We kept being assured that this election would be about the economy, not social issues. But social issues won’t go away.
The Susan G. Komen fight against Planned Parenthood got the GOP presidential candidates involved, siding with Komen’s initial decision to cut off Planned Parenthood and decrying Komen’s reversal.
The Catholic Church’s reaction to contraception coverage under Obamacare also got the GOP candidates siding with the Church as if this were a Catholic country.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision against California’s Proposition 8 opposing gay marriage will keep this issue going for the rest of the election cycle, as the GOP candidates scramble to out-gay bash each other.
Griswold v. Connecticut, which upheld married couples’ right to contraception, has been the law since 1965. Roe v. Wade, which provided limited abortion rights, has been the law since 1973.
But Rick Santorum wants to undo almost 50 years of settled law to let states have the right to ban birth control.
More and more, the fight over abortion has become a fight over the right to contraception, a fight to force Catholic doctrine that even Catholics don’t follow, onto the entire country. We see this in the far-right “Personhood” amendments that would ban many forms of birth control, amendments so extreme that one was defeated in Mississippi last year. Mississippi, that liberal hot bed.
Nothing less than the hard-won rights of women are at stake here, rights too many young women take for granted because they don’t remember what things were like before. We’re so busy fighting the Taliban abroad that we’re ignoring our own version here at home.
I see a table of Catholic bishops lashing out at President Obama, and it looks to me like a group of Ayatollahs. Why didn’t these bishops make such a fuss about priests who were molesting children? They are emperors with no clothes, bereft of moral authority.
We are repelled by Muslim women being forced to wear burkas. But insidious forces in this country are trying to wrap American women in invisible burkas that are just as demeaning and confining.
Meanwhile, while we fight about this stuff that should have been resolved decades ago, too many Americans are sending out too many resumes and never getting an interview, too many homes are still being foreclosed on, too many parents are struggling to feed their kids and keep them warm this winter.
Meanwhile, the centrifuges continue to spin in Iran, and Ahmadinejad is laughing at us.