As Pema Levy notes at Talking Points Memo today, the picture at the head of the posting is from yesterday's Congressional hearing about "religious liberty," and has been circulating all over the Internet since the hearings were convened.
Can you imagine why? Do you spot anything remarkable in this picture of men people gathered for an official hearing to talk about the healthcare needs of women?
Andrew Sullivan features the same picture today in a posting about the hearings that he entitles "Mad Men."
And here's another picture from the same Congressional hearing that is also featured in Levy's article:
When you put this picture together with the one at the top of the posting, does anything strike you? How about when you view these pictures with these of the Catholic bishops of the U.S. meeting, deliberating, praying, plotting political strategy?
For more analysis of the exclusion of women from a Congressional hearing discussing women's healthcare needs religious liberty, see also Irin Carmon at Salon and Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches.
And for more commentary: Rachel Maddow was, as always, brilliant last evening in her dissection of what's going on right now with the Catholic bishops' Republicans' war for "religious freedom" vis-a-vis contraceptive coverage. As she notes, what the Republicans have suddenly discovered as a burning issue of conscience--covering contraception in healthcare plans--is what they themselves have been promoting without any questions asked at all for some years now, soon after they signed on to Viagra coverage for men in a big way following Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole's political promotion of the male erectile dysfunction drug in the late 1990s.
In fact, one of the Republican leaders who has suddenly discovered his tender conscience about contraceptive coverage, Rev. Mike Huckabee of my state of Arkansas, who announced last week that "we're all Catholics now" in the fight for "religious freedom" vis-a-vis contraceptive coverage, signed a mandate for contraceptive coverage in health insurance plans in 2005, as Maddow notes. President George W. Bush did the same at the national level in 2000, with not a whisper of protest from the Catholic bishops.
But then, as Maddow says,
. . . [S]omebody rang a bell somewhere, and now it's a Republican scandal, apparently. And so now even in the face of public polling data that shows this to be politically suicidal, Republicans are running full-tilt against contraception, offended by policies they themselves supported, demanding that those policies be rolled back and that we not only carve away access to contraception for people who work at religiously affiliated institutions, but that we let all employers deny access to contraception. And actually they're going further now. Actually they now say that we should let employers not just deny access to contraception, we should let employers deny access to . . . anything. And we should thereby essentially get rid of health insurance as we know it.
As my grandmother might have said (and yes, with very much the same tone of cutting irony as my mental voice has as I quote her), Glory be to God, isn't it grand that these Republican men have finally discovered their consciences in 2012?
Better late than never, she would also have certainly added.
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