Conservative Pundit Compares Birth Control Mandate To Rise Of Nazi Germany

Conservative commentator Eric Metaxas took the religious lobbyists' argument against birth control coverage to a new extreme on MSNBC Tuesday morning, comparing the Obama administration's new contraception mandate to the rise of Nazi Germany.

"In [my] book, you read about what happened to an amazingly great country, called Germany," he said in an on-air debate with NARAL Pro-Choice America's Donna Crane. "I'm half German. Uh, in the early '30s, little things were happening where the state was bullying the churches. No one spoke up. In the beginning, it always starts really, really small. We need to understand as America, as Americans, if we do not see this as a bright line in the sand, if you're not a Catholic, if you use contraception, doesn't matter. Because eventually, this kind of government overreach will affect you. If we don't speak up, we're gonna be in trouble."

Metaxas was recently awarded the "Canterbury Medal" by the Becket Fund for Religious Freedom, a conservative advocacy organization that is representing a Catholic college and an evangelical university in a lawsuit against the new birth control rule.

Religious groups, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have organized a powerful lobby in opposition to the Department of Health and Human Services' recent decision to require that almost all health insurance plans cover contraception with no co-pay. Churches and other places of worship are exempt from the requirement, but the religious groups are pushing to broaden the exemption to include all employers who are morally opposed to contraception.

A petition calling for the Obama administration to rescind the birth control mandate had received 24,118 comments as of 1:20 p.m. on Tuesday -- just under a thousand short of the 25,000 signatures it needs to elicit an official response from the White House.

But a new poll from the Public Religious Research Institute shows that a majority (55 percent) of Americans agree that "employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost." Nearly 60 percent of Catholic respondents support the birth control rule, and 40 percent of all the people polled said they opposed it.

A senior administration official said in a conference call last week that the decision is about "ensuring there are no cost barriers" to contraception for women who need it.

"We believe this decision was made after very careful consideration of legal and policy points," she said, "and strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious beliefs and providing access to services."

Comments

[Gail Coleman]

05:17 PM on 02/23/2012

First, would they all quit playing the Glenn Beck Nazi card?? Furthermore, I would bet the same employers who are morally opposed to birth control would also be opposed to a workplace breastfeeding room, special parking for new and expectant moms, 12 weeks of maternity leave(paid, please!) and covering the cost of daycare!

[Tatiana Stone]

06:02 PM on 02/13/2012

Funny, that's exactly how I feel about the rise of the tea party.

[David Gomez]

07:24 PM on 02/12/2012

I just love how they twist things. Once again, President Obama's plan was NOT for the churches. Though, the right wing GOP are onto something with their Nazi comparisons but they have the party incorrect - the GOP and the Nazi party are the ones who have things in common as Nazi Germany basically got rid of abortions and birth control and mandated that gays should be killed in gas chambers as well as other 'undesireables'. The Nazi party said that women's place is in the home raising children and should get married and have lots of children and those children should be blonde with blue eyes - they called everyone who disagreed with them a communist. As a matter of fact it was the early Nazi's that murdered Rosa Luxemburg and others who were either communists and socialist. The Nazi's blamed everything on the Jews and the GOP blames everything on the Muslims. I could go on with more comparisons but I think that is a good start.

[larrypsy]

01:21 AM on 02/10/2012

You're the Beast in the Garden - stupid!

[Cacey]

09:37 PM on 02/09/2012

Anyone seeking a true picture of the foolishness of this man's comments need only check out what the ReichsKonkordat, an agreement between the German government and the Vatican, did to benefit both, that was signed in the early 1930s

[Albert Jenkin]

08:59 AM on 02/09/2012

Even persons who should know better are joining the fun. Lable anything and everything you don't like "Nazi". Never mind how little the thing you lable has to do with Nazi doctrine. Just slap on the lable. Scoop up as many as you can of those who react without thinking. And don't accuse the Nazis of Naziism, that would spoil the joke.

[rmarshal]

05:24 PM on 02/08/2012

This ruling has been in place for more than 10 years and no one has complained until the administration extended it to firms with fewer than 15 employees. Even the Bush administration
left it alone.

[sfdcubfan]

04:54 PM on 02/08/2012

WHY must everything the Obama Administration does be affiliated with the monsters that murdered 2/3 of my family?????

[Talaan77]

04:42 PM on 02/08/2012

Bullying the churches? their are so many churches Christian and otherwise that have no issues with this

[JohnBryansFontaine]

04:15 PM on 02/08/2012

Conservative revisionists such as Eric Metaxas can not argue away the stab-in-the-back legend, which proves beyond any doubt that Hitler and the nazis were right-wingers :

The stab-in-the-back legend (German: Dolchstoßlegende (help·info)) is the notion, widely believed in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose World War I but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy. Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the "November Criminals".

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the "November criminals" who used the stab in the back to seize power while betraying the nation. The Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as "a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest 'national opposition' —- fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists and 'cultural Bolsheviks', who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Adolf Hitler and the victory of the 'national revolution' of 1933."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_legend

[Nemo Oudeheis]

04:06 PM on 02/08/2012

Metaxas compares the Right to Choose with Nаzι policies. If anything, the Right to Lifers program might be seen to bear an eerie resemblance to Hιmmler's _Lebensborn_ policy, ensuring that the maximum number of people "like us" will be born.

Think about it.

[Horus45]

12:06 PM on 02/08/2012

Tell these men that they should pay the retail price for their Viagra might change their outlook.

[Albert Jenkin]

08:46 AM on 02/09/2012

An insurance plan that does not include birth control but does include fertility treatments and fancy labeled sexual stimulants for men - that's something dreamed up by a horny teenage boy. Having been one myself, I remember how their lizard brains work. Keep them busy on the football field and out of Congress.

[bbnz]

11:55 AM on 02/08/2012

Before anyone starts comparing this to the Nazi's they should read what the Nazi's actually stood for. They were an extension of the Italian Fascist movement. They were anti-Union, anti-education, anti-equal rights, anti-gay, anti-religion (except Christianity). Although the party name had the word "socialist" in it, they were totally against any form of socialism which is why they targeted the workers and the unions. They were Pro-Big Business and even had some of the USA's major businesses & leaders who supported Hitler and the Nazi's. (like Henry Ford, GM, IBM, Coca Cola, Hearst, Rockefeller, GE and more) Bush's Grandfather (Prescott Bush) gained considerable wealth working with the Nazi party. It would be great if people bothered to really research for themselves how a party like the Nazi's could rise to power and what they stood for. The similarities between the Tea Party movement and the recent Citizens United Decision are frightening.

[King Banhammer]

12:48 PM on 02/08/2012

agreed. Yet this rhetoric is nothing more than a straight-line extension of stuff they were already saying.

[Horus45]

01:30 PM on 02/08/2012

Kinda like how some GOP call the Democratic Party the party of Slavery without mentioning how the southern states switched from Democratic support to Republican AFTER the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Making up History just to try to win some black support.

[JFP11144]

11:53 AM on 02/09/2012

It was the GOP which fought for and passed the Civil Rights Act; the Dems, led by Klansmen Senators Byrd and Bayh fought it tooth and nail. Let's get it right.

[JFP11144]

11:47 AM on 02/08/2012

"Screen"?
You mean censor.....:) to maintain "purity" of leftest thinking. Sounds like Nazism to me.

[King Banhammer]

12:48 PM on 02/08/2012

Yes, yes. I'm sure HuffPo is secretly setting up to round you people into camps as we speak.

[JFP11144]

11:44 AM on 02/09/2012

So predictable. I offer a different historical perspective and you respond with an inane non-sequitur...and not even that clever at that. Read the book and broaden your thinking.

[JScott]

11:36 AM on 02/08/2012

All these 'pundits' think they lord such power over everyone else and they speak with 'authority'.............in their own mind.