Folks, this is a teachable moment!
This is the moment Planned Parenthood has been waiting for. The answer to the inexplicable sacrifice Title X funds get every time a race starts to narrow and a moderate needs to appease the far right.
I am wondering if Gloria Borga of CNN is right and whether it will wind up that Congress steps in to provide supplemental coverage.
In an ideal world, the government wouldn’t be involved in sex ed, abortion services or birth control, at all. But our world is less than ideal, especially if you are a poor woman who doesn’t have a job or health insurance or who works for a small, privately held company whose bosses don’t cover it, because of their religious beliefs.
What perfect timing for Planned Parenthood to say, “If it is unfair to add a contraception mandate to a mandate a lot of family owned business already didn’t like (Obamacare), then someone needs to recognize how unfairly Title X has been treated all these years.”
I’ve been blogging for a few years in hopes of opening up new ways of thinking around the Republicans and politics in general. A swing voter or an Independent Republican, I’ve advocated just going purple and electing the best people, regardless of whether they identify blue or red.
Last weekend, I was one of three people in a car heading to a Republican political event in Columbia, Missouri . Two of us were scrambling to help the driver with directions by looking them up on our phones. We both had the same address but my Mapquest was telling me to turn left; his app was telling him to turn right. I laughed because that pretty much summed up the conversation we had been having on the car ride down about the direction of the Republican Party.
But now, the Supreme Court, which used to be above party politics, represents not only that intractable ideological divide between the Republican and Democratic parties but also the gender divide. OMG. Yes, I know that OMG is a bad pun. But, maybe it’s time for the justices, once charged with rising above the political rancor, to cast off the black robes and just wear the red and/or blue.
The male justices were right that you can’t violate religious freedom. And the female justices were right that many women will need access to the contraceptive methods at the heart of the case, sometimes for reasons other than birth control.
In an ideal world, no one gets their rights infringed on. But no one knows better that life is less than ideal than Planned Parenthood. They’ve always been there to fill the gaps in contraception. To fill the gaps in education. To fill the gaps in income and access. To fill the gaps between what people wish would happen and what did.
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