Cutting Off The Nose To Spite The Face

The latest insane flurry of right-wing efforts to roll back women’s reproductive rights and push women out of civil participation and public discourse has left many liberals certain that come November, Republican women will leave the fold in droves. I am not so sure. There have already been and will continue to be some defections among women who are slightly right-of-center, but the trickle will not become a flood. I do hope history will prove me wrong, but I doubt it will happen in this political climate.

An Argument I Wish Liberals Would Not Make So Much

As the debate over contraception coverage continues, there is an argument that supporters of such coverage frequently rely on, that I believe should not be the centerpiece of the pro-coverage case. At best, it should be offered as a side dish. The argument is that some women need birth control pills for reasons other than preventing pregnancy.

Look, I know that a lot of women, even virgins, take hormonal birth control for certain gynecological problems, to control cramps, etc. Still, the primary purpose of such medication is to prevent pregnancy, and the majority of women who take such pills, take it for this reason alone. To rely on the off-label use as a justification for mandating coverage implicitly concedes the wingnut argument that sexually active women, even married women, should just “hold an aspirin between their knees” if they don’t want to get pregnant. It also concedes their argument that sex for pleasure, as opposed to procreation, is a morally reprehensible “lifestyle” choice that should not be countenanced by making birth control more cheaply available.

I strongly disagree with such a stance, for reasons stated below:

The False Distinction Between “Illness” and “Lifestyle”

There is a relatively new argument in the conservative arsenal of talking points as to why health care plans should not cover contraception: because pregnancy is not a “disease”, and so preventing it is not a medical issue, but a “lifestyle issue”. That’s right: conservatives have become so deranged, sex is now a “lifestyle”. Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing dire warnings about the “sex-haver agenda”.

But let’s think about the logical implications of this new conservative principle, that there should be no insurance coverage for “lifestyle”, only for legitimate “medical problems” over which the individual has absolutely no control. One obvious implication is that, since “pregnancy is not a disease”, there should be no insurance coverage for pregnancy, child birth or post-partum care. After all, having children is, like sex, a lifestyle choice, and pregnancy is “natural”. In fact, since there appears to be a sizeable contingent of moral conservatives who believe that all women who have sex — even within marriage and even for procreation — are irresponsible sluts who must be held accountable for using their lady-parts, I would not be surprised if there is conservative support for forcing women to endure painful and dangerous child-bearing, just as God intended. So I do suspect that in arguing that “pregnancy is not a disease”, conservatives are laying the groundwork for denying care related to child-bearing, not just contraception.

A Modest Proposal

People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress. Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?

– Alan Dlugash, partner, Marks Paneth & Shron, LLP, on Wall Street’s reduced bonuses this year

But the great Bakhtiyar, preoccupied always with care for the welfare of the royal subjects, did his best to set up such laws in Bukhara, that not one penny would linger in the pockets of its inhabitants, but would pass immediately to the Emir — that is, so the citizenry could move about with greater ease, their pockets not burdened with money.

— Leonid Solovyev, “The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin”

In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical essay entitled “A Modest Proposal”, in which he argued that the poor Irish can alleviate their plight by selling their children to slaughter houses, where they would be turned into food. The solution would be a win-win: it would solve the Irish poverty problem, while meeting the need of the affluent for culinary innovation and rich food. Although my humble keyboard could never match the elegance and the sheer intellectual force of Swift’s pen, today I was nevertheless inspired to write a “Modest Proposal” of my own.

Down With Smarties!

Gays. Women. Scientists. People who use birth control. People who are not religious fundamentalists. People who support social programs besides giving taxpayers’ money to churches. You knew that wouldn’t be the end of the list comprising the anti-American “Satan”, right?

Now you can add universities to the roster of things Rick Santorum hates. On Saturday, the Man of God doubled down on his statements characterizing President Obama as a “snob” for trying to make college education affordable for all, and juxtaposed “good and decent people” without college education against “liberal professors” who usurp people’s right to indoctrinate their children. Even grown children, who have reached the age of majority and can presumably think for themselves, may not be exposed to views that conflict with their parents’ views, according to Santorum. Rick’s supporters have chimed in that giving the poor and the lower middle class a chance to attend college makes no sense, because who will clean the streets and pick up garbage then? And finally, if elected, Santorum plans to compel public universities to teach the views of religious and political conservatives uncritically, presenting dogma and fantasy as scientific fact, as well as mischaracterizing and falsifying the findings of social sciences, all in the name of “diversity”. The effect of such regulation would be to outlaw objectivity and investigative rigor in higher education and research, as well as to ban whole swaths of sciences whose findings do not conform to the Biblical account or to conservative social views.

Gutting universities and repressing intellectuals has a long and glorious history.

Three Sacred Cows That Shouldn’t Be

It is truly amazing how, even in our troubled times, when Americans have to contend with high unemployment, endless foreign wars (even if we don’t call them such), growing poverty and the legalized sale of our government to big business, we as a society still find inconsequential nonsense to worry about. I am not even talking about hardcore Republicans obsessing over other people’s sex lives or the non-existent War on Christianity. I am talking about certain non-issues that people on both sides of the political divide get sucked into worrying about and discussing ad nauseam, despite the fact that they are clearly not worth our time. The following three such non-issues take the cake for demonstrating all the ways in which ideology deprives people of common sense.

Freedom of Religion? Did Someone Say Something About Freedom of Religion?

As you are doubtless aware, last week, a group of House Republicans, led by Darrell Issa (R-Cal), brutally gang-raped the First Amendment. With “yeehaw’s” and everything. And in the time-honored tradition of ideological rapists, they motivated their heinous conduct by their supposed love of liberty. Not everyone’s liberty, of course (don’t be silly) — just the liberty of authoritarian men to control and punish sexually active women, and the liberty of fundamentalist religious officials (similarly authoritarian men, all) to be above the law. I make no apologies for my choice of strong language, for what happened last week was the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare come to life: a bunch of clergy explicitly dictating policy in Washington. And by “dictating”, I mean “bodily present in Congress and telling said Congress what laws it may or may not pass, in a hearing whose whole premise was the idea that public policy must comply with clerical law in order to pass Constitutional muster”.

“Objectification”: You Keep Saying That Word …

When I started my blog, I made a pact with myself that I would not use it to attack other people’s blogs. I therefore will not include a link in this post to some of the things that have riled me up in this latest contraception controversy. Instead, I will observe generally that religious conservatives are copiously misusing the term “objectification” in an attempt to mask their fear of and contempt for female sexuality and sex in general. Specifically, a spurious charge is made that the ability to have sex “without consequences” leads to women being objectified.

I should note that objectification, in general, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern political and social discourse. Through basic intellectual laziness, people — especially people hostile to women’s equality — have come to equate objectification with lust. This is the infuriating “logic” behind the claim that the birth control pill leads to objectification: that men will get to have sex with women purely for pleasure. This highly traditionalist view presumes that male desire in and of itself is degrading to a woman, and that any sexual expression is by its very nature a painful sacrifice. Marriage and motherhood, therefore, are the only things that allow a woman to save face, as it were, against the humiliation of a man’s lust for her body. Religious conservatives ominously warn that the availability of birth control leads to men having sex for pleasure, and they fully expect women to be scared by this. And when women don’t get scared, they, of course, bemoan the sorry state of morals in our society.

Fun With The Magna Carta: A Letter to Three Musketeers From New Hampshire

“All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.”

— NH House of Representatives Bill 1850
(Bob Kingsbury – R, Tim Twombley — R, Lucien Vita — R)

Dear Messrs Kingsbury, Twombley and Vita:

I would like to begin by thanking you, Gentlemen, along with many of your colleagues in the conservative movement, for providing countless hours of quality entertainment, so badly needed in these difficult times. You’ve been working overtime since at least 2008, and I think America doesn’t give you quite enough appreciation for all the good times had by water-coolers all over the country.

The Other Birther Movement

Oh, shut up, birthers. There was only one man who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. His name was William Shakespeare.

One of the most puzzling and maddening non-controversies in literature is the spurious question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Since Shakespeare’s life is pretty well-documented for a 16th-century commoner, and since there is not a shred of evidence (not a single inscription, not one letter) suggesting that anyone else wrote any of the works attributed to him, the anti-Stratfordian movement (as the birthers are formally called) revolves entirely around Shakespeare’s background and personality, his supposed personal lack of fitness to wear the laurels as the immense colossus of English-language poetry and theater, the inventor of modern English in all its glory and one of the greatest artists in all of history.