Here is Darrell Issa’s Panel to discuss the contraception and health care issue. Notice something? They are all old clergy men. Not a single woman.
Starting in the early days after the formation of the church and lasting through possibly the nineteenth century, the male power establishment, especially the churches, held on to health care. People with any training in matters of healthcare were usually clerics. They were the doctors of the middle ages. Their primitive methods in medicine resulted in things like “bleeding” of people to extract disease. Midwives were banned at best and sometimes burned at the stake as witches. They were intruding into a power structure that kept money flowing into the church, and more importantly, that kept the populace stupid, uneducated and therefore perfect subjects to the male clergy. Rampant abuse of their power, starting with sexual abuse of women and going all the way to outright torture and killing by the church, was the practice of the day that lasted centuries – CENTURIES.
I believe that had it not been for the Catholic Church, mankind would have landed on the moon in the year 1500.
I have actually met Issa many years ago. Here is a congressman worth $450 million dollars, one of the richest men in politics, with wealth exclusively accumulated through a successful technology business. And he parades a panel of religious zealots, old white men with the exception of the token black to “mix up the panel” to tell us about what to do with our bodies and what rights our women have? Why didn’t he add a representative of the Taliban?
I recognize this is not about healthcare or contraception, but rather religious freedom for the religious organizations. So the panel may actually be technically appropriate. But it does not look good, and it sends a message:
The churches are still scared of the female womb. Keep us stupid, keep us reproducing. Keep us tithing. Slow down progress. Keep us in the middle ages.