Liberal. Leftie. Democrat. Progressive. Whatever label is appropriate, part of being on the left (and therefore, the right) side of the spectrum is that you have a natural openness and willingness to hear all sides of the argument. You're not like them; you don't want to shut opposition out, control information, or spin facts-you want to make the truth plain and clear so people can see it past their whitewash. But therein lies the problem, fellow progressive, fellow liberal: in the process, you're very tolerant, and very..well..humble. Don't bother with that here.
There's no need for you to be humble here. No reason for you to be apologetic. No reason to hold back your vitrol, your venom. We like it. We're all passionate here, including myself, and not afraid to hide it. We don't put up with the people who tell us to settle down-because no movement ever got anywhere by not being uppity, by not being passionate. I tell it like it is, I'll show you the facts, the articles, the talking points, and expose the agenda for everyone to see; regardless of whose agenda it is, including our own. Our agenda is getting to the bottom of things; posting the stories you might not have heard otherwise, and giving you the kind of analysis and commentary that you should be getting elsewhere. Welcome home.
Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?
Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.
But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:
3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.
4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.
5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.
6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.
7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.
8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”
Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:
14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.
15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.
While I don’t think David Rosen’s suggestions would really halt the culture wars (if anything, it might anger the far-right more), I definitely think his suggestions are solid and we should move towards them as soon as possible. When the conservatives took control of the Congress and the White House, they made every attempt possible to criminalize sex and sexuality and punish anyone who dared speak openly about it; there’s a lot of work required to undo the damage.
From safeguarding Roe v. Wade to ending abstinence-only sex education and getting religion out of our classrooms for good, Rosen’s ideas would bring us up to speed to a real, solid, fact-and-evidence based sexual policy and bring some sanity to the way America deals with sex and sexuality. Maybe then the rest of the world (excluding super-religious states like those in the Middle East, of course) will stop laughing at us for being essentially a nation whose sexual policy is descended from the Puritans who fled from Europe because they couldn’t deal with anyone who differed from them.
Sometimes I almost feel bad for the guy when he not only doesn’t remember his own voting record (must be all of that “experience”) but when he can’t come up with a comprehensive stand on a critical issue to women across the country:
Millions of Americans are more than aware of what John McCain is sadly not: the fact that most insurance companies in the country are more than happy to pay for Viagra for men, but refuse to cover birth control for women. It’s a long-standing outrage, and poor sleepy John doesn’t even seem to understand the question, much less know the answer.
The video is part of NARAL Pro-Choice America’s “Meet The Real McCain” campaign, which we’ve covered before not once, but twice.
NARAL has a petition going to get the issue of birth control into the third and final presidential debate, and I’d urge everyone to sign it; not because McCain is weak on the issue, but because the American people have the right to know where a candidate for the Presidency stands on the issue.
Speaking of John McCain’s “maverick” ruse, it’s about time to turn at least some attention towards the Republican nominee and all of the things he’s likely hoping to do as soon as he takes office.
For example, continue the erosion of reproductive rights and the basic freedom to decide when and how you’re planning to have children or raise a family. I’ve said multiple times that choice is not an “issue,” not a political bargaining chip, not a ploy, it’s matter of basic human rights. It’s about freedom, and it’s about liberty, and it’s about the people who are willing to erode those freedoms and rights because of their own moral doctrine without scientific or realistic basis in fact whatsoever. In the end, it’s about people who want to take your freedom and impose their own moral imperative and code on others – no better or worse than in fundamental Islamic countries where theocratic laws are the norm.
Beyond that, it’s about time we’re all absolutely clear on McCain’s stance. From NARAL Pro-Choice America:
The REAL McCain has:
* Voted anti-choice 125 out of 130 times in his congressional career;
* Consistently voted to restrict access to abortion care;
* Voted against measures to prevent unintended pregnancy;
* Voted for the global gag rule, which prohibits federally funded family-planning clinics from giving women full information about their reproductive-health options;
* Voted for and co-sponsored the Federal Abortion Ban; and
* Voted in favor of anti-choice Supreme Court Justices like Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas.
Sound about right to you? McCain has a history of supporting abstinence-only education even though study upon study shows that it’s ineffective, McCain has a history of supporting efforts to whittle away abortion rights, access to contraceptives, and even access to fair, honest information about their options for pregnant women.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire McCain for a lot of things, but his record on choice certainly isn’t one of them, and is certainly cause for attention. The fact that this hasn’t been more widely discussed is in itself an issue. NARAL is sponsoring a petition to get the word out about McCain’s anti-choice record. Link’s below.
I’m actually very amused by the turn of phrase against the Right of the term “judicial activism.” It’s a dirty term, polluted by conservative idealogues who were desperately seeking a way to describe even the smallest judicial ruling that they disagreed with. I almost take exception to using it in this situation; but in this case it’s not a matter of agreeing, or a matter of smallness – this issue is huge, and will have a chilling effect on not only women’s rights in America in the future, but also human rights around the world. America is often looked to as an example of human rights, and nations far less willing to allow their peoples the ability to control their own lives, their own destinies, and at heart- their own families, will follow in the footsteps of this decision in a sad and painful way.
By now we all know the Supreme Court’s decision, but the truly sad part is that the Court decided to abandon decades of precedence and prior ruling to uphold the ban, doing exactly what President Bush chose his nominees to do- sway the court of so-called “moral” issues that are critical energizing issues for the conservative base’s religious, evangelical, and socially fascist elements – those people who believe that the government has every right to tell American citizens not only what they can and cannot do with their bodies in a medical situation (a la Terri Schaivo), but those who believe that your body does and should belong to the State, that the government and the church should have every right to enforce and choose when, how, and with what method a woman or a family has a child but cares little about the future rearing of that child, and so on. These are the folks who truly believe that their misguided interpretation of religion, or in other cases their misguided interpretation of what powers a government should have (eg, you can tell me how or when to or not to have a child, but you can’t keep me from arming myself and shooting my neighbors) gives them just cause to impose their will on millions of Americans who are perfectly capable of directing their own lives. It’s saddening.
Even so, the Justices that begged and pleaded with the Senate before their confirmation hearings that they would not bring a political agenda to the court and won votes because of their convincing act have done exactly as they were tapped to do now that they’ve been allowed to make a crucial decision like this. Future women’s and human rights cases will stall and hesitate before coming to the Supreme Court for justice, just as planned, and this opens the door to future abortion bans and reproductive rights restrictions that the anti-choice crowd have been wringing their hands in glee to push through various state and the federal legislatures for years now.
Over at Alternet, there’s an excellent rundown of the turnabout that the most recently confirmed justices made in their attempts to highlight their multi-sided work before and through the confirmation hearings, but their gleeful demeanor at overturning previous legislation at their first real opportunity. As thrilled as the mainstream and progressive communities have been at some of the court’s rulings to date, this proves that all it takes is one incredibly contentious issue (and interestingly, one seat) to swing the court backwards from America’s great tradition of individual rights and freedoms.
I’m going to let this piece of activism speak for itself. I was so incredibly horrified at the scenario that reading it alone made me want to pass the message along.
Last month, Tashina Byrd and her boyfriend tried to purchase the emergency contraceptive Plan B® at the Springfield, Ohio Wal-Mart after their condom broke. Instead, the pharmacist not only refused to provide Plan B® to them, but he laughed in their faces.
Please join NARAL Pro-Choice America in sending Wal-Mart President & CEO H. Lee Scott, Jr. a message urging him to improve company policy to require Wal-Mart pharmacies to fulfill requests for Plan B® without intimidation, humiliation, or delay.
Byrd’s exact experience?
The pharmacist laughed in our faces and told us, “We have it on hand, but there’s no one here who can dispense it.”
That’s horrifying. It’s bad enough when pharmacists believe they have the right to not do their jobs if they don’t feel like it, it’s almost worse when a pharmacist decides that they have the moral authority to make value judgments about the people who come to them for their prescriptions and medications. In all actuality, I would expect nothing else from Wal-Mart, the thought police of the retail world, but in many communities and cities around the country, Wal-Mart is most people’s only (and in other cases, only affordable) option for medication. If that’s going to be the case, they should observe the law, do their jobs, or fire their pharmacists and hire people willing to perform their duties.
Happy anniversary! It’s the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And I particularly like the idea of Blogging for Choice, to show my support not just for a monumental legal decision that had far reaching effects and sparked a firestorm of discussion and debate over the past three decades, but also to answer the fundamental question that the Blogging for Choice site poses. So in that spirit, let’s get started.
This year’s topic is a simple one: tell us, and your readers, why you’re pro-choice.
This is simple: because I believe in the power of the individual to choose the direction of their own lives.
It’s actually much deeper than that, to be honest, but it starts there. I believe that no one, regardless of their religion, their personal belief system, their personal morality, or their personal decisions, whether those beliefs and choices happen to be pro-choice or anti-choice, have the right to tell anyone else what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, how they can and cannot lead their lives, when they can and cannot start and raise a family, and how they choose or do not choose to have sex or have children. I simply believe that abortion is a matter between a woman, her doctor, and potentially her mate or partner, and that’s where the conversation can and absolutely should end.
I believe that those people standing outside of medical clinics holding photoshopped placards of blender babies that apparently are supposed to make me sympathize but instead make me chuckle at the horrible post-processing work done on the images have an agenda, and that agenda has nothing to do with protecting life, or a “culture of life,” I believe it has nothing to do with proving that all life is sacred, and I believe that they have no one’s best interests at heart and no good intentions to bring to bear. They have a sense of self-righteous, indignant morality that they seek to impose on everyone else-women, children, men, everyone. They seek to control our lives and our bodies, and the matter of abortion is only a first step, and those who believe that this begins and ends with “life,” or begins and ends with “abortion” are either incredibly naive or allowing themselves to be played as pawns in a greater campaign by a vocal minority of evangelical, radical, and incredibly un-Christian religious crusaders and far-right conservative fascists. The question is, then, inevitably, what that campaign seeks to achieve, and the answer is clear: starting with abortion, these people seek to define, legalize, and enforce morality according to their own beliefs and forsaking all others and any sense of pluralism and compassionate civil society. These are the people who would have adulteresses stoned in public and homosexuals beaten, the same people speaking from the same pulpits who felt so strongly about the “horrific ungodliness” of interracial marriage that they would rather castrate and hang young Black men than even stand the possibility that he may have given a white woman a sideways glance. This isn’t about “defending life,” it’s about asserting morality and dominating power, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing at all noble.
I draw these relationships between all of these same people because their eventual goal is crystal clear: to shape and form society in the image of their own morality, their own misinterpreted religious ideas, and their own corrupted sense of right and wrong. There are no analogies between abortion and murder to be drawn here, only between choice and freedom and the oppressive lack thereof.
Why am I pro-choice? I believe in freedom. I believe in liberty, and I believe in the rights of the individual to steer the direction of their own lives, and that includes the basic human right to voluntary reproduction, not compulsory reproduction. Extending this right includes the right to available, affordable, and effective contraception, reproductive care, (which includes not just abortion, but pre-natal care for women who opt to have children-note the opt, and extended care for children who have been born, a group the anti-choice community seems to conspicuously ignore) and education.
There’s nothing more American than choice, than freedom, than liberty, than the power of the individual to chart the course of their own lives, to rise and fall under their own power. It’s the American dream that we all stumble towards and grasp for, advantaged or not, and that choice, that freedom, is that makes us who we are.
Now then. Who are these people who dare try to take our freedom away from us?
Something that seems like common sense to the vast majority of us is unfathomable nonsense to the evangelical right-the notion that by being able to freely engage in sexual behavior-as consenting adults have the right to do and to agree to do, religion or no-but retain the basic human right to decide when and how to have a family and raise children, is something that empowers couples, saves them from financial ruin raising children that they may not be prepared to raise, and alleviating stress and friction in their relationships by giving them the freedom to love, be loved, and make love, while deciding when and how to raise a family.
… Another truth is that when the birth control revolution got underway, women waited to marry and start a family. In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28. Harvard researchers recently reported that legalization of contraception is directly linked to the spike in the number of women becoming more highly educated and entering the “career” professions. In 1970, 5 percent of all lawyers and judges were women; today there are six times that. In 1970, one in 10 physicians was female, today it’s one in three. Similar patterns are true for women architects, dentists, veterinarians, economists and women in most of the engineering fields.
Few women today would trade places with the typical 1950s woman and mother, the one fervently idealized by so-called “pro-family” groups. In the 1950s, women didn’t approach parity with men in education and, guess what, their housework time was constant — despite having new “time-saving” technologies. This was the era in which birth rates soared and doubled the time devoted to child care. And with women assigned to endless tasks of the home, men shouldered the full responsibility of supporting the family economically. One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty.
Not surprisingly, researchers in the ’50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ’50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion — the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement! — teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ’50s than today.
Sounds about right to me-the “good old days” apparently aren’t what they “used” to be.
So the Emergency Contraceptive Pill, also known as Plan B, should be widely available over the counter from pretty much any pharmacist in the country now. But here’s the question: with the current trend of pharmacists being allowed to claim the “moral right” to not do their jobs (can you imagine if firefighters or police officers claimed a “moral right” to not rescue someone from a burning building because they were of another religion? or if a killer were on a rampage but a police officer claimed a “moral right” to not stop them because they don’t like killing? I don’t oppose people not doing something because they have a moral conviction, but I also think they shouldn’t be in a line of work where that’s an issue.) it’s important to make it clear to the major pharmacy chains that we’re paying attention to what they’re doing and we’re making sure they’ll fulfill their obligation to the public by stocking, carrying, and dispensing Plan B appropriately and upon request.
Worried that your pharmacist or pharmacy chain is trying to buck the trend-and the law? Make your voice heard, and press the major pharmacy chains into drafting a national policy requiring their stores to stock Plan B:
In a presidential appointment that doesn’t require congressional approva, President Bush appointed Dr. Eric Keroack to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Keroack has been known to say such things as birth control is “insulting” to women, which is odd for a man who’s just been appointed to the post that ensures that low-income women have access to birth control, and heads up the nations family planning initiative-making sure that every child is a wanted child and a sustainable child. Odd, considering his hard-right ideology.
That might be an odd fit for Keroack. He is medical director of five Boston-area “crisis pregnancy centers” that use ultrasounds to convince women not to have abortions. The centers, called A Woman’s Concern, also emphasize abstinence and are participating in a campaign for the “Sanctity of Human Life Month.” Keroack is also on the medical advisory council of the Abstinence Clearinghouse.
There apparently are just going to be more and more rats to run out of their holes when this admnistration turns over, apparently.
