Amanda,  good luck on the move.  Remember to take time to breathe.  In another blog, someone made the comment about the language of the bill stating “pregnant female” and how this was another step in dehumanizing woman.  They also decided that we shouldn’t call them pro-life any more but forced birthers.  Thanks for the amazing job you are doing trying to politicians honest.

Wow, every vote there’s a list about a page long of Democrats who vote with the Republicans.  After this election cycle, that list is shorter than ever.  2010 really did damage to conservative Democrats.

Good luck with the move—definitely get that shit done before the storm hits tomorrow!

I really enjoy these bloggingheads conversations.

Forget the twisties; go straight to the LEDs.  They are many times more effecient, last much longer and do less damage to the environment in their production.

I always wonder what the end game for these people is. 

If they (god forbid) get their Gilead, what do they think will happen?  Bigger mansion in heaven?  More servants in the afterlife?  Unlimited credit card for Hermes on heaven’s Rodeo Drive?

I realize the politicians who cooperate in this lunacy are just craven opportunists who are seeking any possible way to continue to suck power and money from the government teat, but there are lots of True Believers.  What is their motivation for pissing on everyone else?...

The ability to feel righteous and sadistic at the same time is a pretty powerful motivator for a lot of people.  Modern conservatism is based on sadism to no small extent, and gaining some feeling of moral legitimacy while causing pain will keep people coming to the polls.

I have no idea why Shuler even caucuses with the Democrats anymore, or why they allow him to be a member. That douchebag actually ran against Nancy Pelosi for the top party leadership spot in the House when the 112th Congress was convened a few weeks ago. He obviously knew that his effort would be nothing more than a pointless symbolic gesture, but the fact that the guy would rather trash his own party than take a stand against the opposition party tells me that he needs to just go join his fellow wingnuts on the other side of the aisle.

MikeEss—I think a lot of people don’t realize the subtleties of their motivations. People really do believe that the conscious rationalizations that they’ve concocted to explain their behaviors are the reasons for the behavior, and not after-the-fact scramblings to justify their actions.

When I look at an anti-choice woman, I see a woman who has seen the horrors that the patriarchy will visit upon women who are not compliant and says “fuck that, I’m throwing in with the oppressors so they don’t rain down that shitstorm on me.” It’s a survival mechanism: they know that by helping grind down the bad women, they will get pats on the head from the power structure, which beats a kick in the teeth. Plus, if they ever find themselves in an unfortunate situation, they will be able to weep and wail that they aren’t like those dirty sluts, and that their abortion really is an exceptional situation.

When I look at anti-choice men, I generally see a latent desire to return to aristocracy. Pre-World War aristocracies were fueled largely by a massive, desperate underclass: people who were willing to work for pennies a day, who could be dismissed for the most bullshit reasons because their replacements were plentiful, and who would feel lucky to have that employment because the alternatives were even more horrifying. So you could have a massive manor house that was staffed by a dozen or more servants. Naturally, as a Moral person and the star of your own fantasy, you would be the lord of the manor and not the hallboy who had to wake up at 4 in the morning to light the fires and empty the chamber pots.

In both instances, I’ve talked to enough anti-choicers that I’m pretty comfortable with my theory. It doesn’t take much digging to get their underlying motives, even if their stated motives are “babiez are pwecious.”

While I completely agree with you on this issue, I’ve got to ask about the “sperm are human beings” counter-argument that you’ve thrown into several posts.  I know it’s kind of a snarky throw-away response about embryos being nonviable outside the womb, but I think it’s a distraction and does the argument a diservice.  After all, viability outside the womb is not the point.  And it is patently ridiculous. And because the next counter-counter-argument is about genetic uniqueness, and then you’re talking about twins, and the whole thing derailed.

I normally wouldn’t nitpick, but this issue has made it clear to me that we need to do some serious education about this issue with people who are on the fence or apathetic.  No, we won’t change the minds of anyone from the xtian right, but we can change the minds of a lot of people who just haven’t thought it through.  But only if we have our arguments planned, and (here’s the tricky bit) only if we listen and respond to their real fears and questions, and not retread the same old ground that they have tuned out already.

I think the sperm argument would lose because it doesn’t have the full genetic complement of a human being, although I like the “viable outside the womb” part.  But I actually think the twin argument is a fairly powerful counter to “a fertilized egg is a person”.  I have identical twins.  Was the embryo before they split Baby A, or Baby B, or a precursor that wasn’t either of them.  They certainly aren’t two copies of the same person.  I’d have to go with precursor, which eventually split and became two people.

Hmm, not a single woman listed so far. Doesn’t that tell these guys something? When you craft legislation towards a group of people that the group wants NOTHING to do with, doesn’t that tell them anything?

No, guess not, they’re too busy jerking off to all of those evil sluts getting their gawd-mandated judgement babies. Christ, it’s gotta suck to be unable to acheive an erection without thinking of someone abjectly suffering.

The reason the sperm argument is valid, to me, is because there is a push to ban all forms of contraception because it interferes with the fertilization process.  Mostly, the focus is on oral contraceptives, but I’ve heard people argue against condoms as well, and I imagine that spermicides are not ignored either.  A lot of people, whether they accept that a child also gets DNA from its mother or not, view the act of fertilization as something a man does to a woman through God’s will, and she is merely a vessel for nurturing the future human.  To interfere with that process interferes with God’s will and a man’s right, and so you get the every sperm is sacred argument.  This is simply another fuzzy blanket of reasoning wrapped around the prickly desire to control women and re-establish a hierarchy. 

Don’t worry though, women haven’t been elevated beyond 2nd class status yet.  We don’t have full bodily autonomy consistently protected by the law.  Instead, we have laws that chip away at our right to an abortion by making access difficult to impossible, depending on class and location.  We have individuals impeding our access to legal medical care by refusing to provide medical care or dispense legal medication based of religious views or even physically standing in the way screaming at us, and they are often protected by the law.  Even if we choose to keep a fetus and carry it to term, we have to contend with the idea that medical practitioners may decide we are not competent to make medical decisions and force unnecessary medical procedures on us, often for their convenience, that increase the risk of harm to mother, child or both.  If we resist such decisions, we could have our child taken from us and find ourselves convicted of child endangerment or something similar.  If we are sexually assaulted or raped, the system is broken in so many places, that it often ends up protecting our assailant and putting us on trial, while socially, someone will always find a reason why a woman deserved the assault or rape.  Meanwhile, teaching comprehensive sex ed, or even suggesting that we teach kids that anything less than an enthusiastic YES, is considered an extreme viewpoint, so we aren’t even given the tools to set boundaries, let alone respect other people’s.  The media sends a message that girls should be sexy and available, and many girls end up having sex they don’t want or enjoy specifically to please a male, and often this sex is coerced.  Once we lose our virginity, the default setting is that we from then on consent to all sex acts, on top of a society that pushes hyper-masculinity, so surprise buttsecks is less a joke to many women, and more a reality, and the defense is that we didn’t specifically say no, and date rape is just sooooo easy to prosecute because no one wants to be in the middle of a he said/she said and send someone to jail accidentally because some slut COULD be lying.  So, no, the laws that we have don’t really protect us or ensure that we have the same rights as men to something as basic as bodily autonomy, and even where the laws do specifically bend in our favor, they are easily ignored.  Sorry for the run-ons.  I’m really peeved about this bill right now.

Mighty, agreed. I’ll add that just as many men are authoritarians, so are many women. And being anti-choice is an expression of that. Authoritarians love gods and claims about “natural law”, and always sacrifice for an abstract concept of “order”, even if logically, you get little for the price paid.

The sperm argument doesn’t work, because it doesn’t address the emotional desires underlying anti-choice sentiment. If you’re trying to change minds, I’ve found the best solution is to talk about women, and sexuality. Most people who aren’t full blown don’t see abstinence for life as a reasonable alternative.

As far as the “IT"S ABOUT THE BAYBEEZ” part goes, note that a lot of conservative, anti-choice women have come to accept that their only role is as babymakers, and they fully buy in to the fetishization of reproduction.

I realize I didn’t convey what I meant well, but I don’t agree that every sperm is sacred, just in their minds, that they see it as valid because of God’s will and male authority.  I have no problem, and in fact fully endorse, any snark or arguments against the conservation of sperm.

Bah, I keep losing my reply.

It’s hard to describe it artfully, but I think that authoritarianism is going to have slightly different flavors when you’re talking about a man vs. a woman, especially in regressive environments where women know they’ll never be “the one on top” so to speak. For men, they can always continue to compete and oppress and theoretically climb their way to the top of the bone-pile, but with women, who are raised from the word GO to understand just how badly things are stacked against them, being authoritarian is best represented by currying favor with the people who are in charge and making sure that you’re aligned with the powerful so that you can then exercise whatever little arena of power they put you in charge of. I see it as a survival technique because there isn’t a whole lot of opting out—the rules are going to be applied to you and you can either take your lumps and fight like hell while the entire patriarchal structure focuses on beating your bitch-ass down, you can suffer quietly under the rules in the hopes that it won’t be too bad if you just stay quiet, or you can be the one who enforces the rules in exchange for slightly less attention paid to your own following of said rules. For women who are interested in minimizing their suffering, throwing their lot in with the oppressors is probably a pretty appealing choice.

I made a few calls—both to my congresspeople, who are solidly pro-choice, and to one of those on the list.

”...a lot of conservative, anti-choice women have come to accept that their only role is as babymakers, and they fully buy in to the fetishization of reproduction.”

Michelle Dugger should be awarded a medal for her glorious effort to provide as many children as possible to the Fatherland.  She is an example for all American women!

[/snark]

...

When I look at an anti-choice woman, I see a woman who has seen the horrors that the patriarchy will visit upon women who are not compliant and says “fuck that, I’m throwing in with the oppressors so they don’t rain down that shitstorm on me.”

I think it’s more complex than that. Human beings have a huge tendency to essentialize their own experiences. Everyone does it. We all tend to assume that whatever works for us works for other people, and we have blind spots towards arguments than they don’t. We tend to have to work to see that something that works for us might not work for other people.

The pro-life woman’s worldview probably starts with an attitude that either it’s really easy to find a monogamous male sex partner or that sex really isn’t that important anyway. Because one or the other was true for them.

Add to that an attitude that children are a blessing and that whatever hardships that they impose are totally worth it because there is no more important work a woman can do. (And of course, that statement is full of all sorts of anti-feminist assumptions.) And if a woman finds those hardships to be too great, she can abstain from sex, because, after all, sex isn’t all that important to women anyway.

Add to that, in most cases, a dose of religion and tradition—a belief that traditional gender roles were right and that if women were acting morally—by either getting married and having monogamous sex, or staying single and not committing sinful sexual activity—they would not get pregnant anyway.

Put all that together and you get a very big “it can’t happen to me” complex, or more generally, “it can’t happen to women who are living right”. They are either going to conceive children that are wanted or at least, if unplanned, can be raised within a stable two parent household and welcomed into the world, or they are going to be celibate.

There are, of course, many pro-choice women, but there are also—as Amanda points out—many “pro-choice but anti-abortion” women. And that latter group of women probably include many people who realize (whether or not they know the technical term) the amount of essentializing that pro-life women are engaging in. They say that they don’t approve of abortion, and that people can make choices to prevent abortion, but they also realize there are poor women, women in abusive relationships, women whose unplanned pregnancies could derail an education or a career, contraceptive failures, douchebag guys who can’t be trusted, etc. They aren’t where I am—I am pro-choice with no qualifiers—but the reason why they exist is that they get that just because YOU think you won’t need an abortion is not a reason to deny it to others in different circumstances.

By the way, I think you can tease this thesis out of the data in Kristin Luker’s classic “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood”. She has some detailed surveys in there about how pro-life women view issues of female sexuality.

There’s one other thing I suspect is going on with pro-life women, which I mention separately because you can’t find this in Kristin Luker’s data. I suspect there’s a superiority complex. People like to feel that their life choices are superior to others. There are pro-life women who decided to marry young. To abstain from sex before marriage. To forego pursuing their sexual desires outside of that context. To have children early. To get married to the guy who knocked them up. To delay their education or their career to stay at home with their young children.

They did these things because they thought that they are right. And it gives them a sense of superiority over people who made different choices. Who didn’t make the sacrifices they did. Their image of the woman getting an abortion is of someone taking the easy way out, and not taking responsibility for her life choices they way they did.

To say that abortion is a legitimate choice is to deny them the right to think they are superior. It’s to say that the moral framework that they built their life around, and the sacrifices they made, have no larger meaning and don’t make them any better people than the folks who did something else.

Remember the old definition of a puritan—“a person who is worried that someone, somewhere, is having more fun than they are”. And remember where that comes from—if those people are having fun, and they aren’t paying any consequences for it, that means that your choice to not have that fun might be a personal virtue, but it has no larger social meaning. These people can’t accept that—legalized, accepted abortions means that their choices are no better than anyone else’s, and they desperately want that not to be true.

I don’t get why the ‘he said/she said’ standard doesn’t apply to any other crimes. 

*A) “He punched me in the face and broke my nose!”  B) “We were sparring, he was totally OK with it until the next day.” A) “Sparring in the parking lot of a Walmart?  Nobody does that!” B) “Sure!  I know he spars with other guys at the gym, so it’s totally cool.  Don’t know why he’s overreacting.”

*A) “She stole my car.”  B) “No I didn’t, he gave it to me!”  A) “No I didn’t!”  B) “Yes, she did.  I even filed a police report as soon as I noticed it was missing.  And I had to have the ignition replaced after the car was recovered, because it was damaged by a screwdriver.”  A) “That doesn’t prove anything.  He’s just mad because he’s embarrassed he lent his car to a rough driver.”

*A) “He owes me a carpet cleaner.”  B) “He gave it to me.”  A) “I let him borrow it to clean his carpets.  I didn’t tell him to sell it on Ebay.”  B) “Just a misunderstanding then.  Just ‘he said/she said’.  I thought I could do whatever I wanted with it.”

Instead, she takes potshots at energy-saving light bulbs.

The tendency to sneer at energy-saving measures represents the consistent—“If it pisses off liberals, I’ll do it”—knee-jerk tendency of the conservative hivemind.

When I encounter a conserva-toad who is proudly proclaiming his desire to use as much electricity as he can, I ask him (it’s invariable a “him”), “Wouldn’t you rather spend your money on something other than enriching the electric company’s coffers?  Me, I got better things to do with my money.”

As with the great veggie debate, the right will do anything to prove the left wrong, even if it costs them gobs of money (or in the case of diet, their health).

Just out of curiosity, Amanda, did you find any value in this? It seemed like Mollie was being thoroughly disingenuous the entire time. You talked about how pro-choice people support regulation that would have/should have had an impact on the Philadelphia clinic, she talked about opposition to regulation intended to limit access.  She asked about the survey where a majority of people claim to be pro-life, you pointed out that the survey was flawed and lots of people are “pro-life” until you ask them if they support the logical result of that position, and then she responded that “the whole argument is based on euphemisms”. You explained that PP is a non-profit, she replied “well, money changes hands”.

Who arranges these blogging heads things?

@Zifnab25 (3:43 PM):

I don’t like you plan.  Republicans play bullshit games for two big reasons.  First, they view government as an illegitimate undertaking, so it’s easy for them to play games.  They don’t take the premise seriously.  Second, they have good reason to hide their actions from public view.  Whether they’re honestly embarrassed to be such hacks or if they just think it won’t win them a lot of votes, they’re driven to hide what they do and what they believe.  Thus the code-language, the stupid procedural games, the death-by-1000-cuts strategy all work to their advantage.

Progressives, on the other hand, do believe in the project of governance, and we’re not ashamed of our policy positions nor should we be.  Playing games and hiding what we’re doing doesn’t help our cause.

The big success of the pro-life side of this debate is in distracting from the actual debate.

The debate at hand isn’t “is abortion moral or morally acceptable”.  The debate is “does the us Government have the right stick its nose into this.”

The Goslin issue (yeah, I don’t know how to spell that) and Down’s Syndrome are just distractions.

To explain the obsession with Palin… she’s got the majority of Republicans obsessed.  She’s got every bit of ignorant self-satisfaction that is associated with the absolute worst of the conservative stereotypes.  Where other major Republican Voices try to lead that stereotype, she wants attention for mirroring them, so she leads the absolute worst of conservative stereotypes into the foreground of the American Political Discourse and then right up its own ass.

We respond to Sarah Palin the same reason we respond to Hannity, O’Reily, and Beck.  We want the world to look at the core of the discourse coming from the right and we want them to see that the core is made of self-satisfied ignorance.

I know some thoughtful conservatives all of whome hate Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reily and the indecent amount of power they have over Republican leadership.

#25:

I also think that abortion is kind of a one-way ratchet, in that liberals are defending the right and conservatives are trying to chip away at it. It’s much easier to play that strategy when you are trying to eliminate something that exists than when you are defending something.

If you want an issue where this works in the left’s favor (to some extent), gay rights is that issue. Over time, the left has successfully won small gay rights battles—moving from the out and out ban on gays in the military to don’t ask don’t tell and now finally to full equality in the service, removing bans on gay adoption, enacting domestic partner benefits and civil unions, etc—by picking out instances where discrimination is reasonably unpopular and fighting the battle on that ground. I don’t see how it can work in the abortion rights context, though; the abortion right exist and we are playing defense much of the time.

Seriously, anyone who thinks a twisty light bulb to save the planet is too much of an imposition, but giving up your body for nine months to nurture a mindless ball of cells into a person has something else going on besides a love of life.

copyeditor mode: I think you didn’t finish this sentence.

Odd though that this should come up: I was just thinking this morning about the tantrums ‘conservatives’ throw about any kind of environmental initiative.  They’re happy to take the credit once the park/wilderness/whatever is created or preserved.

“Odd though that this should come up: I was just thinking this morning about the tantrums ‘conservatives’ throw about any kind of environmental initiative.  They’re happy to take the credit once the park/wilderness/whatever is created or preserved.”

That’s an issue with conservatives and liberals in general.  Conservatives are all about preserving yesturday.  Liberals are all about creating tomorrow.  With that in mind, conservatives commonly forget that yesturday happened because of liberals two days ago.

Unlike gay marriage or health care, where you can set up a beautiful picture of loving families living together in peace and happiness because of progressive reforms, it’s much more difficult to paint the same kind of image with regards to abortion.

Um. I can think of several families who are now living together in peace and happiness thanks to a fortuitous legal and safe abortion. And even more women who are thriving and happy thanks to same. Oh, well, but I guess images of happy thriving women are liable to backfire in this culture.

Still…the families…

#30:

There’s a reason Roe v. Wade is a court decision and not a legislative act.  Abortion is inevitably as much a losing issue as nuclear dumping or Wall Street bailouts.

I suspect this is wrong, though I wouldn’t want to test it. Conservatives actually have quite a lot of leeway to take extreme pro-life positions precisely because they know that they will never be called on to enact them.

Overturning Roe would be very bad for abortion rights because there are some parts of the country that would shut off abortion rights entirely or greatly, and because many restrictions that would make access more difficult would pass. But it would also be the case that many parts of the country would become absolutely inhospitable to politicians who wanted to make abortion illegal. In that sense it is not a losing issue.

Roe is a pro-choice victory. But nonetheless, its existence buys conservatives the ability to engage in a form of cost-free extremism which makes abortion seem like a lot more of a losing issue for pro-choicers than it really is.

anyone who thinks a twisty light bulb to save the planet is too much of an imposition

Isn’t it?  I guess it depends on where you live, but a compact fluorescent lightbulb in my city will save all of several bucks a year compared to incandescent.  Meanwhile, CFLs are more expensive and can’t just be thrown in the trash, and, even in my “green” city, it’s necessary to pay for recycling the bulbs at most drop-off locations.  In my experience, CFLs don’t necessarily last much longer than incandescent.  Maybe I’m just buying the wrong ones, but I’m not checking out Consumer Reports for something as basic as a lightbulb.

I’ll still use them for everything except task/reading lighting or lamps that require specialty bulbs, but I can’t fault people for thinking that CFLs are much more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth, especially since people like that are just going to throw CFLs in the trash rather than deal with the annoying-as-fuck recycling issue.

They did these things because they thought that they are right. And it gives them a sense of superiority over people who made different choices. Who didn’t make the sacrifices they did. Their image of the woman getting an abortion is of someone taking the easy way out, and not taking responsibility for her life choices they way they did.

This describes my anti-choice sister to her last molecule. SHE had a hard time, so she knows what it’s like to have a hard time and she also knows you can do it (where “it” has a value of raising children single and/or with an abusive partner, in poverty and isolation). Women who get abortions are not taking responsibility for their lives the way SHE did (never mind that she was actively trying to get pregnant).

The only kind of rebuttal I have ever found to this bullshit is to continuously harp on the choice aspect. “That’s right, you made a CHOICE to give birth and parent children. That was your CHOICE. You had a right to your CHOICE. It should be a CHOICE for everyone. Everyone should have the right to CHOOSE.” It’s not perfect, but if I’m lucky it strokes their “I made the right choices” switch enough to shut them the fuck up and get them considering other people instead of their own fantastic self.

Can I just say, wow did you use the word ‘like’ a lot, Amanda.

The Downs syndrome discussion interests me because there’s similar concerns in the neurodiversity movement should a pre-natal test be developed to identify autistic fetuses.  My answer to this is to try and stop looking at these things as such tragedies, and ultimately cultivate a culture that’s ACTUALLY tolerant of diversity.  A lot of the problems autistics (along with other groups of PWD) face have to do with barriers that society has put in place.  Ultimately, I see the high number of Downs fetuses aborted (and I agree, it’s a bit distracting to stick on that point) as a symptom of a culture that prizes ‘normalcy’ above all else.

Just called Heath Shuler (I live in NC but not in his district) and the young-sounding female staffer who answered the phone sounded sympathetic to what I was saying.  She said a couple of times ‘we really appreciate your call’ and ‘I’ll be sure to pass on your comments to the COngressman”.  She could have been blowing smoke, but it seemed like she wasn’t too happy with her boss’s position on this issue and was happy to be able to pass constituent feedback to that effect on up to him.  Usually when I call a member I’m disagreeing with, I get a lot of ‘uh-huh, uh-huh’s’ and a quick ‘buh-bye’.

”...the young-sounding female staffer who answered the phone sounded sympathetic to what I was saying.  She said a couple of times ‘we really appreciate your call’ and ‘I’ll be sure to pass on your comments to the COngressman”.”

...a “career limiting” move?...

Re: Comment #35: Jayn Newell

The thing about the Downs’ is that they never tell you about the high percentage of those pregnancies which end anyhow.  And the high number that die before their first birthday.  They only refer to the minority of high-functioning cases like Chris Burke.

That’s not a society intolerant of diversity, unless by diversity you mean babies which are missing organs vital for survival.

I say that the Philly case is a problem for rights; it’s a problem with a lack of access.

I’m not sure they’re going against the voters, per your headline. Nationally there is still a pro-choice majority, but Congresscritters don’t run nationally, and look at the states in the list - OK, PA, IN…fairly conservative places.

That nationwide trend is moving in a worrisome direction too, with young people showing less support for abortion rights. That’s not a conservative trend, though, because the same young people also show increasing support for gay rights. It seems to be more cultural.

I was taken back by her smugness. And as far as the Philly issue goes, this is really a problem for anti-choicers.  Amazing that she thought it was reversed.

Another argument that’s annoying to me is the, “well public opinion is turning pro-life” line.  And so what?  Society does not get to decide what happens in my uterus. What my next door neighbor thinks of any gyn procedure I have is of no interest to me.

WRT pro-life women. I have mentioned before that I grew up in backwoods (back-prairie?) IA and SD. There is sort of an ethos here that the official line among conservative protestants here is that pre-marrital sex is bad but will ineveitably happen. Teens and young adults should just sort of fuck around until the eventual accidental pregnancy at which point the makers of said pregnancy must marry. Marriage is considered the only way a woman can be validated and considered the horrible end of a young mans freedom. This sort of thinking leads some women to become anti-choice because if there is a way out of pregnancy, the man may not be guilted into bestowing his status on your worthless lady-self. If you have ever seen ‘feminists” for life’s orwellian “boxed in by choice” ads, this self-loathing demographic is the target.

I am sure authoritarianism is a large part of pro-liferism for a lot of women, but, in my experience, self-loathing women make up a huge chunk of the pro-life rank-and-file.

@42, it’s of interest to your representatives. Being right isn’t enough.

The only reason ‘the public’ is turning ‘against’ abortion is because of two things:  The question is loaded.  At no point do they ask, ‘Are you willing to risk women’s health or freedom to choose to ban abortion’.. And the second part is that young people don’t remember back-alley abortions existed and think it’s legal and available now, and therefore they don’t have to argue with anti-women people.

@46

I completely agree.

I enjoyed the interview (or, at least, your part of it).

It’s interesting to me that you see Sarah Palin as a true believer; I think she actually may be quit cynical about her professed beliefs. I lived in Alaska during her tenure as mayor of Wasilla. I live in Nevada now and have had the opportunity (or misfortune) to observe Sharon Angle. She seems to me to be much more invested in her beliefs than is Palin.

I thought it rather absurd that Ms Ziegler Hemingway claimed an equivalence between Biden’s tendency to commit faux pas and Palin’s stupidity.

Zif, the image is basically women happy and free. Women free to raise the children they fan and do want, women free to get an education, women free to work, and most alarmingly for antis, women free to choose to reject a man, instead of leave the question of marriage entirely up to him.

Agreed that many people (see the doth-protest-too-much above me) don’t want to see women free or happy. Women are the servant class, so it seems uppity. Pushing against misogyny is critical.

I thought it rather absurd that Ms Ziegler Hemingway claimed an equivalence between Biden’s tendency to commit faux pas and Palin’s stupidity.

Agreed.  There’s plenty of politicians who say inappropriate things, but most of them are at least intelligent enough to string more than two words together without shoving their foot in their mouth.  Palin makes Bush look bright—and as a Canadian, the only bright spot of Bush’s election in 2000 was he made Cretien sound eloquent.  On a scale of 1-10, she’s at -2 for me.

EMR’s post-script is the perfect sum-up of his entire ill-considered, cult-of-free-will personality. Paying $.50 more for a CFL over an incandescent does not mean that the incandescent is the “cheaper” bulb when it will cost you something like $18 more than the CFL will per year (and that’s not even bringing into account how much longer CFLs last over incandescents). Raise that to the power of 50 when it comes to his little “I’m pro-choice but god damn you dirty sluts piss me off with your consequence-free fucking” rant.

EMR: Women having a right to our own bodies is “radical” and “kooky” and “man-hating.” Despite this being one of the least-radical feminist blogs out there and with plenty of male regulars.

Another toxic case of unexamined male privilege, with bonus cluelessness about long-term cost-effectiveness (but I’m sure he likes to bloviate about his economics smarts, too).

Eric_RoM @ 28: Put a comma after “into a person”.  There is a complete sentance, but a puntuation error can make it hard to read as such.

If he thinks this is a radical site, EMR is in for quite a shock if he ever meets a real radical.  This is a pretty mainstream liberal site.  The philosophy of most of the authors and posters is pretty well in line with the Democratic Party platform, maybe a little left of that.  It’s significantly to the left of actual Democratic politicians, because we’ve got a party establishment vastly more conservative than the bulk of the party or its own platform, but that’s a separate issue.

Seeing the google banner ads on this post for “pro life checks” is weird.*

*(I’m not the only one who sees them, right?)

A woman wants an abortion - fine. Do it early, pay for it yourself, or get the guy to. Other than that, deal with your own fuckups. You want to have sex? Go fuck all the guys you want. But know that there can be life-altering consequences. Use protection. Some guys are losers and can’t be counted on.

This guy is cute. Pregnancy is God’s punishment for having sex, without the possibility of parole if your income falls below a certain level. Please, ladies, do not have sex with men who think like this. Then they will hopefully die out.

Please, ladies, do not have sex with men who think like this. Then they will hopefully die out.

Don’t worry Hector, we can smell guys like him a mile away.* Somehow I doubt he would be so blase about “make the guy pay for it” when some girl shows up on his doorstep with a positive pregnancy test and an invoice for $600. Then he would rail to the high heavens about the INJUSTICE of it all!

*Sometimes literally. Dear men: Axe is not a thing you should wear, ever. It is a crime against humanity.

Actually, no, we can’t necessarily smell guys like him a mile away. Sometimes, sure. But predators and losers don’t have handy labels on their foreheads, especially not if you’re a very young and inexperienced woman.

And, as Harriet J. of Fugitivus has written, so long as we enculturate women to be submissive and pleasing to men at the expense of their own personhood, we can’t turn around and blame them for “bad choices.”

Here’s an idea, Hector: Talk to your fellow men and shame the assholes for being assholes, rather than putting the burden all on us.

Re: #49:

Notice it’s always stupid men who can’t muster the cognition to consider more than their own brilliant opinion on any issue that doesn’t affect them, those men are always the ones making the easy arguments and screaming about bootstraps. I’m laughing at the expectation of armchair psychoanalysis as though we would be desperately searching the DSM-V for anything that can possibly refute his brilliance. There’s really no need to do anything, it’s quite clear that #49 is a sexist, pseudo-intellectual, condescending, privilege-blind, glibertarian douche who understands nothing but thinks he knows everything.

Actually, no, we can’t necessarily smell guys like him a mile away. Sometimes, sure. But predators and losers don’t have handy labels on their foreheads, especially not if you’re a very young and inexperienced woman.

You’re right. Is there such a thing as long-time feminist privilege? I s’pose if there is, my comment were swimming in it.

Hey #60, I thought you weren’t commenting again? 

I distinctly remember reading that you’d sashay your pert ass out of the door after you’d left behind a shining ingot of golden wisdom for us poor misguided liberals to pick over as though we’d never heard it all before. What gives, man?

All the other lightbulb shit is not worth responding to. Just more barstool psychobabble.

Translation: Even I am (barely) smart enough to know when I’ve been beat.

One who can’t do a cost-benefit analysis for himself (lightbulbs) or society (unwanted births)

I think the link between masculinity anxiety and anti-choice politics is well understood by all here. Now let’s watch a documentary detailing Heath Shuler’s failure to perform American masculinity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW4eXFFxn40

And most people do not want to pay for the actions of other, particularly when there are such moral issues as with abortion.

Here’s my moral dilemma: Back in 2002, the US invasion of Iraq was determined to be an unjust war by no less a moral authority than the current Pope. Yet we will all be paying for the actions of Bush and Cheney for decades to come, essentially till the last Iraq War vet dies in a VA hospital. Yet I must pay Federal income tax or go to prison. What to do?

I can see that there’s no surefire way to get a guy’s real feelings on abortion till it’s too late. Not everyone who thinks like EMR will spout off about it. But I have previously had a hard time persuading assholes not to be misogynistic. I’ll see what I can do.

“it’s quite clear that #49 is a sexist, pseudo-intellectual, condescending, privilege-blind, glibertarian douche who understands nothing but thinks he knows everything. “

The immaturity in both his posts makes me think he hasn’t lived much.  Or just never listens to anything but the judgemental congo line going on in his head. 

He did make me giggle though. It’s so cute when clueless dudes think they have something we haven’t seen 8 billion times before.

“Back in 2002, the US invasion of Iraq was determined to be an unjust war by no less a moral authority than the current Pope.”

...yeah, but I get the feeling that was some sort of pro forma pope thing.  He wasn’t as upset over the war as he was that his kiddie-diddling priests weren’t always staying swept under the rug, and he’s far more concerned with where you stick your penis and where you ejaculate.  (Must remain “open to life”, or else.  Ejaculate with your uncovered penis into the fertile vagina of your wife?  Good.  Ejaculate somewhere else?  Very, very bad!...)

Ultimately, Pope Asshole the 23rd doesn’t give a shit about a few hundred-thousand Iraqis being terminated with <strike>medical</strike> military procedures.  After all, they were (mostly) Mooslims so Jesus didn’t care about them either.

Now if he found out there were good christian boys (and girls) over there having sex and using condoms — well then he’d be pissed.  Shooting a few innocent civilians?  He don’t give a fuck…

I love that basic budgeting is seen as barstool psychobabble.

Over my lunchbreak, I braved the weather to pick up a few items that we had run out of. For example: dish detergent. There was a 18oz box for $4.29, and a 24oz box for $4.99. Fortunately, my barstool psychobabble allowed me to realize that I was going to use all 24oz, that dish detergent didn’t go bad, and that saving $0.70 now would be wasting at least $0.50 in the long run.

It must have been barstool psychobabble, after all. It’s not like I majored in advanced economic theory. So those handful of psych courses I took must have had some sort of hidden budgeting agenda embedded deep in them.

Thanks, Hector. I think that just keeping at it is more important than attempting to convince any specific jackass. In real life, as online, there are “lurkers” who will take away the message that not every other guy is going to back up their misogynist beliefs, and maybe they’ll reconsider some of those beliefs.

I would feel a whole hell of a lot better if 30 Democratic Senators backed a bill today requiring mandatory funding of abortion on demand with no questions asked as a requisite feature of any health insurance marketed in the U.S.

But fecklessness of Democratic politicians is perhaps their only redeemable feature. Other than a few who stand up and take no prisoners, I have no use for their lack of spine. Our Reps should literally be throwing stones at Chris Smith & his ilk. Assault is assault. There’s got to be a penalty.

EMR, pretty much every type of medicine is elective at some level, so I’m not sure of your point here. Given the fact that you don’t want to pay when other people make a mistake, are you also against paying for cancer treatment for smokers, ...? Healthcare could become an interesting matter. Also, you don’t seem to have noticed that this bill says that a woman might not be able to use her own money to buy insurance that includes abortion coverage. Current law does not allow federal money to be used for an abortion, so current law is not making you pay for it—so that part of your rant has nothing to do with the debate at hand.

The reason I’m pro-choice is that I think the woman is more important than the fetus and I think it’s up to the woman (with the help, if she wants it, of her doctor) to decide if a pregnancy would cause a problem. Who do you think should decide?

Also, I’m not sure what country you live in, but in the US there were a lot of people who wanted to go to war with Iraq who had done nothing to the US and there are a lot of people who want to go to war with Iran. To me, that’s pro-war.

Your point on healthcare might make sense if most of the poeple against universal healthcare as passed actually had a plan to improve healthcare—as opposed to their belief that the US has the ‘best healthcare in the world’.

@Comment #60: EMR1976 on 02/01 at 11:28 AM

2/10. Needs more stupid.

pretty much every type of medicine is elective at some level,

Hell yeah! Explain to me why you commiesoshulist radical feminist kooks think anyone should subsidize my MIL’s knee replacement. It’s totally elective. Sure, without it she wouldn’t be able to walk or spend a day free of pain for the rest of her life, but it’s not like she needs it to live. If she’d just stayed off high heels when she was younger she wouldn’t have this problem, damn slutty women with their slutty high heels. Why should anyone else pay for the consequences of her choices?

+1 JohnL, definitely.

Stupid lightbulb thing.  Sure, in some situations an incandescent will last longer than a cheap fluorescent.  So what?  It was using far less power.  If you live in California or one of the states that electricity isn’t subsidized (many states have had subsidized electricity for ever), it’ll save you money.  And yes, I have bulbs that have gone out sooner - but I also have fluorescent bulbs that are now twelve years old.  Damn things refuse to die.

IMO, the one argument that tends not to convince the pro-lifers I know, as much as just shut them up a little, is my “well, you approve of people having 10 kids they can’t afford?  You think that’s moral?” question.  They always agree with me on that one.  If you really care about the kids, rather than punishing the woman, you’d care enough to say that a kid deserves better than growing up poor with no food to eat or no clothes to wear, and with little prospects, and it’s better off to delay one’s existence for much later.  (And no, adoption, the selling of children and the erasure of their heritage by various laws, doesn’t enter into any of this at all.)

Whether people want to admit it or not, children for a lot of them are obtained and maintained like their cars, their houses, or their clothes or jobs—they’re status symbols, they exist as props to make their parents look good.  On one side, we have the supposedly evil abortion, which is at least honest about how people pick, choose, and plan out their lives, whether by choice or by necessity, and thus, the supposed sanctity there is in all this is bullshit, since there has always been choice; on the extreme opposite end, we have the Nadya Sulemans who have kids to puff up their egos at all costs, never minding how the children will suffer.  Which side is more moral?  Many pro-lifers I’ve run into will pick the former scenario, since welfare, when they’re honest enough to admit it, is far more expensive and morally dubious than abortion ever was.  At least abortion helps the parent admit one’s limits and no one else suffers for years and years; welfare is the symptom of something there being very broken in society, despite my undying support for it.

#72 - that is a really good point. Engaging flaccid cowards like EMR shouldn’t be about trying to change that specifical flaccid coward, but about demonstrating to the audience (specifically, silent observers) how such people *are* flaccid cowards, how utterly clueless, how lacking in basic human compassion and decency, how they should absolutely never breed, etc.

I had not considered that before.

EMR, if you’re still reading,
Some of the hostility you are seeing in the reactions to your posts comes from having heard similar arguments which just don’t hold up to careful scrutiny.  Many of us conclude that such arguments are disingenuous because we assume those asserting them have either thought through what they mean in the real world or have heard our responses before and just ignore them.  So, let me make a couple of points, perhaps in a less hostile way.

You say you don’t want to have your tax dollars go to reward irresponsible behavior, that people need to understand that certain actions have consequences (“dick + vagina = baby”).  But as others have pointed out, many medical procedures which taxpayers subsidize are also the result of mistakes or even irresponsible behavior.  You appear to be willing to let those subsidies go forward but not abortions.  The only difference appears that you want pregnant women to be punished by forcing them to carry the fetus to term, to force them to bear the child.  Any objection you may have as a taxpayer to the cost does not bear scrutiny since the costs to taxpayers of an unwanted child to a Medicaid mother is certainly higher than the costs of the abortion. 

The latest anti-abortion posturing by the Republicans, HR 3, is particularly gross since it attempts to block all abortions except from “forcible” rape and those where continuing would endanger the physical life of the mother, even from the private insurance market which might somehow have a tax subsidy or tax benefit.  Statutory rape wouldn’t justify an abortion, or incest, or rape by fraud, or rape by drugging or intoxication, or perhaps even rape by a threat of violence not actually used. 

We find many anti-choice proponents to be disingenuous because they say they want to reduce the number of abortions, but they also oppose programs which actually do reduce unwanted pregnancies, such as promotion of birth control methods.  Many of the people say they want to reduce the number of abortions actually behave like they really want to reduce the amount of extra-marital (pre or otherwise) sex going on.  Whatever your moral position on extra-marital sex might be, denying women the right to choose particular medical help through deliberate government policy (not used on other conditions arguably from disapproved behavior) is a cruel way to go about it. 

And it’s a women’s issue because so far no man has ever been forced to take the life and death risks of childbirth.

It’s not surprising that EMR can’t figure out the cost difference between two lightbulbs.  He makes the exact same mistake in being unwilling to pay for others’ “mistakes” (would he say that to the rape and incest survivors targeted by HR3?  I suspect that he is a douche for all seasons and the answer is yes) by subsidizing abortion.

A woman who can’t afford a $600 abortion probably also can’t afford her exponentially more expensive prenatal care, labor, and healthcare for her child.  When she can’t pay, those costs are eaten by all of us every time we do pay for medical care.  And when she can’t afford to feed or clothe or house her “mistake” (at a yearly cost far more than that of the abortion) we subsidize those things as well.  If the goal is really to pay out as little as possible to anyone who didn’t fight hard enough to keep her legs closed—a morally dubious goal if ever there was one—an honest person would offer to cover the abortion.  It’s being too short-sighted and greedy to choose the cheaper lightbulb, writ large—on someone else’s body.  Charming.

“....an honest person…”

There’s your mistake.

It’s grimly amusing when people like EMR claim to be smart then say really stupid things (showing they can’t do a simple cost benefit analysis) so as to seem like they aren’t just being short-sighted assholes and end up just looking like stupid short-sighted assholes.  And/both blog, right?

Am I missing something about lightbulb tyranny? Has there ever been a law proposed to ban incandecent light bulbs or subsidies the twirly ones? I have only heard people encourage twirly light bulbs as a way to save money, and, last i heard, we don’t have a constitutional/human right protecting us from advice.

Has there ever been a law proposed to ban incandecent light bulbs

Yes, mostly. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Bulbs between 40 and 150 watts will be phased out from 2012 to 2014, beginning with the higher wattages.

The “forcible rape” clause really pisses me off because what it really means is that you had better make damn sure you get the shit kicked out of you while you are being raped or no one will consider it a “real rape.” And even then, there’s no guarantee. The defense in the Richmond High gang rape case are arguing that the girl was not forcibly raped because “the blows were not administered to overcome her will.”  They beat her while she was unconscious so thats totally okay or something. If she was not forcibly raped, there is no chance in hell anyone else can be considered to be forcibly raped.  This is an incredibly dim time in the history of women’s rights.

You’re not “pro-choice,” EMR. If you say, “I’m pro-choice, but,” you’re looking to slap restrictions on a woman’s bodily autonomy.

Oh, and only assholes say “anyhoo.” Then again, “bitch like spurned middle school girls” is as illustrative of your misogyny as your anti-choice beliefs are, so it’s not like you’re telling us anything new about yourself.

He gets off on your responses. He is like that little boy that pulls your hair for attention good or bad. Responses validate him. Don’t feed teh trolls!

We really should ignore EMR because he’s not arguing in good faith. But for everyone else, we are NOT trying to get society to pay for abortions—current law already says the federal government will not pay for them (no matter how much idiots like EMR try to claim it does or will or might). The new bill says that women can not pay for insurance with their own money and for good measure it states that only ‘forcible rape’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean) isn’t really rape. Ya know what, I don’t give a fuck what you do EMR—just don’t make it so we can’t do what we want to do, such as making sure that everyone knows that all rape is serious (yeah, silly me, I get upset when people redefine rape to minimize it—this is another thing that EMR doesn’t care about, like climate change) .

Oh, this is now the second time you’ve come back, you’re like some of that ocean crap that comes in on the tide—let’s see if he comes back in another 12 hours.

“And you have nothing left to do but pout and bitch like spurned middle school girls. I’m amazed that this thread was going on half a day later. grin I really hit a nerve here. LOL! “

Cool story, bro.

wow, his story gets better and better. he has the perfect suburban life! aren’t we so envious! so edgy, not caring about climate change! oh honey, it’s okay, we can tell you’re 17 by your writing.

he has the perfect suburban life!

Ha! I laugh to scorn at his life.

I have TWO houses, FOUR cars, TWO wives, FOUR sons, a turret, a throne room, a moat, an indoor bowling alley, an in-ground pool, a personal masseuse—it just goes on and on.

Actually, there was a law passed to ban the sale of the regular old incandescent lamps.  A tax couldn’t be passed, because, well, Republicans hate taxes.  So we got a phase-out instead.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs

And yes, the twisty lamps are subsidized, at least, there is money at the state level that purchases them and makes them available for cheap or free.  Sometimes these are even good lamps.  And if you install a certain number of them, you can deduct it from your income taxes.

Really, we should have had a tax on bulbs below a certain efficiency.  Sometimes you really do want a bulb with different characteristics.  I’m sure most incandescent bulbs will just be relabeled ‘heat lamps’.

...And I kinda care that I have multiple computers, all the suburban things I love, and a power bill that’s about $80 all year long.

Now if only I could get the winter heating bill down.  This old cabin just eats the fuel; about 2 gallons a day when it’s 50F outside and 65F inside.

I think EMR is new to trolling (EMR, look it up) but he seems to enjoy it so much I suspect it may become a hobby of his.  Sir, you are emulating (look it up) Sarah Palin by being either disingenuous (look it up) or wilfully and smugly ignorant.  Comment sections on blogs routinely go on for days; you didn’t start it. 

No doubt about it, the misogynistic forces of anti-choice are increasing in their power and effectiveness, though hardly “winning” at this point.  But their gains mean that people who care about rights of other living, breathing people need to get clear on the issues and educate both the fence sitters and pro-choicers who are fuzzy on what anti-choice government policies will do.

The part that really stings here is the depiction of Democrats:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obamabacked-bill-that-w,19025/

Shorter EMR:  “I crap in my bed and like it!”

There are two points I would like to make as to how EMR is an over-entitled douchehat of a misogynist (I know I should just walk away, but hey, I’m in a firey mood this morning.)

First, as already been pointed out here, the so-called Stupak on Steroids bill would also eliminate tax breaks for businesses that offer health insurance to their employees if that insurance includes coverage for abortion and would also prevent private insurance programs from participating in future insurance exchange programs if they cover abortion.  That is not even close to taxpayers paying for abortions, despite all of EMR’s bluster and bloviating to the contrary.  In fact, that is standing in the way of businesses doing business they way they want and as they best see fit.  That is contrary to the Republican mission of taking away unnecessary regulations on the business community. 

Second, the best thing EMR can say about his wife is that she’s pretty?  I mean really, not that she’s smart and funny and supportive and is exactly the sort of person he was hoping to have as his partner in life and marriage, but just that she’s pretty and has borne the fruit of his loins for him (and a boy child to boot!)  Not only is that misogyny at it’s very core, but plain old creepy as well.

Comment sections on blogs routinely go on for days; you didn’t start it.

The funniest thing about this to me is how it probably actually didn’t occur once to this pinhead that everyone else on the comment thread might have walked away from it for a while and then come back too. Nope, he thinks unlike him we’re all just here ... waiting. Like the little man who turns the light on when you open the fridge door.

I don’t give a fuck about light bulbs. I buy them. They work. They go out. I throw them away. I buy more. Whatever. Worrying about saving 20 cents, or whatever, is just not important to me. I have my house in the suburbs

If your house were nice, then you would have a Great Room or den with cathedral ceilings and recessed lighting, and electricity bills would be a substantial concern driving you towards CFLs.

So I really don’t believe you—your reaction towards electricity costs are more in line with people who live in their mother’s basements than people who are actually responsible for running a household. Even when I was a young kid living in a modestly sized house my father was constantly reminding us to shit off the lights. Seriously—did anyone grow up with parents who weren’t frequently concerned with saving money on electricity bills? I am not sure such a creature exists, so your rant doesn’t even sound believable.

Tyro et al, it is possible that he really does have a suburban house et al.  He isn’t the person running it though and has no clue what costs what; that is why he has that wife who he can say nothing positive about except that she is “pretty”.  She takes care of all that so he can concentrate on his important work.