Monday morning quarterbacking

Sorry for the light posts over the weekend. Somehow, as I've gotten old(er), I seem to have acquired myself a social life. Not quite sure how it happened, and trust me I am as shocked and awed by the fact as you are, Faithful Reader, but there it is.

Very strong post by Neil over at casa Ezra. Short summary, for those too lazy to click over; the Missouri legislature shot down an attempt to reintroduce public funding for birth control, of course generally for poor women, at the behest of pro-life groups. Money quote:

"If you hand out contraception to single women, we're saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that," Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview.

Apparently, 'promiscuity' is now defined as 'having sex.' Since, of course, it is conceivable that someone who is happily married might want to have sex. And it is possible that this person might not want to get pregnant at that time. Maybe she is sick, or young, or already exhausted from dealing with her 2 toddlers already at home. And it is possible that she might be so poor that she cannot afford birth control on her own, maybe because she took off work to spend time raising her 2 toddlers, and the hubby, well, he's a great guy but just doesn't bring home much bacon with his GED.

Now Missouri wants to assure that this woman will either be celibate or pregnant in the near future. To my mind, this means that their definition of 'promiscuity' is equivalent to 'having sex.' Now I'm not Andrew Sullivan (I don't even play him on TV!) so I am not going to throw a hissy fit here about the Christianists, and the danger of their dominance over American public discourse. Although that is, mostly, true. To me, it's simply a demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of much of the pro-life movement, in that birth control helps prevent abortions from happening, but the 'conservatives' would rather stick their fingers in their ears and sing 'la la la la laaaa' and declare that birth control encourages people to have sex (because, you know, before birth control people almost never had sex!), and sex is bad unless it's for the cause of making more babies, hence birth control is bad!

I'll leave with words from Neil:

For all their lofty rhetoric, they're trying to create a world where being a sexually active single woman is punished by forced childbirth, or by cancer. There may be more destructive people in American politics, but there are none I hate more.