There’s a good lead piece in the current Nation about the work of Cecile Richards, present head of Planned Parenthood, and daughter of Ann Richards, the late former governor (and last Democratic governor) of Texas. Today’s far right Republican money machine spends billions attacking Planned Parenthood to their own detriment. The organization, which has drawn the ire of the religious right (now largely conservative Catholics and the main body of evangelicals), since Roe V Wade continues to thrive. With Santorum and his reactionary views on women and his reflection of the unmarried male hierarchy in the Roman Catholic Church (most American Catholics, something over 85% ignore the hierarchy and practice birth control), women and lots of men are rushing in droves to support Planned Parenthood. While the right attacks the organization as primarily an abortion provider, the truth is only 3 per cent of the work of Planned Parenthood has anything to do with that purpose. Support for Birth Control until very recently has been a no brainer for the vast majority of the American population. But with the religious right tacking ever more rightward and sexist, the Republicans, despite the support of their umpteen billionaires on any given issue, may well be alienating the majority of American women (over half the population).
One of the things that most puzzles me about the “pro-life” crowd is that these are the same people who choose to ignore the obvious daily evidence of global warming, the extinction of 200 species a day, the turning of our oceans into carbonic acid to the detriment of all sea life. Just what kind of world do the “pro-lifers” expect to be bringing all these babies with rights from the moment of conception into? At the rate of the current worldwide supercapitalism, or industrialism on steroids, is going, we will literally extinguish life as we know it by the twenty-second century. And we will make much of the earth damned uninhabitable within decades. For all those deniers with their heads chronically in the sand, when was the last time Chicago was 80 degrees on March 12, as it was this past week? All you’ve got to do is pick up the very non-political weather map of your local newspaper, or look at the Weather Station online, or Yahoo Weather or any weather service, and you can see how out of wack the weather is. And the world’s “leaders” did nothing in Copenhagen and nothing in Durban. Climate change, for Joe Sixpack and Jane Eyeliner is just too big an issue, so we might as well ignore it, or believe the lies the fossil fuels companies tell us about it, and eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we all die. I for one would like my children and grandchildren to have a world to live in. By the way, the seven billion plus humans, the lethal species, that is ever expanding geometrically, and tearing up the planet on a daily basis, are the cause, as humans have always been the cause, of climate change. Denuding forests in the Middle East in biblical times produced, for example, the deserts that now are the norm there. And with our supersized Caterpillar equipment doing the corporate funded extractive thing all over the world now and reducing what were once mountains and rain forests to something akin to the surface of the moon, this does not bode well for posterity. The oh so holy and righteous among the religious right might consider the Gospel parable of the vineyard, whereby the owner of the vineyard entrusts it to a bunch of renters who despoil it, and he ultimately returns to reclaim it, and the despoilers do not make out so well.
Thank you, Stephen, for contributing to the Upper Left Edge. I suspect many readers here will by sympathetic to sermons about the hypocrisy of cave-dwellers in Washington.
The polemics of this particular post could lead us to deduce that said hypocrisy equates to Republican partisanship. Or, said another way, we could infer from your words that the path toward civil evolution is paved with votes for Democrats.
If that were true, then the anti-life policies you rightly expose would have been vigorously challenged a few years ago, when Democrats had clear control of both Congress and the White House. That didn’t happen. Alas, the problems you point out could be framed in terms of duplicity by Dems who claim to be pro-choice, yet by their actions are killing the choice of a healthy green world for our children.
On the topic of Planned Parenthood, I have for many years advocated that agencies involved with birth control should be distinct from agencies involved with abortion. The common sense of contraception — in preventing unwanted pregnancies — deserves it’s own separate platform as a public service.
My comments specifically applied to the tunnel vision of the reproduction fixated religious right and to the odd surfacing of anti-birth control views in that Republican stronghold. I was not writing about how great the Democrats are in being so different from that. There is plenty to criticize in the Democratic Party also. But few Democrats are opposed to birth control or fixated on abortion as the single most important issue upon which to base their vote. My purpose was to show how far away from real issues are these “debates” over birth control, a noncontroversial issue for the vast majority of Americans, including Catholics.
As I say, there is plenty to criticize also in the Democratic Party. They are far to the right of the party of the civil rights era, when I came of age. President Obama appointed a thoroughly establishment, or neoliberal (favoring corporate globalization, deregulation, etc.) economics team, not much different from that of George W. Bush. Neo-Keynesians, who would advocate greater economic stimulus, like Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, were absent. the president also continued and even increased many of the repressive aspects of the Patriot Act. He has used drones to a greater extent than did the Bush administration and has upped the ante in Afghanistan with nothing to show for it.
On the other hand, it is important to point out that the president could get precious little done in terms of such items as relief for subprime mortgage victims and job stimulus, because Republicans, taking their marching orders from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, pursued a wholly obstructionist policy designed to make this administration fail. That’s why the jobs bill he proposed last September was dead on arrival. After a much watered down health care bill passed in 2009, Republicans, spearheaded by Fox News and lots of right wing billionaire money ginned up the Tea Party movement attacking Obama as a “socialist,” a laughable premise, since he is so closely aligned with Wall Street. The health care bill was demonized even though it is the first bill to address the issue of fifty million uninsured Americans. Also ignored in the hysteria against “Obamacare” that characterized Tea Party attacks, was the fact that while requiring people to purchase insurance, it gives generous aid to a broad swath of people with limited funds. It also is the first health care reform to address the issue of refusing to insure people because of pre-existing conditions.
My final point is that while Democrats have their blue dog conservatives, they did pass health care reform in a constructive form that addressed all the above issues while they controlled the Congress. They did not pass a better, more comprehensive bill because of the tremendous power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The 2010 election, was the first one following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United V. U.S.Electoral Commission decision. In that case, five conservative Republican justices (over four more liberal ones) decided that any corporation, or other legal entity including foreign governments could secretly place any amount of money in American political campaigns. And so we had the complete poisoning of the American political system by corporate and other special interest money, which has led to the horrendous mudslinging of the new Super PACs that has only just begun. This has led to what I hope will be the successful Move to Amend movement that will end corporate personhood once and for all. Democrats were not the authors of Citizens United, my friend, or the upending of democracy that has followed in its wake.
The individual mandate to purchase private health insurance (without a public option) sucks, in my opinion. Too bad the leadership of both parties shoved single-payer advocates out of the discussion.
But you make many sapient points here Stephen. I agree that Democrats are often more evolved than Republicans. Sort of like Cro-Magnons -vs- Neanderthals.
While googling the word “troglodyte” I ran across a funky youtube video that provided a little comic relief. Thought I’d pass it along.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlRXQEA0yj0
I wholly agree that that the requirement to buy insurance without a public option stinks and is mainly a boon to the insurance companies. Obama was much too quick to cave on the public option, which he claimed to support. I watched the video, which looks like a remnant of the late sixties or an imitation thereof. Actually “troglodytes” were probably better adapted to for survival than is our own fun house hall of mirrors culture of delusion.