On Sunday’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory led his interview with Newt Gingrich with a question about Rush Limbaugh and contraception. Gingrich rightly took Gregory to task for letting the conversation go off the rails from the get-go; Gregory was buying into and running with the administration’s preferred storyline. The presidential race should be about economics, the Republican candidates discussing how they’ll stop the monolith of mandates in Obamacare, but that isn’t in the Obama playbook.
The truth is this: as the welfare state grew, tax dollars have increasingly gone to support programs that had a moral grey area. As the regulation state grew, government began to assert authority it was never meant to have. We should be having a conversation about what government’s proper role, but it has devolved into a cat fight over insurance coverage for contraception and worse, it has become an argument about whose side is more vicious towards women. We’ve been distracted from the big story, and while it goes on, the fact is that the federal government under the Obama administration is threatening the First Amendment (and practically all of the Bill of Rights, really).
The mandates embedded in Obamacare will bring us down. They are designed to spark division as much as they are there to control and punish those who disagree with the leftist agenda. The audacity of this administration cannot be denied any longer – the line in the sand is over whether you are okay with the United States government telling you your conscience doesn’t matter, that your morals have no place in the operation of your business. And while you’re deciding that, the propaganda machine will make you take sides when the word “slut” errantly enters the conversation; it will distract and drive the conversation far away from substance, where it has no firm ground.
This administration is making decisions based on ideology, not out of caring for anyone’s health, least of all women’s. They are making that clear by threatening to cut off funding for over 2500 women’s health centers that don’t provide abortions, simply because Texas law prohibits tax dollars paying for abortions and therefore Planned Parenthood. To them, it’s about the agenda of you paying to support someone else’s lifestyle choices, period. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the conversation in the last week devolved into an argument about whether or not women who “need” birth control deserve to be called names – the administration doesn’t want you asking the real question, which is whether or not the government should mandate insurance coverage for a lifestyle choice. These things are inherently related. They want to shut down any dissent from the party line, so they change the conversation, and it is no coincidence that these things are happening at the same time.
Whether it is cutting off funding for health programs or mandating specific insurance coverage, we’re being dictated to by those who stop at nothing to get their way. Not letting ourselves be diverted from the true dispute is the only way we have a prayer in this fight.
