Jeremiah Blues (2/12)

It would have been previously unimaginable to think that 2012 would be the year we fight about birth control, but yet here we are in some kind of regressive loop.  There is a war on freedom of religion.  Unfortunately this war is coming from the side of religion.  Refusing to provide birth control to an employee is a pure form of religious discrimination.  One's employer should not dictate what a worker must find moral or immoral.  This is no different than other labor laws.  If a particular religion found it against their code to employ blacks, would that mean its acceptable for them to racially discriminate?  I can't imagine any sane person thinking so.  If a group wants to do business and employ people than they should all be subject to the same fairness and anti-discrimination laws as anyone else.  Furthermore this is not the case of the religious organization being forced to pay for something they find immoral.  Employer-provided health insurance is provided as a part of the worker's compensation for being employed.  It is absolutely no different than their paycheck - it is the same as giving the employee a paycheck and having that worker spend their money on birth control.  Dictating what one can spend their income on would be totalitarian (and we all know how conservatives feel about private-property rights).  However, I think there is a solution for this.  Why are we forcing the burden of insuring people onto employers?  By going to a single-payer system, where we all obtain insurance through the government, we can free employers from the these kinds of problems, and every American citizen can have access to the same healthcare.

Given the recent surge in Santorum's campaign, I have the a feeling that the right has decided to say "f***-it, burn it down".  Santorum, being both for big government and against personal liberty should be a concern for everyone, particularly conservatives who love to throw around words like liberty and freedom.  Having someone like this in office (especially after dangerous legislation like the NDAA) would risk a danger of creating a fundamentalists theocracy - no better than radical Islam and as dangerous as Hitler.  That's right, I'm already invoking Goodwin's law.  But conservatives, rather than giving in to a candidate that might be somewhat moderate, would rather destroy their own party and reverse their core values just to spite the rest of America. For now, all we can do is watch the Republican party fall into chaos and become a joke