A rabid Boxer?

A while back a friend of mine on Facebook unreflectingly posted a transparently bogus argument in favor of the President's anti-religious freedom health care insurance mandate.

You know. The one the Democratically-controlled Senate just upheld. The one that has as much chance of surviving a court challenge as a snowflake would a hot day in San Antonio.

If it's wrong to force insurers to pay for abortificants and birth control medications, she asked, then what is to say that religious types couldn't get away with refusing to pay for insulin to treat diabetics whose condition was (or might be) the result of gluttony, to which they also have religious objections?

The problems with this argument are several. To begin with, no church body I know of-including the Roman Catholic church, which objects in principle to birth control as well as to abortion- has a similar objection to treating diabetes with insulin, regardless of the origins of the disease. In the analogy to the health insurance mandate, the parallel to birth control drugs and/or chemical abortificants would not be insulin, but gluttony.

Second problem: while it is true that most Christian religions oppose gluttony, I know of no suggestion by the Obama administration or anybody else that health insurers be required to pay for the excessive consumption of cheeseburgers. The analogy isn't just comparing apples to oranges; it's comparing apples to aircraft carriers.

The third problem is that the argument, if thought through, is uncharitable nearly to the point of being slanderous. I know of no church or religious organization- other than maybe the zanies at Westboro Baptist "Church-" who would object to medical care for the sick even if their sickness was, or might be (a difficult proposition to prove) the result of behavior it regards as sinful. How many religions, after all, which regard homosexual behavior, adultery, and fornication (as well as the intravenous use of illicit drugs) as immoral for that reason argue that health insurance plans should not pay for drugs to combat HIV? How many religious groups that regard cigarette smoking as morally wrong (an increasing number, btw, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum) argue that insurers should not be required to pay for lung cancer or emphysema treatment?

Finally, a point which, regrettably, Rick Santorum (who has proven incredibly inept at representing the very socially conservative position whose banner he carries) has unfortunately managed to fog by his bizarre argument that since birth control makes promiscuity easier, it is therefore morally illegitimate in principle. Sen. Santorum to the contrary, pregnancy- unlike diabetes or HIV- is not a sickness.

I had simply assumed that my friend had heard the argument somewhere, and failed to think the matter through. Imagine my amazement, therefore, at turning on the PBS News Hour and watching Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cal) make that very same logically incoherent argument!

Most of us are all to aware of the degree to which extremists like Sen. Boxer on both the Left and the Right (including abberations like Ron Paul, who sort of float around in a kind of ideological bubble that can't readily be assigned to either category) contaminate political discourse by logically bizarre and even mean-spirited arguments which generate enough heat, certainly, but somehow manage to produce only darkness instead of light. But certainly a United States Senator ought to be able to parse her own arguments for fallacies of this magnitude in formal logic. And surely the media ought to be able to point them out when she fails to do so.

But that's not the scariest thing about Boxer's logical faux pas, which seems to be popping up all over the Left. The truly scary thing is the depth of contempt for religion and for the Constitution's protection of religious freedom it reveals.

Sen. Boxer and the other elected officials who take their position- including the President of the United States- need to re-read the First Amendment, and also their own oath of office.