Paying For Sex

For the past few weeks I've been attempting to ignore a long discussion in our Capital, mostly for the same reason that I've ignored a few political issues lately:  its goddamn depressing.  So right now in the Congress and around the country we've been back to debating about abortion and birth control and sexual freedom, issues that some people might have thought were settled back in the 1970s.  Like really, abortion again?  Didn't Roe v. Wade solve this shit?  Then you got candidates like Rick Santorum who honestly are out there standing in opposition to the idea of Sexual Liberation and pretty much every modern definition of sexuality.  Its frightening how goddamn crazy the world is getting.

I mean, I try to play up some kind of visage of being a moderate, but its really hard to stand in the middle when the Right keeps getting more and more insane.  Also, I don't like abortion personally, I've had this discussion before (and honestly came off as idiot the last time, I should apologize).  Its hard business, a minefield of contradictory morality that makes it difficult to decide on what or how it should be handled*.  So out of the interests of being a moderate, I'll give Conservatives some credit here.  They aren't talking about banning abortion, they aren't talking about banning contraceptives, but they are talking about blocking the government's funding of them.  Yeah, this an Obamacare situation, so it gets very complicated.  Its specifically the part of Obamacare that demands that religious organizations have to buy Health Insurance for their employees that include birth control.

Now, that doesn't sound so bad, and I guess I came off at the Right too hard at first.  Simply blocking one part of a large bill for one special case isn't all that big or crazy, but the Conservatives don't only want that.  I haven't seen any serious interesting in compromise out of that entire wing of politics for years now, and even when Obama does give ground, they're just as unsatisfied as before.  Also, the debate right now isn't that small, its blown up pretty badly, mostly thanks to one Rush Limbaugh, who went ten steps too crazy.  He went ahead and called Sandra Fluke, a woman who wanted to testify before the Senate for this debate (making her the first, sadly), "a slut".  He went ahead and recasted the debate by ranting against Miss Fluke wanting the United States to "pay for her to have sex", casting Fluke as the prostitute and Obama as her pimp.  Oh, now we see what its really all about, don't we?

First of all, the current political debate is pretty minor, as I pointed out, but Obama actually solved this months ago.  Now religious organizations don't actually have to pay for birth control and other things they find objectionable, the insurance companies pay that money.  So now I have no idea what the religious organizations are even concerned about, they got what they wanted.  They aren't supporting birth control in any way, none of their money is going towards that.  By the way, its surprising enough that their are that many religious organizations against birth control, I have to wonder what century they're living in as well.  Honestly this is a massive blow-up, and people need to seriously chill out.

Second of all, Rush Limbaugh.  I'm not going to go ahead and say that Rush Limbaugh should be thrown off the radio for what he said.  I don't like it when people are kicked off the airways for saying one stupid thing, we shouldn't be a zero-tolerance society where one strike means you're out.  I'm speaking out of self-interest here, I say stupid shit all the time, and I know it will bite me one day.  Rush Limbaugh said a disgusting thing, that's his job, he says disgusting things.  He might have gone too far, oh well, I honestly don't know what you expected out of that asshole considering his years on radio**.  Listen to his show, its stunning how without a sense of irony, how without self-awareness, and how ludicrous he is.  He can rant for hours about how Liberals don't like what he believes, how they hate him, and then he goes into how he hates Liberals.  He hates them for the same reason they hate him!  I really wish he could just listen to himself and realize how ridiculous he comes across.  The sad thing is, people love him for being that stupid.

Even so, Rush Limbaugh isn't even the worst thing on the air right now.  Try listening to Mark Levin... Now that's a fucking piece of shit right there.  Levin is the kind of scumbag so awful that even other total scumbags have to step back and marvel how bad of a person he is.

Anyway, getting into the rhetoric of the matter, Rush Limbaugh jumped ten steps crazy, as I mentioned before.  By accusing this women of wanting the government to pay for her sex, he not only massively expanded the scope of this debate - to his party's detriment, but he also really pointed out how extreme the logic gets here.  Its not about religious organizations being able to pray in peace its about women - specifically women - paying the price for sexual promiscuity.  Birth control shouldn't be an option, says people like Rush Limbaugh, they already screwed around and sinned, so now they need to be punished with diseases and babies.  That's God's wrath that inflicts AIDS on homosexuals, not the incidence of a medical disease***.  I'm not saying that all Republicans believe this, some of them might honestly only want the issue to be about the small exceptions of Obamacare, but Rush Limbaugh is speaking to a deep well of hateful dogma.  The same kind of dogma, which as I've mentioned before, belongs more rightfully in extremist Muslim terrorist groups than in the United States of America.

There's an entire galaxy of anti-birth control measures out there.  Its an endless battle, on a million fronts over this issue.  If the Conservative "Christians" (and I use that term liberally) can find a place to stand against sexual liberation, they're going to do it.  Remember that HPV vaccine?  There was a huge flare up over it because its a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease.  Then there's the battles over sex ed in schools, trying to force abstinence as the only option.  Virginia wants an ultrasound before abortions for no particular reason.  Then there's the morning-after pill.  Planned parenthood is attacked for being an abortion factory, as if it doesn't provide any other service - wrongly.  Its endless.  Its fucking endless.  After a while you get tired of these people and their constant never ending stream of dissatisfaction and hatred for modern society.

So anyway, let me finally answer Rush Limbaugh's logic face-on.  Does society have an interest in paying for birth control?  Is there an advantage there?  First of all, no matter what we do, no matter what restrictions we put in place, people are going to have sex outside of marriage.  Its going to happen, I've made this clear before.  And in most of America, that's not something that's frowned upon.  People have sex for recreation, it happens, you aren't going to end that with any law.  When you don't have birth control, what you do have is uncontrolled and wild pregnancies, often in the places least capable of supporting that extra population.  Limit options to birth control, you get mored births, specially in the poorest and least educated stratas of society.  This isn't hard to gather logically.  Part of the major problems the scourge the poorest areas of America are unwanted pregnancies, they're actually a factor in continued poverty.  Then there's STDs, which we don't want to continue spreading.  Does the United States have a vested interest to stop unwanted pregnancies, to limit STDs?  YES IT DOES.

That's what the United States government is for, to serve our society.  Funding birth control serves society.  The Religious Right can rant and rave about how they hate this and hate that, but I don't see them offering any solution to making society better.  They can actively deny human nature, blindly follow St. Augustine and despite sexual desire, and watch as our vices go mad.  Birth control does what they cannot, it controls the negative impacts of sex.  Obama and democrats offer a practical solution to modern problems, the Right is fighting Medieval battles.

What century is it?

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* My current position is:  the government has no right at all to regulate or interfere with abortions, the most they can do is demand they are performed by qualified medical professionals.  As for the morality, I don't like them, I really wouldn't advise on somebody having them, but I'm not going to tell anybody what to do.  Regular morality   I'm waiting for science to come around and make abortions unnecessary.  Instead of killing the unwanted fetus, I'd much rather they be placed in some sort of artificial incubator to either be donated to another parent or perhaps even mature outside the womb.  That way no organism will be harmed.  Nobody has to carry an unwanted baby, and no fetus has to die because of its unfortunate situation.  Still, abortions are necessary sometimes, they're an important step for the equality of the sexes, and you can't flat ban them without being... a lunatic.  You can't just say 100% of time it HAS to be exactly this way, that's madness, ignoring all the possible situations that can occur.  Rick Santorum is a lunatic, by the way.

** Almost desperate to see how far he could go, Limbaugh also demanded that Miss Fluke film her sexual activities for him to watch, since he's the one paying after all.  I'll give you a minute to sit and think about that one there.  Jesus Christ, huh?

*** This also means, by logical extension of a hateful version of Calvinist predestination, that if God gave AIDS to gay people for being gay, he also gave it to Africans for being... Black?  Ouch.  God is a dick.