Rant warning re “Does Reproductive Freedom Imply a Right to Free Birth Control? | Reason Magazine

RANT WARNING: I am so over this faux controversy, this conflation of “wants” with “needs”, “privileges” with “rights”, “health” with “behaviors”.  On the one hand this nonsensical issue is so illuminating of the poverty of the left / Obama / Obamacare / Socialism premises. On the other this is a painful distraction from real or truthful regarding things such as:

• The role of the Federal Government in personal needs and wants;
• Duties of others to meet needs and wants of the some;
• The constitutional constraints on Executive authority;
• The spinelessness of the Legislative branch;
• The reproach-ability of the Judicial branch (coming soon?);
• The long ignored overpopulation issue (wonder what Paul Ehrlich thinks of this state of affairs?);
• The recent synonymy of “pregnancy” with “disease”;
• The implied misanthropy and human-hating premise of the left and this contraception policy;
• The apparent supplanting of some non-existent ‘birth control debate’ for the ‘abortion debate” which has devolved into an electoral non-starter on which progressives have traditionally relied;
• How this relates to Obama’s low approval ratings among women and the coming election;

My head will burst if I think about this any more…Thank you Rush Limbaugh BTW.

via Reason Magazine… Supporters of Obama’s birth control rule conflate liberty with subsidies, insisting that you are not really free to do something (in this case, use contraceptives) unless it’s free. According to this logic, observant Jews do not have religious freedom unless the government pays for their kosher food, bloggers do not have freedom of speech unless taxpayers buy them computers, and Americans in general do not have a right to keep and bear arms if they have to pay for guns with their own money. By contrast, the religious institutions that object to the contraceptive mandate are not asking for subsidies; they are resisting them. They object to a regulation that forces them to pay for products and services they consider immoral. They want the freedom to offer their employees health plans that do not cover contraception and sterilization…