The Vagina Ideologues

When the Obama administration mandated that churches and faith-based employers (just like every other employer in America) include birth control and other reproductive health services for their employees, churches all over the country went ape-shit complaining of religious persecution and violations of conscience. Inevitably, the Hitler references soon followed. That's a particularly bad strategy, given that when Hitler started his persecution of Jews, it was precisely the Catholic Church that not only stayed silent but actually endorsed his authority. Where was their conscience then? Oh, maybe conscience only exists when you live in a liberal democracy that respects people's freedom of expression and conscience :)

Of course, the healthcare mandate didn't say that individuals will be forced, against their will, to use birth control, only that it should be made available to them (by tax-exempt and government subsidized institutions) if they needed it. To claim that the Obama administration is violating religious conscience is an instance of what logicians call the fallacy of composition: taking the fact that individuals have a conscience to conclude that the institutions that those people comprise also have a conscience. But unless you really buy the claim that institutions and corporations are people, you can probably see right through the fallacy in such a comparison.

To further exploit this idea of religious persecution, Faux News decided to bring in a panel of experts on female reproductive health, which, true to Faux News form, was a total sausage fest. Fortunately, Jon Stewart brings his comedic genius to clarify the situation.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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And of course, this wouldn't be complete without Stephen Colbert's two cents:

The Colbert Report
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