Bishop Dolan and Our Phony Contraception Debate

The Wall Street Journal's editorial section is doing its best to keep the public focused on the Obama administration's usurpation of constitutional liberties despite the rest of the mainstream media's following the administration's lead and burying the matter of Kathleen Sibelius's ObamaCare mandate in the MoveOn.org file.

In an editorial entitled "Bishop Dolan's Liberty Letter" they bring his studiously ignored correspondence to light.

Cardinal Dolan explains that "As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth and helping the poor." The problem, and the genesis of this Catholic confrontation with Washington, is the government's "bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church" and its bid "to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised." 

The test of pluralism in a democracy is the protection afforded to minority views, especially of religious faith and practice. Nine of 10 health plans already cover contraceptive and sterilization methods...

Pluralism: one of those shibboleths incessantly invoked to advance the sexual revolution that has plagued American politics and social life since the invention of that little mother of discord pictured above.  Now that the counter culture is the status quo, and governs, there is evidently no longer any need to respect differences.

The gloves are off, or should I say the mask.  Tyranny of the majority apparently isn't such a worrisome thing after all.

[Bishop Dolan] also relates a remarkable meeting that he says the White House convened with the bishops to "work out the wrinkles" of the mandate... [T]he White House's solution is merely for the bishops to shut up about the wrinkles. Cardinal Dolan writes that "there was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom." White House staffers also cited some writings by vicars of the Catholic left in support of the mandate, in effect telling the bishops that they know less about church teachings than your average Washington Post columnist. 

As a study in ideology and power, the anecdote is chilling, compounded by all the recent claims by Democrats and liberals that Catholics who actually abide by their faith are opposed to modernity. Such prejudice is supposedly defunct in contemporary America, except when it's practiced against religion... 

"Religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief," Cardinal Dolan concludes. The sad reality is that his letter will not persuade the dominant wing of America's governing political party from insisting that religion kneel before its secular will.

It will be up to the American electorate, or the Supreme Court, to persuade the Democratic Party that it is unseemly, not to mention unconstitutional, to commit hegemonic acts "inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects" against unpopular minorities (Romer v. Evans; 1996), and religions. Thank God that the editors of the WSJ's editorial page see the problem.

In a related op-ed entitled "Limbaugh and Our Phony Contraception Debate," Georgetown Law grad Cathy Ruse pulls the halo off of Sandra Fluke, she of the mendacious testimony before Congress, which proceeded to kill a provision protecting the conscience rights of people who disagree with her about sexuality.

Last week Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown University Law Center, went to Congress looking for a handout. She wants free birth-control pills, and she wants the federal government to make her Catholic school give them to her. 

I'm a graduate of Georgetown Law and former chief counsel of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution. Based on her testimony, I wonder how much Ms. Fluke really knows about the university or the Constitution...

I was not Catholic when I attended Georgetown Law, but I certainly knew the university was. So did Ms. Fluke. She told the Washington Post that she chose Georgetown knowing specifically that the school did not cover drugs that run contrary to Catholic teaching in its student health plans. During her law school years she was a president of "Students for Reproductive Justice" and made it her mission to get the school to give up one of the last remnants of its Catholicism. Ms. Fluke is not the "everywoman" portrayed in the media.

No, indeed, Ms. Fluke is a long shot from everywoman.  She is uberwoman, a self-appointed champion aiming to force everywoman's church out of business because it doesn't believe what she and the cognoscenti believe: that everywoman must worship at the altar of promiscuity, sterility, lesbianism, abortion, sterilization, death and all the other things that "Students for Reproductive Justice" routinely support.

I do not know if she is a slut as Mr. Limbaugh contended before apologizing. But, she is a degenerate.

The unreported scandal is that even Catholic law schools have been recruiting, coddling, mentoring, advancing, and tenuring womyn like her for decades.  She is, unfortunately, no fluke.

Congress and the Obama administration are overflowing with them, as are the courts, law firms, state and local governments, and every institution where there are resources to misappropriate.  These monist obsessives are like Orks overrunning Osgiliath.

Today, even men are thoroughly steeped in feminist dogma, especially the ones from big-named schools, or living in what WSJ editorialists used to call the porn belt.  In essence, Christians are now reaping the intolerance and narrow-mindedness that law schools and universities have intentionally sown.

At the hearing of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee chaired by Nancy Pelosi, Sandra Fluke testified as a victim. Having to buy your own contraception is a burden, she said. She testified that all around her at Georgetown she could see the faces of students who were suffering because of Georgetown's refusal to abandon its Catholic principles. 

Exactly what does the face of a law student who must buy her own birth-control pills look like? Did I see them all around me and just not know it? Do male law students who must buy their own condoms have the same look? Perhaps Ms. Fluke should have brought photos to Congress to illustrate her point. 

In her testimony, Ms. Fluke claimed that, "Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school." That's $1,000 per year. But an employee at a Target pharmacy near the university told the Weekly Standard last week that one month's worth of generic oral contraceptives is $9 per month. "That's the price without insurance," the employee said. (It's also $9 per month at Wal-Mart.)

Ms. Fluke joins that burgeoning list of Liberal celebrities that crawl out of the slime to tell the expedient lie at the critical moment, which is shortly forgotten but long rewarded with accolades, publicity, appointments, perhaps tenure and, if she's exceptionally unscrupulous (for a Democrat), a perch in Congress like Ms. Pelosi's.  She reminds me of Ron Fitzsimmons, the abortion careerist the media used to trot out to fib about partial birth abortions being exceedingly rare, even long after admitting to having "lied through his teeth."

Here is a lengthier excerpt from Ms. Fluke's testimony to provide a fuller picture of the law as taught at Georgetown.

Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.

You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go without...

When [waivers to the non-coverage policy due to medical condition] do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms.

Reality to earth.  It's $9 per month, for a product more related to entertainment than to sickness.

Not that facts, or truth, matter to her side of the kulturkampf, the aggressor's side.  She knows from Saul Alinsky's handbook for revolutionaries that any means to her ends are acceptable.

Sandra Fluke is the kind of witness that gives the law a bad name, and makes everywoman, her husband and her children cynical about the law's ability to render justice.

In this instance, everyperson just wants to be left alone.  That used to be called privacy by the Left, which Ms. Fluke is probably too young to remember and too selfish to care to know.

Any legal regime that would embrace her likes is simply the rule of womyn masquerading as the rule of law.  This is what the sexual revolution has done for, and to, America.

At issue isn't inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics. Contraception isn't like other kinds of "health care." Yes, birth-control pills can be prescribed to address medical problems, though that's relatively rare and the Catholic Church has no quarrel with their use in this circumstance. And the university's insurance covers prescriptions in these cases. 

Still, Ms. Fluke is not mollified. Why? Because at the end of the day this is not about coverage of a medical condition. 

Ms. Fluke's crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It's nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown's refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself. 

Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion? Even a first-year law student should know where the Constitution comes down on that.

Georgetown should be embarrassed to count her among its students.  The woman is primarily educated in manipulation, hyperbole, histrionics, grievance, entitlement and power dynamics.

In this she's just like our President, just not as smart.  What little law she's learned is merely coincidental to her interest in defeating the enemy she's constructed in her mind.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.  Just because Sandra Fluke and her lesbian friend with polycystic ovarian syndrome wear feminist blinders doesn't mean you need to let the intolerant Party, theirs, rob you blind of your constitutional inheritance.