What conservatives want
According to Morning Edition on NPR today, 71% of all the low-income women who went to a clinic in Odessa, TX, in 2010, under the Texas Women's Health Program, went to Planned Parenthood. Furthermore Texas has among the highest rates of cervical cancer and unwanted pregnancies in the nation.
So how did the Texas legislature respond to these facts? Well, they gutted the program of course, forcing the Odessa Planned Parenthood to shutter its doors!
Just another example of misogynistic, sex-negative Republican men trying to force back the clock and “put women in their place.”
I don’t understand why the women of America don’t rise up and say “Enough!” What will it take for women – and men – to realize that these people are not just after gays; they are after women and minorities as well. In fact, they are after one solid majority: the vast number of sex-positive folks who think the government has no damn business in our bedrooms.
Can someone explain to me how these fundamentalist Christian bigots can argue against birth control AND against abortion? How they can deny women access to proven methods of family planning that limit the number of unwanted pregnancies? How they can dare to pass laws that force their twisted, sex-phobic vision of the world on the rest of us?
What will it take for us to wake up?
Remember, the Christian right is neither!
The Right is so contradictory in what it wants, I have trouble with the idea that there is a rational mind of any kind behind any of this.
ReplyDeleteNo sex education. No access to contraceptives. Once pregnant, no access to pre-natal care, no abortion, no information about how to be a parent, no food, no shelter, no clothes, no education, but at some point, we will be glad to spend more than $100,000 per inmate per year to keep you off the streets. Once out, no jobs, since you are now an ex-con, no civil rights, no future.
Is it any wonder poor people are stealing? Not all of them, but some. Then, the rest are tarred with that. Poverty is shown as a 'moral issue', since if Jesus loved you, you would have a job and an education. Jesus must not have loved you or he wouldn't have made you gay/a woman/black/latino/poor/different.
I try to think of how many young people are turned down each year for the Armed Forces because of preventable medical conditions, like dental problems. I try to see if subjugating women, stigmatizing gays, keeping the poor of all colors uneducated (and then blaming them for their condition) in some manner makes America a stronger country. It does not.
What it does do is open the door for sweat shops and such again, when a poor, uneducated populace will finally take any poor paying position at all at any pay, in order to feed the hungry children at home they didn't need to have but not having access information, education and medical care, were not able to prevent.
Many today are writing books about dystopian futures, like The Hunger Games. I say we are living in a Dystopian Present. I wonder what my grandson will see when he becomes a man. I shudder to think.