Not Requiring Cultural Deflation

I just wanted to take a moment to thank Governor Carcieri for this:

Gov. Don Carcieri has vetoed a bill requiring health insurers to cover infertility treatments for unmarried people, saying they shouldn't be forced to subsidize out-of-wedlock births.

The Republican governor, who opposes same-sex marriage and civil unions, warned that eliminating the marriage restriction would also drive up health care costs.

''As a matter of public policy, the state should be encouraging the birth of children to two-parent families, not the reverse,'' he said in a written statement Thursday announcing his Wednesday veto.

We've gone far enough. It's one thing to allow people to seek such treatments even if they aren't married. I would argue that doing so would be an immoral act on several levels, but that's a case that has to be made to individuals as well as to society as a whole. But requiring insurance companies to cover such treatments — beyond the additional costs and disincentive for insurers to operate in Rhode Island — would push us one, possibly decisive, step farther down the self-destructive path of rejecting the traditional family.

ADDENDUM:

As a government matter, I feel as if I've come across just one more way in which Rhode Island allows itself to be governed via prestidigitation. Note the following from the above-linked story:

Two weeks ago, Carcieri permitted another bill to become law without his signature that required insurers to increase the age cap on eligible women to 42 from 40. It also required insurers to pay for infertility treatments after a couple fails to conceive or carry a pregnancy after one year of trying, instead of two.

I did receive, at the time, the General Assembly's press release about that bill's passage in the legislature and didn't see anything sufficiently beyond my normal reservations to make a point of mentioning it. But close inspection reveals that, although the release cites H5251A (PDF) as "the House version," it fails to note the significant addition of the "regardless of marital status" clause. Moreover, there has been no press release for the second bill.

Call me paranoid, but that looks deliberately misleading — selling one bill to the public, while hoping to slip a similar (but objectionable) through in its wake. And for their role in the process, several Republican representatives (including my own) have made it that much clearer that they must be replaced before the party can move forward.