Why Do We Celebrate This?

A few years ago, when I was still living out in Tennessee, I brought my first girlfriend home to visit family for the holidays.  She had never been to NorCal before.  The architecture here tends to be heavily Spanish-villa/mission influenced; I remember as we were driving somewhere, and we were talking about a particularly spectacular example of it (a country club out in Napa, IIRC), she got quiet for a moment, then asked, "Why?"

"Why what?" I replied.

"The mission-style architecture.  Why is that still such a thing?  Why model buildings after a period of colonization, where the purpose of the original buildings you're inspired by was to forcibly take over and convert the Native populations?"

I was at a loss.  "Because it's our history?" I offered, knowing what a weak excuse that was.

That conversation was brought to mind today by this post over on Calitics, a California-specific politics blog where I get most of my local- and state-level political news.  Fort Ross, an old Russian outpost and historic site on the northern coast of California that was one of the first European settlements on the west coast, turned 200 yesterday.  The post was a simple enough quick-recap of the history of it and a "happy birthday", but it got me wondering.

Why do we celebrate this?

Especially since the subhead was about it being one of the first European settlements in the area, like that was the salient point and major accomplishment we were celebrating?

What we're "celebrating" is a new phase in the invasion and colonization of the Americas.  An event which ended in the deaths of many, and the near or total obliteration of hundreds of unique cultures, simply because they were here first and white people wanted the land for them(our)selves, and which has left a legacy of racism, poverty, and appropriation that continues today.

Do we have these bicentennials (or really, far-more-centennials) for enduring Native settlements?  LOLno.  Both because most were destroyed by colonizers and the people forcibly moved away, and because even if they hadn't been this wouldn't be a priority for the general public.

And that disparity in and of itself should tell you that this is not the innocuous "yay history" it seems at first glance.

We should not be uncritically celebrating this.

Rep. Mike Kelly Thinks No-Copay BC Is Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11

From the "I couldn't make this shit up if I tried" files, via RHRC, this fucking stunner of a quote from Rep. Mike Kelly (R-eprehensible):

"I know in your mind, you can think of the times America was attacked," he said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "One is Dec. 7, that's Pearl Harbor Day. The other is Sept. 11, and that's the day the terrorists attacked. I want you to remember Aug. 1, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."

Day.
That will live.
In infamy.
Like Pearl Harbor
And 9/11
Days when hundreds of people were violently killed
And wars were begun from those attacks that killed thousands more.

The ability of people who have health insurance to access hormonal birth control without paying anything out-of-pocket for it is equivalent to MILITARY ATTACKS THAT STARTED WARS?

Go
Drink
Motor oil
and hydrochloric acid
you miserable
insufferable
PRICK.

I suggest we tell him exactly how we feel about this bullshit.  Drop him an email here (use zip code 16002-3805 to bypass the "only in my district" crap), and this page has the phone and fax numbers for all his offices.  Oh, also here's his Twitter (though it hasn't been used in months, it seems) and his Facebook, where the conversation is rather more lively regarding his absurd remarks.

Fly, my pretties.

Dear Self: You know better. DON'T. READ. THE FUCKING COMMENTS.

I've been spending some spare time lately fucking around on Experience Project, a social networking site designed around connecting people not by geographical location, or demographics, but by shared experiences.  You join groups that are all titled "I have [$EXPERIENCE]" - "gotten divorced" or "gone skydiving" or something like that - and you always know that within the group you're talking about something you all know.  It's interesting.

Well, EP has a "questions" section, where people post random questions and other people answer them, vote for their favorite answers, reply to other answers, etc.  It's slightly above the level of YouTube comments.  Most of the time.  I'm developing a reputation as a feminist killjoy* because I slap down bullshit with glee and don't let people get away with shit when they're arguing with me.  This pleases me greatly.  ^_^

Today, I was browsing around, and came across the question "How do you define a 'real lady'?"

Oh, shit.  So I waded right in.

My initial reply: "Do you identify as a woman?" "Yes" "Are you okay with being called a lady?" "Yes" - there you go, that's how you define a real lady.  I'm not a lady, because I fcking HATE that term (considering its history of being used to judge and restrict "appropriate" standards of female behavior) and will vehemently correct anyone who tries to call me a lady, real or otherwise.  Tautology it may be, but a "real lady" is simply a person who identifies as a lady. 

Another reply: "A female with self-control, who is quick to hold her tongue.  She delights in everything lovely and feminine and she isn't afraid to speak her mind when needed.  Compassion and passion are two of her best qualities, along with nurturing, serving others, unselfishness and poise.  She is passionate about her beliefs and she accomplishes anything she puts her mind to.  Her peers respect her for being truly female." with my next comment nested underneath as a response: "...ew.  Thank you for reinforcing that I am NOT, and do not EVER want to be, a "lady".  Notice how it basically requires you to STFU, put yourself last, and treat yourself as if you matter less than other people?  Yeah no.  If it means hewing to ancient, restrictive, patriarchal stereotypes of "appropriate" womanhood...all aboard the Nope Train to Fuck-that-ville."  and another response saying "Well said", although since EP only nests to a single level, it's unclear whether they're commending the OP or my response to it.

There is not enough EW in the world for that OP.  I notice that "speak her mind" is qualified with "when needed", which is in the passive voice, raising the question, who decides when it's needed?  (Hint: it's never the woman doing the speaking.)  We then get three different synonyms for "Put other people's needs ahead of your own at all times, you come last," and end with gender policing.  I think I need a shower.

Another comment: "Treats others and expects to be treated with respect, compassion, has strength and dignity, humor."

See, this is not a bad definition.  I'm still never going to back it myself, because it still involves an arbitrary definition against which a person can be measured and "disqualified", but it's at least closer to just a measure of a good person than archaic gender roles.

Another comment: "Feminine, charming, romantic, sentimental, motherly, refrains from gossip, independent when the need arises, smart and willing to please her man in bed."

Oh, gross, another one.  "Feminine" - how are we defining that?  It's one of those arbitrary things that, like "when needed", is never judged by the person performing the action, but always judged by the male opinions around her.  "Motherly" - oh goody, here we go with the biological essentialism and reducing women to their uteruses (whether they have them or not, etc).  "Refrains from gossip" - so uh, men get to gossip without restriction or something?  Ooh look, "when needed" rears its head again!  And then the kicker, "willing to please her man in bed."  Heteronormative, assumes active sexuality and dating, places female sexuality subordinated in service to male sexual desires, and I notice there's nothing about eager to receive reciprocal pleasure...Guess men don't need to please their ladies in bed.  Gods, I'm glad I not a lady!  More orgasms for me!

Like I said - slightly above the level of YouTube comments sections.  Between this one and the "ZOMG OBESITYZZZ" and "TEH GAYZZ IN MILITARY" questions I've also been playing whack-a-dumbfuck with, I'm about tapped out for the day.

Feminist killjoy, out.

*I actually just ordered this necklace today.  I'm so excited for it!  I also ordered a literal flying fuck.

"Pre-Pregnant" Goes a Step Further

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

"Too equal" and Nikki Haley's Contempt for Rape Victims

I reblogged a post the other day about Nikki Haley's line-veto of the entire budget for the South Carolina Department of Health's network of rape crisis centers, with a quote of her truly reprehensible "justfication" for doing so:

The problem is it's like when you give something to a child. They're always going to figure out how they can get away with a little more ... [the rape crisis funding/centers] distract from the agency’s broader mission of protecting South Carolina’s public health.

 I set that post to push to Twitter as well, figuring that Haley's gross disrespect for survivors deserved to be as widely disseminated as possible.  A follower RT'd it, adding "Clarity in party for people vs. cash improves".

At the time they said it, I had a hard time parsing it (obviously I've been off twitter too much of late), but I've eventually understood it as a comment on the GOP's priorities of people versus profit, and how a move like this makes that ever more blatantly clear.  Rape victims are a "distraction" because it's a nice tidy half-mil line item to cut from the budget, which is far more important than actually caring for people who need it.

Relatedly, I was sitting in on a meeting at work the other day, about a jobsite that's just getting started.  I was involved in the hiring process for the half dozen employees we have out there, three of whom are PoC, including one WoC.  The job superintendent (who is a gigantic dumbfuck we have to patiently, carefully lead by the nose into understanding anything the company needs to do or needs him to be in compliance with) was saying there was a guy he knows that he wanted to hire on as well, and he offered as a selling point that this guy is black, which would add to our EEO numbers.  (Projects by a government entity, which comprise the bulk of what we do, have minority participation targets - usually that I've seen, 16.9% non-white and 9% female.)

Tracy, the general manager for our office, shook his head.  "No," he said, "We've already made our target numbers for this job.  We don't want to go over those numbers."

I raised an eyebrow at him from my corner of the table, not quite pushy enough to speak up but wanting an explanation.  They're used to my being a bit behind on industry-specific stuff, by now, and mostly don't mind explaining things like EEO jobsite quotas, or submittals, or whatever.  He explained for my benefit (and Ron's, too, I think, as he's an older guy who probably hasn't had to worry too much about this sort of thing for most of his career), "We have to try to meet those numbers, but we don't want to go over them if we can avoid it, because they might raise the target number for next time if we do and then we have to scramble even more to try to make it."  He added, "I don't personally care if this guy is black, blue, or purple, but we don't want to overdo our EEO numbers."  (Yes, the "purple people" made an appearance; I narrowly managed to avoid rolling my eyes or snorting in disdain, though I'm not sure I kept "you have got to be fucking kidding me" off my face.)

You wouldn't necessarily think this is related to a philosophy of government that prizes profits (or low expenditures) over people.  And yet as I went back to my desk after the meeting, shaking my head at that little revelation, it seemed to me that it did.

See, why do we care about minimizing the need to make EEO targets when it comes time for hiring for a jobsite?  Because it takes longer and is more work on our part to find qualified people belonging to an underrepresented minority in the field, as opposed to scooping up the first half-dozen white guys who walk in the door.  That's more time and work and, in the end, money that we spend trying to meet this quota.  The bid process for getting government contracts is actually pretty competitive (at least at the levels we're working at; this isn't Halliburton here), and it comes down to who can shave the most off their final bid amount.  Who can bring in the lowest number?  We lost a bid two weeks ago by a mere $1300, for example.

So when we have this EEO target to meet, if it goes up and we have to spend more time and effort or delay starting a job in order to make our target number, we have to either take it out of our bottom line, or raise our price a bit and risk getting fewer or no bids at all because of it.  The government has a limited budget and wants to spend as little as possible, and it's up to the contractors to give them the cheapest possible route.  The system is intended to save the government money, not to do the best for the people being hired with the government's money.  Thus contractors have an incentive to do the bare minimum and deliberately do no more than that.  It becomes an incentive for tokenism, rather than an incentive for inclusion.

I'm not saying I'm against the idea of EEO targets and such - quite the opposite.  I'd like to see a better system than crude number quotas, perhaps, but I don't know that any such exists at present, and something is better than nothing.  I'm just noticing that this system is rigged to fail, in a very profits-versus-people manner.  If we made EEO a priority instead of an legally-obliged afterthought - if we committed to spending a bit more specifically on hiring and training personnel beyond the average white-and-male demographic at the government level, thus taking the burden off the individual contractors, who knows?  We might have a situation where actual employment diversity is encouraged and achieved, rather than "encouraged" on paper but discouraged in practice.

But the Republicans have been so absurdly successful in shifting the discourse to be about OUR TAX DOLLARS and GOVERNMENT WASTE and INEFFICIENCY and PORK, rather than centering it on how to best help the people they govern, that a Republican governor can wipe out a budget for helping rape victims without batting an eyelash, and companies seeking government contracts deliberately restrict the number of PoC and/or women they hire, all in the service of the almighty dollar.

"Fuck the people.  We just want money."
  - the GOP

New Layout - Accessibility check, please?

Hey everyone, no new content today.  Just wanted to announce the redesign - I got tired of wrangling with a template designed for the old blogger interface and being unable to edit it easily; besides, it was really time for something new - and ask if anyone has any accessibility issues that I need to address.  I'm no expert on web accessibility, but I do want this space to be accessible for all, so please let me know if there's anything that needs to be changed!

Microaggressive Naming

[This is dredged up from the drafts folder, so context-dependent time references are no longer correct, but I'm too lazy to fix it.  Sorry for the lack of posting, some personal life shit has been going on and it has fucked me up but good.  Even with meds, I'm only just managing to be mostly functional; blogging is often beyond me, cause it takes too much focus, concentration, interest, and energy.  Well-wishes, good vibes, prayers, etc are welcome for Ozz's and my relationship, and for me personally if you want.  Sorry again and thanks.]

It's bid day today!  I work for a general contractor, and we have not one, but TWO jobs bidding today.  Which means that, since a major part of my job includes handling the incoming faxes and making sure everything gets to the right people, I'm pretty busy today with the dozens and dozens of bids subcontractors are faxing in.  (Not too busy to write irritated posts, though!)  Because in the last batch of faxes, there was this lovely little gem of a company:

The header of an incoming fax from a company named "Shutter-Up Window Coverings", whose logo seems to be two stylistically-drawn people, one in a skirt with hands on hips, the other in pants casually leaning against the skirted figure with an arm draped around her neck.

Now the name itself was irritating enough when I saw it that I intended to post about it already, considering that it basically boils down to a creaky old "joke" about lol women talking amirite?

But the fun part was when, after I'd printed this fax off and given it to John, our lead estimator, I heard him laugh a few minutes later and poke his head into our general manager's office.

"Hey Tracy, did you see this sub bid?  I love the name!"

And Tracy looks at the copy I left on his desk and cracks up, and I overhear them reminiscing about another misogynistically entertainingly-named subcontractor from a few bids ago, "Gutter-Done" (a play on git-r-done).

Yeah, because play-on-word names that reference silencing women and fucking them are soooo hilarious, amirite?  Not like there are any women in your office - or working for those companies, for that matter - who might end up feeling excluded and demeaned by it, by the reminder that when it's convenient, y'all are quite pleased to assert your male privilege and participate in sexism, and even find it funny.  I know I totes feel like a valued and equal person to my coworkers while they're laughing over shutting women up.

(And this is not even mentioning the latest fuckery from yesterday, which I ranted about on tumblr here.)

Willow Smith's Hair: Gender, Race, and White Feminism

Over the holiday weekend, this quote from Will Smith on his daughter Willow's choice of hairstyle flew about the intertubes, making the rounds of the feminisphere on tumblr, twitter, and showing up on a few of the bigger blogs as well:

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”

I reblogged it when I saw it, with a comment about "Parenting, ur doin it right," as did most of the other people I saw reblogging it.

But this morning, as I was reading through my daily un-newspaper (the collection of blogs from which I get my news on a daily basis), I found the above-linked post by Renee of Womanist Musings, which addressed the quote in a context that focuses on the racial dynamic at play when you're talking about a young black girl's hair like that.

And I realized, as I read her commentary on the way white feminists picked up and passed around this quote, treating it as a statement on gender equality and encouraging a young girl's sense of bodily sovereignty while ignoring the girl's race and how that intersects to give the statement a totally different meaning and context...that I had done exactly that.  I read that quote and got excited about what it meant in terms of gender only, without taking into account the additional politics of black women's hair and how that was really the bigger issue being addressed here.

So I wanted to A: apologize for my personal intersectionality fail in how I viewed/addressed the issue when I saw it this weekend (though I didn't do it *here*; I will however be cross-posting some version of this to tumblr), and B: signal-boost a great post about the racial+gender politics of it, for those who similarly heard about this but forgot to look beyond our own immediate gendered oppression.

Today in Not Actually Helping

Look, I'm as much a fan as anyone of the making-a-point "lol let's propose bills restricting men's reproductive rights to see how y'all like it" legislative shenanigans that have become semi-popular lately.  Attempting to require invasive ultrasounds before prescribing ED pills, declaring the existence of "sperm persons" and making murder of said spermsons illegal, that sort of thing.  It's funny in a dark sort of way, it makes a good point about the ridiculous invasiveness of the legislation the right-wing is pushing across the country.

But it can be taken too far.  Just because we know damn well that the pushback bills won't actually be passed, doesn't mean we can do absolutely anything we want.  (Okay, yes, we *can* - but everyone knows that just because you can, doesn't mean you should.)  Some bills are funny but inappropriate, as a mockery of equally-inappropriate bills that they actually intend seriously.  Today, I ran across one that, to me at least, crosses that line.

In Utah, a doctor wrote and submitted a bill that would institute heavy penalties against any man who impregnated a woman:

• Restrict elective abortion to the first 16 weeks.
• Require DNA testing to determine paternity of all out-of-wedlock children, even aborted.
• Require the father to establish a $50,000 trust fund to care for any out-of-wedlock child, even if adopted. If the child is aborted, the fund is used for sex education.
• If the father can’t pay, he joins the military and uses his enlistment bonus and salary to pay.
• No man can avoid paternity claiming “she seduced me,” or that she claimed she was on the pill, had her tubes tied, whatever.
• Man under 18? His parents are responsible.

It would be funny, in an over-the-top sort of way, except for numbers 1 and 4 there.  The first one, for obvious reasons - I don't think any of us would see a 16-week restriction as a fair trade for penalties against impregnators to try to discourage them.  And the fourth one, because compulsory military service is a really fucked-up idea.

And then there's the fact that, despite what RH Reality Check may think of the bill's aims, I don't actually think the bill's author is intending this as a joke or mockery.  He calls it a way to eradicate abortion, and I think he means it, for all that he knows it would never even get passed, much less pass constitutional muster before the courts if someone challenged it.

Oh, and when you have a doctor claiming it would scare men into using 3 condoms as an entry in the "pros" column for his bill, considering that using multiple condoms is actually less safe than using a single condom...I'm kind of disinclined to think it's a good idea on any level, from the silly nonsense down to no-I-really-mean-it.  And I would like to see a little - or a lot - more discernment from such a big, generally reputable source on reproductive health issues as RHRC before they slap the "not gonna happen but funny anyway" sticker on something like this.

The man who wrote this bill is not on our side.  Let's not gloss over that and lol at it like he's in on the joke, okay?

The Miter Mafia and HHS, Part II

I didn't title the first part as Part I only because I didn't realize I would be writing a Part II.  The problem is, I wrote my first post about the 5 pages of "summary" at the start of their 21-page whinefest, hit publish...and then I kept reading.  And there is far too much fuckery in there to keep to myself.

This is why you read me: I'm the gift that keeps on giving!

So, my original post was about what I got out of pages 1-5.  Yes.  A whole post about just the first 5 pages.  Now.  Picking up on page 6...

"Indeed, for individuals with a conscientious objection to contraceptive coverage, the ANPRM actually exacerbates the problem.  In its February 10 rule, the Administration proposed to have insurers “offer contraceptive coverage directly to the employer’s plan participants (and their beneficiaries) who desire it."  The ANPRM,however, no longer uses the language of “offer,” which allows for the possibility of acceptance or rejection.  Instead, HHS would now require insurers or third-party administrators simply to “provide this coverage automatically to participants and beneficiaries covered under the organization’s plan (for example, without an application or enrollment process), and protect the privacy of participants and beneficiaries covered under the plan who use contraceptive services.” 

As a result, women will have less freedom, not more.  They will not have the freedom to decline such coverage.  They will not have the freedom to keep their own minor children from being offered “free” and “private” contraceptive services and related “education and counseling” without their consent.  Thus, the mandate now poses a threat to the rights not only of employers, religious and secular, but of parents as well.  It is even proposed that this intervention into the family may be delegated to “private, non-profit organization[s]”potentially including groups such as Planned Parenthood, which may volunteer for the task.

Restriction is Freedom!  Up is Down!  Right is Left!  Making something available without requiring you to A: have prior knowledge that it exists, and B: jump through hoops to get it, is TAKING AWAY OUR FREEDOM, LADIES!  (As usual, the Church refuses to acknowledge cis women who can't get pregnant, trans women, trans men, and everyone else not a fertile cis lady who will use birth control specifically to keep her uterus empty.)

They are being willfully obtuse about the difference between "automatic coverage" and "taking advantage of coverage provided", of course.  Yes, everyone will be automatically covered, but it's not like the insurance companies are going to show up at your doorstep and force packets of the Pill into your hands.  Being covered by this rule is a passive state that doesn't affect you in any way, unless you choose to access these services.  Hell, I'm sure they'd be thrilled if nobody used the coverage, as that means less money spent on providing it.  As I understand Catholic doctrine, the sin is *using* birth control, not simply *having access* to it.  So this objection is purely spurious, not that I expected anything better from the MM's spin machine.

And what is this fuckery about minor children?  We are talking about health plans provided to employees and, in some cases, college students.  All of whom are adults.

If they're talking about the minor children of the employees who may be covered as dependents on their parents' plan, well...again I will point out that it's a passive coverage.  Considering that most kids don't exactly get individual mail notifying them of their coverage under their parents' health insurance, how exactly are they going to know A: that it's covered, and B: even if they know that (which would most likely be because of the giant shit fit the MM is throwing over this rule in the first place), how to go about accessing it?  Again, this is not a situation where PP employees are going to climb through your child's bedroom window and deliver the Pill by the bucketload.  They're kicking up stink over a, while possible, extremely implausible occurrence.

Next up, page 8, where they express their dissatisfaction with the definition of "religious organization" (which we all know they want to mean "any organization with a religious person running it, no matter the purpose and scope of their work or who they serve or hire"):

Reduced to its simplest terms, an organization is “religious,” in the Administration’s view, only if it is insular, while organizations with a missionary or public outreach are deemed insufficiently “religious” to qualify for the exemption.  We are free to worship our God, but not to serve our neighbor.

Bzzzzzzzt!  Thanks for playing, try again never.  This is their usual bullshit of "any restriction in any way of how we do our public service stuff, even if it's for the protection of said public we're "serving", even simply removing government contracts or money from the equation and leaving us to do it on our own, is OPPRESSING OUR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!"

Y'all are absolutely free to both worship your god and serve your neighbor.  You just can't use worshiping your god as a shield for discrimination in how you serve your neighbor (or how you treat the secular personnel you hire to help you serve your neighbor).  There's a difference.

Okay, now, stop eating and drinking and cover your keyboards, everyone, this next one had me making extremely undignified sounds at my desk.  Page 12, regarding the fact that the insurer would still be providing the objectionable services using premiums the employer paid to them:

One might ask how this is any different from paying salary to an employee who then uses that salary toward purposes the employer believes to be intrinsically evil.  

WHAT DID I TELL YOU?!?!  DID I NOT SAY THEY WOULD MAKE EXACTLY THIS ARGUMENT?!  DID I FUCKING CALL IT OR WHAT?!

Ahem.  What I mean to say is, lol they are making the exact argument I - and probably many other people - fully expected them to fall back on in order to take the next step in exerting religious control over nonreligious people simply because those nonreligious people happen to depend on the religious people for an income to live off of.  They're currently only using it as an analogy for the relationship between the employer and the insurer that provides the "intrinsically evil" care, but that tells us they do believe the two to be equivalent.  So given that, how long before they start applying that argument directly?

Continuing shortly thereafter on page 13, the MM begins making up new "rights" for themselves, as they are so often wont to do...

One can suppress religion not only by making conscientious objectors actively cooperate with what they see as evil, but also by depriving them of the right (a right that others continue to exercise) to support what they see as good.  Those who favor contraceptive coverage will retain the right they have always had as employers to provide a health plan consistent with their values.  Objecting religious organizations will lose that right, because any plan they offer will be amended by others so that the practical outcome for employees is exactly the same as if the organization had no such objection.  

Yeah, that's...really not what's going on here.  Not even a little bit.  Employers do not have any "right" to "provide a health plan consistent with their values".  What they have is a legal obligation to provide a health plan to their employees, without discriminating in that coverage.  Y'all are making this up.  This "right" is pulled *right* (u c wat i did thar?) out of your collective ass.

And you notice, dear readers, that they're not even baww'ing about their precious pennies funding it at this point.  They're just upset because the practical outcome for employees is not within their control.  That they cannot literally force their employees to abide by their moral rules or force them to pay out the ass for the privilege of self-determination to go outside the purview of the church's control.  They are revealing perhaps more than they think they are, when they make this objection.  They've just admitted that no matter what kind of compromise we offer, it will never be okay unless they can completely bar their employees access to family planning of any kind, without regard for the employee's moral rules on the subject.  They really do believe that employing a person entitles you to control over that person, including in extremely personal areas of their life, if it's because "Jesus said so".

They then try to pretzel-logic their way into arguing that there's no point in providing contraceptive services for free like this anyway, because either it's the government trying to "convince" employees of religious organizations to use contraception they weren't already using, or just relieving the financial burden on those who already use them and pay out of pocket for it, in which case the savings that are supposed to go to paying for the coverage, which are intended to come from costs like childbirth and well-baby care that won't be necessary if more people have access to contraception, won't be there to support it.

The Administration’s assumption under Goal 2 [to fund the coverage with savings on birth/well-baby costs] is that the employees of objecting employers were not already using contraceptives.  If, for example, they already were paying for contraceptives with their own financial resources, there would be no reduction in births from making those contraceptives “free.”  (The only thing to which this would “increase access” is whatever the employees will now purchase with the money they no longer spend on contraception—and that could be almost anything.)  Yet in earlier rulemaking, the Administration tried to justify its narrow and discriminatory definition of an exempt “religious employer” by arguing that any broader class of religious organizations probably has many employees who have no objection to contraception and so will not be seriously impacted by the mandate. The Administration faces a dilemma on this point.  Is it trying to change these employees’ reproductive behavior, or not?  That is, does it assume that its policy will chiefly influence employees of religious employers to increase their use of contraception by removing perceived cost barriers, or that it will merely reduce the out-of-pocket cost of contraception for employees who already use it? If the former, it intrudes into the right of employees and their families to take account of the teaching of their faith without undue influence from government.  If the latter, the policy may produce no “savings” that can be applied toward helping to offset the costs of contraceptive coverage, because it is chiefly being applied to people who already accept and use contraceptives anyway. In the very cases where the contraceptive coverage is “free”—that is, where its costs are offset by “savings” in other areas—the Administration would achieve this goal by undermining a far more important freedom.

So they're again taking the very broad stance - you know, the one that can't even remotely be repackaged as being about "religious freedom" - that contraception should not be universally covered at all.

They're also making an extremely flawed assumption - namely, that employees of religious organizations which do not offer contraceptive coverage will be able to afford contraception outside that coverage and will have done so in every case.  Some can.  Some do.  Some are able to access other resources, like Planned Parenthood, which can help them access low-cost contraception.  But it is the height of naivete (and no more than I would expect from a bunch of celibate old cis men pontificating from on high) to assume that anyone in this country who wants contraception will have it with or without insurance to help them pay for it.

Not to mention, that people who manage to make whatever sacrifices in order to be safe from unintended pregnancy (or, y'know, to control any of the half a dozen conditions that hormonal birth control helps with...?), may be giving up almost anything to make that work.  Like better food - or enough food.  Clothes for the kids they already have.  The ability to live in a safer part of town.  The MM made that argument themselves, in the above quote, only they meant it to sound scary - who KNOWS what else those godless fucks might be doing with that money??? - rather than reasonable - who knows what those people might be doing without in order to have this?

And at last, we have reached the end of this coal train of bullshit, finishing on a summary note that reemphasizes their misunderstanding of the terms "health care" and "preventative care" by insisting that contraception is neither, and at the last brings it back to trying to make things about their freedom to impose their will on those around them, while disappearing the freedoms and lives of those most affected by this whole fiasco:

The final rule continues to keep in place a regulation that defines as “preventive health care” drugs, devices, and procedures that render a woman temporarily or permanently infertile, and that may be associated with serious adverse health outcomes.  We believe that this mandate is unjust and unlawful—it is bad health policy, and because it entails an element of government coercion against conscience, it creates a religious freedom problem.  

Similarly to the related issue of abortion, this problem comes down to a fundamental clash of freedoms: when the freedoms and rights of two different entities are in mutual opposition to one another, something has to give.  Someone has to come out on top.  Someone has to have the 51%, the tie-breaker vote.  And as usual, the Miter Mafia would see the individual freedom and lives of people with uteruses subsumed to the will of the Church.

Fuck.  These.  Assholes.  I cannot say this clearly enough.  The Miter Mafia is worming its way further and further into the lawmaking and regulation activities of an explicitly secular government which governs a population comprising many different faiths and often, no faith at all.

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

And I can only hope that the Obama administration and HSS have the spine to stand up to them and tell them exactly where they can shove their notions of Catholic moral supremacy.