In a column published in the Star Tribune last Tuesday, Michael Gerson describes the controversy regarding the Affordable Care Act and "religious freedom" in the following terms:
At issue is whether Obamacare's broad mandate of insurance coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacients should apply to institutions with moral objections. For more than a year, the administration has struggled to clarify a set of regulations, while provoking 44 legal challenges.
Well, it must be a pretty bad policy if it has provoked 44 legal challenges, right? But what if there are 44 crazy fanatics who can afford lawyers and the court filing fees?
Then there are "abortifacients" and "sterilization" to consider. These may be known to you as the morning after pill and vasectomies, respectively. But calling things by their familiar names will not advance the cause. People may then notice that what you call "moral objections" is more like nostalgia for the days when the church was preeminent and human life was more plausibly described as nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.
