[img_assist|nid=58034|title=Outrageous|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=122|height=156]Even after the Obama administration ran an end-around on mouthy Republicans and Catholic bishops to resolve a health insurance contraception impasse, heated rhetoric about Obama's "assault" on democracy continue from the right.
Obama's compromise, announced Friday, will assign insurance companies to cover contraception coverage costs, rather than requiring religiously-affiliated employers to cover contraception as part of their insurance plans. Ironically, although you haven't yet heard this from most mainstream news outlets, that's something of a retreat from an existing national norm.
Here's a quick reality check, courtesy of several sources including ThinkProgress.org and the research staff at MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show:
1. Republicans proposed virtually the same federal contraception health care coverage plan decades ago that Obama has proposed (sound familiar?).
2. Twenty-eight states already require that employees of religious institutions receive health care coverage for contraception. Many of these state-legislated requirements have been in place at least for a decade. And that means many religious institutions including Catholic universities already cover contraception in their employee insurance plans.
3. Among those 28 states is Wisconsin. Read the state law if you're curious: Wis. Stat. § 609.805 and § 632.895(17) (2009)
But to hear Mitt Romney and the rest of the GOP presidential field tell it, America's freedom allegedly is at sudden risk now that the Obama administration has further rationalized this already widely implemented standard. Government is telling us what to do! Washington is interfering in religion! We've crossed the line! We've gone too far!
Interestingly, this dust-up conveniently arrives political stage center at the very moment job numbers are up, economic indicators are up and the federal government announces a $25 billion penalty to be shared among aggrieved mortgage borrowers -- part of a settlement against banks accused of misconduct that helped send the economy into the tank.
But let's not talk about any of that. Let's talk about birth control! It is so-o-o out there, so-o-o-o controversial! In fact, some science-addled conservatives have now decided that contraception is tantamount to abortion, so they're just going to call it abortion. Because "abortion!" polls well as an issue among their base.
And so the mass media for the past two weeks has enabled the GOP's rather studied brouhaha. Nonetheless, the real need right now is to engage in a conversation not about birth control but in one about birther control.
We need no more of the GOP's inane histrionics that serve no purpose other than to distract people from the real issues, turning molehills into mountains. Republican-based legislatures across this country years ago dispensed with the contraception issue that national Republicans are suddenly calling a threat to our very existence as a society.
This is the latest in a disturbing pattern of Republican flip-flopping not just on a candidate scale but on a party-wide scale. Let's not forget that most of what is now attacked as "Obamacare" itself was originally proposed by the deniers.
Grabbing the football away just before Charlie Brown kicks it is no way to run a country, however good it may feel. So kindly cut out the crap, GOP. If you feel forced to disembrace your own ideas the moment Democrats assent to them, then there's something seriously wrong with the way you formulate your ideas, if not your faith in them.