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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Family planning

Family planning

by Kay|  March 18, 201210:50 am| 94 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics

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There seems to be some mistaken notion out there that the the efforts to limit access to family planning by Republicans are purely abstract and hypothetical and “political” and unlikely to have any real effect on real women, if Democrats win the “message war” on the HHS contraception rule. That isn’t true.

Democrats portray Blunt’s measure as the latest example of a Republican attack on women’s access to health care.

Limiting access to family planning services isn’t a “losing” purely political ploy by Republicans that is then being countered by a “winning” purely political ploy by Democrats. Both sides aren’t doing it. One side is limiting access to birth control, now, today, and the other side is pointing that out. No “portrayal” about it. It’s happening.

We’ll go to Republican actions at the federal , state and then county level, so it’s clear.

First, Title X is a federal program that subsidizes access to contraception, which should be obvious to even the most even-handed, even-steven, fair and balanced political reporter, because this is the name of the Title X program:

The Title X Family Planning program [“Population Research and Voluntary Family Planning Programs” (Public Law 91-572)]

Actions at the federal level taken by Republicans to limit access to contraception; Title X:

The Tea Party House attempts 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 two GOP candidates for the presidency both oppose Title X funding. That’s fact. If a candidate opposes Title X funding, that candidate is vowing to limit access to family planning. It isn’t that complicated. If Mitt Romney intends to eliminate Title X, Mitt Romney intends to limit access to family planning for 5 million people. Title X = family planning for 5 million people. No funding, no Title X.

Actions at the state level by Republicans to limit access to contraception:

Now in place, in Indiana and Texas;

The bill would cut $3 million in federal money the state currently allocates to the women’s health group. But the bill also puts Indiana in a financial tight spot as it risks losing $4 million a year in federal family-planning money that would be eliminated because of the state legislation.

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. Now, the same sentiment is likely to lead to a shutdown next week of another significant source of reproductive health care: the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which serves 130,000 women with grants to many clinics, including those run by Planned Parenthood. Gov. Rick Perry and Republican lawmakers have said they would forgo the $35 million in federal money that finances the women’s health program in order to keep Planned Parenthood from getting any of it.

When Republican governors like Mitch Daniels and Rick Perry refuse to fund Planned Parenthood clinics with Medicaid funds, Republican governors like Mitch Daniels and Rick Perry are limiting access to contraception, because Planned Parenthood clinics are where certain women go to get contraception:

Contraception — 35 percent of services in 2008
Reversible Contraception Clients, Women** 2,263,776
Emergency Contraception Kits 1,436,808
Tubal Sterilization Clients 489
Reversible Contraception Clients, Men 109,823
Vasectomy Clients 2,979

Contraception is the single biggest service Planned Parenthood provides (pdf)

Planned Parenthood clinics = access to birth control for certain women. Again, not that complicated.

Actions taken by Republicans at the county level to limit access to contraception:

After yesterday’s post about county commissioners in New Hanover County, North Carolina, voting to reject state money for family planning, Amber Pickman wrote to tell us about a similar move in Miami County, Kansas.
The Miami County Commission voted 3-2 last week to exclude about $9,000 in funding aimed at covering contraceptives from the county’s state grant applications.

To recap: Republicans have been taking action to limit access to contraception at the federal level since 2010. All of the Republicans candidates for President have vowed to limit access to contraception through Title X. Republicans at the state level are right now, today, limiting access to contraception, because they are defunding the Plannned Parenthood facilities that provide access to contraception, and, finally, Republicans at the county level are limiting access to contraception by zeroing-out funding for family planning programs. Limiting access to contraception is conservative policy, in action, at the federal state and county level, now, today.

Further, these actions by Republicans at the federal, state and county level have nothing to do with President Obama’s announcement of the rule on contraception in the health care law or “religious liberty” because they were attempted, in place or in the works before President Obama’s announcement of the rule. These actions to limit access to contraception have nothing whatever to do with church-owned health care corporations or entities, so are completely unrelated to the nonsensical “religious liberty” smokescreen. Republicans have been and are taking action to limit access to contraception separate and apart from President Obama’s HHS rule.

The answer to the question “are Republicans limiting access to contraception?” is “yes”. The one and only question remaining is how far they’ll go. Will they go to employer-provided health insurance policies and all women, or will this conservative campaign to limit access to contraception remain confined to women who rely on Title X, Planned Parenthood and county-funded family planning services?

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Reader Interactions

94Comments

  1. 1.

    Phylllis

    March 18, 2012 at 11:01 am

    Another example of the ‘must present both sides’ school of journalism. Which usually leads to one side being incorrectly represented. Because if it’s R’s taking the action, then the only anodyne response that can be presented is the (always) opposing side D’s are taking. And poor news* writers relying too much on adverbs and adjectives instead of simple nouns and verbs.

    *term used loosely, natch.

  2. 2.

    Schlemizel

    March 18, 2012 at 11:08 am

    The one and only question remaining is how far they’ll go.

    My assumption is they will only go so far as to ‘allow’ companies to deny coverage as part of their insurance plans . . . then they will send their flying monkeys against companies to do provide coverage, protests, boycotts, whatever it takes to make those sluts pop out kids.

  3. 3.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 11:11 am

    Conservatives hold epic grudges. They will never forgive the Womens’ Libbers for castrating the Male Dominion, and giving women the legal balls to break the Glass Ceiling.

    It’s simply not forgiveable.

  4. 4.

    Soonergrunt

    March 18, 2012 at 11:14 am

    This isn’t just a war on women, even as that is the primary target and goal, it is a war on poor people generally.
    More than 110,000 of the service recipients were men.

  5. 5.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 18, 2012 at 11:15 am

    Well, in the 1930’s there was a “political” thing going on concerning members of a certain minority religious/ethnic/cultural group in a certain central European country, but nothing at all came of it because it was, you know, “political” in nature.

    The Village…it must be destroyed.

  6. 6.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 11:16 am

    @Schlemizel:

    I think there’s an inability to see it on the part of political and policy reporters, because they are convinced it is purely political. They are convinced that Republicans are somehow “not really” going after contraception, because that’s so extreme.

    But they are.

    It’s already down the county level, which means it’s a policy position that has been widely adopted among the GOP base.

    Too we have our ordinary class-based coverage of health care, where if it’s poor women or uninsured women, it doesn’t “count”.

    I think the only reason it became such a big deal is the HHS rule took it out to ALL women, not just poor women or uninsured women.

  7. 7.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 11:18 am

    @Soonergrunt:

    I saw that, and I would have mentioned it, but I run into space constraints :)

    It’s a great point.

  8. 8.

    General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)

    March 18, 2012 at 11:19 am

    While these people, at best, are showing indifference to outright contempt for women’s rights and health, and some are just sick mofo’s who hate, I still think the basic motivation for a lot of this, is an attempt to more empower religious freedom to in a way, secede from the union. At least in legal terms. And use that expanded freedom to ignore more federal primacy when it violates their belief system.

    They are losing the demographics, and alternatives to maintaining an upper hand on installing their right wing ideas as policy, are needed. With hopeful eyes turned toward the SCOTUS for a big assist down the road.

  9. 9.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:19 am

    I thought I had an understanding of the right wingers but I really don’t understand this fight against contraception.

    I understand the bishops agitating against birth control. That’s their job. But I don’t understand the evangelical-Catholic coalition.

    I understand that these guys are trying to repress women and I understand that at a primitive level men are afraid that women will laugh at them, unless the ladies are afraid. Or if the women are barefoot and pregnant all the time. But I don’t understand why they hate women so much. Is it a case of “Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted”?

    That coalition, however, is very puzzling to me. Perhaps the evangelicals think they can profit temporarily from cooperating with the bishops but think they can withdraw at any time, with no lasting consequences. Perhaps the bishops think they can gain more political power by this route. They also might think that separation in the future would be simple and clean.

    I think they’re both mistaken.

    But what do I know? I’m female. I’m a DFH. I’m probably a slut [although at my age, that’s a compliment]. Whatever.

    I just really don’t understand.

  10. 10.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 11:23 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    I thought I had an understanding of the right wingers but I really don’t understand this fight against contraception.

    I think you’ll get it better if you listen to the GOP candidates.

    Santorum was defending his Senate votes for Title X (which he no longer defends, he now opposes Title X funding, a 180 in the course of A WEEK) and he said he voted for Title X only because it also included “abstinence education” funding.

    They’re opposed to contraception. They’re promoting abstinence as contraception, as a replacement for contraception.

  11. 11.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 11:23 am

    In lieu of population growth & dwindling resources, rabid misogyny seems too insane for even these crazy people.
    I am in my mid-60s so I’m not unfamiliar with their mindset but, for the life of me, I can’t understand its resurgence in the culture now.

  12. 12.

    Schlemizel

    March 18, 2012 at 11:24 am

    @kay:
    trust me I was being a cynical smart ass.

    The wingnuts love this long game, they teethed it on the anti-abortion movement. They will only legislate as much as they can, which is not as much as they really want, then allow their flying monkey patrols make the legal uncomfortable and or extremely costly. They have not outlawed abortion but they have made them much more difficult, if not impossible in may areas. The collateral damage to all womans health issues may be coincidental but not unforeseeable. That the GOP makes sure that no effort to replace those other services etc should be evidence of their actual intent but most people are not paying attention & won’t until it is their ox being gored.

  13. 13.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 11:24 am

    I understand the bishops agitating against birth control. That’s their job.

    Their job, primary requirement: born with a penis. Period.

  14. 14.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 11:25 am

    in moderation because I used the word p*nis, in discussing job requirement for being a bishop

  15. 15.

    General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)

    March 18, 2012 at 11:25 am

    so are completely unrelated to the nonsensical “religious liberty” smokescreen.

    It is nonsensical to us, but not to them. So I guess we disagree on this point, kay.

  16. 16.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 11:28 am

    @Schlemizel:

    I’ve said it before, but the part that amazes me, politically, is that liberals have been saying for decades that anti-abortion conservatives would go after contraception.

    That was always dismissed as hysteria.

    But it’s TRUE, turns out. Contraception was apparently the end game. I think that’s why women are so shocked by this. It’s the most over the top, slippery slope hypothetical coming true.

  17. 17.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 11:29 am

    I don’t understand the rank meanness in rightwing politics these days.

    As usual, the reader comments on newspaper account of people being fired for wearing orange (previous post), were depressing.

    This isn’t just a poor economy, is it?

    (Would have been a hoot to have internet commenting during the Gilded Age.)

  18. 18.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 18, 2012 at 11:29 am

    @General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):

    Unless they can ram their primitive superstitions down everyone’s throats, their religious liberty is being infringed.

    This is why the old practice of tossing these shitstains into an arena with starved animals is due for a comeback.

  19. 19.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 11:30 am

    rabid misogyny seems too insane for even these crazy people.

    It’s Party Misogyny. Fluke is a slut because she took the Hill and called them out. Only Stepford unaminity releases a woman from the clutches of Sodom.

  20. 20.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:31 am

    @kay: #10

    They’re opposed to contraception.

    That might be all there is to it. But I have a feeling [unsupported by facts or logic] that the real motive is something else. Something deeper and darker.

  21. 21.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 18, 2012 at 11:34 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    But I have a feeling [unsupported by facts or logic] that the real motive is something else. Something deeper and darker.

    It’s about sex, it’s about women’s agency, and it’s about freedom from biological “destiny” concerning sex.

    It’s about a bizarre fear of sex as a pleasurable activity unrelated to reproduction removed from the control of those who seek to dominate.

  22. 22.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 11:35 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Something deeper and darker

    .
    Because they have viagra?

  23. 23.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:36 am

    @Ben Franklin: #19

    Only Stepford unanimity releases a woman from the clutches of Sodom.

    You’re probably right on that one. However, I’d rather take my chances in a hell created by God than face a hell made by these assholes.

  24. 24.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 11:38 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Please comment further on this.

    I think at base it’s separation of church and state, and this is an object lesson in why that policy is necessary.

  25. 25.

    Smiling Mortician

    March 18, 2012 at 11:39 am

    @Linda Featheringill: I suspect there are at least three real motives:

    1. normalize religious control of law
    2. relegate poor women (as well as women in general and the poor in general) to a powerless status
    3. increase the population of poor and working-class whites for future party-building (offsetting or at least delaying the great demographic earthquake headed their way)

    For the record, I don’t believe for a moment that most republican lawmakers are genuinely, morally, “opposed to contraception” — they ALL use it, or have used it, themselves (well, except Santorum maybe). But they do all sense an opportunity in this issue to go for broke in pursuit of the only prize they care about: power.

  26. 26.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:39 am

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    It’s about a bizarre fear of sex as a pleasurable activity unrelated to reproduction removed from the control of those who seek to dominate.

    They want to create a world where only the alpha male or his designated standin actually gets laid?

  27. 27.

    Karounie

    March 18, 2012 at 11:40 am

    My theory is that a few too many people became embarrassed after they were told that statements like “90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion services” were patently untrue. Soooo,they are setting out to make sure that everything else that planned parenthood does becomes impossible. Eventually that ridiculous percentage will actually reflect reality.

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    March 18, 2012 at 11:41 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    They are that fucked up, yes.

  29. 29.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 11:42 am

    But they do all sense an opportunity in this issue to go for broke in pursuit of the only prize they care about: power.

    Too funny. They stake out an intuitive (male) hunch against the other half?

    Impressive

  30. 30.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:43 am

    @Elizabelle: #23

    Separation of church and state is definitely an issue.

    I suppose that if that separation were erased, and organized religion gained more temporal power, then the more orthodox portions of religious people would gain the most power.

  31. 31.

    cmorenc

    March 18, 2012 at 11:44 am

    Here’s where the rubber meets the road in the contraception controversy:

    WILL enough women revolt against the GOP at the polls to effectively punish and repudiate them for going after contraception and women’s health, or will they not?

    This is a two-part (or perhaps three-part) equation:
    1) Will the number of women voting for the Dems and against the GOP due to the contraception/women’s health care issue be sufficiently greater than the number of right-wing e.g. evangelical women supporting the GOP’s policies to make a substantial difference in the results at the polls in not just the Presidential race, but in Congressional and state races as well?
    2) To what extent will these issues motivate significantly greater turnout among women inclined to vote their disapproval of the GOP’s attack on contraception/women’s health care?
    3) To what extent will women who might ordinarily open to voting GOP on e.g. economic and other issues be instead inclined to vote Dem due to this issue?

  32. 32.

    MikeJ

    March 18, 2012 at 11:44 am

    @Linda Featheringill:

    But I have a feeling [unsupported by facts or logic] that the real motive is something else.

    They hate the idea that somebody might get away with something. If you have sex, you should be punished with a child.

    If there is one dollar’s worth of fraud in a program, they will happily spend a trillion to stop it. If there is one person voting who shouldn’t, they’ll stop 100 million legal voters.

    The inevitability of punishment is the most important thing to them. More important than money, more important than your rights to your own body.

  33. 33.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 11:44 am

    Anyhew. It’s pure guesswork that any real thinking is going on. Cro-Magnon’s have more insight.

  34. 34.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    March 18, 2012 at 11:45 am

    Stop watching cable news. Try getting out of your basement and not reading from the Democrat Playbook and manifesto about the “war on women.” Well that’s what a nutter from high school told me the other day.

  35. 35.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 11:46 am

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    I think it’s even more primal than that.

    It’s about marking women, and that women can choose — on their own, with medical counsel, and without (necessarily) the father’s approval — to terminate a pregnancy. To unplant that seed.

    Unsaid in so much of the abortion debate is that a decision to terminate a pregnancy can have a lot more to do with the father — do you want to have a lifetime of interacting with him? — than with the prospect of a child.

  36. 36.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 11:47 am

    How many American males will happily return to days without contraception? Have these Santoriums made that calculation?

    This is a war not just on women but a war on a sane human way of life finally.

  37. 37.

    Linda Featheringill

    March 18, 2012 at 11:51 am

    @MikeJ: #31

    The inevitability of punishment is the most important thing to them. More important than money, more important than your rights to your own body.

    I actually understand that, which obviously says something about my own psyche. :-)

    But seriously, I’ll give some thought to punishment uber alles and see if it explains some stuff.

  38. 38.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 11:53 am

    @MikeJ:

    If there is one dollar’s worth of fraud in a program, they will happily spend a trillion to stop it.

    Yet the real fraud is almost always committed by one of their own.

  39. 39.

    pat

    March 18, 2012 at 11:54 am

    What is being forgotten in all this is that there will be FATHERS involved in all these unwanted pregnancies. Imagine some poor slob trying to support a family working two or three minimum wage jobs and all of a sudden there is another mouth to feed, and a wife who has to give up a job in order to care for it, because these evil bastards will probably take away the money for child care whereever they can.

    There is no other word for it. These people, including the women who support this crap, are evil.

  40. 40.

    cathyx

    March 18, 2012 at 11:55 am

    @Palli: This is so true. It’s not just about single men, but married men also may not want to have more children. Let’s face it, children are a financial burden on a family, even though we love them.

  41. 41.

    Nix

    March 18, 2012 at 11:58 am

    It is what it is. The company wanted to send a message to the rest of the staff about how big their balls are. This is in Fl where if you spend anytime there you will find out that there is a traffic hit and run on a few minority children weekly and they never catch the hitters. This is FL they have no ground water the entire state smells of rotting vegetation.

  42. 42.

    General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)

    March 18, 2012 at 11:58 am

    Whatever their ultimate purpose is, that I suspect is several things from one wingnut to the next. If you read the bowels of their websites, blogs and such, they, in their minds are obsessed about Saul Alinsky, and his Rules For Radicals, and seem to adopting those tactics for their own purposes. Planned Parenthood is currently on tap, after ACORN. Sandra Fluke, her boyfriend, etc…

    * RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

    I think it is comical how they misread modern liberals and the dem party, that for better of worse, are focusing on actual progressive policy, such as to expand health care coverage for as many people as they can. Without much time left over for going Alinsky on the wingnuts what with wingers doing a bang up job self immolating on their own accord. We sometimes run out of popcorn, and step away from the computer, for various reasons, but no need much to get in the way of republicans biting off way more than they can chew.

    And it is doubly hilarious their claims that dems are going after Rush Limbaugh, who is doing a great job going after himself with the over the line hate speech on Fluke, and women in general.

  43. 43.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:03 pm

    Why? Because this is older than the New Deal, older than the Gilded Age, as old as Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” at least: it has always been true that women, especially young women, have been at the forefront of labour resistance, “Bread AND Roses,” in the first strikes when the first New England mills were new, in the general suffrage and anti-price-fixing protests before Peterloo. It’s always been true that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, even older than human nature (zoologists have found that risk taking is higher with lower status in all kinds of social animals, down to wasps and bees) and one way of giving a woman something to lose is to make sure she has children. Or the social risk of having them, as well.

    They’ve always been against contraception, as they’ve always been against suffrage (not just female but limiting males as much as possible, via property ownership as well as race) and always against unions. There’s a direct lineage among all of these ideological movements and their public actors, and not just on this continent: there’s a reason that the Murdochs were made peers of the Realm after all.

    Pantysniffing prudery and racism/xenophobia are very useful servants in this struggle, but only that. And thus it has always been, if you read back to the earliest newspaper articles and editorials denouncing Female Suffrage, social and economic justice and sexual freedom — they were all seen as linked by conservatives in the early 1900s and the mid 1800s and even the late 1700s during the Age of Revolutions: Abigail Adams wasn’t alone when she demanded that men “remember the ladies” and give up the legal right to domestic tyranny, she was in the vanguard of a rising tide…

  44. 44.

    gaz

    March 18, 2012 at 12:04 pm

    @Kay, just curious who the douchewhistle was that made that first statement you quoted in your post.

    You’re the first to bring this crap to my attention (the fact that some moron or other somewhere has decided that this is all abstract political posturing, or what have you)

    Frankly, if anyone had the huevos to say that to my face, I’d kick them in the aforementioned bits… on principle, you understand.

    Just fucking wow. I really wanna know who’s pushing this bankrupt argument.

  45. 45.

    Smiling Mortician

    March 18, 2012 at 12:06 pm

    Imagine some poor slob trying to support a family working two or three minimum wage jobs and all of a sudden there is another mouth to feed, and a wife who has to give up a job in order to care for it, because these evil bastards will probably take away the money for child care whereever they can.

    Well, of course they will. The authoritarians who insist that “those people” can’t have access to contraception will also insist that “those people” have no business having children they can’t support. The question is how much of the authoritarian-minded electorate will realize that they are also “those people,” and that a vote for republicans at this point is a vote for people who apparently believe that only the wealthy have the right to have sex.

  46. 46.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 12:10 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt:

    Abigail Adams wasn’t alone when she demanded that men “remember the ladies” and give up the legal right to domestic tyranny, she was in the vanguard of a rising tide…

    And…the other shoe drops.

  47. 47.

    gaz

    March 18, 2012 at 12:10 pm

    @gaz: oops. MOAR coffee. WRT to my comment above, I wasn’t reading a quote, I was reading Kay, I got my wires crossed.

    Still, I’d like to know who’s pushing this sick meme.

    Any names to name? =)

  48. 48.

    rikyrah

    March 18, 2012 at 12:12 pm

    keep it up, kay.

    keep on telling us the truth. I’m trying to spread the word on these issues, and you give us the info.

  49. 49.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 12:13 pm

    @gaz:

    Sentence out of a Bloomberg article. Not attributed to anyone per se.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-01/birth-control-vote-roils-both-parties-seeking-election-advantage.html

    It follows this paragraph:

    “If Democrats no longer see the value in defending the First Amendment because they don’t think it’s politically expedient to do so, or because they want to protect the president, then Republicans will have to do it for them,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.

    Is this it? The Republicans are hiding behind “First Amendment” and daring the Democrats to invoke separation of church and state?

  50. 50.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:16 pm

    As to why they think “Back to the kitchens, you godless wenches, and rear your brats!” is a winning strategy in 2012 — well, partly that’s what happens when you stay in your own enclaves and banish dissenters. But partly it’s due to how many decades of successful Hyde Amendments and other backlash-fueled retrenchments in the face of the Panty-Sniffing Brigade’s Junior Anti-Sex League, now? No wonder they got overconfident.

  51. 51.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:23 pm

    @Ben Franklin Yup. And the churches have always been on the side of the property owners, with rare (and usually excommunicated) exceptions. The “religious” aspect of the unholy union of anti-Labour and anti-women’s rights Right has been there since forever, using prudery and Think of The Children! as a shield at least since they could blame it all on the French (then the Marxists, then…yeah, the Jews, after all wasn’t Marx a Jew? ZOMG liberal-commie-godless-athiest-Jews gonna steal our women to freelove communes and abort white babeez!!! Brooke whatsisface has a longer intellectual pedigree than even students of Henry Ford may realize.

  52. 52.

    gaz

    March 18, 2012 at 12:25 pm

    @Elizabelle: I did read that, but it seems kind of an over-extrapolation to take that statement and spin this meme out of that.

    There must be more. But then again, I’ve got “attack on the 1st amendment” fatigue.

    It’s the standard GOP refrain whenever anyone tries to hold them accountable for anything. At this point, it’s in one ear out the other whenever I hear a wingnut mention the first amendment (something they clearly do not understand)

    Anyway, yeah. None of this is to be read as me believing Kay is intentionally misrepresenting anything. Kay strikes me as honest, sincere, and thorough in general, and I definitely respect her and her contributions to BJ. Just wondering if there’s more here I’m missing, is all.

  53. 53.

    Ben Franklin

    March 18, 2012 at 12:26 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt:

    It’s a primordial reflex with conservatives. We tend to overthink the simpletons.

  54. 54.

    amused

    March 18, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    I’ve noticed a few people saying “it’s not just a war on women, but a war on…”

    Yes it is a war on women. It’s been going on as long as humans have been on earth. Witch hunts, anyone? Sure, in the 21st century it seems insane to go there again, and yes, the higher proportion of harm will fall on the poor, but it’s all about control of women.

    The pill took away man’s centuries old right: a foothold in a woman’s life, through her uterus, and it pissed off a certain segment of the population something fierce. Abortion served these fanatics well as a cudgel in the past few decades, because they could get the squeamish to agree that babies are teh preciousss, but they were always after contraception. The nutbars know that this is the closest they’ll get to any sort of mainstream power in their lifetimes, so they’re pushing all they can before November. The efforts seem coordinated, too. There’ll be enough lawsuits to get something kicked up to the SCOTUS in the coming years, right?

    cmorenc – while I agree that women need to stand up for themselves now more than ever, I don’t see any evidence that they’re not outside the whackos on the far right. Furthermore, contraception affects both men and women; shouldn’t men be exhorted to defend their interests as well?

  55. 55.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:27 pm

    @Smiling Mortician: Depends on the strength of the cognitive dissonance and internal barriers. I know that I and many other ex-conservative women were able to tell ourselves for YEARS that they weren’t talking about US when they said awful things about women in general, just the “bad girls” and WE were good girls so there! But eventually denial wears thin and then you have to decide if you can or can’t lie to yourself any more and then live with it.

  56. 56.

    Teresa

    March 18, 2012 at 12:28 pm

    It’s so depressing living in a nation that hates you just for existing.

  57. 57.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:31 pm

    @Ben Franklin: Oh, I was one for many years, before I had my own David Brock moment. Read all our rationalizing magazines and newsletters, made the arguments, studied the dialectic. Yes, from the outside it seems like nothing but simpletons all the way down — but when you’re one of the clique of David Brooks wannabes, there’s a lot more to it than that. Killing and stifling your better impulses, curiosity, and cognitive dissonances takes a LOT of justifying.

  58. 58.

    gaz

    March 18, 2012 at 12:33 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt: glad you decided to join the dark side. we have cookies =)

  59. 59.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:34 pm

    @amused: In the conservative Christian orthodoxy, liberal men only care about contraception so they can convince women to give up “the milk” without having to buy “the cow,” and don’t really care about us as persons at all. Think the beginning sequences of The Handmaid’s Tale where the narrator’s boyfriend shrugs and goes along with the increasing restrictions. They aren’t expecting an equal-opportunity backlash to this.

  60. 60.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    @gaz: Oh yes indeed ;D though I prefer to think of it as stopping being Lawful Stupid myself!

  61. 61.

    losgatosca

    March 18, 2012 at 12:37 pm

    . . . for the life of me, I can’t understand its resurgence in the culture now.

    When is hysteria the natural course of events? The historical treatment of the immediate post-Cold War era in America will be that of ever increasing irrationality starting to manifest itself with the Clinton impeachment to stealing the 2000 election through 9/11 and the mass hysteria leading to Iraq and the Great Recession.

    This is not a new trend and this is only the latest natural development of a group of people at odds with modernity being exploited for political power by the upper classes.

    It’s a variation on the theme of ‘Let’s you and him have fight (while I steal both your wallets).’

  62. 62.

    PIGL

    March 18, 2012 at 12:44 pm

    @MikeJ: This.

    They are vicious, vengeful, racist, tribalist, misogynist creeps who should not be allowed anywhere near a political process because they are incapable of making decisions on any bases other than revenge, spite and power worship.

    I stand with Samara Morgan on this. A democracy where 30% of the population has these traits and where the elite have committed to exploiting that fact must fall. And the consequence of this is that universal suffrage is not sustainable, because the elite are always after the same things.

    I conclude from this that there needs to be a vote qualification: not sex, wealth, race, education or criminal record, but simply proof that one is not a flaming asshole. The assays in fact exist.

  63. 63.

    Ash Can

    March 18, 2012 at 12:48 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt: I for one find your comments very interesting (in a good way, that is). I’ve never been a right-winger myself, and I find, looking in from the outside, that it’s very difficult to understand what exactly goes on in a right-wingnut’s mind, and, even more difficult, why. We discuss it plenty here, and I’m sure there’s much truth to the answers we come up with, but it doesn’t make any of it seem any less fucked up. Thanks for commenting.

  64. 64.

    amused

    March 18, 2012 at 12:50 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt: Believe me, I know what you’re talking about. I lived it, too. Then I divorced it. But then, I was in the first all-female squad in Navy boot camp, so when I married, a (so-called) godly husband was attractive because he’d take care of you and be faithful. (hah!)

    Being on a pedestal is great until you realize that’s the only place you’re allowed to go. Add some anchoring babies and your life is complete, better learn to like it. To do that, though, you’re expected to hate those who have more mobility than you. It works, for a while. Only reason I stuck around so long is because he was on a ship all the time.

  65. 65.

    PaminBB

    March 18, 2012 at 12:52 pm

    @General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):

    “…in their minds are obsessed about Saul Alinsky, and his Rules For Radicals…”

    And yet they fail to realize that adopting such rules, they are themselves radicals, not “conservatives”. No ability to reason.

  66. 66.

    amused

    March 18, 2012 at 12:56 pm

    @Ash Can: Sara Robinson and Dave Neiwert formerly of Orcinus and I think they’re at C&L now, wrote extensively on the mindset of the fundies. Very interesting stuff, really, especially looking at it after living it.

  67. 67.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 1:03 pm

    @amused:
    My point exactly. War on Women is war on a sane human life. Without full-throated opposition from intelligent men the backslide will happen.

    Contraception will become a black market drug to be acquired as Rush gets his oxicontin and viagra.

    These republicans may not be able to pray away the climate change but they think they can roll back access to contraceptive science.

    Which poses a question I’ve wondered about. How would these laws affect big pharma bottom lines or will the patents on big pharma contraceptives run out soon?

  68. 68.

    PIGL

    March 18, 2012 at 1:08 pm

    @Smiling Mortician: They are trying to create a (greater) scarcity of sex so they can make more money off of pornography and prostitution. Add “pimp” to the list of their disgusting proclivities.

  69. 69.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    March 18, 2012 at 1:08 pm

    @kay: It’s indeed the slippery slope in action as predicted. I confess to having some doubts initially. Now I recognize that it’s a balls to the wall war on women and the poor. But how else can we be kept in our place unless kept pregnant and poorer?

  70. 70.

    Kristin

    March 18, 2012 at 1:08 pm

    I am a single woman in my ’30’s, and I almost literally can’t believe that contraception is even remotely controversial. It’s always been available to me. I always felt lucky that this fight was fought on my behalf before I was even born. To think that contraception might be in jeopardy is just… outrageous.

    That said, I think corporate America will ultimately win this battle. HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to let this happen. It will be the right outcome, but the wrong process. The process is frightening.

  71. 71.

    Brachiator

    March 18, 2012 at 1:09 pm

    @Linda Featheringill:

    That might be all there is to it. But I have a feeling [unsupported by facts or logic] that the real motive is something else. Something deeper and darker.

    I don’t understand why people just don’t take these goobers at their word. The American Taliban believe that imposed religion is the answer to everything, and will make America great again. They are willing to sacrifice women now, but will come for the rest later.

    And the war on women and on contraception just not just target poor women. Rachel Maddow’s most recent show mentions a proposed Arizona law that would let employers question whether women were using birth control for non reproductive purposes. This targets working women of all income levels, not just poor women.

    Other proposed laws would protect doctors who deliberately lie to women about problem pregnancies. To be blunt, both Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum have special needs children. They and the people who believe as they do want to make sure that all women have the opportunity to be as blessed as they were.

    They believe that all children come from the deity, and that no woman, no married couple, no one, has the right to interfere with the deity’s will. You must accept what is given to you.

    Separation of church and state? How quaint. The Republicans offer state sponsored theocracy.

  72. 72.

    Palli

    March 18, 2012 at 1:09 pm

    @amused:
    and from the middle days:
    “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.” Gloria Steinem

  73. 73.

    Svensker

    March 18, 2012 at 1:11 pm

    @MikeJ:

    The inevitability of punishment is the most important thing to them.

    I had an interesting conversation with a right winger on that. We were discussing a store owner’s reaction to a young teenage “minority” (I think Hispanic, but don’t remember) who had come into his store to steal. Instead of catching the kid and turning him over to the cops, the store owner asked the kid if needed money or food and was kind to him. The kid ended up crying, returning what he’d stolen and eventually ended up helping out in the store.

    I viewed this story as illustrating the power of non-violence and redemptive love. The right winger viewed it as a horror story — he called it “evil”. Why? Because the kid should have been punished! He was rewarded for bad behavior!

    He was an atheist, so I can’t point to his hypocrisy in not understanding the parable of the workers in the vineyard… But it certainly was illustrative of a strange mindset, very authoritarian, for all the guy’s “small government” line of patter (aka crap).

  74. 74.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 1:20 pm

    Gaz, I’ll clarify.
    Approaching these as discrete issues is deceptive, to me.
    The political question, the crucial question for women who vote is “do conservative actions limit access to contraception?”
    The answer is “yes”
    Opposing Title X means 5 million people lose the access THEY HAD to birth control.
    It’s not about a proposed HHS rule.
    It’s happening now.
    Women who vote need this context, instead of a fuzzy round table debate on “religious liberty”

  75. 75.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 1:23 pm

    Here’s an op ed by E. Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star.

    Note how he — and naturally, it’s a he — positions the issue as Obama’s crazy mad power overreach.

    If our government can do this, what can they not do?</strong

    Now there could be no question — thank you, El Rushbo! — that the GOP is waging a war on women and this is all about women’s health. Heaven knows no one wants to talk about the government giving orders to the church. No, it’s about Republicans wiping out birth control pills — or as New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg put it, how the GOP wants to take the country back to “when women were property.”
    __
    Lautenberg’s histrionics may stand as the climactic aria in the comic opera phase of all this. But Obama’s gift will prove the more lasting. The White House has needlessly bought itself a great deal of trouble and a likely Supreme Court case. As with so much that this administration has done, the latest debate again prompts the question: If they can do this, what can they not do?

    Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/17/141473/commentary-if-our-government-can.html#storylink=cpy

    Those poor, poor Catholic bishops.

  76. 76.

    WereBear

    March 18, 2012 at 1:27 pm

    @Svensker: Every time I do manage to uncover such people motivations; it comes down to how they were raised. And how much that method, sucked.

  77. 77.

    Doctor Science

    March 18, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    One of the New Hanover, NC, commissioners has changed his mind:

    Barfield says he realized his mistake after talking with his wife.

    “Her first question was, ‘What were you thinking?’ and we started walking through and talking about this discussion,” Barfield said. “She brought up some very valid points that if someone is seeking contraception, it shows that they are being responsible.”

    The GOP and the conservative churches are giving themselves one hell of a Mrs Barfield Problem. I’m certain she doesn’t call herself a feminist, but they’re making her act like one.

  78. 78.

    kay

    March 18, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    Elizabelle, yet another conservative who neglects to mention Title X, or the fact that the Title X funding fight preceded the HHS rule.
    The bishops should be glad I’m not in charge.
    I’d open an investigation into whether
    religious health care corporations are
    putting pregnant women in their care at increased risk because they are allowing theology to trump medical care.
    I’d like to see some stats, for comparison.

  79. 79.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 1:35 pm

    @Ash Can: Check out the online archives of magazines like “First Things” and “National Catholic Register” — they’ve always been more explicit about all of this than “National Review” ever was. (Even when I was a conservative I couldn’t understand a lot of what NR was going on about, because it was so much double-speak and plausible deniability, none of it made sense to me as a young Republican who hadnt grown up with the same circumstances. It wasn’t until I started running into liberal writers and heard the term “dogwhistle” that I finally understood what I’d been missing.)

    You’ll find lots of people like Bork and Bennett back in the 1980s talking about how important it is to slut-shame because something something decline and fall something something Eurabia demographic winter something something evil unions Japan secular humanism taxes gold standard prayer in school happy holidays moral standards broken windows inner city death penalty Aristotle whargarble, like that poem by e. e. cummings about the politician. There’s a seamlessness between the so called “social” and “fiscal” conservativism that was just taken for granted among the insiders from the beginning.

  80. 80.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 1:39 pm

    @amused: Yeah, it sent chills down my back the first time I heard that “pedestal is a prison” analogy as a teenager, because i’d been avoiding that realization pretty hard myself! and it sure is easier to ignore the problems with the system when they’re not being rubbed in your face by proximity. I saw that in my own circle too, things going bad, or worse, when husbands retired or started working from home more. And the hate/resentment of women who dared to try to be independent, sigh.

  81. 81.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 1:41 pm

    @kay:

    I have been a lapsed Catholic for years.

    This is the issue that broke me from the Church.

    I think the Catholic and religious affiliated hospitals are also endangering non-pregnant women and men.

    Think of their opposition to stem cell research, and the therapeutic possibilities it promises.

    I wonder if the Catholic leadership has bought themselves a bigger headache, because now you don’t want them affiliated with healthcare, or enlarging their share of it.

  82. 82.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 1:43 pm

    @Elizabelle:

    Catholic bishop fights contraception in 1948, changes position by 1965: (via)

    According to Meehan, in 1948 Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing led public efforts against Referendum No. 4, which was a statewide ballot measure to relax the state’s then-existing ban on contraception.

    Using both the pulpit and the public air waves, the Catholic leadership argued that birth control was “still against God’s law” while Cushing himself defined contraception as “anti-social and anti-patriotic, as well as absolutely immoral.” In the end, says Meehan, 57% of voters rejected the referendum.

    Nearly 20 years later, Cardinal Cushing had a change of heart. Just prior to the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut that rendered the controversy moot, Cushing entered into what he called a “friendly discussion with those whose views of life and its meaning are different than his own.” One of those with whom the Cardinal “adopted a conciliatory tone” on the Church’s objections to birth control, was a young state representative from the Boston suburb of Brookline named Michael Dukakis.

    As Meehan reports, in 1963 Cushing told an unidentified radio caller that the existing ban on birth control was “bad law” because neither he nor anyone else had a right “to impose my thinking, which is rooted in religious thought, on those who do not think as I do.”

    Funny how none of the conservatives who praised the Cardinal Archbishop in later years ever mentioned his apostasy on that point!

    ETA link to original NYT blog post and to fix blockquote.

  83. 83.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 1:48 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt:

    Most interesting.

  84. 84.

    Mike in NC

    March 18, 2012 at 1:55 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Separation of church and state? How quaint. The Republicans offer state sponsored theocracy.

    Once again, our wingnuts point at the horrors of living in places like Iran and China, all the while envying their governments’ ability to control access to things like health care, education, technology, and information. It’s all about having absolute power to control peoples’ lives.

  85. 85.

    Sgaile-beairt

    March 18, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    @Elizabelle: Its like Reagan and Nixon being squishy liberals by the standards of their followers today!

  86. 86.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 2:21 pm

    I guess what we’re seeing is the right wing going down hard, and throwing up every cultural issue they can on their slide.

    It’s frightening to watch because this is a country that inaugurated George W. Bush. Twice.

    (I say inaugurated now. Less and less sure about “elected.”)

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    March 18, 2012 at 2:33 pm

    @Elizabelle:

    I guess what we’re seeing is the right wing going down hard, and throwing up every cultural issue they can on their slide.

    Until I see the right wing being voted out of office at the local, state, and federal level, I will not assume that they are going down, hard or easy.

  88. 88.

    Elizabelle

    March 18, 2012 at 2:36 pm

    @Brachiator: It’s our job to make apparent the disconnect between their promises and their actions.

    Can’t count on the media to do it, and politics is so ugly that a lot of people are tuning out. (Also a GOP goal. If you can’t get your folks out, make sure the other candidate’s supporters stay home.)

  89. 89.

    nellcote

    March 18, 2012 at 2:51 pm

    @Linda Featheringill:

    But I have a feeling [unsupported by facts or logic] that the real motive is something else. Something deeper and darker.

    It’s coming from the same place that justifies rape as a weapon of war.

  90. 90.

    Brachiator

    March 18, 2012 at 2:57 pm

    @Mike in NC:

    Once again, our wingnuts point at the horrors of living in places like Iran and China, all the while envying their governments’ ability to control access to things like health care, education, technology, and information. It’s all about having absolute power to control peoples’ lives.

    The American Christian Taliban, like the brethren overseas, are not interested in controlling access to health care, education, technology, and information. They see these things as evil, and want to eliminate them. They want to restore, by force, purity of faith, with a free market twist in which corporations would rampant over the people. For their own good, of course.

  91. 91.

    Cat Lady

    March 18, 2012 at 2:59 pm

    @Linda Featheringill:

    Watching my right wing FIL going through a health crisis that most assuredly will kill him has gotten me to think about what’s really going on too – he’s not a culture warrior, but he’s a control freak with an authoritarian mindset that stopped emotionally maturing in the 1950s. The 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s never happened for him, and now that his body is betraying him, he’s TERRIFIED. He’s revoked his DNR orders, and he’s hanging on for dear life because he has no inner peace, because he always believed that he would always be the alpha male and that the world reflected himself back at him. Everything different than his view of the world he considers to be bad, and his world is ending for him – in all the ways it can. Fear of being deeply, essentially wrong about the nature of the world and your place in it – that your beliefs and your actions and your words might all have been just flat out wrong and repudiated or irrelevant is at the bottom of the conservative white male anxiety, and they’re lashing out in a last gasp of relevancy. It’s dangerous.

  92. 92.

    Lurker

    March 18, 2012 at 3:42 pm

    @Old Dan and Little Ann:

    Stop watching cable news. Try getting out of your basement and not reading from the Democrat Playbook and manifesto about the “war on women.” Well that’s what a nutter from high school told me the other day.

    I heard similar denials from an acquaintance this past week. The Democratic party is the true anti-women party, he said. As proof, he claimed that Senators Feinstein and Schumer derailed the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act by putting a bunch of unrelated “crap” about illegal immigrants and visas into the law.

    I looked it up on the Internet, and it looks like Feinstein’s “crime” was attempting to extend legal protection against domestic violence to gays, lesbians, illegal immigrants and Indian tribes. This made the law unpalatable to Republicans, which in turn somehow makes Democrats “anti-women.”

    I don’t agree with his distorted point-of-view, but I don’t know how I’ll convince him that Republicans are doing more damage to women than Democrats.

  93. 93.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 18, 2012 at 11:59 pm

    @Sgaile-beairt: Just a suggestion. John Cole – do a little research toward the intent of of making this commenter a front pager.

    Kay … thank you for this. You are so on target. Of course, they want to eliminate contraception. It’s that simple, and that obvious, no matter how difficult it might be for us to understand such lunacy

  94. 94.

    economy

    March 27, 2012 at 7:20 pm

    It should also be said that the attacks against RFI are a reflection of its noteworthy impact on the discourse on Iran. It is one of the few sites with quality info and analyses worth reading.

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