The Democrats take off their humanitarian mask
Alexis Zarkov writes:
I am appalled that many women think that they are entitled to absolutely free contraception so they can engage in recreational sex. Compare and contrast to people who are subject to large co-payments for medically necessary drugs. My own case in particular. I suffer from repeated attacks of migraine headaches. In the past, I have spent up to three days in a dark room in absolute agony. Now I have a medication that is almost 100 percent effective in aborting migraine attacks. I used to pay a $43 copay for nine pills. This year my insurance company took the drug off their formulary, meaning they won’t pay anything. I got my doctor to request a waiver and that was granted. But my new co-pay has about doubled to $93 for nine pills. On average, I use that much every month. Why is Fluke entitled to an absolutely free substance to facilitate her hedonistic behavior, while I have to pay a large co-pay for necessary medication?
Once when I was refilling my prescription years ago, the drugstore clerk asked how well the medication worked as she too suffered from migraines. She told me that she would rather endure another childbirth than suffer one—yes, one—migraine.
Let’s be clear, a contraceptive is a “medication” designed to make a healthy body partly dysfunctional. It doesn’t treat any kind of disease—quite the opposite. Fluke’s advocates try to compare female contraceptives to Viagra. But Viagra is designed to restore normal function, it makes a sick body better in a sense, not the other way around. Even pregnancy is not a sickness, but the normal functioning of the female human body. Why should childbirth be covered by medical insurance? If we want to encourage people to have more children then we can do that through the tax code instead of pretending a normal healthy condition is some kind of sickness.
Every day Obama continues to split Americans in warring camps. The divide is becoming so severe, we could be headed towards civil war. And I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean it in the sense of Spain 1936.
LA replies:
The situation described by Mr. Zarkov exemplifies how, as Gintas and I wrote in another entry, liberals have launched themselves into some speeded-up liberal dimension of complete irrationality. As we all remember, nationalized health insurance was supposedly absolutely necessary because, as the Democrats kept saying over and over and over, there are so many people in America with terrible medical conditions for which they cannot afford the care. Nationalized health insurance was demanded on the basis that there are seriously suffering people who lack affordable health care and must have it. As flawed as that argument was, it at least made a rational-sounding appeal related to some supposed actual human need.
But now, with this contraceptive business, the Democrats have thrown away their own supposedly irresistibly compelling rationale for nationalized health insurance. Now they want to give free birth control to every woman in America who wants it,—free birth control from puberty to menopause—while people with serious, debilitating conditions must continue paying very large amounts for their care.
Why? What explains this?
What explains it is that the Democrats’ sob stories about sick people in need were never their true or highest motivation. Their highest motivation is their ideology of sexual liberation and particularly of female empowerment, all aimed at destroying whatever remains of the traditional family and traditional sex relations.
Female empowerment, as the word suggests, is about power—pure power. It is about giving single, sexually active women power over the rest of society, so that churches, employers, insurance companies, and the tax-paying part of the population must subsidize their lifestyle. It is about making the rest of society the slaves of single women.
If that sounds extreme, how else can you explain the fact that the Democrats, the tribunes of the suffering and unfortunate, now support an arrangement under which people with serious medical conditions must pay substantial co-pays or even the whole amount for vitally needed medicines, while they, the Democrats, simultaneously declare that women of child-bearing age have an absolute, non-negotiable right to the absolutely free consumption of birth control products, which shall be subsidized 100 percent by other people?
“What do you want, Ellsworth”?
“Power, Petey.”
LA continues:
This “free” birth control business is analogous to the stimulus three years ago, but is even more shocking. The stimulus was supposedly about rescuing the economy from a dire emergency. That was the pressing concern that legitimized the huge expenditures. Then it turned out that the stimulus was really about giving the Democrats and their friends and client groups every pork barrel project they had been lusting to get for decades. Saving the economy was just a pretext.
Similarly, nationalized health insurance was supposedly about helping people in dire need. That was the argument that created the emotional fervor that pushed the legislation through. But it turns out that nationalized health insurance is really about empowering, at the expense of everyone else, the Democrats’ primary constituency—single women.
- end of initial entry -
Kathlene M. writes:
Very well-stated.
I take a life-saving biologic injectable drug for rheumatoid arthritis that costs $1,700-$2,000 per month. I pay a very-high premium each month to get this drug for a decent price. On my former insurance policy, I had to pay almost the full price for the drug (and there are no cheap generics available at this time). So the Left’s fake concern for women’s health or anyone’s health angers me greatly.
Aaron S. writes:
Alexis Zarkov hits the main point here:
Let’s be clear, a contraceptive is a “medication” designed to make a healthy body partly dysfunctional. It doesn’t treat any kind of disease—quite the opposite. Fluke’s advocates try to compare female contraceptives to Viagra. But Viagra is designed to restore normal function, it makes a sick body better in a sense, not the other way around. Even pregnancy is not a sickness, but the normal functioning of the female human body.
That’s just it: to liberals, freedom means freedom over nature. Freedom over nature means freedom over the normal constraints of the sexual act. That nature places men and women in different consequential predicaments with respect to the sexual act is the most unbearable tyranny of all. Society cannot be just until this is made not to matter. Viagra and contraceptives are thus morally equivalent. They both facilitate sexual pleasure—at once the highest and most basic facet of our being. All opposing claims in politics—and especially religion—exist covertly to deprive someone of this most basic element of humanity.
Since all thinking, rational people understand this, the concerns for “religious liberty” may be safely dismissed. A “reproductive rights advocate” at a Catholic school therefore understands more about Catholics, and even Catholicism itself, than the church does. This was the “real testimony” that was being denied, and was happily granted in the end a hearing, thanks to the courageous Miss Fluke and the misogynistic Mr. Limbaugh.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 04, 2012 11:22 PM | Send