“Republicans want women to have easier access to birth control–so why is Planned Parenthood against this?” An Explanation.

RARE (self characterized as “America's News Feed”), offered an article by W. James Antle III, entitled “Republicans want women to have easier access to birth control–so why is Planned Parenthood against this?”

Both the Republican election year contraception proposals and Antle's analysis purporting to uncover "liberal" and "feminist" hypocrisy are completely disingenuous.
As for the “metaphorical” war on women—yes, it is metaphorical, just like the war on drugs, war on poverty, war on terrorism, war on Christmas, et al. In this case, however, it is a metaphor for the real life, day to day assaults on women's rights and women's access to health care being perpetrated locally and nationally by radical right ideologues. How long have Bobby Jindal and the other four Republicans running for office been supportive of over the counter contraception? Bobby Jindal suggested it two years ago. The others, four to six days ago! By the way, Planned Parenthood welcomed Bobby Jindal's OTR advocacy back then, what they question now on all of these politicians are their motives and their actual intentions—more about that later.

Several of the arguments this article makes for OTC contraception in terms of accessibility are precisely the arguments made for years by women's advocates. And, yes, “Polls find no significant partisan disagreement about birth control”; however, Republican politicians have shown a complete disregard for the interests or wishes of the vast majority of Americans on women's rights including contraception and abortion, worker's rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, civil rights, the government shut down, income inequality and many other issues. Is this Republican ruse on contraception an attempt to obfuscate their basic legislative antipathy toward women and women's rights? Undoubtedly.

This new “bi-partisan” effort to promote over the counter contraception is EXACTLY what it seems: A double-edged political ploy. While overtly harming women with opposition to raising the minimum wage (a majority of the lowest wage workers are women), cutting back on child and family welfare programs while extending corporate tax breaks and hand outs, opposition to extending unemployment insurance, limiting voter access (to name a few right wing tactics), the new Republican proposal offered by four or five candidates seems to offer a long sought feminist goal—less expensive, less prohibitive access to birth control.

Make no mistake: this tiny, carefully nuanced Republican overture is the direct result of the Affordable Care Act offering no-copay, shared-cost access to birth control. [“Shared cost” is precisely the premise of insurance; i.e., everyone pays in, and those who wind up needing it use it]. Is over-the-counter guaranteed to make access cheaper? NO. Look at the skyrocketing costs of medical and pharmaceuticals. They have been entirely, outrageously disproportionate from the actual COLA for decades. If some forms of contraception become designated as OTC, will insurance still be required to to cover them. No one knows! The Republican House tried over 50 times to destroy the ACA. If they are ever successful, would even over-the-counter contraception be certain? Absolutely not. Even under the ACA, could OTC status remove contraception from insurance coverage? Quite possibly, and quite certainly with a little legislative tweaking. The absurd Arizona bill declaring that a woman is pregnant two weeks BEFORE conception shows the political vagaries of trusting women's rights to Republican politicians.

As stated, Hobby Lobby's insurance allowed many of the available forms of contraception, only banning a few, but there was absolutely no guarantee that they wouldn't exclude many more once their exemption under the Affordable Care Act was allowed; other plaintiffs argued for a complete exemption.

The “free-market” solution offered by Antle can and is constantly subverted by the very players who tout laissez faire. A single payer program with contraception and abortion provided without additional cost provides a much less costly approach to health care in general (by eliminating the middle man—the for-profit insurance industry—and by having much greater negotiating power with the profiteering pharmaceutical industry), including a much greater likelihood of eliminating unwanted pregnancies.

Should we trust Bobby Jindal, Ed Gillespie, Mike McFadden, Cory Gardner, Thom Tillis or W. James Antle III and their advocacy of over-the-counter contraception? Better to call it over-the-counter deception. First of all, this advocacy is only about “oral contraception,” aka “the pill.” Antle's article alludes to “the more controversial ones, like IUDs.” The major controversy over the IUD was in 1974 over one specific brand that was pulled from the market this year; most of the other “controversy” was and is over myths and misconceptions. However, the limitation of the Republican proposal to basically ONE form of contraception could potentially and quite easily put many of the others in much greater doubt.

All five vehemently oppose abortion rights, and all four oppose the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurance policies pay for preventative care, including birth control, with no deductibles or co-pays. They adamantly support the argument that NO ONE should have to help to pay for abortion against their religious beliefs. This “pro-life” stance, of course, does not extend the same consideration for those whose religious beliefs oppose executions or war. They support a personhood amendment which could easily be used to undermine many current forms of birth control. The idea that one should not in any way be “forced” to pay for someone else's contraception or abortion could immediately lead to the insistence that, since religious objectors carry insurance and pay into that insurance, no insurance company should provide insurance for any form of contraception or abortion. “So, here, ladies (and gents),” you can hear the Republican bandwagon whisper, “Here's your over-the-counter Oral contraception...ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!” Tim McMullen

Healthcare and the "It's My Money" Argument

A friend on Facebook posted an article about a chain store, Hobby Lobby, suing the government over the Affordable Care Act because of their religious opposition to contraception. Though the thread got a little off topic, the following reasonable question was raised about another commentator’s suggestion that we should have universal healthcare like 90% of the developed nations.

“Why should I be forced to pay for the irresponsibility of another person? Rights are restrictions on what other people can force upon you. You have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You have the right to believe what you want, the right to go about doing whatever you want without being forced into doing anything with anybody else that you do not wish to participate in so long as you are not effecting there rights. How is it your birthright to take my money and pay for your healthcare if you choose to live a lifestyle that will cause medical problems?"

Granted, it missed the whole religious aspect of the contraception issue, but it asks a question many ask about taxes. What follows is my answer:

Fred, I was going to let this thread about a petty and spurious legal squabble slide since your response to my answer about the religious nature of the lawsuit was not a rebuttal but a complete reframing of the issue that was, again, completely irrelevant to the article. But after your answer to Amy’s question about universal healthcare, I feel compelled to weigh in.

I do not wish to attribute to you any assumptions or views that you do not hold, yet in order to respond to the underlying premises, I find it necessary to make some generalizations. I am not accusing you of or praising you for being a libertarian; however, your line of reasoning is along “libertarian” lines.

People like Ron Paul and Penn Gillette make compelling arguments about the intrusive and/or oppressive nature of government while elevating the rights of the individual over the demands of society. I am guessing that these arguments, if unexamined, have resonance with a majority Americans.

Ayn Rand’s vision of the exceptional, self-made man, the individualistic hero—Emerson and Thoreau’s “self-reliant” individual turned into a morally superior and anti-social megalomaniac—as well as Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” or “Superman,” has also found increasing popularity in an ethical, social, political, and economic milieu where the wages and rights of the worker have been significantly eroded while a new class of corporate mega-millionaires has been created.

Anyone born during or since Reagan’s reign has lived in a society in which “government IS the PROBLEM” has been the “common wisdom”; this is a “consensus” that was carefully designed and executed long before Reagan’s ascendancy, and one that continues to be bought and paid for by billions of corporate dollars spent to perpetuate that destructive falsehood. Government is NOT the problem. However, BAD government is ONE of the problems. Mythical distortions of history and anti-intellectualism are also problematic for a society as is an unsustainable economy predicated on personal greed and perpetual growth.

E.E. Cummings coined the phrase “shrill, collective myth” to describe a “popular” view of history. Our collective myth perpetuates some very powerful and laudable assumptions. You said, for example, “Rights are restrictions on what other people can force upon you.” This point, of course, stems from an assumption of “Natural Rights,” i.e., those rights that are “inalienable” and which apply equally to all humans, as opposed to “Legal Rights,” which are those rights conferred by the laws of a society. Jefferson included the phrase, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” If, by Creator (with a capital “C”) he meant God, then this very line of reasoning is not self-evident, but pure conjecture. The existence of God (as anthropomorphic being rather than as Tillich’s “Ultimate Concern”) is certainly not self-evident any more than basic rights are self-evident. This, on the other hand, does not mean that these enumerated rights are not good goals.

You also quote the brilliant “Declaration of Independence” directly: “You have the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” Of course, it is important to remember that the men who penned these phrases held and justified the holding of slaves, in essence, instantly contradicting all three provisions as far as slaves were concerned.

John Locke, the philosopher from whom much of the rationale for the “Declaration” was acquired, suggested in “A Letter Concerning Toleration”: “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests.  ¶Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” Notice that he actually included health as one of these “civil interests.” These sentences were preceded by his analysis and dismissal of the “pretense” of claims by both church and magistrate as an excuse to dominate others. His rational analysis of and call for religious tolerance (which echoes Roger William’s essay “On the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 1644) is extremely pertinent and, I think you would agree, comes down solidly on the side of the Affordable Care Act and against Hobby Lobby.

Finally, you suggest the following: “You have the right to believe what you want, the right to go about doing whatever you want without being forced into doing anything with anybody else that you do not wish to participate in so long as you are not effecting there (sic) rights.” This is certainly true in a social vacuum, and as long as one lives completely outside of any human contact (and some would extend this to inter-species contact), such rights can remain sacrosanct. However, as soon as another individual enters the picture, such rights are either lost entirely, in the case of subjugation or domination, or compromised in ways that accommodate both individuals. This is the nature of society. I completely agree with your characterization of lofty goals, and I would tend to agree with Locke and Jefferson (and with you, perhaps?) that governments came into existence to “secure these rights.”

Unfortunately, lofty goals aside, the argument nearly always degenerates into an argument about “MY MONEY!” and returns us to the fiction of the “self-made man” and the “self-made money.” I would be happy to address this “we made this” fallacy elsewhere, but here it simply comes down to the simple fact that taxes are not the government stealing from the individual, it is the individual consenting to be taxed as a part of being the governed.

As Locke said in “Sec. 140.” Of the Second Treatise of Civil Government, after spending paragraphs explaining why no person can be legally deprived of property, he avers: “It is true, governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection, should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them: for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people, by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government: for what property have I in that, which another may by right take, when he pleases, to himself?”

Therefore, roads and schools and military and police and business regulations and health care that the society, through their representative government, deem worthy of securing, is a fundamental part of a societal construct. That our own society has abdicated Locke’s “civil interest” in health is a moral disgrace, and the fact that we have relegated basic health protections to the private profiteers is something that we actually should be up in arms about.

This brings us to your view of “health” and “health care.” You argue, “How is it your birthright to take my money and pay for your healthcare if you choose to live a lifestyle that will cause medical problems?" Are you arguing that all health issues can be avoided through lifestyle choices? Mitigated, certainly, but avoided? Of course not. What of the child born with a disease or who contracts one early in life? Was that a result of the child’s lifestyle? If not, would you admit that this child has a birthright to health care? Or is this individual’s life merely determined by the vagaries of wealth and whether or not the family can afford it? We have a right, as a society, to agree otherwise.

If I knowingly eat spoiled food, I am an idiot. But do we, as a part of our consent to be governed have a right to demand that the government regulate those who make and provide food so that it is not spoiled when we eat it? Do we have a right to demand that corporations not pollute our environment or that when they do, we, as a society, have a right to extract both compensation and punishment for that harm (a basic Lockean premise from the same paragraph of his letter quoted above).

I have no children. You appear to argue that the government taking my money and paying for the education of someone else’s children is inherently wrong. Howard Jarvis, the demagogue who led the “taxpayers’ revolt” with Prop 13 in California is still hailed as a guiding light by many. He stated unequivocally that he did not believe in public education. I believe that Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann were idiots about tax policy (or more likely, knowing con men), sycophants for the corporatocracy parading as “grass roots” organizers, an early example of “astro-turfing,” and direct contributors to our current economic woes.

I, however, would not begrudge their children a public education nor would I deny their fundamental social right to health care. Ironically, Paul Gann contracted AIDS, apparently from a transfusion, and at the end of his life, he was an advocate for AIDS treatment and patient’s rights. The "Paul Gann Blood Safety Act" (California Health and Safety Code Section 1645(b)) mandates that physicians discuss the risks of blood transfusions. Public money well spent on government intervention to protect the health of individuals. Just like public money well spent on public education, fire and safety enforcement, infrastructure, business regulations, and health care—including contraception.

We, as citizens, have every right to demand that our tax dollars are “well spent,” and we have a right to argue about how to spend them, but we don’t have a right to individually withhold it on religious or personal grounds. I, of course, also think that Churches who participate in political activity either in the pulpit or through campaign contributions as well as any “non-profit” (501(c)(3)’s, like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, that engage in political activity should also be taxed, but that, again, is a different argument for a different time.

Personally, I sort of like the idea of voters getting to “check off” where their tax dollars will go. I am enraged and outraged that my taxes support the murdering of innocent civilians by “video game” (drone); the protection and subsidizing of irresponsible, criminal, and in some cases, murderous corporations and their management; and myriad other examples of what I see as misuses of government, i.e., tax-payer, funds. But until we, the governed, create such a system, then it is unfair and unreasonable to argue that the government is usurping or commandeering or “stealing” your money simply because you object to how it is used. Lobby to change it, or revolt to change it, but to argue coercion on a particular specific is, at the very least, disingenuous.

Encouraging De Tocqueville's Slippery Slope

In a recent post on my brother’s Facebook page, one of his friends commented on a graphic deriding those who could not differentiate between Joseph Stalin and Barack Obama. He quoted Alexis De Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, as follows:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

He then added, “Sounds like Obamacare and many more of the entitlement programs to me.”

I am offering this lengthy treatise because I think that we fall too easily into the use of catch phrases, code words, and intellectual short cuts to demonize rather than think about real issues. “Obamacare,” “entitlements,” “nanny state,” “socialism,” “big government,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “tax and spend,” “job killers,” etc., are pejoratives used to obfuscate and denigrate rather than to understand problems and find real solutions.

Benjamin Franklin, in his “Speech to the Convention, 1789,” after a very clever use of irony and self deprecation in his intro, said, “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

Forty-five to fifty years later, De Tocqueville made a great number of astute observations and suggestions about democracy in America in Democracy in America. In the above quote, De Tocqueville echoed much of Franklin’s sentiment.

I would suggest that, in this case, his prediction and admonition in Chapter XX, comes much closer to what has actually happened in the last forty years. He said, “I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous [What do you think he would say now?]. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”

Speaking of “slippery slopes,“(another of the commentators suggested this premise), we actually have two occurring, both of which are conflicting impulses found in De Tocqueville. One slippery slope that he championed was equality and social justice. He saw the rise of these trends over hundreds of years of history, and the demise of the aristocracy was one of the most important in the evolution of equality and social justice. He deeply admired America for having created the world’s best effort at accomplishing these principles both consciously, through the creation of its institutions, and unconsciously, through the character and aspirations of the people.

The other slippery slope is the rise of another aristocracy that could exploit what he called the principles of “manufactures” to the point where the workers are essentially disenfranchised, and the “owners” control the government; thus, another route to despotism other than “majority” wanting to feed off the largesse of government.

Only thirty years after De Tocqueville published his tome, we had the rise of the “Robber Barons” and the exploitation of wage slavery until the rise of labor began to curb some of the most egregious excesses. With Theodore Roosevelt, we get the first inklings of “progressive” government as an actual protector of the “people’s” interests and rights and a hedge against the exploitation and domination of bosses and corporations. Jim Crow, of course, was still alive and well, and women were still disenfranchised, but workers began to have a glimmer of hope in achieving the equality and social justice that the author of Democracy in America envisioned.

Until the latter part of the 1960’s, we saw a steady rise in equality and justice which some might argue created a strong middle class and others might suggest resulted from that strong middle class. Either way, pensions, health care, overtime, five day work weeks, concern for the environment, concern for the health and safety of workers and consumers, all became attainable.  These improvements were, of course, fought viciously every step of the way by those who profited from a workforce at the mercy of their masters (as De Tocqueville called them). After the massive defeat of Barry Goldwater’s brand of fiscal conservatism, the corporatocracy put millions of dollars into think tanks and media manipulation. Eventually, they found their front man in the form of affable but feisty Ronald Reagan who gleefully attacked government as “the problem” and espoused deregulation and the free reign of business to exploit and manipulate at will.

A slavish acceptance of Milton Friedman’s fantasy “free market” philosophy, a whole-hearted adoption of Arthur Laffer’s laughable (but devastating) “supply-side” economics, combined with a similar cherry-picking of Ayn Rand’s antithetical distortion of Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” and you get forty years of lax regulation, deregulation, and manipulation of the marketplace that have lead to the destruction of journalism and objective reporting, the savings and loan debacle, the energy fraud (Enron), the dot com bubble collapsing, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, “too big to fail,” ad infinitum.

Thoreau said, in his essay, “On the Duty of Resistance to Civil Government (1848)” (aka “Civil Disobedience”), “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” On the other hand, Milton Friedman declared that profit was the only moral duty of a corporation or a business man, and he lambasted the idea that business had any kind of social responsibility as “socialism,” which was, to him, of course, the most extreme negative attack in his arsenal of derision.

I see the current assaults on women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, gay rights, health and safety regulations, environmental regulations, et al, as a last gasp of a newly emerged and rapidly expanded oligarchy to turn back the inevitable march of equality and social justice and promote the specious fable of a “meritocracy” that in reality rewards fraud, malfeasance, and injustice. Unfortunately, last gasps can last a long time, and if we, as a society, buy into the grotesque misuse of “Self Reliance” as a justification for “Social Darwinism,” a premise which the corporate oligarchs have been trying to sell us for over thirty years, rather than understanding the actual moral import of both Emerson’s essay or Darwin’s book, it will be a long slog indeed.

"The Greatest Threat to Democracy is Hypocrisy! Seek Truth! Speak Truth!"

Tim McMullen