Heaven Help Us

When next you wonder why our government is dysfunctional and why the country is in the mess it's in just recall that we live in a nation which repeatedly elects to the House, Senate, and White House people like Sen. Barbara Boxer, and then all will be clear. Ms Boxer, weighing in on the case before the Supreme Court in which the government is seeking to compel businesses to provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees even though the employers believe that this is tantamount to providing their employees with the means to commit murder, seems oblivious to the distinction between drugs which kill embryos and drugs which enable males to perform sexually. Nor does she seem aware that very few insurance policies cover the latter. Watch the video and then read Ed Morrissey's commentary below:

First and foremost, Viagra (and other erectile-dysfunction drugs and treatments) aren’t widely covered by insurance. That’s one reason why a large online market for inexpensive purchases of the drugs exist.

Second, as anyone who gives a moment’s thought about the subject would realize, such drugs would be appropriate to help empower natural procreation, which isn’t against anyone’s religion, last I checked. Lastly, and this is a more minor point, Boxer ignorantly invokes the Catholicism of the plaintiffs in this court hearing, when none of them are actually Catholic.

The religious objection is to contraception and sterilization, and in the Hobby Lobby case, it’s narrowed to a specific kind of contraception — abortifacients. Boxer blithely dismisses the distinction and blathers about the employer taking away the woman’s right to choose her form of contraception — which is nonsense. Just because an employer refuses to subsidize that choice does not mean they are forbidding it or blocking access to it. It’s the same kind of “war on women” double-talk that assumes that employers have total control over the private choices of their employees, when the existence of an independent salary demonstrates the exact opposite. No one gets paid in company scrip any longer, and haven’t for a century or so.

Ms. Boxer's stunning foray into what is apparently for her the terra incognita of informed thought on these matters follows hard upon Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee's astonishing revelation that the Constitution is a 400 year-old document.

The charitable thing to do, perhaps, would be to avert one's eyes from Ms. Boxer and Ms. Lee as they undertake to publicly embarrass themselves. Unfortunately, they're a United States Senator and a United States Congresswoman and are making decisions that affect our lives in very critical ways, and it would be irresponsible to ignore their inexcusable ignorance. The people of the United States need representatives in Congress who possess at the least a passing familiarity with the matters upon which they hold forth.

Ultimately, of course, the blame rests with the voters who keep reelecting to office people who have no business being there. Whatever are we thinking?