By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 7, 2013
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So why are politicians even talking about something as uncontroversial as birth control in 2013? The issue was slipped into a short-term spending bill the GOP-led U.S. House passed this weekend that delays Obamacare. Since Congress and the president didn't agree to a spending bill by today, the government has shut down. President Obama said he wouldn't sign the House bill -- especially since the GOP plopped a poison pill like contraception into it. One part of the Affordable Care Act requires employers to cover birth control. It's a fairness issue. Most employers don't think twice about covering erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra (which, it should be noted, are marketed to older men who usually aren't using the drug as a means to conceive children).I did you a favor and didn't excerpt the part where she speculates about the reproductive life of George W. Bush. You're welcome. Now how does one go about constructing such a twisted pattern of logic? Aside from the fact that the shutdown is about many things (ObamaCare, the Keystone XL Pipeline, federal spending) but certainly not contraception, there is also the fact that no House or Senate Republican has ever proposed anything restricting access to contraception. The only thing that's been proposed is that anyone who does have a moral objection to contraception should not be forced to pay for someone else's pills, condoms, etc. There is no conservative movement against birth control. But then, you knew that. So what is the predominant conservative (and Christian) position on birth control? OK, I'll volunteer, without making you really deal with . . . well, you know. My wife and I have been happily married for 16 years. We have one child. He is 13. How we arrived at this point, you don't need the details, but I'll give you this one: All of it, we paid for ourselves. There's this one thing that comes in a round case that will run you about $9 a month. Another thing you can get just once. It will run you several hundred dollars, but that's a lot cheaper than pregnancy. Or kids. It's not that different from our furniture, our TVs, our car, our dishwasher, our baseball gloves . . . we wanted stuff, we paid for stuff, we got stuff. Perhaps this could be the liberals' guide to contraception. Birth control in two easy steps! 1. Get some money. 2. Use it to pay for your contraception. Or you could demand that the government force someone else to pay for it for you, then when there is opposition to that, shriek that it must be the reason the entire government was shut down! Then again, there is something to be said for making sure that certain people do not procreate.
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