Two Messages to Think About:

 

Trump Abortion Bans have had devastating consequences for women across America.

Donald Trump is the architect of this health care crisis. If elected, he will go even further to ban abortion nationwide and strip away reproductive freedom in all 50 states. pic.twitter.com/eglE7Smdrr

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 1, 2024

VS.

Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go. 👨🏼#JohnMcEntee #McEntee2028 pic.twitter.com/OJzXadROgo

— McEntee 2028 (@JohnMcEntee28) October 28, 2024

I don't know that it gets any starker than that--do I have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or am I the appendage of male society?

If I was not already a Democrat, this stark comparison would be everything I really needed to know. And it is not a joke--it's a vintage concern in the age of Trump. 

I am not going back.  I don't want any woman to feel like she has to accept she has to go back to when we didn't have choices and we didn't have voices. 

 

The Deaths We Could Have Prevented

 

Vice President Harris: We now know that women have died because of Trump Abortion Bans. That includes a healthy 28-year-old woman in Georgia. Her name was Amber Nicole Thurman. She died of sepsis, and experts have determined that her death was preventable pic.twitter.com/loBJDsbY9Z

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024

I have seen on social media how angry some "pro-lifers" are at the idea that abortion care saves lives. You can't EVER terminate a pregnancy--it's MURDER!  These stories that humanize and normalize the procedure that can save women's lives appalls them, because they can't accept that the God they profess to love and believe in would make babies ("before you were in the womb I knew you") with gross congenital defects, tumors, or other difficulties "incompatible with life".

Something else other than the lack of abortion care "must have" killed these women. They took abortion drugs. They were sin-minded. This had to be their own fault. 

It wasn't. 

What Makes us Great

 

Crowd chanting USA at the DNC pic.twitter.com/zNh8WBPNRM

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 19, 2024

The above clip is from a full house at the DNC showing pride in the USA. They aren't calling for mass deportations. They don't want a day-one dictator to make America great by looking towards some mythologized past. They don't want some parade of demagogues to tell them horror stories about an imagined dystopia in the hopes they will trade today's freedoms for a false promise of security in a less-free tomorrow.

They want to move forward. Time's arrow goes in one direction, and they want that trajectory to bend towards justice. 

This diverse crowd has come together to do the work, to put in the sweat equity of democracy. The first night of the DNC was a crowded stage and at times, I felt something in my heart swelling about that. Unity through inclusion. Strength in protecting and defending one another's freedoms and hearing one another's stories. Standing up for what is right and even great about this country. 

Do They Want to Adopt Your Baby?

 

A photo has been going around the Twitter of a smiling couple with a sign: "We will adopt your baby." These people seem sketchy as hell. There may be perfectly lovely people out there willing to adopt "unwanted" children, but so much of this kind of signifying suggests that the only reason for terminating a pregnancy is that one doesn't want a baby. Sometimes pregnancies are terminated because someone did want a child--but this pregnancy is fatally flawed, or the baby will have disabilities incompatible with life. Sometimes, in the case of a minor or a rape victim, the pregnancy itself is a burden.

The smiling couple imply one of the other fears a person might have--that selfish, cultish, unsuitable people will adopt their child and give it a terrible life. There's a sense deep down that it might be better not to be, than to be unloved or abused. 

And then there's people who will smile at a camera and say of course they love babies.  And they would adopt yours, but, really, more as a "for instance". 

It's just more...theoretical, you know, in the abstract. It's complicated, you know? 

Sure. Pregnant people understand all kinds of things are complicated. That's why they deserve a choice.

Barbara Bush Was Unique, Wasn't She?

I guess the thing that sticks in the memory for me regarding Barbara Bush was how she had spoken about the Hurricane Katrina survivors who had been displaced by circumstance; they were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."  It was, if not racist (who knows to what extent she was looking at this through the lens of race?) at least deeply classist. She was privileged, and she could only see silver linings because she did not understand how desperate it was for people to lose literally everything they had. One thing you could say about the former First Lady--she was blunt, and she did not go out of her way to camoflage her meanings. If anything, she was highly articulate and sharp-tongued. It was hard to say she "mispoke" when she held forth.

This isn't the sort of thing one normally thinks about when considering a political wife--the spouse of a president and mother of another. The stereotype of the political "helpmeet" is inoffensiveness, but that was not really Mrs. Bush's style. But, she made her sarcasm and directness work for her, even if she could not always help the fortunes of her spouse or her first-born son with them. 

Without gilding over her flaws, Barbara Bush was a serious and intellegent person. She was not an orthodox conservative, and one of the things she did best was simply be, quite publically, an imperfect figure. She stood in her prematurely white hair and solid frame, and just was herself. 

She isn't alone by a long shot at being a first lady who I liked better than I liked her spouse, or, for that matter, her son. And while I do wonder how GWB's values reflect how he was raised, I can't help but wonder about her speech to Wellsley in 1990:

For over 50 years, it was said that the winner of Wellesley's annual hoop race would be the first to get married. Now they say the winner will be the first to become a C.E.O. Both of those stereotypes show too little tolerance for those who want to know where the mermaids stand. So I want to offer you today a new legend: The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream ... not society's dreams ... her own personal dream. And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse.

I wish him well!

Her understanding of what it meant to be a mermaid--to do one's own thing and do it with one's heart, to be connected and live so as to have no regrets, resonates with me. Her thing was marriage and children, but she wasn't judging anyone else's thing. That was saying a lot.

And as for her son, who I like far more as a late-blooming painter than I ever did as a president, he summed something up about her so aptly:

Laura, Barbara, Jenna, and I are are sad, but our souls are settled because we know hers was,” George W. Bush said. “Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us she was so much more.”

"Our souls are settled because we know hers was."  It was her time, and she went with no regrets and laid her down with a will.

We could anyone of us do worse, couldn't we?

I could wish some of her family anything at all as a political happenstance, but about seeing her life through and the business of burial, I wish them well. She had a great if awkward spirit. She knew educational inequality and illiteracy were such great barriers to success that she strove to see people acheive parity. She was kind of like America's occasionally not enlightened Mee-Maw, whose pronouncements were not right, but she thought you should hear them anyway.

She was unique.

The Burden is Undue

The SCOTUS decision against HB2 in Whole Women's Health v Hellerstadt might be summed up as: The right of bodily self-determination established under Roe v Wade should exist as much in practice as it does in theory. For pro-choice activists and proponents, this ruling reinforces what we always knew--that TRAP laws like HB2 in Texas were never predicated on what was best for reproductive health care patients, but only aimed at reducing access to abortion services. It was always a sham.

This ruling has set a precedent that may affect similar laws in 25 other states, including mine (Pennsylvania). It comes too late in many states where clinics have been shut down, and access might not easily be reestablished, which no doubt has already impacted the health care decisions of thousands of people.

But it can be reestablished, and this was the necessary point--unnecessary regulations that served no other purpose than to make it harder to access an abortion were determined to be simply wrong. The written opinion of the court delivered by Justice Breyer rests on the language of the previous Casey decision regarding "undue burden", recognizing that this is what, in effect the TRAP laws aim at. The concurrence, by Justice Ginsburg, makes the point of how they arrived at this decision clear:

Many medical procedures, including childbirth, are far more dangerous to patients, yet are not subject to ambulatory surgical-center or hospital admitting-privileges requirements ... Given those realities, it is beyond rational belief that H.B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions. When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners ... at great risk to their health and safety.

And we know at least that many Texas women are resorting to DIY abortions, which are not safe or sure.

This was a very meaningful decision, and I am relieved that they arrived at the decision that best respects the highly personal decision of pregnant persons with respect to their own bodies. Now, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick might try and stick with his lie about what he thinks the aim of that legislations was, but sorry, fella. He doesn't give a good goddamn about women's health and we know it. He can kindly and gently and Christianly stick that noise where the sun and wind won't molest it.

The War on Women is Still a Thing--2015

Technically, we knew the House Select Committee on Planned Parenthood was going to happen for a bit, and that it would be headed by a skirt, Rep. Marsha Blackburn,  an anti-choice Republican who is entirely retrograde. (The GOP panel is exactly 8 people, four male, four female. Equalitude!) What could possibly be wrong with siding with the people supporting those videos, eh?  The first grilling of Cecile Richards went so well, that, in conjunction with the obvious ripping success of the Benghazi Select Committee hearing with Hillary Clinton, they absolutely had to try it. Why not make trying to end a low-cost medical care provider funding or status just because of derp?

Really, why not encourage domestic terrorism in the form of arson against medical establishments? Who do these politicians believe that kind of activity even hurts? Because rashes of PP arson is now a thing. And I know the GOP in Congress don't care about anything but the politics--

Also Texas doesn't care. They went from simply defunding Planned Parenthood, to raiding locations to get at confidential medical information. What in the hell are they fixing to do with it? Do they mean to target women who donated their fetal tissue to science for some investigation? How will they use these people's identities? How with they misappropriate their experiences? How will these once-pregnant people be exploited?

I Stand with Planned Parenthood and HRC

On Oct. 16, 1916, Planned Parenthood opened their first health center and changed life for women in America. Here's to the next 99 years. -H

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 16, 2015

.@HillaryClinton They've also ended the lives of millions of unborn babies. Here's to ending #PlannedParenthood's destruction. #ProLife

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 16, 2015

One of the real true things about me is my support of the health care access of every person in this country. Respecting all bodies, of whatever walk of life, as equally dignified and deserving of care, seems like a no-brainer to me. Understanding that human beings are sexual beings, and that their reproductive health is not some freakish "extra" thing, but central to their ability to control their economic fate--by making family-planning choices--is essential to understanding how to stem poverty and make healthy families the center of a thriving economy. Hillary Clinton has been a great proponent of women and children's health for as long as I have known of her. She supports the idea that the health of families is crucial to the health of our nation.

Mike Huckabee is a bone-ignorant culture warrior and wouldn't grasp why any woman sees terminating a pregnancy as relative to her own health, even while he easily excuses why a young male sees fit to sexually violate his sisters or their companions.

I know who would dominate in a debate on this subject. But Mike Huckabee will not get the nomination of his party, not least because he is more fit to be a Twitter troll than a president.

Also, I would, grammatically speaking, also like to end the destruction of Planned Parenthood! Yeah! Let's stop trying to end an organization that does a lot for regular people!

It's Anti-Choice, and it is Wrong

The GOP-lead House of Representatives is pretty pleased with itself over having made a command decision over the intentions of the District of Columbia regarding whether employers may discriminate against employees over their employees'--or their employees' immediate family's--reproductive choices. Leaving aside that I've never held with the House having the right to overrule the DC, the law they've voted to overturn was thoroughly sensible--

What right is it of an employer to mine the reproductive health decisions of other people? What bearing does that deeply personal activity have on the ability of an employee to do his or her job? If an employee, their spouse, or their child, opts for some method of birth control up to and including an abortion--that knowledge and the details of it are not an employer's place to litigate.

It's disturbing to me that here, in 2015, there are people with such a basic ignorance of the human body and the reproductive systems thereof, that they can't grasp that "baby-making" is not a cut and dried moral issue where "saving babies" is our only concern. There are definitely situations in which the ability to conceive and carry a child is contraindicative to a pre-existing condition. There are situations in which a given fetus may not be viable. There are reasons why medical interventions might be taken with respects to one's conceiving or carrying a child. And those reasons are simply not anyone else's business but the patient's, and especially not their employer's. And the reason why should be patently obvious--because it is discriminatory. It provides the employer with a leverage against that employee that should not exist.

When I Hear the "Right to Life" Folks, It Doesn't Sound that Way

Just yesterday marked the 41st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which was noted by some right to life (or as I prefer, anti-choice) groups by a gathering in Washington, DC. I know some people consider the activists involved with anti-abortion protests as benevolent "counselors", but I guess I have a hard time reconciling that outlook with the folks who yell about baby-murder, whoredom, compare clinics to the Holocaust and, presumably, the women who elect to end their pregnancies with--Hitler? and get a little handsy with people seeking information and medical care, and sometimes, I dunno, bomb clinics and shoot doctors and nurses.

I don't think people really seek "counseling" from random, uncredentialed strangers who lie to them about stuff and might be involved in some nefarious anti-life nonsense, but that's just me being knee-jerk rational. And yeah, those people are often even lying about things, like whether abortion is related to breast cancer (it isn't) and whether women who've had abortions are going to be desperately regretful afterwards.  And while I know a lot of the nice folks who park themselves outside clinics are just sweet old religious busybodies who will pray for you and don't really want to bomb anyone, their tone deaf inability to express their reasons for telling someone else what they really should do with their own bodies is just vexing.

And sometimes it's damn dumb. Take Rep. Vicky Hartzler for example. Her rationale for why women should not end their pregnancies is that:

“It ends a beating heart, it leaves emotional wounds with women that they carry for life and it robs men of the privilege of fatherhood,” she said. “That’s why we must do everything in our power to end this devastating practice.”

Okay, I know I can't be alone when I see bumperstickers that say "Abortion stops a beating heart" who thinks "Well, that's the point." But this idea that it "robs men of the privilege of fatherhood". That's a privilege, not a right, okay? And actually, the ability to impregnate is not an ability to dictate what anyone does with her body nor provides any indication of fitness to parent.  They aren't robbed of anything they have a right to, and the actual "labor" is pretty much on the woman's part, so?  That might just be one of the dumbest reasons for somone to do their nine months and the cost of the hospital bill, plus the responsiblity of bringing a person into the world one is not prepared to be responsible for, except:

Hartzler asserted that if abortion hadn’t been legalized, “perhaps we would have had a cure for cancer now.”

And if sardines had wings, we'd all be using jetpacks.

Oh, Hold Up There, Mr. Man

The other evening, TX state Senator Wendy Davis performed a multi-hour filibuster that, for now, has killed a draconian anti-choice bill. This has impressed an awful lot of people (me included), but you know what? It didn't impress Governor Rick Perry. Let's see what he had to say:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry today slammed Democratic State Sen. Wendy Davis, who filibustered a GOP-backed 20-week abortion ban this week, for not learning from “her own example” as a teen mother. 

“She was the daughter of single woman, she was a teenage mother herself,” Perry said today at the National Right to Life Convention in Dallas. “She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. 

“It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.”

Huh. Why, it's as if Governor Perry believes he knows better than Sen. Davis about the lessons she should take away from her own life experiences. It could just be that she has come to the conclusion, among other things, that a woman is the best judge of what choices are best for her own life, body and future, and that it isn't the place of the government to reduce those choices with excessive regulations.

It also seems like Governor Perry could stand to learn from his own life experiences, because among them are the simple fact that he sometimes doesn't seem to know what he's talking about when he talks about, say, teen pregnancy (or really, lots of things).  Also, when he indicates that "every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential", it seems like he might mean full potential--without little luxuries like a good education or affordable health care access.  And his concern for how much "every life matters" is a bit of a head-scratcher when posed against his record as the US governor who has presided over the most executions. (Or, he could bother to realize that women's lives matter, and that this bill could endanger some of their lives.)

In short, Perry could stand to borrow a nice cup of shut up just for that. But WAIT! That wasn't all he said. Try this out:

 “The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done.”

Referring of course to the pro-choice opposition to this bill. Well, either you're "getting something done"--or maybe you're doing active harm. Something like that. But really? "Louder they scream"? In a debate that has been largely about women's voices being heard, this jackass wants to say that women raising their voices in protest--in a scream!--is like music to his ears.  If screaming means he's thinks he's doing something right--what the hell kind of noise do you have to make to tell him he's doing something wrong?

CPAC's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Or in other words: FREEDOM!!!1111

My Rumproast co-bloggers YAFB and marindenver have covered some of the fail in admirable fashion, but where they dip I dare but wade. It's an astonishing parade of high and low profile conservative characters at an event that should be a celebration of the movement, but sure looks an awful lot like ALL THE PROBLEMS of the Republican party in one handy space. That being said, my premise is made, and I can go ahead and just air the brief thoughts I've jotted on scrap paper while on breaks at work through out the last day and a half. In no particular order because I forget what order it was supposed to be in.

RAND PAUL

I think Rand Paul wants a Republican party that is not your father's Republican party, but which might be his father's Republican party. He thinks the party has become stale and moss-covered, and cobwebby, and sits at the end of the bar hoping someone will buy it a drink and it's becoming clear hardly anyone ever does anymore, so what the hell, maybe the GOP should think of undoing a few buttons or get a fetching wig. Also  America don't need no Department of Education. Because Thought Control. Also Teachers! Leave those god-fearing gun-toting kids alone!

MARCO RUBIO

Marco Rubio made a really weird statement about the science of global warming vs. embryology that, if anyone else would have said it, knowing my biases, I would be all over, and yet--No. He's a climate denialist and thinks the end word on abortion is that life begins, for the fetus, at conception. Whoops die on my lips,  un-big and ill-thought. I do not care about what Rubio has to say because I have come to the conclusion no one loves him for his mind.  Also, he said this thing:

"Just because I believe that states should have the right to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot."

Well, no. The causality chain would be more like, you are a bigot, and that is what makes you believe that the states should chose what rights LGBT people should enjoy.  But thanks for playing.

Transvaginal Ultrasounds and Making it Personal--Probably coming to Your State, Soon

Well, the transvaginal ultrasound craze has hit my state, Pennsylvania, with a truly disgusting "thwack" of "Take that, you whorish baby-killer!"

In addition to mandating the much-maligned transvaginal ultrasound requirements since rejected by the state of Virginia, Pennsylvania legislators proposed strongly encouraging women to view and listen to the ultrasounds, forcing technicians to give the women personalized copies of the results and mandating how long before any abortion the ultrasound much be preformed — and that’s just for starters. That last requirement has already been passed and struck down in Louisiana, partially over concerns of patients’ privacy and potential risks for women in abusive relationships, Nash said

That's just for starters. Then:

Additionally, Nash points out that the length of the legislation hides bizarre and unprecedented requirements, such as asking women who gets an ultrasound more than 14 days before her abortion to view a state-approved video on fetal gestation.

One supposes that what she will learn during the video is how much fetal development occurs within 14 days and what a difference they make. At what point are they no longer informing a pregnant woman of the very thing she already knows (that she's pregnant, duh) and are rubbing her nose in it? Is it necessary to show her an ultrasound of her own fetus, when ultrasound pictures of other fetuses at comparable age are available (the picture I'm showing is of a fetus at 10 weeks, via Baby2See. Such pictures are easily available via an Internet search. I'm pretty sure a clinic can get their hands on some very explicit instructional materials without vaginally invading their patients, just as I'm sure that it actually isn't necessary to remind women just what they are pregnant with. It's also dubious whether viewing an ultrasound actually acts as a deterrent to abortion. These laws are designed solely to humiliate and distress the pregnant person who seeks reproductive health services. They aren't necessary.

I think I understand what the authors of such legislation want pregnant women to see--but I hate to break this to them: The "baby" or "child" that they want to protect is usually about the size of a cocktail shrimp and lacks all the warm and fuzzy personality they want to attribute to it at the stage when women generally determine they want to terminate their pregnancies (over 80% in the first trimester). I "get" that in some respect, in the minds of many anti-abortion folks, the "baby" conceived poofs onto a cloud in heaven at the moment sperm meets egg, resembling something like a one-year-old with a halo and a full grasp of English--but that fantasy kid isn't what a women looks at when she views an ultrasound of her first-trimester pregnancy. It's not going to wave to her during the ultrasound or sign "Please carry me to term." It's a ghostly "Could Have Been"--but how different is that to any thinking person than what their own imagination would have given them?

I resent the mandate that puts an onus on both doctor to provide an unnecessary service, and on the pregnant women to be essentially insulted and humiliated for her exercise of a reasoned choice. I think the nature of the legislation shows how very much this transvaginal ultrasound business really has to do with "sending a message" rather than providing education to the patient. It's demeaning. And in all honesty, it's not necessarily going to even reduce abortions, so much as potentially send women to acquire them in a less-safe fashion--but where they face less judgment. That would be the real tragedy.

We won't go back--

It's not "Uter-YOU", it's "Uter-US"!

Sexually-active female-bodied people recognize the importance of birth control and the role that it plays in family-planning, their own physical well-being, and their economic security, and support the provision that birth control be covered by insurance without co-pay.  The celibate male-bodied Catholic Bishops think this is a terrible thing, and that their religious freedom extends to telling grown human beings what kind of medical care they can seek for their reproductive organs. The very idea of providing insurance that covers birth control makes them feel so, so....dirty. 

The Catholic Church leadership is at the forefront of the argument that their non-church institutions shouldn't be "forced" to provide health insurance that covers birth control because of the aforementioned idea that this makes them feel complicit in their employees' non-reproductive sexy-times. As if they aren't already paying their employees in money, that is already being used for out-of-pocket birth control expenses, anyway.  What are they going to do next--not pay their employees?  You know, because the money can be used for "sin"?

They claim their problem has to do with "religious freedom".  How is that?

They have the freedom to disapprove. They have the freedom to preach about how they'd rather people not use birth control. But I would have a real problem, as an employee, if my employer was going to make decisions for me that effected my access to reproductive health care. That doesn't sound like my freedom to make choices about my body are being respected.  My choice to use birth control doesn't have any impact on the beliefs of any religious person whatsoever.  They, however, want to exert a "right" that would interfere in how others carry out their lives.  That doesn't strike me a real "right".  Actually, that strikes me as a self-appointed privilege that undermines the bodily autonomy of others.

In other words--no. This rejection of a simple rule regarding coverage for people who may not even themselves have any belief that birth control is somehow sinful is overstepping the authority to simply practice one's religion, to imposing tenets of it on others.  That's not okay.  I hope this rule regarding birth control remains, because it is my belief that this is entirely a private matter for individuals and the medical counsel that they seek--not their employers, regardless of the religious status of that employer.

Sharron Angle's Very Sour Lemonade

This is just a "What tha'?" snippet of Sharron Angle's Deep Thoughts on abortion via Think Progress, covering the part I was a bit put off and concerned about: the reproductive rights of rape and incest victims, particularly if they are minors.

STOCK: What do you say then to a young girl, I am going to place it as he said it, when a young girl is raped by her father, let’s say, and she is pregnant. How do you explain this to her in terms of wanting her to go through the process of having the baby?

ANGLE: I think that two wrongs don’t make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade. Well one girl in particular moved in with the adoptive parents of her child, and they both were adopted. Both of them grew up, one graduated from high school, the other had parents that loved her and she also graduated from high school. And I’ll tell you the little girl who was born from that very poor situation came to me when she was 13 and said ‘I know what you did thank you for saving my life.’ So it is meaningful to me to err on the side of life."

She also advises that pregnant teens and rape victims can have their babies on "the sunny side of the street" and should probably let a smile be their umbrella. (She DID NOT say that--on record, that I know of.)

So this hypothetical girl in her anecdote made out in her mind something like the way those lucky Katrina victims made out in the mind of Barbara Bush. Silver linings, you could say.

Of course, lemonade also requires water, sugar, and a pitcher to mix it in, or, you know, you just have squished lemons. To belabor the point and try to back out of the analogy--not everyone can make "lemonade" out of their situation. Try asking that of a pregnant ten-year old who's body isn't mature enough to carry a child. Try asking that of a woman whose abusive ex might use a child to continue to weasel his way into her life and abuse her and the baby.

No wonder she appears to run from her platform at times more than she runs on it. It doesn't look good close up.

Okay, I'm done, I *heart* AFA's Bryan Fischer.

I blog about politics and right-wing Christian zaniness as a matter of choice. I usually gravitate towards stories where some kind of moralistic jerk makes some doofus pronouncement that is super out-of-touch with the reality of how people actually live or just seems to be out on some figurative ledge pounding out a blogular Liebestod sung by themselves and the god-like voice in their head just before jumping to some new low.

For which reason, I have become a fan of Bryan Fischer. He's an antitheist blogger's dream content-generator all by his lonesome. This silver fox has captured the ugly little place in my heart that I reserve for--well (did you notice I also hate onblog about the Cheneys and John McCain all the time?) people who I hate so much they turn me on (it's not necessarily a sexual thing....)

Well, this post made me all about the Fischer-man:

The rate at which bastard children were born in 1963, when Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty, was seven percent. Meanwhile, we continue to maintain actual marriage penalties in our tax code, including the newly hatched monstrosity of health care reform. So we subsidize illegitimacy and penalize marriage, and we wonder why things get worse rather than better.


And President Obama intends to zero out the one budget item devoted to strengthening marriage in low-income communities.


The place to begin? By reforming state and federal budgets so that we no longer subsidize immorality. It's time to communicate in policy and not just in words that in America, we expect you to save sex for marriage, to have children only within the marriage relationship, and that we will no longer force American taxpayers to fund the expenses of children they did not conceive and with whom they have no relationship and for whom they have no responsibility.


if you conceive children out of wedlock, we will expect you and your families to find a way to take care of the expenses involved in raising that child. In America, that child is your responsibility and no one else's. You may look for help to charities funded by private, voluntary, compassion-driven donations, but you may not look to government to force other Americans at gunpoint to take money out of their wallets and fork it over to you. We are no longer going to treat you as helpless little children; we are going to treat you as the responsible adults you can become. It's time to grow up.

"Bastards"? How quaint! One seldom ever hears anyone use "bastard" in its etymological context anymore!

A child isn't really a bastard though....or even "illegitimate", the popular euphemism. Nope, all children are actually future responsible adults in smaller form. By trying to raise them well, we hope to make them into good adults. A child can't help his parents' after all. Or decide what circumstances to be born into. Penalizing the child to get back at the parents is--

Dumb. Let's go for dumb, unfair, and counterproductive, because we want to have "productive" and "dependable" people in our society, not outcasts who think they suck because moralistic jag-offs, no wait! moralistic jag-offs! want to punish their parents for being bad people who acted on the basic inbuilt urge to procreate and be fruitful and multiply and stuff....or so the AFA would generally have us believe.

What he said was major theist-stupid. I need a cigarette and another glass of bourbon. Once again, he hit my sweet blogular needs the way they needed hit.