Happy Halloween! In honor of the holiday, Reality Cast will take a long, hard look at what scares the right wing and keeps them up at night. Also, Jaclyn Friedman helps women get what they really, really want.

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Beckel claims high school girls look like “hookers”

Oh my god, a mother at Occupy Wall St.!

Jim DeMint tries to ban online discussions of abortion

Pat Buchanan is on about the white race again

Santorum on Europe’s declining birth rate

Limbaugh says you shouldn’t have kids if you can’t afford them

Imus being sexist to Megyn Kelly

This week’s podcast is coming out on Halloween, and so in honor of that, I thought I’d do a very spooky edition of Reality Cast. Well, maybe not spooky for you, dear listeners, since the real world is scary enough as is. But this will be a peek into the demons and ghouls that haunt the right wing imagination! What fears them motivates them, and we’re going to take a peek at some of the sillier things that go bump in the wingnut night. Plus, I’ll have an interview with author Jaclyn Friedman, who has been known to scare a few social conservatives in her day. So come with me on this spooky journey, and have a happy Halloween!

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To watch Fox News or turn on your local right wing talk radio means to be awash in fear. Fear of foreigners. Fear of terrorism. Fear of crime. Fear of liberals. Fear of gay people. And of course, fear of female sexuality. That’s a big one, and consumes a great deal of the 24/7 anxiety airwaves. If there’s any one theme I could really pull with ease out of the wingnut chatter machine, it’s that people, especially women and gay men, are having sex without your permission and you can’t do anything to stop them! Disobedient women are considered a far, far greater problem than, say, global warming, which they don’t believe in anyway, or even world hunger. Who can worry about hunger when young women are out there wearing what they want as if they have a right!

• scary 1 *

That’s Bob Beckel on Fox News, and he seems completely oblivious to the fact that he just implied that he spends some of his time driving around high schools to stare at teenage girls. But it’s not like Fox News is content to be horrified only at young women going ahead and doing what they want without having the talking heads at Fox sign off on it first.  Adult women, mothers with teenaged children, are also objects of horror if they up and do something scary like reject the strict model of righteous womanhood provided by Fox. It seems the New York Post discovered that one of the Occupy Wall St. protesters is, oh my god, a mother! Which was apparently against the rules they made up. The Post called her a “wayward wife”, because she is taking the time to go to this protest when she has kids at home, most of whom are teenagers but one who is 7. To most people, this isn’t really that interesting a story. It’s not like she abandoned them to the dogs. She went off to do something important while her husband looks after the kids. It happens all the time for all different reasons for different families. But the opportunity to lay some mommy guilt on her for being a disobedient female was too exciting for Fox to pass up.

• scary 2 *

Uh, that’s like a phone call on average every 4 days. That doesn’t strike me as inadequate when you’re away from home. But that’s sexism for you; a woman’s private life is considered public property to the point where some know-nothing anchors on Fox feel like they need to monitor the number of phone calls a mother makes. What next? Dictating how many minutes a woman must spend on these phone calls? Are they going to open up an investigation into the nicknames she and her husband have for each other and judge whether they’re smoochy enough? But at least they did manage not to get into a deep investigation as to how this woman styles her hair. Sadly, Scarce Media could not resist raising the alarm that a mother of four might have a non-compliant hair style.

• scary 3 *

If you were checking the calendar to verify that this is 2011, you weren’t alone. People are still ringing the “oh my god hippies are so crazy run away” alarm, and ringing it even harder if a hippie dare do something as shocking as be female. But don’t worry. Even though the easily spooked right is playing the same fear of hippies song that they were playing in the 60s, some conservatives are coming up with 21^st century ways to raise the alarm about female sexuality.

• scary 4 *

What scares me is that DeMint sits up at night worrying that someone, somewhere might be  having a conversation about abortion out of his earshot. How dare they! It’s like they believe they are free people instead of property owned and controlled by Senator DeMint.

After the interview, more coverage of things that go bump in the night in the right wing imagination.

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insert interview

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Part two in the Reality Cast overview of things that go bump in the night for paranoid right wingers. A big one that haunts the dreams of right wing nuts is the theory is that we started letting women have the right to say no to child-bearing, and they took us up on that offer and now we’re somehow facing a baby shortage.  But not just any baby storage! They don’t just want any kind of babies. What’s most important is that white women have more white babies. Pat Buchanan was playing that song loudly on Sean Hannity’s show.

• fearful 1 *

Ha ha! Man, you just can’t say unbelievably racist things without people coming out and calling you a racist these days. So unfair.

This “end of the white race” nonsense has been lingering on the fringes of the mainstream right for a long time now, not quite ever becoming a standard issue freakout embraced across the board by all conservatives, but not ever really going away, either. It’s easy to see why it’s so appealing, of course. It allows them to attack two groups of people they don’t like, racial minorities of all genders and white women as well, the former for having too many babies in their minds and the latter for not having enough. Buchanan goes on to say that the lack of white women having babies is why there’s gang problems and not enough taxpayers in cities. No, I’m not kidding; he very clearly seems to believe there’s something intrinsic to being white that makes you more likely to pay taxes, when of course the wealth divide between the races isn’t intrinsic at all, but a result of the very racism he’s promoting here. Using racism to attack a woman’s right to control her number of births; Fox News is always keeping it classy.

But Buchanan is far from the only one banging this drum. Rick Santorum alluded to it during a Republican primary debate, poking this right wing fear of declining birth rates to attack Herman Cain’s admittedly stupid tax plan.

• fearful 2 *

Of course, when you hear the mention of declining birth rates and Europe, know that this is a racist dogwhistle. Birth rates are declining all over the world, but you never hear conservatives freak out at the possibilities that Asians or Africans are having fewer babies. Just Europeans. By the way, the worldwide decline in birth rates demonstrates that tax policy doesn’t really have that much to do with it. It’s a combination of factors, with the most important being women’s right to choose when to give birth being expanded through contraception access. Since our worldwide population levels have already started to provoke resource battles in some places and environmental degradation everywhere, I fail to see why it’s considered some automatically bad thing if women have fewer kids, much less such a bad thing that taking away our basic human rights is on the table as a solution. And that’s because the enthusiasm for population growth is the effect and not the cause of their hostility to women’s rights. They start from the assumption that women’s rights should be stripped and start looking around for reasonable-sounding reasons to justify that, and happened upon population as the reason.

But let’s be clear: just because conservatives are sounding the alarm about the declining birth rate doesn’t mean that they want everyone to have more babies. Some people they really, really don’t want to have babies at all. Rush Limbaugh and a caller were on a rant about a proposed bill that would offer assistance to parents who struggle to afford diapers.

• fearful 3 *

Of course, Limbaugh is anti-choice and has supported stripping contraception subsidies. So he doesn’t think you should have kids if you’re poor, but he also doesn’t think you should get to say no to pregnancy, either. That there’s a contradiction here doesn’t seem to bother him, since the main thing is making sure that poor people are wrong no matter what they do.  What’s frustrating is that the data demonstrates that a lot of people prefer to delay child-bearing until they can better afford to raise a kid. But a lot of women can’t, because contraception is so expensive. The unintended pregnancy rate for poor women is already high and rising. No wonder there’s a problem for women affording diapers, and I’m glad someone is trying to do something about it. But that’s the sort of thing that goes up in grown-up land. In right wing land, it’s just about making you afraid, very afraid.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, talking down edition. I’ve been playing nothing but clips of right wing nuts being very, very afraid. Now it’s time for another flavor of sexism, the talking about women like they’re children or animals flavor. Here’s Don Imus talking about Fox New’s Megyn Kelly.

• imus *

In case you needed a reminder as to why Imus needed to be fired long before he was for general piggishness. He said this while praising known hysterics like Sean Hannity for being supposedly level-headed. Clearly, there’s only one thing in Imus’s mind that determines if someone is “hysterical”.