust inch our way past that stubborn wall of opposition to taxes and limiting military expenditure; if we can show how public services and government-funded projects—not to mention socialized healthcare and controversial measures like free birth control for women and free sterilized needles for drug users (not to equate the two in any way, hehe)—are inherently rational from a practical perspective, will be wholly in our best interest and will achieve the results we seek if by non-conventional means; if we can show that using moral and religious platitudes to inform public policy has not been beneficial to a people since the time of Moses; if we can use data in all the forms available to appeal to people’s minds, not condescend or neglect all opposition that is raised, then we can perhaps have the kind of debate that will lead us in the direction to making such faraway dreams a reality.

Of course, it’s hard to be optimistic in this environment. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum quibble amongst themselves while constantly using liberals as a foil. The leading candidates for the highest office in the nation are so preoccupied with appealing to the lowest common denominator in America that they don’t feel the need to really qualify some crazy claims that they have made about our current President, Barrack Obama. (The food-stamps President remark comes to mind.) And so many people fall in with simplistic theories and with candidates because of poisonous political memes that have no basis in fact. The solution to this much deeper problem of finding the truth, of separating fact from horse crap…well, that could take some doing.

In the meantime there is always the present. They say there’s no time like it. We can at least use the present to throw around ideas for what’s wrong and how to fix it. And at the very least we can enjoy what we have in life because, as the Greeks are showing us—nothing is for certain; nothing good is free.