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" (Optional Musical Accompaniment For This Post) The Wall Street Journal brought out a couple of women from the Senate\u2014Kelly Ayotte, The Metternich Of Manchester, and Deb Fischer, the rookie fluke from Nebraska\u2014to reassure their fellow ladies that the Supreme Court ever has their interests at heart, along with those of Jesus, whose mysterious ways only scrapbooking millionnaires truly can divine. What followed was a positive master class in bamboozlement. Contrary to the misleading rhetoric, the Hobby Lobby ruling does not take away women&amp;#039;s access to birth control. No employee is prohibited from purchasing any Food and Drug Administration approved drug or device, and contraception remains readily available and accessible for all women nationwide. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, prior to ObamaCare over 85% of large businesses already offered contraceptive coverage to their employees. And the ObamaCare mandate under review in the case doesn&amp;#039;t even apply to businesses with fewer than 50 employees. For lower-income women, there are five programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that help ensure access to contraception for women, including Medicaid. This has been a favorite trope of Ayotte&amp;#039;s ever since the sedevacantist wing of the Supreme Court decided to make Humanae Vitae the law of the land\u2014that, hey, ladies, what are you worried about? You can still buy it for yourself. The teenage clerk at Walgreen&amp;#039;s can fit you for that IUD. Of course, this requires Ayotte to be deliberately obtuse on the topic of an earned benefit, and on the topic of Hobby Lobby&amp;#039;s rather flexible historic attitude toward the medical coverage in question, and on the fact that the Supreme Court came back shortly after the Hobby Lobby to expand its &amp;quot;narrow&amp;quot; decision, which has opened the floodgates for the religious liberty scam to be applied in all kinds of areas. I don&amp;#039;t much care about Fischer one way or the other, but Ayotte has national ambitions so I think she should write another op-ed explaining how religious-liberty exemptions that allow employment discrimination and that sanctify union-busting are what America was founded upon, and, if not, why not. After all, with her deep understanding of what religious liberty really means, Kelly Ayotte then could go home and explain why Catholics should opt out of granting First Amendment protections to anyone since, in 1898, Pope Leo XIII denounced the idea of a separation of church and state as an example of the heresy of &amp;quot;Americanism.&amp;quot; From the foregoing it is manifest, beloved son, that we are not able to give approval to those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some &amp;quot;Americanism.&amp;quot; But if by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name. But if this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world. We certainly know where old Leo XIII would have bought his Rhinestone embellishments, don&amp;#039;t we? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21193/the-ladies-of-the-company/>