Pryor Attacks Religious Liberty

Last week I wrote about Mark Pryor’s MIA stance on Senator Harry Reid’s (and his fellow Senate Democrats’) bill — the bill that would have essentially overridden the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision,which protectedreligious liberty rights for business owners.
I asked his press secretary for a statement regarding his stance on the bill, but she never got back to me.
To no one’s surprise, yesterday we found out that Pryor found another area of agreement with Reid on this issue.
Pryor told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

I believe women should control their own health-care decisions, not employers or insurance company bureaucrats. This bill allows women and their families to make health-care decisions in accordance with their own religious beliefs.

Let’s decode this: What It means is that Pryor thinks that the federal government should be able to force business owners to pay for items in employee health plans that they object to on religious grounds, such as contraceptives.
Republican Senator John Boozman told me last week:

The Supreme Court correctly ruled that Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate eroded our religious liberty. This proposal is another attack on our religious freedoms. I will continue to oppose legislation that threatens the rights of Americans to freely practice their religious beliefs.

Anyway, the issue is now moot, because Senate Democrats couldn’t scrounge up the 60 votes to get this bill to a vote yesterday — but it does demonstrate how little Senate Democrats care about religious liberty. It is remarkable that they would waste time on this bill, which never had a chance of becoming law.
Pryor obviously thinks his stance on this issue will play well with the female vote in his Senate race this November. Maybe he thinks this will divert voters’ attention away from the fact that men on his staff are paid $5,800 more than women.

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