The Party of Condoms

It is illuminating to observe tactics and divine motives.  

President Barack Obama and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, have decided that free, mandated contraceptives are a national emergency requiring intense efforts by the federal government; this, under the auspices of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.  The new policies also call upon Catholic or other religious institutions opposed to participating in providing contraception to do so, despite religious objections, abridging their first amendment rights.  

That such contraceptives must be "free" is yet another liberal oddity.  Why "free?"  Is anything actually "free?" Someone, of course, must pay.  And why, of all things, contraceptives?  What about treatment for heart disease or strokes?  Has there been an evolving national consensus in support of free contraceptives?

Obama's minions in Congress apparently detected one and called upon Sandra Fluke to testify regarding the extraordinary deprivations that a 31-year-old coed at Georgetown Law must endure engaging in recreational sex absent taxpayer funded contraceptives.

Talk Radio Host, Rush Limbaugh, subsequently referred to her as a “slut” and a “prostitute,” issued an apology, but reaped the liberal/media whirlwind.  President Obama called Ms. Fluke personally to commiserate and even invoked the names of his children in her defense at a press conference. 

Presidential phone calls to certain conservative women (Sara Palin, Michelle Bachman, others), attacked far more distastefully by prominent liberal media figures have not been forthcoming...

And so the Democrat Party and its media appendage have defined the ground upon which they seek to go to war: and it is - drumroll - contraception!  Who knew this was the driving issue of the day?  Prior to the media onslaught, did anyone care?

The left, ever resourceful at creating straw men, is engaged in a charade, the purpose of which is to divert attention from the state of the republic after three years of Obama's stewardship, which, of course, is dismal.  Why pursue such rubbish if there was an actual record of achievement?  But with trillion dollar annual deficits and a sputtering economy, the Democrats have manufactured a non-existent crisis in the hopes of distracting voters long enough to get them safely past November. 

The contradictions and hypocrisies abound.

Why, for example, should employers and insurance companies, and, indirectly, taxpayers, be required to provide free contraception? Birth control pills and condoms are available, accessible, and affordable already without federal mandates.  Nor does anyone seek to prevent women from having access to contraceptives. There is no “war on women” by Republicans other than that which exists within the febrile liberal imagination.    

Obama also has no authority to order Catholic or other religious institutions to act against their religious convictions by mandating they provide insurance for not just birth control pills but abortifacients, abortion, sterilization procedures, and, who knows, “sex rearrangement surgery?”

And why is Sandra Fluke who attends a prestigious law school with a lucrative future demanding that others pay for her recreational sexual activity?  This moves the public discourse to the point of absurdity.  Is life that good in the US that the pivotal debate for an entire week is not about war, jobs, or terror, but whether a 31 year old law student is entitled to free contraception?  This is nanny state liberalism at its most vacuous.

What of the pained outrage of the media who routinely overlook far more offensive language against a host of conservative women by the likes of such liberal icons as Bill Maher, David Letterman, or Keith Olberman?  The double standard is obvious: slurs are slurs only when directed against liberal women.  

But the effort to sidetrack voters from Obama’s record is understandable: the nation faces mounting debts, our entitlement programs are broken, more Americans than ever are on food stamps, gas prices are soaring, “stimulus” is now a dirty word, unemployment hovers above 8%, housing is down, illegal immigrants pour over our borders, Iran pursues nuclear weapons, socialist Europe is crumbling - and the left wants to talk about contraception.

The once mighty Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy that led the nation through Depression and war, defeated the Nazis and confronted the Soviets, has vanished - replaced by a new Democrat party that came of age in 1972 with George McGovern, taken over by the countercultural radical left. It has now reached its acme under Obama and marches boldly into a brave new world under the banner of... birth control pills and condoms.