Clara Gustafson (Georgetown) on Millennials' Disenchantment with Ineffective Government

As the Berkley Center Millennial Values Survey indicated, “despite holding some moral reservations about abortion, a majority of college-age Millennials support legal abortion, as well as community access to abortion services;” that is just one of a few distinct examples in the survey that seem to indicate that Millennials are not interested in imposing their own beliefs on others. The freedom to choose for ourselves on personal issues trumps societal mandates on how we should live our lives. The option to choose birth control or not is important, the option to get an abortion or not is important so that individuals can choose for themselves and their situation how it is best to live their own lives. Providing those options through healthcare is the best way to accomplish this goal. The challenging aspect of this is how to cope with the freedom of religious institutions and their value sets while also valuing the employee and their right to differ, on a private and personal level, from their employers. With the Health and Human Services Healthcare Mandate and the Catholic bishops that are suing the Obama administration, the debate on religious freedom and imposition of value sets on others has reached a modern day high.

To me, and I think to the majority of my generation, it is clear that setting up a legislative structure to incentivize personal choice while respecting the freedom of institution is of the utmost importance. The logistics of this incentive structure are what our leaders need to come together to discuss. Suing is the last resort and I think that the archdioceses and other religious institutions should have taken a more active role in the conversation around a compromise. Instead, they are taking their lead from many movements of the past few years by taking an extreme stance on a single issue so as to further muddle and slow the already slow-moving beast that is Washington.

Not only is my generation incredibly disenchanted with a discussion that continues to be dominated by private, social issues that we feel the government has no mandate over, but we are even more frustrated that our leaders have continued to fail us by not leading. It is a broken system, where compromise is a dirty word and bipartisan discussion no longer exists in a public, constructive way. We, the leaders of tomorrow, would like our leaders, elected and otherwise, to lead on issues that can be solved through the mechanism of the government.

Talk about the economy. Talk about jobs. Talk about fair wages. Talk about labor inequalities. Talk about immigration. Talk about how we educate foreigners at our world-renowned universities and then make them leave. Talk about affordable housing. Talk about corruption on Wall Street. Talk about healthcare t.o.g.e.t.h.e.r. Talk about crime. Talk about the huge demand for drugs in our country. Talk about our overflowing jails. Talk about education. Talk about teacher tenure and our broken incentives system in public education. Talk about energy. Talk about renewable energy and the cocktail of resources that will wean us off of our dependence on oil. Talk about anything EXCEPT how you get to determine when I get to choose what is best for myself (when it is a private and personal decision). It is not your job, or anyone else’s, to choose for me. It is your job to provide me with the opportunity to choose.

There are many things that I do not discuss in this blog post. For example, what is a private and personal decision? However, I think if our leaders came together to discuss these things they would be able to legally define these words and circumstances. We elected them to lead—they should do it.