WEBB CITY, Mo. —
The craziness index has just about gone off the charts. Case in point: The date of Aug. 1, 2012, according to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., will live in infamy along with Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Why?
Because that is the day health insurance companies were required to begin offering to women coverage for their birth control.
Our own esteemed 7th District Republican congressman, Billy Long, weighed in with this startling insight: “Goodness gracious — the land of the free. We are no longer free in this country.”
Say what?
A woman chooses to acquire a packet of birth control pills with some help from her health insurance policy (for which she has paid monthly premiums) and somehow the entire nation is now at risk and no one is free to live their lives as they choose?
Rep. Kelly also said we should remember that day “as an attack on religious freedom.”
So I guess that means that people aren’t free to worship as they please anymore, and that Catholic women and others who don’t believe in contraception will be forced to use it.
Equating a policy regarding women’s health with those two horrendous days in our history, days on which thousands of Americans lost their lives, is appalling and outrageous.
It also is indicative of the desperation of the Republicans to defeat at all costs a program which, though flawed, may actually do some good for the middle income and poorer citizens of the country they purport to protect and defend.
(Remember, these are the same politicians who receive absolutely free, readily accessible health care.)
As for religious freedom, that also means freedom from having religious beliefs with which you may not agree forced upon you.
Now will the politicians please refrain from grasping for complete control over women and their bodies and get back to the important business of the country that will improve our nation in the 21st century instead of taking us back to the 19th?
Gwen Hunt
Webb City
Opinion
Your View: Off the charts
- Opinion
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