Dear Eric Cantor, you're an idiot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Birth control is not the same as kosher food and an organization is not the same as an individual person of faith. Sorry. For that analogy alone, you're an idiot.

For more, read Nicole Belle's post at C&L on Cantor and the Blunt Amendment:

Here's the logic fail on the part of the Republicans and the Blunt Amendment's "moral objection" clause: where does it stop? Who is the ultimate decider? What if the CEO of a corporation is a Scandinavian Lutheran who does not want to include coverage for circumcision, but the Board of Directors has a minority percentage of Jews who do? What if the President of the company is a Christian Scientist and wants to eliminate coverage for blood transfusions, but the Chief Operating Officer has a son who is a hemophiliac and wants it covered? Or a head of a company is a Scientologist and believes that psychiatry and psychiatric drugs are a racket and refuses to include that despite the fact that the head of Human Resources and the person who negotiates with the insurance company has been struggling with clinical depression? Who gets the final say in what kind of coverage an employer can have a moral objection to?

Therein lies the problem. Companies and corporations are not corporeal beings. They are non-living fictitious entities. They have no faith, because they are not a person. Not even a Jesuit institution, such as Georgetown University. The university itself holds no faith. Its Board of Directors even includes a Sunni Muslim woman. It employs Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It accepts non-Catholics as students. Those students pay a significant tuition for the prestige of attending the law school, and even pay their share of premiums for health insurance. All that was asked was that the coverage include a full range of women's health needs. Not for taxpayers to subsidize it. And then in turn, the individual women could follow the tenets of their own faith as they saw fit and either make use of the coverage or not. 

Exactly.

And so actually it's the opposite of what Cantor said. A woman (or man) should have the choice of whether or not to use her (or his) coverage for birth control, just as a Jew should have the choice of whether or not to be kosher. Just as a Jew shouldn't be told what kosher means, a woman shouldn't be denied access to birth control just because of someone else's (or some organization's) moral objections, whatever that even means. No one's telling an organization it has to endorse birth control, just as no one's telling any Jew what he or she may eat.

It's about access and choice, you see. And Cantor opposes both.