The headline on today's editorial makes a bold statement. The column itself, however, is so qualified and mealy-mouthed that you can almost see the editor squirming to get out of the assignment.
The issue is Republican attacks nationally and locally on users of birth-control medications, trying to allow religionists to restrict coverage for employees, invade their privacy and even subject them to dismissal. This is wrong, and the editor could have said that. It appears that the idea that it's wrong was agreed in the editorial committee meeting. But the editorial dances around it.
Starting at the top -- "Women are seemingly and perhaps unwittingly being shoved into the spotlight this year" -- the confusion is evident. The Courier has a long and storied history of eliminating the passive voice, even at the expense of sense, and here it's the other way around. It obscures the agent doing the thrusting -- the Republican religionists -- leaving a mishmash of adverbs characterizing women, who are obviously neither "seeming" or "unwitting" in the attack on them. But this is what happens when a writer can't bring himself to criticize his political team directly.
He trips over his own typewriter in trying to say something sensible: "What a woman decides, no matter her convictions, is her business." I have to wonder what kind of mental short-circuit it takes to commit this nonsensical statement to paper and pass it through proofreading.
Every time the editor reaches a point where the reader might expect a call to action, he fades: "Candidates have a right to their beliefs, as does the electorate in deciding when legislation crosses the line and intrudes upon personal freedoms." ... "You decide whether government has any right to give an employer the right to intrude this deeply into women's privacy."
Nowhere in the piece does he bring the subtext to the surface and just say it: the Republican attacks on contraceptive users are morally wrong, legally wrong and politically idiotic. I'll give him credit for trying to get over the fence on this one, but he clearly caught something sensitive on the barbed wire and isn't quite disentangled yet.
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