Hooray! The New York Times finally goes to the real issue:
Leticia Parra, a mother of five scraping by on income from her husband’s sporadic construction jobs, relied on the Planned Parenthood clinic in San Carlos, an impoverished town in South Texas, for breast cancer screenings, free birth control pills and pap smears for cervical cancer.
But the clinic closed in October, along with more than a dozen others in the state, after financing for women’s health was slashed by two-thirds by the Republican-controlled Legislature.
The cuts, which left many low-income women with inconvenient or costly options, grew out of the effort to eliminate state support for Planned Parenthood. Although the cuts also forced clinics that were not affiliated with the agency to close — and none of them, even the ones run by Planned Parenthood, performed abortions — supporters of the cutbacks said they were motivated by the fight againstabortion.
As the case in Texas illustrates, such battles are affecting broader women’s health services. Some women have lost the only nearby clinic providing routine care.
Nationally, the newest target is Title X, the main federal family planning program. All four Republican presidential candidates support eliminating Title X, which was created in 1970 with Republican support from President Nixon and the elder George Bush, then a congressman.
Like other federal financing, Title X does not pay for abortions. Only some of it covers birth control. Title X also provides money for cervical and breast cancer screening, testing for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases, adolescent abstinence counseling, infertility counseling and other services.
Mitt Romney’s fiscal plan proposes eliminating Title X because it “subsidizes family planning programs that benefit abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.”
Rick Santorum, in a recent debate, acknowledged, to boos, that in Congress he voted for appropriations bills that included Title X money. He pledged to rectify that if elected, saying, “I’ve always opposed Title X funding.”
President Obama supports Title X, which serves five million low-income people.
Two things. First, Rick Santorum supported funding Title X a couple of weeks ago, but no more. He’s done a dramatic 180. You heard that right, Rick Santorum was to the Left of the Republican Party on contraception:
“It’s funny that I’ve been criticized by Governor Romney and by Ron Paul for having voted for something called Title X, which is actually federal funding of contraception,” Santorum told CBS’s Charlie Rose. “My public policy beliefs are that contraception should be available. Again, I’ve supported Title X funding.”
Excellent. Except, here is Santorum, five days later, at the Arizona presidential debate:
“As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things,” Santorum said.
Second, President Obama more than “supports” Title X. President Obama stood in the way when the Tea Party House ordered Boehner to gut Title X.
But when Boehner later asked for the elimination of funds for Title X — spending for women’s health and family planning organizations that also provide abortion services, the aide said the president flatly refused.
The president replied, “Nope. Zero.”
Boehner continued to push to discuss the funds, the aide recalled.
The President repeated: “Nope. Zero.”
“‘John, this is it,'” the aide described the president as saying. “‘This is it, John.”
This is Title X:
The Title X Family Planning program [“Population Research and Voluntary Family Planning Programs” (Public Law 91-572)], was enacted in 1970 as Title X of the Public Health Service Act. Title X is the only Federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services. The Title X program is designed to provide access to contraceptive services, supplies and information to all who want and need them. By law, priority is given to persons from low-income families.
Title X has been funded in a bipartisan manner since 1970. Rick Santorum voted for Title X funding as late as 2006. Now, the entire Republican Party opposes Title X funding.
This is a huge step backwards for the GOP, a big policy change, and they need to address it, not on abortion, but on contraception. Beneath all the screaming about sluts, there really is an attack on contraception on the Right. Democrats and Republicans are fighting on policy here, not rhetoric. Republicans are substantively going after access to contraception, and women are being affected by that right now.
Republicans are not being straight with women on this. If they are attempting to defund Title X (and they are) and closing the clinics where certain women can access contraception (and they are) that is an attack on contraception. They can call it whatever they want, but the practical effect is loss of access to contraception. Mitt Romney, the “moderate”, opposes Title X funding. That’s how far Right they’ve gone on contraception.
“I will have to go without,” Ms. Parra said as she left an English class at a community center and was walking to pick up her two youngest children from a Head Start program. “If I get pregnant again, God forbid.”
sb
To which a repug will reply, “Then stop having sex.”
SiubhanDuinne
These people are evil sadists.
cathyx
Will the republicans be for funding vasectomies? They are for men after all.
Tokyokie
Yeah, I know the Republican Party has grown increasingly insane, but why a political organization would decide to deliberately exclude half the electorate from its electoral calculus right off the bat is beyond my comprehension.
cathyx
She’s obviously a slut. 5 kids.
Egg Berry
Today is International Women’s Day.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
I’m glad the Times is finally waking up. I just hope the rest of the nitwits in the media do. I just worry about the usual myopia and amnesia the media and electorate tend to have on these things. The GOP stepped on landmines of their own accord with the Vaginal Ultrasound bullshit and then Rushbo and friends climbing on the slut-shaming wagon over birth control. But how many people are connecting the dots past that? How many of the newsmakers are actually going to ALLOW those dots to be connected?
Kay
@cathyx:
It’s a great question, because Title X is funding for family planning, and despite the belief on the Right that all women are sluts, men use family planning services too.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@sb: No, because she wouldn’t be doing the will of her husband. The Republicans would say it’s a gift from God.
Zagloba
Inside the echo chamber, the women are just as gung-ho about it as the men.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Tokyokie:
Because GOP voters have become experts at voting against their own interests. A significant chunk are going to vote GOP anyway despite the party’s best attempts to shit on them and shun them from the party table.
Kay
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I have to say I think the MSM got this connection before blogs did.
They’ve been talking about Title X funding for months, because it really is a dramatic policy change in the GOP. Paul Begala brings it up all the time, and Romney was asked about Griswold in a debate.
This is one time we won’t be able to bitch at them. Turns out, sluts was a distraction from what is a real and substantive policy change.
Felinious Wench
This is intensely personal. If we poll the women on this blog, I bet almost every one of us has taken some form of hormonal birth control…and paid for it with no insurance.
As I wrote before, I was on it at 13 for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. When I went to college and started paying for it myself, I was so dirt poor there were times I faced the decision of birth control or text books. I stopped taking it, and ended up in the hospital with yet another massive cyst, which I had not dealt with since I was in jr. high. However, THAT was covered by insurance.
I remember when my insurance started covering birth control. I was well out of college and could afford it, but I thought “Thank God, maybe other women won’t have to go through that now.”
I will fight with everything I have to protect other women like me.
Scott
@cathyx: I’ve actually heard some Repubs say they oppose vasectomies. Catholics oppose ’em, and the Modern GOP will do anything the Pope tells ’em to.
Poopyman
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: And they’ve got Fox News covering their right flank:
DFS
Pal of mine got a free vasectomy thanks to Title X. Wonder if they want to blow up that end of it too.
c u n d gulag
If I had to guess, what they’re really against, is WHITE women using contraception, and not giving birth to more white children.
And if they could, they’d pass “The Minority Reproductive Freedom Act,” where they would sterilize brown and black women (and Democratic ones, as well, if they can figure out a way…).
Finally, an America FREE of “THEM” REPRODUCING!
Percysowner
But, but President Obama ALWAYS caves to the Republicans and has betrayed Progressive ideals. We should not vote for him because he isn’t any better than a Republican President would be.
This is the reason why we have to keep President Obama as President and some day get a Democratic majority that can actual govern, as opposed to fighting filibusters every single time.
rea
@Poopyman: Yes, there is a war on conservative women. It’s being waged by conservative men.
Kay
@Felinious Wench:
I know you know this, but it isn’t just paying for it. It is quite literally access for poor women in rural areas.
Poor people don’t have reliable transportation. Poor people work insane, ever-changing shifts. Poor people can’t afford a babysitter. If you are a poor woman in a remote area of Texas, you cannot GET to another clinic if they close these clinics, and they ARE closing these clinics.
They’re cutting them off from access to contraception. They won’t be able to get it.
Percysowner
@c u n d gulag: Sadly I think they really want minorities to live in poverty and misery and become a defacto slave class. But I’m cynical that way.
sb
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I stand corrected.
Bob2
But oh man, you don’t want to go after Rush’s advertisers because it’s going after his livelihood!
MikeTheZ
I heard the faux noise war on conservative women report. Almost vomited.
Elizabelle
Telling this story, about Texas, will help persuade Facebook friends (and potential voters) that there is a real difference between the parties. There’s no defense against this one.
This makes a great story for door to door.
The great majority of women, and men who love and respect them, don’t want to go backwards on family planning.
kay
@MikeTheZ:
I’ll have this fight with conservatives, but they should be forced to be truthful.
As a practical matter, does mainstream conservative policy since 2006 affect access to contraception?
It does. Right now.
Explain the shift, and who or what drove that shift, and explain how they are supposedly not opposing contraception while working to limit access to contraception.
PeakVT
I thought the Republicans hated Latinos. Shouldn’t they be trying to provide more contraception to South Texas?
They never really quite think things through, do they?
kay
@Elizabelle:
I agree. The sense of panic by the women in the story hits me, gut-level. Today. It’s happening today.
rikyrah
once again, I thank you Kay, for this good information. I will continue to try and spread the word of the knowledge that you drop here and these important issues.
it is a GOP WAR ON WOMEN.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Poopyman:
Yeah, and considering GOPers tend to trust nothing else BUT Fox….yeah. Whether this sticks with anyone on the GOP side in the long-term is a tenuous assumption.
@Kay:
I’ll give you that, but I can’t give them credit for any sort of significant followup. Bringing up Griswold in those cases felt less like concerned reporting and more an attempt to feed the horse race and/or provoke those crowd reactions the debate kept having. Then again, I’ve been even more cynical than usual these past few months.
cathyx
Could it be that one of the biggest campaign contributors to republicans are condom producers? They can make a killing if birth control pills cost too much.
Nutella
@cathyx:
Probably. But they will definitely be for funding v-i-a-g-r-a.
kay
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I’ve been listening to it really closely and there was always an undercurrent of a real and substantive policy fight here btwn Republicans and Democrats, beneath the screeching. I think Rush was a gift to Democrats, but the facts are that Democrats have been fighting the GOP on birth control since the 2010 election.
The tip-off for me was listening to Matalin DENY it. She went nuts when it was raised. It’s real and they think it’s politically damaging.
RSA
It’s a huge policy change but not necessarily a change in their principles. For a blog post elsewhere I browsed through the record of the Republican party platform. As you might expect, it grows more reactionary over the years. In 1988:
Notice that abstinence education is cast as a preventative health measure. But they give the game away in 1996:
Their most recent move is to expand their attention from young women to all women.
Tokyokie
@Zagloba: And then when they pull the curtain in the voting booth, a lot of them are going to vote the other way.
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: The GOP fooling people into voting against their interests I understand. It’s how they think they can spin cutting funding for women’s healthcare into a positive for women that I can’t comprehend.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@kay:
True, but that’s the thing too I’m having with the media: outside of places like Maddow, you don’t hear a lot of consistent and persistent pointing out of just much the GOP has gone in full bore against abortion and birth control. Usually just when it’s convenient, and it usually takes outrage from the bottom up before they even start on it. Like with the Rush and slut-shaming thing, like with the vaginal ultrasound, like with Komen, etc. I mean, there’s demonstrable stats on how much the GOP, on both state and federal level, have pushed historically high amounts of anti-abortion stuff in what’s really been essentially a year and a half at most. Especially when they were all about jobs when they were elected, and you don’t even hear much about that aspect as a reason to bring up the stats.
It’s an issue the GOP really can’t defend themselves on, but they usually don’t have to since the media seems to only pipe up when they’re hand is forced.
@Tokyokie:
Because of detachment. “Those cuts will never affect ME!” And better the leeches get their stuff cut for the sake of trickle-down than anything, you know. No sympathy, no empathy, those are both four-letter words.
TK-421
No, it’s not even about contraception. And in a way, it’s not even about women (but it mostly is).
IT’S ABOUT SEX. CONSERVATIVES WANT YOU TO STOP HAVING SEX.
Specifically, premarital sex, sex for pleasure, man and man sex, woman and woman sex, sex sex sex. Republicans haaaaaaaate that some people are having sex that is outside of marriage and not for procreation, and they want to punish us all for being naughty.
The minute everybody on the left gets on the same messaging page and insists that this is about sex is the minute the entire conservative movement goes off the rails (no, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet).
jibeaux
Kay, you are a treasure.
I try to mete out my preaching on the facebook because I don’t want to do it too much, I want people to actually read things. I’d say I’m about 15-20% political, and a fair bit of the political is just snarky jokes. Things like this, though, make the cut. Men should of course pay attention to this, but women *really* need to. If I worked with anyone not already in the choir, I’d be doing the same thing. We all need to be talking about this. It’s indefensible. The Title X funding prevents up to a million unwanted pregnancies a year — obviously it helps prevent many abortions.
Malatesta
Wingnut. Singularity.
Culture of Truth
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeese”
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
Well, then she should just go on the…heh, oh yeah, that’s right. Never mind.
aimai
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Not a lot of people understand how health insurance works or how health care is provided on a regular basis–even when they were/are covered themselves or rather especially when they were/are covered. I had minimal health coverage through my Universities (Harvard and Yale) but never accessed any services–any services (!) until years later when I got married and began needing ob/gyn appointents because I was pregnant. I never had any kind of regular medical care until I was 35 even though I may have had some kind of health insurance. Because I was largely healthy and I didn’t use hormonal birth control.
The fact that people live in health care deserts escaped me because I didn’t know how other people were living, either.
I really wish the Dems would
a) Introduce a bill that would make health care a right at the federal level and
b) Create standalone federal clinics or federal reimbursement procedures instead of block granting to the states. There is zero reason that PP should have to contract with the state instead of the federal government to serve underserved populations once the states, like Texas, have shown they are actively hostile to the provision of medical services (all medical services) for the poor.
aimai
Rosalita
@c u n d gulag:
unless it’s for their mistresses…then it’s a must have
Lawnguylander
@elizabelle
maus
contraception and religion, useful smokescreens for further allowing corporations to have control over our private lives. This isn’t about Catholiism, folks.
xian
i think lakoff would say “war on conservative women” is weak tea from the fox right, as it attempts to turn a powerful meme their way but largely restates the frame. (people will still hear the “war on… women” part.
Frankensteinbeck
@TK-421:
That’s a big part of it. These positions are not new. The GOP has always been anti-contraception. They just haven’t pushed for it on a national level in decades because it makes them look crazy. It’s always been on the plank, like all other anti-sex positions.
Describing these policies as misogyny is a distraction from the central truth. Yes, it’s a useful distraction because women need to know the GOP wants to hurt and humiliate them. Yes, there are abundant haters of all kinds in the GOP who will flock to an anti-woman stance – Rush is a great example. It’s still missing the point. Conservative policies are universally united by one thing – they don’t care about you. Whoever you are, they are utterly indifferent to your needs and wants. Minorities, children, often themselves (it’s easy to convince yourself you’re not the target), you mean so little to them that any ideal that sounds nice in their head is more important than your survival. If they think the bible says contraception is wrong, then even if they don’t much care about that issue it’s STILL more important than any misery their ideal could cause. This holds in foreign policy, economic policy, civil rights policy, everything. It is the poor man’s IGMFY, and they do so love their IGMFY.
kindness
What kills me is all the people out there who don’t vote. If they voted most these legislatures wouldn’t be nearly so crazy conservative. Not to say Texas would become Austin, it wouldn’t, but you might get some sane folk instead of the teahaddists that run all too many shows across this land as it is now.
McJulie
@RSA: “We support educational initiatives to promote chastity until marriage as the expected standard of behavior.”
The right in this country seems to have decided that their main policy thrust is to use the power of the government to attempt to coerce ritualized obeisance to a particular behavior pattern.
The point is not to actually prevent a single abortion — it’s to “send the message” that abortion is bad. That’s why you can have one, and as long as you don’t change your mind about whether they’re okay or not, you’re okay on the right.
You can have pre-marital sex and a baby out of wedlock (cf Bristol Palin) but as long as you still insist that the real key to keeping that from happening to other people is abstinence education and purity balls, the right will embrace you as one of their own.
You can cheat on your wife with a male prostitute (cf Ted Haggard), but as long as you continue to maintain that homosexuality is evil, the right will forgive you.
In their world, it’s okay to screw up again and again and again according to their stated morals, as long as you never learn anything from the process or change your mind.
satby
@c u n d gulag:
And we have a winner. In the mid-70s, when I attended a Catholic hospital’s nursing school, they had reps from IL Right-to-Life who were very clear that the opposition to both birth control and abortion was due to the fact that white women were more likely to use both than minority women. Even though the class was 95% white and mostly good Catholic girls straight out of Catholic (single sex) high schools this blatantly racist statement wasn’t received well by the students. RTF learned to tone it down soon after that, though it’s always been more about the “(white as)snowflake” babies than about true “prolife” beliefs.
Schlemizel
Not just minorities, any poor people. They really want to bring back the Antebellum South. No public education, if daddy is rich he will get you book learnin, if not you will make a good field hand for a rich daddy. No public infrastructure. There were few roads or railroads in the South because the local community would not support anything that they did not disproportionally benefit from. This was the plantation mentality and it is the mentality of the modern GOP
Schlemizel
@Rosalita:
But really its still the bitches problem, not mine.
Same with vasectomies. Real men would never get them so the government should not fund them ever & private insurance should only if they feel like it.
kay
@McJulie:
Great comment.
The other part that bothers me about this is that we have been told by Right-leaning, libertarian-leaning paid pundits for two years that the GOP and the Tea Party were moving away from social issues, which is just a lie. It’s become the conventional wisdom, but it’s a flat-out lie.
It’s a lie predicated on the fact that Right-leaning and libertarian-leaning paid pundits DO NOT SEE poor women. They simply don’t see them. These women don’t exist in that world. Because the fact is that today, right now, the GOP and the Tea Party are limiting access to contraception, they just aren’t limiting access to contraception to white people with health insurance, yet.
How could they miss this? It wasn’t a secret. ALL of the GOP Presidential candidates are RUNNING on this.
scav
Minor point that might prove useful for those assembling arguments. I swear I read some of the Rush supporters going on and on about how contraception was free if you wanted and you could just go pick some up at Title X and other clinics so why are the sluts asking us to pay for their slutitude? blah blah while on the sneaky hand behind the back they’re trying to cut funding to that access. It was through this site, I think it was in one of the watch us abuse our calculators figuring out how much sex she has daily rants. If I can gird my loins enough to dive back in, I might go looking.
Tokyokie
@kindness: Of course, Republicans are doing their damnedest to keep non-Republicans from voting as well.
Elizabelle
@kindness:
I think keeping an archive of articles like this, and handing them out, might persuade some of the non-voters that it’s worth their while.
satby
@McJulie:
McJulie, that’s a great analysis of the evangelicals, because their beliefs are based on salvation through faith alone. Hence all the hypocrisy, because saying sorry is all the repentance they need as long as Jeebus is their lord and savior.
But for many of the Catholics, stopping abortion is the goal, and for really uber Catholics like Santorum, birth control is wrong too. The Catholic faith holds that actions, not faith alone, are the ticket to salvation; so assuming they buy the Church line, they have to oppose and try to influence legislation to outlaw abortion. They really want it ended, and single issue vote accordingly, in spite of the fact that most of the rest of the R platform is at odds with Church teaching on care for the poor and sick. It’s an odd coalition, but as long as the bishops hammer abortion as the most important issue facing Catholic voters, the faithful who listen will comply with their votes. Fortunately, the faithful mostly walked away years ago on contraception and they won’t be coming back on that issue.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
I think the GOP of today is a “built” entity, mostly for the purpose of winning elections and power. Most of the elements that include a sense of decency and country were already taken by the democratic party, so they had to build an oppo party that could cobble enough votes to win elections.
And it began with the Southern Strategy and immediately before that the Red Scare Bircher types, and from there added on The Moral Majority, and later in the 90’s disparate groups like Neo Cons and the quisling libertarians. All of this glued around the existing core of conservatism, being status quo maintenance and hoarding and protecting wealth, privilege and the power that comes from that hoarded wealth.
They had to win elections to maintain that core, so they put together a Frankenstein Party and invited all the whackadoos in to join up for the cause. The religionists and their sexual police are just front and center for the present, later it will be the neo con turn with Iran and bombing brown people. Then the xenophobes will have some fun with immigration reform when Harry Reid brings it up soon. And the wheel of misfortune will turn to each faction for the limelight. A horror show of id fueled mayhem and insatiable appetite for control or destruction, one or the other.
But the Frankenstein Party, soon found out it also needed a uniting dear leader top down person to keep the wingnutting effect to a minimum and the crazies to all behave themselves enough to get elected and stay elected. Ronnie Reagan, then George Bush.
But the inmates got restless as the excesses piled up under Bush and Cheney, massive transfers of wealth via tax cuts, military industrial complex gluttony, and a practiced end to any and all financial and business regulation that led to TARP ONE and the implosion of the conservative movement as it was — a cogent theory on paper, practiced with a degree of restraint and deflection to not cause the rubes to ask pesky questions as they were being robbed blind.
Now the crazies all want to run the show, and there is no one to make them behave, no Reagan , no Bush, and the majority southern contingent bullied itself into the clown car drivers seat, and we are where we are.
kay
The cruelty of this really sticks out. There’s no other word for it. It’s cruel.
There’s your “pro life” movement, right there, underneath all the hearts and flowers and soft-focus pictures of mommies and babies.
She has no way to get there, and she has four children. That’s their mother.
So much for mommies, huh?
RSA
@McJulie:
That’s a very nice insight.
bootsy
Know This: The Arizona GOP Senate passed a bill making it legal for a Doctor to hide information about a bad pregnancy. It would be perfectly legal in Arizona to Let a Woman Die, with a miscarriage or disabled child as the result, simply because a Doctor disagrees with Abortion.
You can vote for Women to be Property that it’s legal to kill, or you can vote for Democrats.
Schlemizel
@kay:
I think its been pretty well established they only care about them until they are born. Once past the birth canal its devil take the hind most, you are on your own loser.
Frankensteinbeck
@kay:
Like I said, they don’t care. They absolutely don’t care. They are callously unconcerned. They care only about abstracts, like ‘abortion is bad’. The children themselves are of no concern.
Poopyman
@kay:
It’s easy to miss when getting your paycheck depends on you missing it.
Trakker
This is the kind of overreach that is handing the Democrats loaded cannons to use against them in November. There is NO ONE in the Republican party that can save these idiots from themselves. They just can’t stop vying for the title of “I Hate Government Most!” and alienating more and more of the electorate.
For years they were able to make their cuts to government sound good, but no more. All the Democrats have to do is expose the America that would result from the Republicans proposals and they will emphatically reject it in November.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@kay:
@Schlemizel:
Or, as better put by one of the late, great philosophers of our time:
And mind, this was back in ’96, and Carlin wasn’t exactly being prescient here.
Trakker
@kay:
Kay, thanks for calling it what it is, cruelty, and for being outraged. It gives me hope that others who read it will not just move on to the next article, but will stop and think, and then get really, really pissed that this is happening in the richest fucking country in the world!” What have we become?
Poopyman
Hey Kay, how about Ohio SB307?
Mnemosyne
Here’s what they want to return us to:
ksmiami
The GOP is a hideous collection of hate, greed and pure monstrosity and we need to destroy the entire party in November, full stop…
Poopyman
@ksmiami: It’s not the party, it’s the people. Your idea … has difficulties.
danielx
@Zagloba:
Inside the echo chamber, true to an extent, particularly with those inclined to vote for Santoronola. But they can’t win elections with the only the votes of those inside the echo chamber. I suspect there are, moreover, a great many Republican women who are not inclined to give up careers and turn into babymaking machines to satisfy the wingnuts who wish to outlaw contraception.
They really don’t want to live out The Handmaid’s Tale.
Someguy
I don’t see why anybody is decrying the Republican turn to the far right on this. It’s a good thing because women are now moving into the Dems’ camp. They are looking at upwards of 75-80% of women associating themselves with Democrats as a result of this issue. That’s a huge win.
Even Scarborough was on Today this morning talking about how the Republicans are heading for a defeat of epic proportions in the fall.
So we should be encouraging them, not trying to stop them.
jim filyaw
can’t wait to see the 2012 official republican platform. for thirty years, the wingnuts have pushed the envelope on that item. this years edition will rank right up there with the protocols of the elders of zion, mein kampf, and the best of l.ron hubbard.
MCA1
This is a great article to use; I’ve already forwarded it twice today. I was recently talking to a woman about the upcoming election and was asked if I’d be voting for Obama again. I said “Of course. I wouldn’t vote for any Republican for any office right now. They’ve lost their collective minds. And no sane woman would vote for them, either.” I then started in on the Blunt Amendment and the Virginia forced ultrasound legislation, but the response was “Those are really just social issues. I’m more about fiscal issues.”
Well, trying to eliminate Title X is the perfect nexus of Republican morals pushing social issue and Republican economic policy. THIS is how they envision paying for retaining the Bush tax cuts (and adding more tax cuts) and simultaneously fixing the deficit issues through supply-side magic. When Democrats say R’s just want to pay for that stuff on the backs of the working class, this is EXACTLY what we’re talking about.
kay
@Poopyman:
I thought it was funny, as a political tactic, and I got about 20 emails from local women directing my attention to it, so it was a big hit w/women in Ohio, but for me, the whole point of this thing is I think this is peoples’ personal bidness, so I didn’t see fit to front page it :)
TooManyJens
@Someguy:
Because in the real world, today, women are losing access to birth control. This shit has consequences for life beyond elections.
Mnemosyne
@Someguy:
Because people like Mrs. Parra may end up pregnant with a baby they don’t want long before November thanks to decisions that have already been made and policies that have already been implemented.
We may be able to reverse those decisions and policies after November, but that won’t do much for people who need access to birth control now.
Mart
You would think conservatives would support these clinics as it would result in less of “them” having babies.
Mnemosyne
@Mart:
Actually, the favored tactic was forced sterilization, often without the patient’s knowledge or consent. They’re still pissed that it was made illegal.
Tonal Crow
Yep. The Republican War on Women proceeds apace. They’re just begging to be Komened and Limbaughed again.
pseudonymous in nc
I just wish that the NYT didn’t cover poor/rural Americans like they’re some undiscovered Amazonian tribe. That “hark at the natives” tone seems to be part of its house style, and it’s not there for actual foreign coverage.
Elie
Their Christianist members got ahold of the policy direction and got the whole thing off track from where Americans/women are. No help for it now… like an effed up zipper, you can try to pull it up or down but it aint going anywhere. There is no way for them to get back on track without replacing the zipper. That is what we are going to start this next election when their pants fall down around their ankles. Its going to be up to the surviving, if sane remnants to rip out the old thing and put in something new. Till then, all this is just watching them use pliers and some such to get their busted zipper to work while their asses hang open to the air…
wobbly
In the State of New York, refusing to have sex with one’s spouse is one of the five grounds for divorce. The others are infidelity, abandonment, incarceration, and abuse.