I'm a little curious how the first post can end up at "-1, Redundant". Does that mean the mods foresaw it?

Not that I really blame any of you for being misinformed, BTW. In the US at least, there's been a heck of a lot of money and effort put in to misinforming people about this sort of stuff for a long time now.

Yes, yes, people should disclose the info when they are testifying on behalf of an activist group. I expect Ms. Fluke would agree, since she did exactly that in her testimony (starting in the very first paragraph):

From the LSRJ website:

So, pretty much the very first thing she said in her testimony was that she was there representing an openly "pro-abortion and pro-government paying for birth control [group]" (to put it in your words). She never tried to hide it; rather, she appears to be proud of it. Also, perhaps she has been paid by someone other that LSRJ for her activism in the past, but I don't see how that is relevant now. Should everyone be required to start their testimony by reading off their entire resume? That could take quite a while for someone nearing the end of a long career as a lobbyist.

I'm done with this conversation. If you can't see at this point why you need to actually do research for yourself instead of just listening to talk radio, you are just going to continue to be hopelessly misinformed. There are legitimate arguments about religious liberty on this issue. Unfortunately, though, talk radio has completely abandoned them in favor of demagoguery. Personally, I'd prefer health care to be uncoupled from employment, partly so that religious liberty issues don't come into play the way they have in this case.

For the large number of people posting here about how this will just turn alcoholics into LSD addicts, read some actual research. This article and the linked to study within is a good place to start: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210

Not only is LSD not addictive, it is among the safest recreational drugs known.

I've never tried it, and it isn't entirely without risks (what is?), but there really doesn't seem to be much reason to be scared of it relative to most other drugs. If it really helps with alcoholism, using it for treating that addiction would probably be a great thing both for alcoholics and society.

Ah, so you are just going to ignore the fact that there is no reason to believe the insurance companies will raise their prices for other services to cover the cost of birth control coverage. Your argument is this: The price increase is unrelated to the cost of covering birth control, but it is due to the fact that we are covering birth control. It's a non-sequitur. Oh well, if you want to live in your own little reality and avoid all available evidence (both rational and empirical at this point) that you are wrong I can't stop you.

I've searched and searched and found no reports that she is 23. I found many, many articles claiming she was reported to be 23, but not one of them mentions a source for that claim. Oddly, many of them do quote from http://www.law.georgetown.edu/pils/CurrentPILS.htm where it is stated that Fluke received a BS from Cornell in 2003. Considering its presence on that page, there's clearly been no attempt to hide that info. So, according to these articles, the media's initial reporting implied that she graduated from Cornell when she was 14. That's a little silly. Perhaps someone said she was 23 at some point, but one act of incompetence does not a conspiracy make. Also, I've seen no evidence that she herself claimed to be 23. She has, however, stated that she is 30. If her "handlers" were really trying to make people believe she was 23, they should have mentioned the plan to her so she could help out.

First off, testifying in front of Congress is not the same as a press conference. Second, I've read (and searched) her testimony. The word shocked is nowhere to be found. Either you are lying (and bad at it!) or you haven't done the slightest research (i.e., reading/viewing her testimony) and are just blindly repeating the lies of others.

Oh, so she's a "plant" because she's been a professional activist in addition to being a student. By your definition, almost every politician in Washington is a "plant". How exactly is it that being committed enough to her cause to get paid for it nullifies her points?

Nice, a red herring and an ad hominem at the same time. You get double logical fallacy bonus points! We haven't been talking about condoms -- we've been talking about hormonal birth control.

Once again, if you had bothered to read her testimony you would know that isn't true. She said "Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school." That statement points out that $3000 is the maximum cost. You are talking like she said it is the minimum cost. And I'm supposed to believe she is the liar?

You don't need "reports" to know Georgetown's insurance is supposed to cover non-contraceptive uses of birth control -- Fluke clearly pointed that out herself in her testimony. In fact, half her point was that even though the insurance technically covers non-contraceptive use of birth control, it can be difficult to get it to cover such use in practice.

Just FYI, although some of Planned Parenthood's funding is charitable, Title X funds and student health centers are not based on charity -- they are based on government subsidies. Subsidies != charity.

I don't get what you are saying here. If the insurance company starts charging more for non-contraceptive items for reasons that aren't tied to the cost of providing contraceptive coverage, how exactly can contraceptive coverage be blamed for the price increase?

Re-reading your comment, it is true, you didn't say her being 30 disqualifies her as referring to herself as a student. Sorry I missed that -- I've suddenly seen her age mentioned a lot the last few days, and save for this instance every other time I've seen that it was in the context of "she's not a student/co-ed, she's a 30 year old woman!".

The point remains, though, that she is an activist and an advocate for less well off female college students, which are perfectly reasonable things for a law student to be. It is also perfectly reasonable for someone in such a position to testify in front of congress about the issue. Since she is an activist, it seems entirely possible that she may have chosen to attend Georgetown in hopes of making an effort to reform their policies. Law students are quite regularly interested in changing laws and rules to better fit their liking -- that's why there are so many politicians that are also lawyers. I'm not sure on what basis she qualifies as a democratic "plant", though. Is it just because she agrees with them on this issue, or are you saying the Democratic Party has been paying for her education so they could use her just in case an issue like this came up? That seems unlikely to happen in large part because it seems unlikely to be necessary -- plenty of liberal women agree with her positions without needing to be paid off.

Also, I'm a guy, so I've got no experience buying birth control, but if the woman Fluke testified about who lost an ovary could have easily afforded birth control, I have to imagine she would have obtained it. If I'm to believe someone let themselves lose an ovary just to make a point about contraceptive coverage, then I'm going to need much more solid evidence in favor of that than what I've seen so far, which amounts to "it's cheap, she's lying!". At any rate, to the extent cheap birth control is available, it is often only available via Planned Parenthood and Title X funding. The Republicans have long disliked funding PP, and many of them, including Romney and Santorum, want to get rid of Title X funding altogether.

Finally, not being able to afford preventative health care doesn't mean someone is stupid and helpless. It means they are poor. Hopefully you don't conflate the two.

Except for the fact that it is cheaper for insurance companies to cover contraceptives than for them to cover all the additional pregnancies that occur when they don't offer contraceptive coverage. In other words, a price increase for other items due to contraceptive coverage is exactly what won't happen.

What the hell is it with this BS where people keep talking about Fluke being 30 years old as though that disqualifies her from speaking about herself as a student? I'm 30 and I'm a grad student -- big deal. Every female law student is a woman. There a few if any teenage girls in law school -- you have to have a bachelors before you can even apply, after all. Also, so what if she's rich? She wasn't testifying only about herself -- she was acting as an advocate for those who are not so well off. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for a law student to do, since that is often a part of what lawyers do.

If people want to counter the substance of Fluke's argument, then they should do so. Simply claiming she's a grown woman and acting like that renders her incapable of also being a student is a red herring and and very stupid one at that. Not to mention it insultingly implies that all female students are just little girls.

Except for the fact that some of the same research showing incompetent people overestimate their abilities also shows that very high performing people *underestimate* their abilities. (See the paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It" by Kruger and Dunning)

Whoa, chill out there, I wasn't attacking you -- I was just wondering about the apparent contradictions between theistic evolution and Christianity (as the GP was talking about Christianity), and I am genuinely curious about how people who believe in theistic evolution reconcile it with the Bible. My hunch, at least from reading a bit about it online after posting my comment, is that in the more liberal view the references to sin causing death are apparently supposed to be referring simply to spiritual death. I assumed since you brought up theistic evolution as a solution to the creationism vs evolution problem, you (or someone else) may have been interested in defending it.

Okay, let's assume God used evolution to create humans (and other life). Can you explain why an all-powerful, all-good, all-loving being chose a method of creation that necessitates suffering and death for all organisms? Also, unless I'm misremembering, suffering and death, in the Christian worldview, are supposed to be due to the fall of man. However, if God used evolution to create man, how did suffering and death not begin until after man existed?

There is good reason why evangelicals are so freaked out by evolution, and I am curious how Catholics and liberal denominations manage to accept it.

Your analogy to the broken window fallacy isn't valid for taxing and spending in general, and I'm not sure it is even applicable to the welfare question (what exactly gets destroyed the way the window does when it comes to welfare?). Yes, business owners are forced to distribute some of their profit to others due to taxes, but it isn't the same sort of futile cycle when the spending isn't being spurred by destruction.

As for the idea that spending tax money on the economy necessarily detracts from it, the interstate highway system was built via taxing and spending. Did it only "appear" to make the economy stronger? Or would the economy have actually grown more if only state and county roads existed? Oh, wait, it turns out state and county roads are built by taxing and spending, too? Clearly, the optimal solution for the economy is for private businesses to simply build roads as they need them -- if someone else wants to use a road, you can just pay a toll to the company that owns it. Sure, a toll in this case is money you pay to an outside entity, but at least you don't *have to* pay it like taxes. Oh, wait, you want to leave your house and get food? I guess you *will* have to pay that toll, unless you want to starve; either that or build your own road to the grocery store. Or just go gather your food in the woods.

Yes, spending is too high in some areas, but your claim that in general taxing and spending only create the "appearance" of growth while actually detracting from the economy? That idea is ridiculous on its face if you bother to pay the slightest bit of attention to reality. Large parts of modern civilization only exist because of taxing and spending. Certainly there are sectors of the economy where government spending may be wasteful, but you clearly can't treat that like a general principle -- you have to deal with it on case by case basis.

Since you don't seem to be aware, National Guard != Police