Mitt Romney has launched a petition accusing the Obama administration of “using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.” The move is the latest in a concerted campaign effort to rally the conservative base around a supposed “war against religion” and misrepresent or outright lie about a new regulation requiring employers and insurers to offer contraception coverage.
“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s first right, a right to worship God, according to the dictates of our own conscience,” Romney told an audience of nearly 3,000 people in Colorado. “We’ll either have a government that protects religious diversity and freedom, or we’ll have a government that tells us what kind of conscience they think we ought to have.” But Romney’s new-found outrage is a stark contrast from his record as Massachusetts governor, when he tacitly endorsed a very similar coverage mandate and greatly expanded government-funded contraceptive services.
In 2002 — the very same year Romney campaigned for governor of Massachusetts — the state enacted a “contraceptive equity” law that required insurers that provide outpatient benefits to cover hormone replacement therapy and all FDA-approved contraceptive methods. Similar to the Obama regulation, the law exempted “an employer that is a church or qualified church-controlled organization” from the requirement and the legislature soundly defeated an amendment that “would have allowed affiliated institutions such as hospitals, universities, and nursing homes to deny their employees coverage.” The defeated amendment closely mirrors the expanded conscience protections religious groups are now clamoring for.
Romney remained mum on the requirement — which passed unanimously in the Senate and in a 140 to 16 vote in the House — and pledged to maintain the status quo on family-planning related policy throughout his gubernatorial campaign. He even promised to expand access to emergency contraception and restore state funding for family-planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs.
After all, before deciding to run for President, Romney had been a strong supporter of expanding public access to birth control. In 2007, the Boston Globe reported that “Romney’s wife, Ann, made a $150 contribution to Planned Parenthood in 1994, the year Romney ran for Senate as a candidate supporting abortion rights” from “the Romneys’ joint checking account.” And in 2005, he “signed a bill that could expand the number of people who get family-planning services, including the morning-after pill.” Romney even pressured the state Department of Health and Human Services to issue regulations that required Catholic hospitals to issue the morning after pill to rape victims, despite initially vetoing the bill and claiming that the pill constituted an “abortifacient.”
But perhaps his greatest contribution to expanding the public availability of birth control came from his health care reform law. The state’s Commonwealth Care, which offers subsidized, low or no-cost insurance program for low-income residents without access to employer-sponsored health insurance, offers primary and preventive care that includes “family planning services” and prescription contraceptives.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.