Because It's Easy to Sell Out Women

I remember that at the turn of the century (ha! I've always wanted to get to write that) it seemed like you couldn't read a news outlet anywhere that wasn't running articles on Islam 101 and the institution of Sharia law in some country. In one such article I read, a clerical commentator, iirc, was talking about why the veil was such a big deal to newly instituted Islamic governments.

He said, roughly, that it was because it was a lot easier to prove your piety by insisting that women cover themselves than it was to give up banking with interest.

I've always thought of that story when people go tediously on about the huge, innate cultural differences between Us and Them. It isn't only that women haven't been able to vote in the US for even a full 90 years, that we're only at about the 150 year mark for meaningful property rights for married women, that the states never ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, that women get paid less than men, etc. It's also because still today, our rights and health are often the first bone offered up on the altar of bipartisan consensus.

For the sake of people who believe that undifferentiated cell balls are people, the Democrats routinely ignore the interests of those who believe that women are people. Hence, the uterus remains the only organ that the state can require any adult living or dead to donate the use of for anyone else's sake.

The health financing reform fight has been no exception to this trend, and I don't know if I'm even capable of conveying how angry it makes me that Obama's signaling he's willing to gut reproductive health coverage in even private insurance plans, and almost certainly to exclude it from any public option, just so he can stake a claim to being the "last" president to deal with health care.

If you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. Probably. Unless you're a chick.