Obama and the birth control mandate

Alright, I'm going to try my hand at blogging about politics. I consider it a victory already, in the sense that I'm even attempting this, but it was kind of necessary. See, I have to read this article for our sociology project and write about it, so, before I make any kind of legitimate attempt at pretending I know what I'm talking about, I have to come here first. What the articles states (that is, what I can minimally deduce from the article) is that President Obama has a birth control mandate out that requires employees of religiously affiliated institutions to receive free contraception in their health plans. The catch is that these institutions are only in the likes of schools and hospitals, and not churches. Which is fine on a personal level, considering there are at least half a dozen places I'd go for contraceptives other than a church, but on a fundamental level, I mean, why not make churches provide contraceptives? Can't hurt, right?

One thing that I like out of this is the fact that religiously affiliated schools (ahem, Stonehill) are required to do this. While I don't think that students receive anything, I believe that they should. (And this is where the first instance of any political opinion comes from the mind of Matt Tardiff.) Our research project will take a look at Stonehill students, and how often they use contraceptives, as well as the basic plethora of demographic information - we don't have a ton of concretely defined hypotheses (instead, a few general outlines from which we will work), but I bet that more students would use contraceptives if they were in some basket at Campus Ministry, or somewhere slightly more conveniently located. After all, numbers don't lie. That being said, we have no numbers yet. Which makes this post entirely about something that has nothing to do with numbers or math!