The comedian Jimmy Durante asked a question that is evergreen in American politics: “Why doesn’t everybody just leave everybody else the hell alone?”
That question has occurred to me in spades in the last couple of weeks, with the ascendancy of Rick Santorum in the GOP primary race and the attendant return of the culture wars. And it was only aggravated by the contretemps over the Obama Administration’s rule that religiously based businesses must provide contraceptives as part of their health insurance.
The latter has been particularly vexing, although it’s a happy thing if you’re hoping Obama gets re-elected.
While the right wing has tried to frame the debate as being over religious freedom, that’s a pretty small and inadequate fig leaf. Make no mistake about it; it’s about women’s health care.
For one thing, birth control pills aren’t strictly about birth control. One of my best friends in high school was a girl who went through the tortures of the damned every month. The girl was in serious pain. She was prescribed birth control pills and that cleared up the problem. And she started taking them years before she lost her virginity (believe me, we were close enough friends that I would’ve known).
But that’s sort of beside the point, the point being: You don’t get to choose what parts of your employees’ health your company insurance covers. It’s a matter of labor law. That would simply be wrong, in the first place. And it would make the insurance structure in this country even more of a cluster than it is, with employers demanding that every policy from every company cater to the CEO’s religious beliefs, no matter how much that CEO was in the minority.
But what’s really disturbing is that the issue has spurred a debate over the morality of contraception.
As much as I disagree with the anti-abortion folks, I can at least understand their commitment to the issue. If you really believe that a cluster of cells constitutes a human being, then abortion actually is killing a person. And that particular belief introduces a different set of moral questions in the debate.
But contraception? I have yet to hear anybody argue that either an egg or a sperm cell is a human being. At best, they’re the ingredients of a potential human being. Flour is not an entire cake. You need other ingredients and a whole process.
People like Santorum, who’s a devout Catholic, instead have to fall back on sententious arguments that convince only the already converted. Birth control encourages sex between people who shouldn’t be having sex, they say. I guess we’re all supposed to just accede to their opinions. Kinda puts the nail in the coffin of that whole Protestant Reformation thing. Why didn’t they think of that earlier?
What amazes me, aside from the whole wooden-headedness of the whole debate, is that anybody can actually think that’ll be a winning strategy come November. The fact is, most of the people in this country who are having sex practice some form of birth control. Telling them they’re wrong to do so is, in the first place, an insult to their moral sense. And telling them you’re going to make it more difficult for them to do so is, politically, fatal. You can debate tax policy all you want, but telling a woman she can’t have sex without getting pregnant is just a bad career move for a politician.
I’m just already getting tired of people telling me how I should live, what I should watch on TV and how I should think. Please, stop. I’m not going to listen to you. And most other people aren’t either.
What’s irritating is that the impulse of some to tell others how to live extends even to the smallest, most inconsequential matters.
I currently have a class on open records laws. While reading the textbook – which actually is fascinating and extremely well-written – I came across a website that actually has posted online complaints to the FCC about television shows. The section on “South Park” is particularly large. Being a fan, I had to look it up.
It was hysterical. The funniest complaint I saw came from a guy who was incensed that two boys asked him for sex. When he asked them why they did that, it was because Chef on “South Park” suggested it. “The boys are 12 and 9,” the complainant wrote. “I am 63 and male.” There’s probably a really funny backstory there. My guess is that the kids did it after the 400th time the old guy yelled at them to get off his lawn and he didn’t know they were just yanking his chain.
But a lot of the complaints call for the show’s makers to be heavily penalized because what they do is so offensive and, of course, Dangerous to the Children.
Hey, I’ve got a better idea. Two, actually. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. And don’t let your kids watch it. Learn how to block the channel off your cable menu.
That will accomplish all that needs to be accomplished, at least for your good and sanity. And it won’t affect the rest of us a bit.
But please, Rick Santorum and the rest of you culture warriors, just stop trying to change my life when what I’m doing doesn’t affect yours one bit. Hell, you don’t even know what I’m doing. Why are you so desperate to change it?
Or, to paraphrase that great political philosopher Jimmy Durante: Leave me the hell alone.