health care is the great moral cause of our time

the invective coming from the uglier corners of the right wing aimed at the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has always been colored by a particular cruelty. here's senator ted cruz saying that those who lack health care should just get a job. here's mitt romney blaming his 2012 loss on the affection minorities have for obamacare, which he also described as something like a bribe in exchange for votes. the video above depicts a republican crowd cheering for the death of a hypothetical uninsured man.

recently, though, the rhetoric has escalated from garden-variety poor-bashing all the way to DEFCON 1. opponents are reaching for the grandest, most spectacular historical crimes in describing the dangers of the law: the holocaust, slavery, eugenics -- no atrocity is too great to warrant a comparison to the health care bill.

there's a particular--and in my opinion, fascinating--focus on american slavery; elected officals, respected pundits, gubernatorial candidates have each mentioned slavery in discussing the law.

there is, i believe, a good analogy to be made here, though it's not the one the opponents are attempting to make. like slavery, or civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, health care is the great moral cause of our era. it shares with those struggles a debate over who is to be considered worthy of protection by our society.

we are currently in the midst of an extremely bumpy rollout of what may or may not be a successful piece of legislation, but the details of website functionality or even the individual mandate should not obscure the fact that the question itself -- whom should we let live, and whom should we let die -- is the most consequential political question we've tackled in several generations. i believe that there are many ways to get to full coverage, but the principle should be beyond question: no american should be denied the right to live. the rancor inspired by the health care bill shows that many americans believe otherwise.

i further believe that history will judge opponents of this principle in the way that history has always judged those who seek to deny equal protection to certain groups of people: that is, damnably. it will be difficult for future generations to explain why radicals shut down the government to prevent access to health care, just as it is difficult today to explain how anyone could have taken up arms to defend slavery, but take up arms they did, and if nothing else, the ugliness of the current debate will serve as yet another perennial reminder that equal protection requires constant struggle, and the brotherhood of humankind is not a given.