Dark Brown Waffles

(Catholics love birth control, incidentally. It’s just their bishops that don’t.)

Socially conservative Christians would like me to believe that a governmental rule forcing their organizations to pay for birth control is oppressive at best and tyrannical at worst. You can see at least some of their seething contempt for the rule in this article. As is typically the case with socially conservative Christians, they are under the impression that any government policy which does not align entirely with their own views is an injustice of the highest order. Why, it’s even comparable to 1930’s era Germany!

Of course, social conservatives aren’t nearly as whiny when the things Americans they’re forced to pay for are things that they do believe in, even in scenarios in which their own churches stand in opposition. For example, the Vatican (an awful institution by almost any measure) stands forcefully against the imposition of a death penalty. Americans in states where the death penalty is legal - even Catholic Americans - are forced to contribute via taxation to a system that their spiritual ruler has declared out-of-bounds. Do these same social conservatives currently comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler object? Of course they don’t. Just as they didn’t object to wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq (over the objections of the Catholic Church) because if there is one true thing about social conservatives, it is that they are raging, feckless hypocrites.

Social conservatives wail about the institution of marriage while the highest divorce rates happen to occur in socially conservative strongholds. Social conservatives wail about contraceptives and yet, they’re used everywhere and almost certainly by least some of the same socially conservative women complaining about them.

But nothing stops social conservatives from complaining, mostly because society and culture is passing them by without really having much concern for the religious fundamentalism that once predominated American culture. Instead of accepting the fact that their refusal to adjust to a changing society has rendered their political and religious beliefs unpopular, they instead demand that exemptions be carved out for themselves, so that at no time are they ever forced to do anything that they don’t personally approve of.

Welcome to the world. We all pay for things that we’d rather not. It’s part of living in a pluralistic society comprised of diverse people with diverse beliefs. Acting as though it shouldn’t be this way because suddenly you’re also being forced to do what the rest of us have been forced to do for generations is nothing more than whining.