Birth Control And The Dufus Vote

After weeks of conflict over the peripheral question of whether employees of Roman Catholic institutions should be offered free birth control, the New York Times finally gets to the nub of the the matter -- the Obama administration's requirement that all employers offer contraception to insured employees:

Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.

As I've argued to conservative friends, the religious freedom issue is relatively trivial compared to the federal government deciding in its great wisdom that of all the procedures and medications that could be free of charge, including hay fever pills, Lipitor, and prostate cancer screening, the nod now goes to birth control and other women's health services.

What are the feds up to, anyway? One motive is equity. If women seem to be unduly advantaged under the Obama health care reform, perhaps it's because in the past they've been charged higher premiums than men and had to endure pregnancy being defined as a preexisting condition. Providing free birth control is in the insurance companies' interests as well, since contraception is cheaper than prenatal and obstetrics care during an unplanned pregnancy.

Far more important, the policy will reduce the number of abortions. The more birth control, the fewer abortions. Nothing could be more obvious, except to two powerful constituencies. The first is the Roman Catholic church, which in its absolutism equates never-pregnant with getting an abortion. In doing so, it facilitates more abortions, especially in the developing world. (The Protestant view of contraception runs the gamut.) A theologically sound way out of the thicket of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical on reproduction, is to compare the emotional condition of the parents when an abortion occurs vs. the moment of contraception. God can tell the difference between a fetus and a sperm and egg that are never formally introduced, and so can almost everyone else. Catholic women in the U.S. have figured it out for themselves, thereby writing smarter theology than the pope.

But understanding women's perspectives is not the Vatican's specialty, nor indeed Rush Limbaugh's, who viciously attacked a Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress about a friend who lost an ovary because she couldn't get birth control. I'd like to think he'll get spanked for his 13-year-old's potty mouth -- at least a few lost advertisers. Critics are demanding that Republicans denounce him, but they probably won't*. He's powerful, because some people like what he says. On this issue, he's channeling the creepy vein of misogyny that lingers in our culture and crops up during debates over women's reproductive rights. Remember that women didn't even get the vote in the U.S. until 1920. Even today, some smile inwardly when Rush calls Sandra Fluke a whore.

So the second powerful constituency preventing a rational discussion of contraception is composed of ignoramuses and dufuses. That's why on this issue, which is all about reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions, I'm sorry to say that Big Brother knows best.

*After posting this, I learned that this morning Speaker of the House John Boehner released a statement saying that Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke were "inappropriate." Carly Fiorina, last year's GOP candidate for the Senate in California, said they were "incendiary" and "distracting."

Obama In "You Talkin' To Me?" Mode

Mark Knoller, the veteran CBS News radio reporter, had stayed behind in the press room Thursday afternoon in Chicago after listening to an audio feed of President Obama's speech at a fundraiser. Obama's microphone was left on, so Knoller heard his private conversations with home town donors about last week's 11th hour budget deal. "Politico" reports:

Obama, recalling a conversation with Boehner staff: “I said, ‘You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid? … Put it in a separate bill. … We'll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. BUT DON’T TRY TO SNEAK THIS THROUGH.’ … When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for … So it's not on the level.”

Speaker John's Band

Reaching out to Barack Obama on entitlement reform, the speaker of the House shows how grownups govern.

Sanity And Boehner Rising

You want sensible reactions to Saturday's tragedy? Two out of three ain't bad. From this morning's New York Times:

“I don’t understand how anybody can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this,” an adviser to Ms. Palin, Rebecca Mansour, said in an interview with a conservative radio host, Tammy Bruce. Responding to accusatory messages on the Web, Ms. Mansour added: “People actually accuse Governor Palin of this. It’s appalling — appalling. I can’t actually express how disgusting that is.”

Ms. Mansour said that the cross hairs, in fact, were not meant to be an allusion to guns, and agreed with her interviewer’s reference to them as “surveyors symbols.”

Two problems with that. First, it's almost impossible to believe that they weren't intended as cross hairs. Mansour helps neither Palin nor the country by claiming otherwise. Second, "disgusting"? She may think that, but playing the victim when the only victims were in Tucson is, again, poor form. Palin must find a way to adjust her public posture. She can acknowledge the reality of an unfortunate situation -- the correlation between recent events and her frontier rhetoric and choice of graphics -- without taking any personal responsibility. If she doesn't, I don't see how she avoids becoming a marginal figure in U.S. politics.

Meanwhile, at the White House:

Mr. Obama was considering delivering a speech about the greater context surrounding the shooting, but advisers said it was premature to do so until Ms. Giffords’s condition stabilized and more became known about the gunman’s motives.

Sounds just right, especially in the light of the comments by a Clinton administration veteran:

“The only way you gain political advantage is by doing absolutely nothing to take advantage — and not have a lot of people backgrounding about how clever your political strategy is,” said Michael D. McCurry, who was Mr. Clinton’s press secretary at the time of the Oklahoma bombing.

This is a situation where political advantage and the moral high ground may well coincide, not only for Obama but the GOP. Regardless of what we learn about the suspect, in fewer than 48 hours it's become a commonplace to say that we have to restore some civility to our political and media conversation. But the only way to do that is just do it. Scapegoating Palin or anyone else for Tucson is an escalation in the political wars. So is the Palin camp's own harsh, defensive rhetoric.

One Republican who has gotten it right is the speaker of the House, John Boehner. He's done so, as far as I can tell, because of the quality of his heart, which has been much derided recently. We could do worse than having his tear-stained face as the new face of responsible conservative leadership.

Beer Summits Take Two

Ask most Washington observers who the obstructionists will be over the next two years, and they're likely to say congressional Republicans. But in a Nov. 3 interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," veteran political writer Todd Purdum tells a somewhat different story. He describes the incoming GOP speaker, John Boehner, as likable and willing to work with Democrats, the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. His relationship with the tea party crowd is, in Purdum's word, correct. He's not interested in radically reforming government. He is interested in creating jobs and getting spending under control.

The problem, Purdum said, may end up being the president's worldview:

Certainly John Boehner and Barack Obama do not have the kind of personal reality and experience in common that you could say Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton had [after Republicans took control of Congress in 1995]. There was a level at which Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were able to take the measure of each other as wonky, super-political Southern guys of a comparable generation, and I think they each felt they had the other's number and could somehow understand each other. I don't think there's much in Barack Obama's life experience or worldview that would make him a natural, give him natural affinities with John Boehner. So it'll be really interesting to see how they are able to work together.