Give Them an Inch...

Well, it's a good thing President Obama made that concession on birth control in order to mollify conservatives, because they're definitely satisfied now and will not try to exploit the president's willingness to treat women's healthcare as a negotiable item.

Whooooooooooooooooops just kidding!

The Republican battle against the President Obama's new birth-control mandate will continue until the policy is reversed, the top GOP senator warned Sunday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Obama's rule requiring employer-based healthcare plans – even those sponsored by faith-based groups – to cover contraception infringes on the religious freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. The Kentucky Republican vowed to fight the policy until the White House "backs down."

"In this country the government doesn't get to tell you or your organization what your religious views are – and they could well be minority views – but the Bill of Rights is designed to protect the minority from the will of the majority," McConnell said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"So this issue will not go away until the administration simply backs down. They don't have the authority … to tell someone in this country, or some organization in this country, what their religious beliefs are. Therein lies the problem."

The argument is this: If an explicitly religious employer gets an exemption, why shouldn't an employer who isn't explicitly religious but personally holds the same religious beliefs?

That question is fundamentally dishonest, because not all religious employers are exempt. (A Catholic church is, but a Catholic hospital isn't.) That distinction is, however, easy to elide in a soundbite. And the president's concession probably made it easier for the mendacious fucks trying to turn this into an issue of religious freedom.

I know there are people of good will who disagree with me, who believe that Obama effectively took religion off the table. I understand and respect that position, though I do disagree with it. It is my estimation that the concession only would have taken religion off the table in a nation with an opposition party who plays fair and a responsible media. We have neither.

To my enduring despair.

I feel like the president is still governing the country he wishes we had, instead of the one we actually have. He keeps counting on appeals to conservatives' better nature, despite the cavernous void of evidence that they have one.