Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control ...Contraception is the ultimate wedge that Pro-Choice groups have used for years to divide the Pro-Life movement.
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...Churches, synagogues and other houses of worship are exempt from the requirement, but religious-affiliated hospitals and universities only get a one-year delay and must comply by Aug. 1, 2013.
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“This ruling forces religious organizations to violate the fundamental tenets of their faith, or stop offering health insurance coverage to their employees,” said the Republican Policy Committee. “Time will tell whether those institutions choose the former or the latter course — but neither option should be necessary, if the administration had not taken such an unbending approach to appease its liberal base.” (link)
The Obama administration's choice could not have been more clever. Pro-Life supporters who favor contraception should see this for what it is: a cleverly disguised attack on the right to freedom of conscience.
If I decide to do, or decide not to do, particular things that you may or may not agree with based on my own conscience I should be allowed to those things so long as they don't interfere with the rights of someone else. The decision to use contraception or not affects no one's rights. It's a personal decision. There is no right to contraception by any stretch of the imagination.
If we do anything less than respect people's decisions on these particular issues than we might as well eliminate the concept of a "conscience" all together in society. Many died for that right throughout history - the right to believe in what many believe are crazy and ridiculous things that affect no one else.
You don't have to oppose contraception to disagree with this decision. All you have to be is someone that believes that someone's private life is his own business. Libertarians should be shouting down this move first and foremost.
Liberals should be shouting down this measure as it is entirely inconsistent with a state that stays out of the "bedrooms of the nation." It's a horrible abomination of anything any Progressive Democrat or Social Democrat has ever espoused. It's thought control on steroids. It's state control of sexual decisions.
Social Conservatives and People of faith, and even those people of faith with differing beliefs on the issue of contraception, should object to this on MORAL grounds. If we do not allow the free space in society for people to decide whether an act is moral or not we might as well forget about any other belief you may have. So long as the majority disagrees with you, you must shut up. This is entirely inconsistent with the concept of each one of us having an immortal soul whose health depends on the decisions we make in this life. Those decisions require free will which God has given us - only for Obama to take away.