Nancy Goes Blind Over Religious Rights

It's Sunday, so I'll be mercifully brief today. On Thursday, the House Committee hearing on religious liberty involved two panels of religious experts, each panel comprised of people discussing why the Obamacare mandate for religious institutions to provide free birth control and abortifacients should be tossed out. Following the lead of committee member Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), San Fran Nan looked at the panels and asked "where are the women?"

At least she didn't sing "where have all the women gone, long time passing." But there is a small problem with the question. It seems Pelosi and Maloney share the same optometrist. Somehow they couldn't see that Dr. Allison Dabbs Garrett of Oklahoma Christian University and Laura Champion MD from Calvin College Health Services were both on the panels and both testified. Yessir, they are both bona fide women--ladies, even.

It's not too difficult to figure out that the Democrats want to make this issue about "women's rights," while the actual subject is religious freedom protected by the First Amendment. And by their measure, it would be mighty convenient to attack the panel as unfriendly to women by the lack of women testifying. Men are by biological imperative unable to understand or properly discuss women's rights.

Whined Pelosi: "Where are the women women on that panel? Imagine, they are having a panel on women's health and they don't have any women on the panel." That proves that Pelosi is at least partially-blind both literally and metaphorically. She couldn't see the two women panelists, and she couldn't see that the entire committee hearing was about religious freedom, not women's rights.

Never daunted, the botox queen went on to ask the queston: "What is it that men don't understand about women's health, that how central the issue of family planning is to that? Not just if you're having families (well if you're not, you don't need to plan), but if you need those kinds of prescription drugs for your general health, which was the testimony they would have heard this morning if they had allowed a woman on the panel (emphasis added)." Maybe she's deaf, too.

And if you didn't get the message yet, she said: "I think it's really curiouser and curioser that as we get further into this debate the Republican leadership of this Congress thinks it's appropriate to have a hearing on a subject of women's health and purposefully exclude women from the panel." Perhaps she actually did see the women, but has the leftist view that conservative religious women are not really female. Just like black conservatives are not authentically black. So they don't count.

All of the panelists, including the women, were asked if they would risk going to jail for refusing to follow the Obama mandate. Each answered in turn, "I would." But they aren't willing to go to jail over an issue of women's rights. They are willing to go to jail to defend their religious beliefs from government interference. They have a lot of history to go with their bravery, from the Christian martyrs of Rome to the American Founders who considered religious freedom so important that they wrote it into the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Of course it could just be that Pelosi is simply like the theater critic who leaves the show during the intermission and writes a review centering on the finale.