Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The Arizona Tea-Publican legislature is one step closer to reducing women to second-class citizens who are property of the state by stripping women of their Constitutional rights and liberties in Arizona. Birth-control-exclusion bill goes to AZ Senate:
A Senate panel voted Monday to let employers with religious or moral objections refuse to include contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans for their workers.
HB 2625 would repeal a decade-old mandate that says companies that provide coverage must also include contraceptives. Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, said the move is necessary to protect freedom.
The measure already has been approved by the House, meaning it needs only approval by the full Senate before going to the governor.
"I believe that we live in America. We don't live in the Soviet Union," Lesko said. "And so government shouldn't be telling employers, Catholic organizations or mom-and-pop employers to do something that's against their moral beliefs."
Wow. This Lesko is seriously whack. She has a different definition of "freedom" than everyone else. And the Soviet Union? Please. This is the most authoritarian piece of legislation yet from the Tea-Publicans.
What Lesko is really saying is that Constitutional rights and liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are not shared by all Americans equally, but are ranked according to classes of individuals, including the legal fiction of corporations ("corporations are people too, my friend"), who enjoy a preferential legal status over lower-ranked classes of individuals.
This is the only possible explanation for why employers (including corporations, many of them multi-nationals) and insurance companies should enjoy a preferential legal status to make health care decisions for American women, rather than American women enjoy the individual "freedom" to make health care decisions for themselves in consulation with their physician:
Class 1
Corporations, Partnerships, Nonprofit Organizations, Trusts, Sole Proprietorships
Class 2
Males (preferably White)
Class 3
Fertilized human eggs, zygotes, fetuses
Class 4
Females*
* Constitutional rights and liberties subject to and limited by the preferential status granted by the state of Arizona to higher ranked classes. Voidable upon the occurrence of pregnancy.