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The Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Monday night took aim at Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)’s all-male birth control hearing.

The hearing focused on the president’s new rule that private insurance plans pay for preventative care, which is to include contraceptives for women. Chairman Issa lined up a collection of religious experts who object to the rule as abridging their freedom of speech, even though the administration has exempted religious groups from having to pay for contraceptive coverage.

Featured front and center was an all-male panel of witnesses from the Catholic church, the Lutheran Church, a Jewish Rabbi, and a Southern Baptist ethics professor, among others, all of whom seemed to object to having insurance plans pay for contraceptives. Each man present said they felt that the requirement went too far and trampled on their religious beliefs.

“I don’t normally quote from Josef Stalin,” Rep. Tim Walberg said at the hearing, before Stewart abruptly cut off the clip.

“Ok, I’m going to stop you right there,” Stewart said. “We’re just going to move on to the next guy if that’s all right. Anyone have a slightly less hyperbolic take on this?”

He then played a clip of one of the witnesses saying that violating a person’s moral conscience was equivalent to a “rape of the soul.”

“No one loves their insurance plan, but soul rape?” Stewart remarked and noted that the Catholic Church offers health insurance plans that cover erectile dysfunction medication like Viagra.

“So the Catholic Church says a boner is a need, but not getting pregnant is more of a want.”

“Although, to be fair to Darrell Issa, at the hearing a woman was put forth on behalf of someone who needed contraception to help with a medical condition, and that speaker was denied a spot, because, you know, Stalin rape,” Stewart later added.

[Raw Story’s piece on Stewart’s take down of the ridiculous hearing.]

(via kurookami)