“Moderate” Republicans hobbled by Hobby Lobby
by David Atkins
Yesterday at Washington Monthly I examined, among other things, the impact of the Hobby Lobby case on conservative Republicans posing as moderates in purple districts:
The case puts conservative legislators in a bind: most people do not, in fact, believe that corporations should have religious rights. Most people don’t believe that contraception is a bad thing, or that employers should get to interfere in whether an employee’s insurance can cover contraception.
Republican lawmakers who claim to be moderates on reproductive rights are especially challenged. Many Republicans who claim to have a more tolerant philosophy on reproductive freedom nevertheless cast votes that align with their more extreme partisan counterparts, and paper it over by saying that they aren’t trying to ban abortion or contraception, but simply that they’re trying to make it “safer.”
The Hobby Lobby case removes that cover. Either you think it’s OK for corporation to decide not to cover birth control out of extremist religious objection, or you don’t.
Take the case of Jeff Gorell, Republican Assemblymember in California and candidate for Congress against freshman Congresswoman Julia Brownley. Gorell calls himself “pro-choice” even though he has a 0% rating with Planned Parenthood, and a 90% rating from the California Pro-Life Council. He has been silent on the Hobby Lobby case despite repeated requests for comment. There’s even video of him stonewalling a questioner on the subject.My tweets to both the NRCC and Mr. Gorell have also gone without response.
They’re silent, of course, because they have no good answer. If Mr. Gorell and Republicans like him all across America stand with Scalia and Alito on Hobby Lobby, they will betray themselves as far too extreme for the voters of their districts. If they disagree with the ruling, their rabid Tea Party base will stay home or actively nip at their heels from the right.
So they just hope the issue will go away and people will stop talking about it. It won’t, of course. Republicans across the board will eventually have take a stand on whether they think corporations should have the religious right to prevent their employees from receiving birth control coverage.
Hobby Lobby isn’t the only issue for which this is true. Equal pay for women, marriage equality, minimum wage increases and a host of other important public policy matters serve to accomplish the same goals. But there’s something about the ridiculousness of pretending a corporation is a “person” with religious rights that can insist on not allowing an employee to be covered for birth control even if the employer doesn’t have to pay for it that sounds like a throwback to before even Archie Bunker.
It’s too bizarre. If supposedly moderate Republicans can’t even bring themselves to oppose that weirdness, then they don’t have much a fig leaf to stand behind. They’re just another group of patriarchal Tea Partiers, except they’re savvy enough to pretend they’re something else.
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