Texas RR Groups Push War on Contraception

UPDATE: A CBS News/New York Times poll released yesterday shows that a large majority of Americans — including 61 percent of Catholics — appear to support the new rule requiring insurance plans to cover contraception even for women working at religiously affiliated institutions.

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Some religious-right groups in Texas are eagerly entering the war on women’s access to contraception and reproductive health care. As usual, truth is an early casualty.

Liberty Institute, the Texas affiliate of Focus on the Family, goes so far as to claim that the Obama administration is “mandating that Catholic institutions and other religious organizations must provide abortifacents and birth control in violation of their own teachings and consciences.” Of course, that’s not true. The policy would require that insurance companies provide, if religious institutions do not, coverage for contraceptive services for women.

Texans for Life Coalition, an anti-abortion and anti-sex education group based in Irving near Dallas, is also denouncing the new federal policy. The organization’s blog even argues that birth control is bad for women’s health:

“I am so sick of people lumping abortion and birth control together and calling it ‘women’s health.’ Neither one of these two things are necessary for women to be healthy. In fact, you can make a pretty solid argument that both of these things are damaging to women’s health, emotionally and physically.”

This new eruption in the culture wars follows a 2011 legislative session in which Texas lawmakers passed a number of measures limiting women’s access to contraceptive and health services. One legislator even acknowledged that he and his political allies were engaged in a “war on birth control.”

5 thoughts on “Texas RR Groups Push War on Contraception

  1. When are these idiots going to go house to house and see who has birth control pills or what ever. It unbelieveable today that a group will try and tell another group how to live and what they can do. Our freedoms are in the toilet and they keep flushing.
    What people do in their bedrooms should be their business and no one elses.

  2. The world has too few Christian fundamentalists and someone has to do something about it. The answer is to have more fundie children—-to flood the Earth with them. The answer is to get rid of contraceptives. Hear the preacher out and learn. This is for you too TFN:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS9__78U_1w

  3. You know, it would be nice if these sexually repressed, right-wing misogynists would get their heads out of women’s panties long enough to focus on issues that really affect life and death. Women’s health issues are between women and their doctors. End of story. Not our concern.

    How about capital punishment? How about indefinite detention? How about domestic violence? How about road carnage? Where’s the Republican party on these issues but nowhere to be seen.

    Returning prayer in school will not return jobs from China to Iowa. Sorry, that ship has sailed.

    The fanatical right is fiddling while Rome burns.

  4. The GOP and the religious right are in most cases one and the same, at least when it comes to gathering votes.
    After that it is all up for grabs. Folks, whether you know it or not the Texas Taliban is alive, well and growing by leaps and bounds. It is a very scarry time to be living in Texas (and in many GOP states for that matter). We are losing young men and women in a foreign land to protect their population from a group (the Taliban) which is trying to impose their idea of religon on the population. They could care less about individual rights, human dignity, or the commandments, it is all about whatever they decide is right, moral or convienient for them at a particular time. Does that ring a bell for the poor folks in Texas who believe that the GOP is operating in their best interest? What a sorry state of affairs, these folks are in for a very rude awakening.

  5. Republicans are not interested in reducing abortion, only in banning it. They do not believe birth control reduces abortion. Does this mean that banning firehouses will reduce fires? They also do not care about kids after they are born. They also do not believe in free health care for all children and pregnant women.