Social conservatives — you’ve been had. But you knew that already, right? From my New York Post column today:
The first ideological tentacles of ObamaCare began snaking their way into the pocketbooks of private insurers and the consciences of religious Americans when, on Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services issued new guidelines requiring insurers to provide free birth control — including “morning-after” abortion pills — in the name of “women’s health.”
“These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Insurers will have to provide the services without deductibles, co-pays or any other charges.
In other words, the federal government — choosing sides in the culture war — now considers “unplanned” pregnancy to be a preventable disease.
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them this long, but then suicide cults aren’t built in a day.
This is just another case where the critics in the debate over ratifying ObamaCare are being proved right — with the defenders exposed as liars or dupes.
The “antis” warned that “universal health care” would inevitably leave the feds ruling on a host of charged moral issues; the “pros” denied it — though many doubtless saw it as a feature, not a bug.
Because, after all, it’s the only way they’re going to win — by having the state impose their values without actually admitting it.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Sun online, Seth Lipsky traces the decision in part to the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold case — that one that found a constitutional “right to privacy” lurking in the document’s various penumbras and emanations.
… This newspaper does not agitate for the return to a pre-Griswold America. We do, however, reckon that a lot of constitutional nonsense has followed from Griswold. It was the case in which Justice Douglas, writing for the majority of the court, found that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights** have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”
This gave us the right to privacy that makes it hard not only to ban abortion but even to regulate it. Leave abortion aside, though. If the penumbras formed by emanations from the guarantees in the Bill of Rights give us a right to privacy, what penumbras and emanations give the government the power to require insurers to cover birth control free of charge? The way the Obama administration is playing this issue, we are going to get in a fell swoop from the freedom to disseminate birth control to the prohibition on insurance companies to charge for birth control so much as an ordinary a co-payment.
The moral of the story: The only way to stop the Left is to stop them. If you try to negotiate with them, this is what happens. They never sleep, they never stop, they never quit. Why can’t we be the same way?
As Glenn Reynolds likes to say: Somebody should write a book about it.