The Opposite of Religious Freedom

You know, I'd rather talk about rights than freedoms.  Because freedom, well, sometimes I hate Freedom.  I hate Freedom with a capital F that is used in political rhetoric.  Freedom has been taken out of context to mean a whole lot of things I don't agree with.  In this country you are free to be poor and uneducated, free to be uninsured and unfed.  But in my mind, a good education, healthcare, food and shelter - those aren't freedoms, they're human rights.  They are inalienable.  Oh and it might seem I like I don't need to mention this part, but they belong to humans.  They don't belong to corporations and they can't be voted on.

I do believe that health care is a human right.  I think taking care of people to keep them healthy is better and cheaper for our country, but it's also the moral thing to do.  Even if they can't pay for it or don't have a job who pays for it for them.  And, as crazy as it might sound to some, women's health and by extension reproductive health, are also parts of health care.  We don't want mani-pedis and ponies, we just want health care for the parts we have that You (the big patriarchal You, yea the one that held a panel on birth control access that was ALL MEN) don't have.

In the recent birth control flap, it became clear that the Bishops didn't just want an exception to birth control coverage for Catholic institutions, they wanted an exception for anyone who wanted it - like the Catholic who owns a Taco Bell or runs a bank.  And then came Sen. Blunt saying we should let ANY employer deny you coverage for ANY health care for ANY moral/religious qualm you may have, which was properly dubbed the Blunt Measure.

But you the individual, the human, the employee have a right to health care.  And that includes, this needs to be repeated, women's health and reproductive health.  It is not freedom when your employer says, you cannot have this coverage because of my religious beliefs.  That is not religious freedom; it is the opposite of that.  It is allowing others to push their religious beliefs on people who may not agree and who are held captive by their economic relationship with their employer.  Freedom with a capital F is about Freedom from your government, not freedom from you employer so that we are Free from Uncle Sam, but a slave to capitalism.