Wayne Christian lets the truth slip in an interview with the Texas Tribune:
Of course it’s a war on birth control, abortion, everything — that’s what family planning is supposed to be about.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9gS1gYyozs&feature=player_embedded]
This wasn’t a momentary slip of the tongue. Christian is just saying out loud what many Texas lawmakers believe — and many more supported with their votes this session. The ideology underlying all the attacks on abortion and Planned Parenthood is fundamentally anti-birth control and anti-family planning. And as so many others have pointed out, it is ultimately self-defeating, as depriving Texas women of birth control is one sure-fire way to increase the number of abortions in this state.
Is viagra part of family planning?
No. Viagara is a special gift from God that allows more men to use women as a tool to “get off.” It reminds me of an old question joke my boss put to me about 20 years ago:
“What are the useless folds of skin that surround the vagina called?”
Punch line: “A woman.”
The Religious Right wants to return women to the time when they were cute, sweet, wholly sex objects, and degraded like that. I sometimes wonder why God even bothered to give them a brain.
“The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions”
Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/katz/files/goldin_katz_pill.pdf
From the conclusion:
“We have presented a collage of evidence for the impact of the pill on
young women’s career decisions and on marriage rates in the 1970s.
The direct effect of the pill decreased the cost to women of remaining
unmarried while investing in a professional career. The pill further
reduced the cost of career investment for women by serving to increase
the age at first marriage for a large fraction of all young people. The
power of the pill in affecting women’s careers was magnified by its
impact on the age at first marriage.[…]
“The most persuasive evidence for a role of the pill is that its initial
diffusion among single women coincided with, and is analytically related
to, the increase in the age at first marriage and the increase in women
in professional degree programs. Other factors were involved in these
changes, to be sure. No great social movement is caused by a single
factor.”
In other words, women’s contraception enabled women to live the lives of their choosing. Whether this Republican realizes it or not, he’s asking for a return to the days when women were dependent on men — and therefore also subordinate to men.
Women entering the workforce in droves saved the Social Security System. If the US didn’t have the women paying into it, the system would have gone broke already.
We can’t let the tea party take us back to the days of the original tea party in the 18th century.
How true is it that insurance companies don’t cover contraceptives, and that single women cannot be insured for maternity coverage by
Texas Blue Cross/Blue Shield? Is it true that Viagra, et.al. is covered by insurance?
Now that more than half of couples are not married, how do their inevitable babies get born? Are midwives cheap?
Please tell me, is Texas turning out people capable of being in the legislature at all? Determining cause and effect is one science
principle which should be gone over during campaigns. I used to assume that all grown people could use this principle but sadly it seems
the leg just doesn’t get it. No services means more poor, neglected, abused unwanted babies. That’s why health and human services were invented wasn’t it?
Just for the record, insurance companies (for the most part that I know of) will not pay for Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra. From my visit to Walgreens this afternoon, the cost of Levitra is $20.00 per pill and Blue Cross/Blue shield in my state will not pay for or discount it.
Perhaps that is what they mean by “$20.00 whore.” That’s what it feels like.
Actually, Viagra isn’t covered by insurance, but typically birth control is (it’s much less expensive than actually having a baby)
But let us turn to the real reasons for the Religious Right’s new war on contraceptives. I read one of their articles on the subject last year. Just as evolution was responsible for nearly every heinous human act committed since Darwin wrote his book, the Religious Right has done some for of what we scientists call “root cause analysis” and concluded that contraceptives were the root cause of everything that they do not like about the modern woman.
For example, women are lawyers because of the pill. If the pill had never been invented, these women would be doing God’s will: cooking food, washing clothes, drying runny noses, watching “The Edge of Night,” and trying out the newest Helen Curtis nail polish to entice her husband into bed. The Religious Right wants to return women to this state of existence. If we do this, so they believe, tons of societal problems will just melt away.
As I recently told you, the demand for adoptable white babies is so high that abstinence-only sex education is unable to meet the demand. If we can get rid of those unfortunate contraceptives, maybe the demand will finally be met. Every white couple who wants a white baby will finally be able to get one.
There is another factor here too. As I have also said on many occasions, the followers of the Religious Right feel marginalized and threatened in American society. They feel that the things they value are being squeezed out of existence. I have also mentioned that they are worried about the increasing nonacceptance of Christian fundamentalism in American society and the fresh-baked coconut cake lifestyle that goes with it. Translate that as: “I tried to witness to them and they slammed their front door in my face.” I have also quoted their own statistic that 88 percent of their children leave the independent churches or denominations in which they were raised—and never come back. When the Roman Catholics shunned contraceptives in the 1960s, the standard snide response from those that would one day be on the Religious Right was, “They just want to make sure that the number of Catholic babies will far outnumber those of other Christian denominations and religions. It’s a plan to dominate us.” Well guess what? I think the Religious Right has bought into its own mythology about the Catholics is consciously making the play that they imagined the Catholics were making. With the Christian fundamentalist population in real trouble from all of those runaway children and slammed doors, I suspect that they see the demise of contraceptives (among their own women at least) as a way to increase the population who believe as they believe.
But here is why I am happy with American society as a whole right now. I am 58 years old, and I have been panning the American cultural landscape. I have concluded that my generation was the last generation of American women that still carried some small seed that said the “Stepford Wife – Suzy Homemaker” existence is somehow acceptable for most American women. Just in case you are unaware of it, demographers count a generation as 20 years. My generation began around 1952 and ended about 1972. I doubt very seriously that many women who were born after 1972 would want to live this sort of fresh-baked coconut cake life. Therefore, I think that this fledgling Religious Right war against contraceptives is doomed to failure—as is their attempt to pull women back down into a meaningless, mindless, and subservient condition. Those who would have a chance of willingly going along with that program are old now—like me—and headed for the grave in a few years. The old ding bats who run the state Eagle Forums will begin their “rot in a corpse’s shell” even sooner (Thank you Michael Jackson and Vincent Price).
My daughter will be 18 years old in February. She has substantial talents and abilities with art and computers. She claims that she wants to major in computer science in college. She is also an equestrian and would like to do something with horses at some point in her life. She has no interest in cooking. She has no interest in cleaning house. She has no interest in watching soap operas on TV. She has no interest in having babies or mothering them—maybe someday—but not for a long time yet. She is as thin as a fashion model but wears hardly any makeup. She had a bad romance with a real Latin lover in her sophomore year—and was hurt so badly that she does not seem to care much for men. She wears tacky, unattractive clothing that would never attract any man. If I know her, she will have a wonderful life and live to be 150.
Always enjoy your comments, Charles. Thanks for the positive view! I am almost sixty-five, and am numbered among those with a fundamentalist upbringing that required many years to overcome. I like your attitude!
It is interesting that the largest drop in abortion rates occured during the Clinton term.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Statistics
So let me get this straight.
Texas Republicans declare war on birth control and defund Planned Parenhood.
Most women who get birth control from Planned Parenthood are poor and / or minorities.
These women have lots more babies.
The poor and minorities are overwhelmingly Democrats.
Over a generation the percentage of Democrats increases, dramatically.
Republicans are eventually voted out of power, permanently.
Hey wait a minute, this might not be all bad! There might be an upside. Could this somehow be a stealth plan to create more long term Democrats?
What a brilliant plan!
Except for one thing, those poor people do not vote. The right wing extremists think social programs cause the millions of poor people they help to go to the polls in droves and vote for Democrats. Not the ones I met when I worked for a social services program years ago. As the old insect repellant commercial used to say, “They don’t bite. They don’t even light.”
Let me tell you a short story about Social Security. It is nearly impossible to get a haircut on Saturday in my town. One Saturday I decided to get to the barber shop very early in the morning and wait outside the door for about 45 minutes to be the first one to go inside. As it turned out, another person had the same idea. He was an elderly man driving a very spiffy-looking late model Mercedes Benz. This guy was obviously well educated and had lots of extra money. We did a little small-time chit-chat in the freezing air while the lady in the locked barber shop continued to have no mercy on our frozen ears and fingers. All of a sudden, the face of my conversant waxed grave. He was upset because the Federales had refused to give him and his age cohorts an annual cost-of-living increase in their Social Security payments. This guy was absolutely bitter about it and cussing up a storm. You know what else. I could tell this guy votes—maybe 37 times on the same election day. Heck, his car could have financed most people’s retirement!!!!!
What is my point? My point is that Paul Ryan is absolutely silly if he thinks going after Medicare is going to win friends and influence people. It isn’t the poor people who never vote that he has to worry about. He had better be worried about the rich and powerful who cherish their Medicare and Social Security as much as this guy does. They do vote—and they are not amused.
The men in our extended family do not want too many children to support, they want a small family well taken care of, well fed, well educated, what are these people thinking, wanting to turn the clock back?
Here’s a thought to ponder. Perhaps the Republicans want women back in the kitchen so the men can have all the jobs and decrease the unemployment. You know that’s at the back of their minds. Can’t hire women if they’re preggers all the time can we?
Darlene: Interesting story. Very believable. I’ve always been vehemently pro-choice, however I have no sympathy w/ either the woman or “her man.” How does birth control affect a woman’s “nature?” Can anyone explain that?
When I was in nursing school, one of my courses was at a Health Unit in the ARKLATEX. A client showed up saying that she was there because she was pregnant with #4. On welfare, medicaid, the whole bit.When asked if she had not taken the birth control pill prescription she had been provided by her request at tax-payer expense, she said she stopped because her man said it was affecting her “nature”. Better to have another kid on the dole I guess.
If Rick Perry and the other Repubs. that run Texas were SERIOUS about reducing abortion, they would get SERIOUS about reducing pregnancy. You can’t have an abortion unless you are pregnant. Got that, Rick & Friends? So I propose the State of TX fund a massive condom project where large jars of FREE condoms are in every bar, gym, beauty shop, barber shop and pharmacy in Texas. Fund that for a generation (20 years) and see what behavior changes occur and what happens to the pregnancy rate, abortion rate and STD incidence. Win win win win win win. And condoms are CHEAP. Make ’em free!