There was recently a study that looked at the early childhood intelligent quotients and political views later in life that found a correlation between low i.q.'s and racism, bigotry and socially conservative views later in life. The Republican party is doing everything they can to show that this study was dead on.
For months now, I have been planning a post entitled "Why I Am Not Voting For Barack Obama, And Why You Shouldn't Either." I was prepared for all of the attacks from my liberal friends who have already been critical of me for my criticisms of the President's continual idiotic decision making, especially when it comes to his handling of the economy and the banking sector. There are plenty of reasons not to vote for a second term for Obama -- his continuing bailout of the banks, his coddling of Wall Street, his failure to pass any kind of immigration reform resulting in the highest number of deportations of any President, his awful deal on the debt ceiling, the overwhelming secrecy of his administration, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, NDAA, on and on and on and on...
So, faced with a President who is and has always been weak in the polls, an economy that is floundering, a continuing unacceptably high number of unemployed and underemployed, what do the Republicans do? They declare war on 52% of the population! The Republicans for some reason have decided that it is a winning strategy to attack women's rights.
We're all used to the Republican platform including the so-called "right to life" plank (it seems Republicans are all in favor of making sure that life is preserved and nurtured as long as it is in utero). Every four years they talk about passing constitutional amendments to ban abortion, and in the interim we have states passing increasingly inane laws that treat pregnant women as if they are too stupid to make decisions for themselves and are therefore forced to have the government intervene on their behalf to saddle them with even more guilt than they would normally have when making such a monumental decision.
But this year, they have gone above and beyond their usual primary season insanity and have crossed straight over into a reality that only seems to exist in the minds of Rick Santorum and those who have spent their adult lives confined to some sort of cult compound (or the Vatican). The four remaining candidates for the Republican nomination are falling all over themselves to find out who can most restrict the lives of American women. Rick Santorum leads the pack with the following arguments: women who have been impregnated as the result of a rape should make the best out of a bad situation and not be allowed to have an abortion (rape is a bad situation?); women should not serve in combat because their emotions may get in the way; abortion causes breast cancer; women should stay at home and are forced by society to enter the workplace (and then blamed his wife for that one). But the others have just been clawing all over themselves to keep up.
This was sent into overdrive when the Obama administration ruled that Catholic hospitals and universities (but not churches or other strictly religious employers) would not be allowed to restrict their employees access to free birth control as part of their employee health insurance. This piggy-backed on the earlier decision of the Obama administration that health insurance policies would have to cover birth control at no cost, something health insurers are more than happy to do since the cost of birth control is less than the cost of abortion and a whole lot less than the cost of pregnancy and birth.
Suddenly the entire party was howling at the top of their lungs. None of the candidates could get to the microphone fast enough to declare this move as an outright attack on the Catholic Church and freedom of religion. Huh? The conservatives were foaming at the mouth over the inherent evil of -- birth control? Now of course, nobody was saying that the Catholic Church had to hand out birth control or that Catholic women had to use birth control (something that 98% of them already do), nobody was telling Catholic doctors that they had to prescribe birth control against their own conscience (although would you go to a doctor who wouldn't prescribe it?), nobody was telling Catholic professors that they had to teach that birth control was morally acceptable or a good thing. They were simply stating that if an employee is covered under their employee health insurance that the Catholic hospital or university could not prevent them from obtaining birth control under their plan.
The outcry over this (or at least the outcry reported by the MSM) forced the administration to take a second look at this and they bent a little. What they did, in a move that was pure political genius, is that they said to the Catholic employers, ok, we are not going to mandate that you pay for the coverage for birth control, what we are going to do is say that the insurer must make it available directly to the employee at no cost. So, religious freedom conundrum avoided, everyone goes home happy, right? Of course not!!!!!
As I said at the time, this move of the Obama administration was going to show once and for all that this issue had absolutely nothing to do with religious freedom, this had to do with women's access to contraception specifically, and women's health and women's rights in general. It amazes me that we are having this argument in 2012. Birth control is simply not controversial for a vast, vast majority of Americans. But there have always been the crazies -- the religious zealots who have never really been comfortable with women having an equal place in society with men, who saw a woman's ability to control if and when she has a child as a threat to their world view. These are the folks that push the failed policies of abstinence only sex education, as if teenagers only thought about having sex because they were told they could in school.
What's even more troubling about these arguments is that, at least in the myopic world of the Republican primaries, they seem to be working. The latest polls show that Rick Santorum is in a dead heat nationally with Mitt Romney. Conservatives are pressuring Newt Gingrich to get out of the race as they seem to be coalescing behind Santorum as the right wing candidate, the new Not-Mitt who will challenge the preppy New England Mormon for the nomination. So, don't expect these arguments to go away anytime soon. In fact as the race grinds on, expect to hear even more crazy statements such as the one from some nitwit woman on Fox News today who said that women in the Army should expect to get raped (I can't make this shit up). We have already seen that the Republicans are already conflating birth control with abortion and they will continue to get further and further off the range as we go along.
What amazes me about this is how it is how much these arguments are sure fire losers. The only thing that the Republicans are doing is scaring the living hell out of everyone who doesn't wear prairie dresses and refuse to cut their hair. Continuing along this road does nothing but assure Barack Obama of re-election and they apparently can't see that this is the case.
So where does this leave us? In a nation whose economy is a house of cards with its central bank sitting on an almost unfathomable amount of toxic debts previously owned by criminal enterprise banking establishments, whose middle class is eroding away to the point of almost non-existence, whose unemployment is still unacceptably high and those who are finding work are finding it at a much less desirable wage and working conditions, whose labor force is having their rights annihilated and their pensions stolen, whose safety net is being eaten away and the futures of our youth being gambled in international casinos of finance, we will again be told that the most important issues facing us are gays, guns and remarkably uppity women.
So, I haven't written that column about why I'm not voting for Barack Obama. And I have gone from looking for anyone to vote for instead of Barack Obama, to seriously considering the possibility that I may have no choice other than to vote for him. This is the first Presidential election in which I will vote as a father. Do I really want to do anything to endanger my daughter's right to live equally in a society with men, to make her own decisions and chase her own opportunities free from the shackles of the past that have kept women subservient to men? Right now, that's what the Republicans are making this election about. And I can tell them the answer to that question is a resounding NO.
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