After close to eight years watching our former governor try to buy the nation's highest political office, and these many months of spectacle as he and his opponents fight for the Republican presidential nomination, I thought I had become pretty much inured to hypocrisy, big lies and Orwellian double speak. So I was surprised to find myself as bothered as I am by the recent uproar around the requirement in the new federal health care law that employers provide health plans that include free birth control coverage. For the first time in almost five years of writing this column, I feel compelled to address an issue with no specifically local angle.

What's so upsetting? First is the way the narrative is twisted to present those who would choose to limit the rights of others to appear to be themselves the victims. Religious leaders and their allies are trying to impose their beliefs on others - employees of the hospitals, schools and universities they operate - yet they claim that not being allowed to withhold certain types of health coverage that their employees may want and need is a violation of their own religious rights.

This is not far removed from the myth of corporations as people that I wrote about last month. Those who object to the Obama administration's rule ignore the rights of individual employees while advocating for the religious rights of corporate institutions.

The issue is manufactured for political purpose. The Catholic Church has been living with identical rules in many states for some time. As Rachel Maddow wrote in the Washington Post (Feb. 10), "The right has picked a fight on this issue because religiosity is a convenient partisan cudgel to use against Democrats in an election year. Despite that, some Democrats and even some liberals have embraced their logic."

It is particularly troubling to see the number of self-described liberals, from E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post to Michael Sean Winters, of the National Catholic Reporter, who have bought into the argument that this is an issue of religious liberty rather than recognizing it as part of a continued attack on women's autonomy in health decisions and a classic culture-war wedge issue for an election year.

Melissa Rogers, of Wake Forest University Divinity School and former chair of Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, writes in "God's Blog" (Feb. 10) on the Sojourner's website, "Just as we would not want the government to force pacifist religious organizations to have to pay for and provide military training for their employees, we do not want to force Catholic and other religious organizations to pay for and provide services that are objectionable to them."

This is absurd, not just for equating purchase of contraceptives with the training of soldiers, but because, in fact, members of pacifist religions - Quakers, Mennonites, and others - do not have a religious exemption from paying for war. On the contrary, religious tax resisters risk severe financial penalties including the loss of their homes and other property if they act on their beliefs.

While the manipulation of this issue by conservatives, and the thoughtless buy-in by some liberals, are both upsetting, I think what most bothers me is that this all was unnecessary. If Obama had fought for single-payer health care, instead of opposing it, this would not be an issue.

This is the continued failing of Obama and the Democrats: By abandoning basic principles in favor of "compromise," one creates flawed policies that are easy to attack. Just as bailing out banks, rather than homeowners, created the almost unbelievable opportunity for the right to attack Obama on the economy, so too has the creation of "Obamacare" created an easy target while maintaining most of the flaws of the previous system. The current fight about who pays for contraceptives is really just another problem arising from leaving healthcare in the hands of employers and insurance companies.

Jim Oldham is a Town Meeting member from Precinct 5.