Imploding
First and foremost, image credit to Dogmomster (or maybe The Engineer took the photoooo). No particular reason for posting.
And don’t worry, it isn’t me who’s imploding. I am fine albeit in that kind of floaty place that I have been occupying since January 1, 2012. I also kind of got to the end of a prodject at work today and the LSCHP was having a particularly busy day. I need a new prodject to sink my teeth into, requirements to untangle, flow diagrams and pictures to draw, spreadsheets and tables to engineer, walks to take to digest complicated stuff, yada yada yada. I didn’t have that today soooo….
…I went home for lunch. And I faaarrrred up my loverly (but flawed) MacBook Pro and Whoa!!! My Twitter feed was filled with crap about some Repiglican (yes) panel on contraceptives. Every single over-fed person Male Chauvinist Pig who appeared in the photoooos that I saw had at least one Y chromosome1.
Yes, I am angry! Male Chauvinist Pigs. We (aka women) fought against MCP control back in the 1960s2. I won’t go into all of the wars that we waged3 to legalize abortion so that women didn’t die in sordid bathrooms with coat hangers up their… Okay, I will not go any further on that. For now anyway.
Let’s not talk about abortion tonight. It is a horrible thing and I, who have birthed two children, do not see it as a black and white issue. But. People will still find ways to have abortions whether or not it is legal. And I believe that abortion should be provided in a legal and safe way. But then.
Sigh. The abortion issue aside, I cannot understand why the current crop of Repiglicans is so focused on contraception. Contraception has been going on in one form or another since the beginning of time. Picture a “cave woman” saying, “you aren’t bringing home enough game to take care of the kids we already have. We’re not having any more babies. Sleep on that rock out there tonight.” And I bet she would’ve hit him with her twig broom!
But what in the f*ck are the Repiglicans thinking about not providing women with contraceptives!!! Who the f*ck ARE these people? Who has elected them? I am sure that there are SOME women out there who agree. I have even met some of them. But. Do these people not realize that if you do not allow people to buy contraceptives, more people will be getting abortions? Or maybe the woman cannot get contraceptives and therefore gets pregnant and has the child. That’s wonderful. But what if she can’t really take care of the child? She has no money or any family support and she ends up living in a car with her kids. Who is paying for this? What the f*ck? It is the taxpayer. This taxpayer is happy to pay for CHILDREN who have no support in life. And she also wants to provide that child’s MOTHER (and the FATHER, if he is involved but oftentimes he isn’t) with some help.
But the Repiglicans do not want to help pay for these people…
Other people have discussed this issue more eloquently than I have today. But fer kee-reist! How do the Repiglicans plan to win a presidential election if they are alienating a majority of women? Hmmm?
1 Look up “XYY” chromosome on google. Gender is not a black and white thing.
2 There were many surges of “women’s lib” before the damn 1960s. I am sorry that I feel like we have to do that all again…
3 It was really horrible back in those days. If you had supportive parents, they would find you somewhere to get a safe abortion. Or you might be spirited away somewhere to have your child whether you wanted to or not and give it up to someone else. Or…
February 16th, 2012 at 8:12 pm
Amen, sister. This is outrageous. And yet they turn it around and call it a war on religion or on Catholics. Do the rest of us who are NOT Catholic or not religious have any rights at all??
February 16th, 2012 at 9:07 pm
You mention XYY chromosomes, there are also XXY chromosomes. It is a one off of your birth control crank off, but Hanne Blank’s new non-fiction, “Straight”, looks interesting. Her husband has XXY chromosomes. I mean, if you are going to jump into the whole sexual politics debate, why not do it with both feet?
February 16th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Well. I don’t exactly understand the last comment. I will never jump into the whole sexual politics debate with both feet because I do not see the issues in a black and white way. This stuff is extremely complicated. What I saw Issa and his Repiglican cohorts try to do today was reprehensible. I *hope* that these kinds of shenanigans will cost the Repigs the elections next fall. I am sad about that because I would prefer that our two-party system offered us a choice. At the moment, I do not feel that I have a choice.
February 17th, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Anne-
The issue is not contraception. This issue is government infringement on right to religious beliefs. We are all free to have our own beliefs and not have a central planner in Washington think for us.
The press, I guess, makes it sound like “Republicans” are against contraception or abortion, but that is a distortion. (Just as many Democrats are against contraception and abortion as well.) The issue is that Obama wants to force religious based organizations and hospitals to do something that is against their core beliefs.
Republican’s want this government to but out of our private business and to stop their generosity with other peoples money. They don’t want government to use tax dollars, confiscated from you and me, to pay for someone else to have sex and pay for the consequences of sex. We should all buy our own supplies and health care.
Remember, when a politician is benevolent to some cause, he/she is spending someone else’s money to do it. That shit has got to stop.
Yes, you can have the press put a fundamentalist jerk on TV ranting about abstinence and the tooth fairy and then call that the Republican platform. That is a distortion and totally off point.
If you read this far, thank for listening.
Good blog.
-Bob
February 18th, 2012 at 10:47 am
Amen Bob.
February 18th, 2012 at 11:03 am
@Bob, I replied privately as you know. @Kathy, you have a wonderful life and family but if I am not mistaken, you CHOSE that life and the children that are part of it and could provide for them both financially and emotionally. And so did I, for that matter. Y’all can disagree with me if you want but I strongly believe that women should be able to CHOOSE when and if to have children. I *will* fight this issue and the extreme religious conservatives that are gunning to take away my hard-earned rights.
February 18th, 2012 at 10:50 pm
I absolutely LOVE this post. I’ve spent this entire week feeling the fury of a thousand white hot suns. (And did you hear that comment by Santorum’s wealthy supporter about “back in my day women put an aspirin between their knees” ?!?! Blows my mind that in 2012 we are still having to deal with Neanderthals!
Giving women access to contraception IS NOT “intrusion of government on religion.” In fact, revoking that access is religion’s intrusion on government. And certainly on the rights of women.
February 19th, 2012 at 5:05 pm
Well, then, let’s demand that health insurance stop paying for all those ED drugs (you know: Viagra, Cialis, …), if they are going to deny something that benefits women’s health (for more than “simple contraception” – these are used for far more).
And, this whole business of asking that insurance cover hormones for women being “an affront to the Catholic Religion”… now we have the Catholics imposing their religious beliefs on non-Catholics. What we are running into is not just a “freedom of religion” issue, but also an issue of “freedom FROM religion”: I respect your right to practice your belief system in the privacy of your own home, but please don’t shove it down my throat or up my ……..