Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Reproductive rights; violent rhetoric.]

"I know in your mind you can think of the times America was attacked. One is December 7—that is Pearl Harbor Day. Another was September 11—that was the day of the terrorist attack. I want you to remember August 1, 2012—the attack on our religious freedom. That is a date that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."—Freshman Representative Mike Kelly (R-Idiculous), on the floor of the House yesterday, in response to the implementation of the birth control mandate, a provision of the Affordable Care Act which requires that insurance plans cover reproductive healthcare.

When asked if the Congressman wasn't being a bit of a hyperbolic d-bag (I'm paraphrasing), Kelly's office called the birth control mandate "an undeniable and unprecedented attack on Americans' First Amendment rights" (lulz sure) and added: "Our freedoms and way of life have been under attack before, from both internal and external threats. If we fail to defend our constitutional rights, we risk losing the freedoms that so many brave men and women have given their lives to defend throughout the course of our nation's history."

To hear them tell it, you'd think that the objective of the birth control mandate was to mandate that everyone be on birth control. As opposed to, you know, telling insurance companies they're not allowed to treat having a uterus as a preexisting condition.

The vast majority of the people who will benefit from the birth control mandate are women. (Whose freedom to control our reproduction is, as per usual, not a concern of Republican men.) When a sitting member of Congress says that giving women control over their bodies is equivalent to a terrorist act, equivalent to encroachments on liberty over which we've fought wars, that is a level of hostility toward women's agency which would be considered hate speech in a decent country that took misogyny seriously.