“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” ~ Ernest Benn

Rush Limbaugh as seen on The Daily Show (3-5-12)

                   

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H. L. Mencken

I must confess that I haven’t thought about Rush Limbaugh too much in quite a while. I mean, El Douchebag is not on the top of my things to think about. Unfortunately, maggot-head opened his mouth recently and spewed forth some vile that simply cannot be ignored. I’m referring to, of course, the Sandra Fluke tirade.

Sandra Fluke

For those of you who don’t know, let me summarize (for a full timeline, click here): Sandra Fluke is a Georgetown law student. Georgetown is a Jesuit school, by the way. Fluke, a co-president of the Georgetown chapter of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, testified before a Democratic forum on February 23, having been denied by Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) the opportunity to speak before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s session on health reform law’s mandated coverage of contraceptives. The committee was probing whether the provision violates religious liberties. In her testimony, Fluke shared experiences by other Georgetown law students regarding access to female contraception, something the Jesuit institution does not believe that it should provide for its non-Catholic students seeking access:

Students who pay as much as $1,000 a year out-of-pocket for a birth-control prescription, a married woman who stopped taking the pill because she couldn’t afford it, and a friend who needed the prescription for a medical condition unrelated to pregnancy but gave up battling to get it.

“We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that we should have gone to school elsewhere” to receive contraception coverage, Fluke’s testimony stated.

“We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health.” (Washington Post)

Enter El Douchebag.On February 29, Limbaugh joined other right-wing politicos who likened Fluke’s testimony to women wanting to be paid to have sex. Said Limbaugh:

“She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

The next day, Limbaugh again brought up Fluke on his show, saying to Fluke and other women, “Here’s the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” (Washington Post)

Really Rush? Are you really that stupid or have the past decades all been an act? I would like to think that no one can be that stupid, but I know better, especially since you were not alone in the rush to judge the law student as sex crazed. Witness a headline on Hot Air: “Georgetown co-ed: Please pay for us to have sex … We’re going broke buying birth control.” In this particular post, Tina Korbe states the following:

Craig Bannister at CNSNews.com did the math — and discovered that these co-eds, assuming they’re using the cheapest possible contraception, must be having sex about three times a day every day to incur that kind of expense. What Fluke is arguing, then, is that her fellow law students have a right to consequence-free sex whenever, wherever. Why, exactly, especially if it costs other people something? When I can’t pay for something, I do without it. Fortunately, in the case of contraception, women can make lifestyle choices that render it unnecessary.

Five Male Witnesses Testifying Before House Oversight Committee

Hello? Again, really? Lifestyle choices? I know two young women who began taking birth control not so they could have sex but because they had health-related issues that could be eased with contraception.

To put it plainly, this issue, which until recently was being discussed by a group of men, is about women’s health (for more on how this issue is being discussed, click here). Women, informed women, are asking that they have access under their health insurance coverage to birth control, which is still legal in this country as far as I know. These women are not asking for someone to hand them money when they have sex. These women are not suggesting that access to birth control will make it easier for them to have sex with a wild abandon and without any thought to the consequences.

Under President Obama’s compromise, the religiously affiliated institutions that do not wish to go against their principles are not being forced to do so. The compromise calls for the contraceptives to be made available directly through the health insurer. Of course, this compromise is not good enough for those who view the issue as religious rather than health-related.

“We must . . . guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.” ~ Henry W. Kendall

And as for picking people’s pockets to pay for something they don’t support, let me put this in a way that you might be better able to understand:

Viagra. Yep, I’m going there. Viagra is available under prescription coverage with almost every health plan. Viagra is taken by men to help them to get and sustain erections. I’m pretty sure that erections are used for . . . shall we say sex?

And hey, I can do math too, and unlike some people, my math is based on facts: Viagra costs between $10 and $11 per pill. Using information found on just about any site on birth control pills, I calculated that the average of cost of one month’s worth of pills would be $32.50; divide that number by 28, the number of pills in a pack, and the average cost of one birth control pill is $1.16.

Now, I pay a lot for my health insurance each month. I know that my insurance plan covers the cost of both bc pills and Viagra. This means that if I look at it in the same way as Limbaugh and his cronies, which I don’t, my pocket is being picked so that some man can get an erection and have sex.

Ewwww. But let’s continue in this vein:

If I’m helping to pay for unknown males to get erections, then by Limbaugh’s logic, these same men should make videos of their sexual escapades and make them available to everyone for viewing, just like Sandra Fluke. Personally, I have no desire to see such videos.

And further, since my health insurance prescription coverage includes my medications for health issues over which I have no control, I’m not going to complain about the people who have access to Viagra any more than I’m going to complain about women having access to birth control.

As Jon Stewart points out in the video below, we all pay for things we don’t support. Our taxes are used for all kinds of things that we might find abhorrent. But trust me when I tell you that paying for birth control is a lot cheaper than paying for unwanted pregnancies. Paying for birth control is a lot cheaper than paying for surgeries to remove ovarian tumors. Paying for birth control is a lot cheaper than the time lost in productivity in the workplace by women who are completely incapacitated by their monthly periods.

And just remember when you accuse women of wanting special treatment: Viagra, for men only.

More later. Peace.

                   

Jon Stewart takes on Rush Limbaugh:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Related articles

• WATCH: Colbert Calls Rush Limbaugh A ‘Poster Boy For Contraception’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Who’s the Slut? (tothelionsden.wordpress.com)

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Because I Said So . . .

I Promise Never Say To My Children Some of The Bizarre Things My Mother Said To Me

“Someday you’ll have a daughter, and I hope that she’s just like you” (mom)

How many of us remember swearing when we were younger that we would not be like our parents? That we would never ever answer a questions with the completely nonsensical words “because I said so”? How many of us have used those exact words out of complete and utter exasperation only to realize two seconds later, ‘I’ve become my mother/father’? I’ll admit to doing worse. I’ve actually used the mother’s curse: I’ve said, “I can’t wait for you to grow up and have children of your own some day so that you can see what it’s like to have an ungrateful child.”

Yep. I have gone there. More than once. Even when I swore in my oh so holier than thou youthful twenties that I would never say that to my children, that I wouldn’t resort to the same tactics that my mother used. But of course, that was before . . . before my daughter went through her teens, decided to use her bedroom window as a door to the world, decided to run up $500 in long distance charges on our phone bill because we didn’t get her a cell phone, to name but a few. But that was nothing as compared to my oldest son, who really was supposed to be born to very rich parents because his sense of entitlement is beyond astounding.

However, I am told that this is not a phenomenon belonging to him alone. If all is to be believed, his entire generation is rich in its sense of entitlement and completely lacking in a sense of sexual morality. Okay. Let me stop here. I know, you will say that this is a generational thing, that each generation believes that its younger counterpart has no morals when it comes to sex. Our parents were astounded with the whole idea of “free love,” and then living together before marriage and then living together with no intentions of getting married. Admittedly, each generation breaks boundaries of the generation before.

But there are a few significant differences between the generation that grew up having sex from the 90’s on, and the biggest one, of course, is that no other generation before could literally die from having sex. You could catch some nasty diseases, but they were all curable. Herpes came along, and that one, we found out, stayed around forever, but no one died from it. It could cause birth defects if a baby delivered vaginally while the mother had an outbreak. But with AIDS, we were moving onto a new playing field.

“Babies comes from mommy’s tummies, but don’t tell anyone” (mom)

So when you gave the lectures on sex and birth control and being responsible, you also told your kids about AIDS and what it was and what it could do, and you told them that birth control was not AIDS control, and you prayed that they listened and you hoped that they would be a little less free with their love than maybe you were and that they would wait a little longer than you did.

Turns out you were wrong. The average age at which teens lose their virginity today is 15, and more young girls are shooting for 14. I’m not using the phrase “shooting for” lightly. That whole peer pressure thing is a bitch. Only about one in seven uses birth control, often because the male pressures against condom usage, and the girl is afraid that if she pressures for a condom, he will find another willing partner. From the statistics, it seems that he probably will. A new study from the Kaiser Foundation shows that more than a third of new HIV infections in the U.S. occur among young people between the ages of 13 and 29, those very people who do not believe in their own fallibility, the ones who are not using condoms religiously like their older counterparts.

May I just pause here to say, What In The Hell Is Wrong With This Picture??? If you just read the paragraph above and are thinking that those statistics only apply to a certain ethnic group or only apply to urban high schools, well I hate to burst your great big bubble of unreality, but WRONG. In one of the surveys I read, 14 percent of the 10,000 participants said that they are having sex at school (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27706917/). Something even scarier: one in five girls claimed that she wanted to be a teenage mom. Teen pregnancies already occur in about three quarter of a million girls a year. Whoa!

What a lot of these young women, (using the term loosely) do not realize about frequent sexual activity at such a young age is the risk that they are taking with their bodies and how it might affect their ability to have children later in life. Their cervixes aren’t fully formed and are at greater risk for diseases such as chlamydia. Left untreated, chlamydia can lead to cervical cancer. Pelvic Inflammatory Disease often goes undiagnosed and untreated and can also lead to infertility. Undiagnosed STDs are passed from partner to partner, and male partners are not invulnerable.

“Women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex” (mom)

But what about intimacy? What about saving yourself for that special someone? That does not even seem to come into play with this generation. Sex is truly casual, referred to as hooking up; oral sex is seen as non-sexual, which, pardon the expression, blows me away. Something that we used to save for special relationships, fiancés even, these kids perform in the gym on people they aren’t even dating.  I found the following statistics from the The Guttmacher Institute staggering, and as you know, I’m pretty liberal:

• More than 75 percent of teens have had sex by the time they are 19 years old.
• Some 25 percent of virgins over 15 have had oral sex; of those who’ve had intercourse, almost all have also engaged in oral sex
• Eleven percent have engaged in anal sex.
• Of kids under 15, about 14 percent have had sexual intercourse
• One quarter of teenagers have had at least one sexually transmitted disease
• Young people account for half of the 19 million new STD cases each year.

The problem—as far as I can determine from reading about it in article after article—is that young people who are sexually active with partner after partner, treat sex like a party favor. They don’t understand the concept of intimacy, of finding closeness with one person and how that intimacy actually changes the whole sexual experience, transforms it. In an age of entitlement, in which the man-child wants what he wants when he wants it when he wants it and sees no need to wait for it, how does society convey intimacy against a backdrop of video games, movies, and comedians in which the badass refers to women as hoes and bitches, demeans them to non-entity status? How or why should one seek intimacy with an inanimate object? Bros before hoes, right?

How does a young female with limited self-worth thrive against such a backdrop? Bros before hoes—it’s the mantra she hears, and she grows accustomed to it unless someone tells her no, that’s not how it should be. You are worth something. And you hope that she hears you, actually hears you.

No matter what our teenagers are told at home, no matter what kind of loving, respectful relationship they might see between their parents at home, how can that compete with what happens when they walk out the front door? You talk and you talk and you talk, and then you read about how camera phones allow teens to send each other explicit pictures of each other that end up on the internet, and they may have just been playing around, but never thought about the consequences of a wired in world.

Being a good role model, taking the time to have those special talks, showing respect to one another within the family unit, reinforcing treatment of women as people not objects . . . how much more can you do? It tends to make me want to crawl back under the covers and never come out again, just when I was beginning to think that it was safe out here.

Too much to think about. Peace.