The "Moral Conscience" Double Meaning (Pun) That Was Missed

Jack Kemp

Looking at American Thinker on February 13th, there is a blog piece written by Jon Hall on Obama's requirement that insurance companies pay for birth control.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/02/obamacares_moral_conscience_accommodation.html

The title and introductory "teaser" say:

“ObamaCare's Moral Conscience Accommodation

The absurdity of ObamaCare's ‘accommodation’ for those whose moral conscience prevents them from paying for birth control”
END QUOTE

But Mr. Hall went on to only talk about Catholic and, by implication, other religious objections to paying for birth control, however indirectly. He clearly missed the obvious double meaning/pun in his introductory “teaser.” What is that?

The second meaning is that the left thinks they, like the Catholic Church, shouldn’t pay for birth control either, but for an entirely different reason to entirely different ends. And although Mr. Hall went out of his way to not mention abortions, Mr. Obama went out of his way to definitely mention them in the thing that an insurance company was required to pay for. I am not "intellectual" enough to split hairs here.

The left has an intense belief, bordering on religious fervor, that they are entitled to birth control and abortion coverage as a sacred right which the government is bound by moral conscience of its officials, both elected and not elected, to pay for. Thus the left believes, in effect, that despite earlier presidents’ administrations’ rulings, they have a moral right to not have to pay for birth control and abortions.

Now the practical matter of sharing the expense for that birth control coverage with everyone else in the insurance pool of premium payers will cause individual leftists to pay for abortions, if only in part. But that is a detail mostly of interest to policy wonks, GAO staffers and conservative bloggers. The Beneficent State will be seen to hand out birth control pills the way John D. Rockefeller and Teddy Roosevelt handed out dimes in public during an earlier era.

But there are more issues, both political and practical.

Requiring every American to pay for birth control is a violation of the First Amendment that negates Catholic’s (and others’) Freedom of Religion, but the situation is even a greater power grab. Obama, by forcing the purchase of birth control on everyone is essentially imposing Secular Humanism as the official state religion of the United States. It is the modern version of Olde England’s state religion(s) imposed by their monarchs, complete with the mandatory tithing for all subjects, including non-members of the monarch’s Church. Those past practices were what lead to the Pilgrims to flee England for The New World.

Let us further consider a job related aspect of requiring all to buy insurance with birth control and abortion coverage, an aspect the left largely disregards. When a business owner or manager pays for the bulk of employee’s job related insurance, the business person can't afford to give new raises to workers without first covering their new expenses. Of course, if a leftist is elated by the secular religious rite and right of “free birth control,” hidden indirect expenses that lower their own salary potentials are facts they will easy chose to ignore in light of this leftist “higher good” being enacted.

But let’s consider also Obama’s new insurance requirement as being shrewd retail political marketing, similar to acts a retail business does to draw in customers. When someone rationalized that Obama was offering “free birth control,” it is similar to the rationalization that occurs when a member of a gated community - and not a senior one - finds that they now have "free" ambulance service - but their monthly community fees have gone up by $17.50. Obama, like the gated community management, knows his voting customers fairly well. And both marketing manipulations, if offered today, will have to wait for a time between now and November to know if their membership voters find this ploy attractive enough to support with a vote of confidence or gets withdrawn in the next membership meeting's vote. I believe a majority of readers at this website think this birth control “free offer” is not worth it for the reasons stated above, but I am here “preaching to the choir.”

Whether the majority of American voters agree with the free offer by Mr. Obama depends on a myriad of factors such as how much they believe what the media is telling them, whether the price of gas will be too high for them to even afford a drive to bar for beer or whether the voters and their loved ones have jobs. I wish I could say for sure that the “free birth control” offer will be rejected at the polls in November, but the truth is I – and even Obama - do not know how much Americans can be influenced by both major party’s candidates or influenced by the media – or have been influenced not only in the last four years but over the last twenty-five. Who could have predicted Senator Al Franken, Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton or the 2010 Tea Party-inspired Republican victories?

As for the validity of the “Moral Conscience Accommodations” of Obama’s birth control payment scheme, that all depends on how you define each of those three words.