WHAT REPUBLICANS AREN'T TELLING YOU ABOUT HOBBY LOBBY: ACCESS DEPENDS ON MEANS

Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte and Deb Fischer took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal---once a respected journalistic enterprise, now little more than the print form of FOX News---this week to accuse Democrats of distorting the ramifications of the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case.

Ms. Ayotte---the Senate version of Marsha Blackburn sans the hilarious attempt on Ms. Blackburn's part to effect a Kathleen Parker look---and Ms. Fischer accused Democrats of falsely stating that the Hobby Lobby decision enables corporations to "deny their employees access to birth control."

While that would, indeed, be a false statement, the only people employing falsehoods in this instance are Ms. Ayotte and Ms. Fischer.  That's because the position of Democrats has never been that this decision enables corporations to "deny" employee access to birth control.  It has, instead, accurately described the decision as one which enables corporations to "limit" employee access to birth control.

In their op-ed, Ms. Ayotte and Ms. Fischer conveniently allow that fact to go unmentioned.  Their intent is clear---by focusing on what the decision does not do (it does not "deny" access), they hope to distract us from understanding what the decision does do (it "limits" access).  And, in ignoring how the ruling will thusly affect thousands of women, they engage in the very distortion of which they falsely accuse Democrats.

Access to any commodity---be it food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc.---requires means.  For  thousands of women employed by Hobby Lobby, the means by which they accessed birth control was their employer-provided health insurance.  Apart from the means provided by their health insurance, many of them cannot access---because they cannot afford!---the prescribed contraceptives they utilize for birth control as well as reproductive/general health.

Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), responding to the Ayotte/Fischer piece, noted that "While some are saying this case has nothing to do with access to birth control, that is simply not true.  For most working families, affordability is access.  A third of women in America say they have struggled with the cost of birth control at some point in their lives.  For a working family getting by month to month, these costs...can put contraception out of reach."

The Hobby Lobby decision, while not technically denying access to birth control for female employees of the company, has certainly limited access to birth control for those female employees who are of limited means.  For that matter, to the extent that their "limited means" prevents those female employees from purchasing prescribed contraception, their actual, real-time "access to birth control" has been effectively denied.

In order to serve their false and misleading narrative, Ms. Ayotte and Ms. Fischer try to separate two issues---"access" and "means"---that cannot be separated.  The former, apart from the latter, is moot.  If one does not have the "means" to "access" something, the freedom to "access" it is irrelevant.  And what the decision in Hobby Lobby has done is taken away from thousands of women the "means" to "access" birth control---turning the freedom to "access" it into nothing more than fool's gold.

What Ms. Ayotte and Ms. Fischer wanted to do was convince female voters that Democrats were distorting the implications of Hobby Lobby to promote a false anti-women's rights narrative about Republicans.  What they succeeded in doing was confirming that Republicans think women are so simple-minded that they can be fooled into thinking that "access" implies "means."

They---and their Republican BFF's---were/are wrong.  Women are smarter than they think.  One would have thought they might have learned that during the 2012 election cycle.  But, alas, they didn't learn a thing.