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Links in this episode:
NPR on abortion and health care reform
Rock For Life doesn't quite rock
Todd Tiahrt gets a little too enthused
On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be talking with Dana Goldstein about the role of abortion in the health care debates, and another segment looking at NPR's coverage of the issue. Also, anti-sex rock music is as bad as you'd imagine it could be.
At the current rate we're going, we're going to lose 100% of the moral scolds in Congress before the 2010 elections. The latest victim of the "do as I say, not as I do" school is Mississippi Congressman Chip Pickering.
- pickering *
Watch the whole clip from Rachel Maddow. She also covers how The Family, a secretive religious group in D.C., has links to all these scandalous affairs.
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Just in case you were hoping that the need for health care reform is so great that anti-choicers would have the good taste to lay back and not make the issue all about their strong need to find every way possible to squash a woman's right to control her own fertility, well, I hate to squash your hopes. NPR had a report on the way that anti-choice members of Congress are trying to leverage health care reform to make sure that women who need abortion can't get insurance coverage for it.
- reform 1 *
The whole situation is confusing, but from what I can tell, what an amendment like this could do is actually take coverage away from women who already receive insurance coverage for abortion. Right now, insurance companies have a right to cover abortion if they want, and it's actually not all that uncommon to cover it. But if the government starts subsidizing the purchase of private insurance, then women who receive those subsidies won't, under this amendment, be allowed to buy insurance that offers abortion coverage.
There's a real irony here, in that opponents to health care reform are turning to their base and telling them to be afraid because health care reform means that the government will dictate what kind of care you can get. But the very same people are the ones most aggressively trying to use health care reform to restrict access to health care, if it's abortion care. This hypocrisy doesn't, as you can imagine, matter much to conservatives.
The whine is that tax dollars shouldn't fund abortion services in any way, shape, or form. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had a great retort to that nonsense.
- reform 2 *
Senator Whitehouse, don't give them any ideas. You probably think there's a limit to the creative ways anti-choicers will seek to curtail the freedom of women that have been having unauthorized sexual intercourse, but there's not. For all we know, they'd probably also be interested in writing legislation forbidding women who have abortions to breath the same air as everyone else.
As much as pro-choicers would love it if women's reproductive health care was a mandatory part of health care reform, we'll be lucky if some of it like cancer screening, HPV vaccinations, and contraception are covered. All these sorts of things are easy enough to use to provoke anger and fear over female sexuality, and use that to bully this coverage out of the bill. But while mandating abortion coverage is the right thing to do, it's also about as likely as Rush Limbaugh growing a heart.
This hasn't stopped anti-choice nuts from being paranoid, though. For some reason, NPR allows Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life lie about the issue.
- reform 3 *
I can't honestly think of a better example of how conservatives exploit people's fears of sexuality and their easy to manipulate emotions about abortion to garner support for other conservative agenda items that openly hurt their workaday supporters. I have little doubt that most of the everyday people who call themselves "pro-life" would be better off if we passed universal health care and guaranteed that they could get health care no matter how sick they get. So how do you get people to oppose a government program that could help them out substantially? Well, apparently you lie to them and tell them that they'll be paying money to girls that are out there having all these sexual adventures without you, and that will distract enough of them so that they won't see that in the end, they're the ones who will lose out if universal health care doesn't pass.
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insert interview
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Oh my god, I have to thank Heather Corinna for introducing me to a couple of anti-choice podcasts. Thank her and curse her, because as usual, I'm left with a mix of amusement at the stupidity, horror at the mean-spiritedness, and pity, because anti-choice pitches are aimed straight at lonely, desperate, mixed-up people and it's repulsive. But listening to the Rock For Life podcast, hilarity wins out, because I'm a huge music snob and Christian rock, particularly if it's aggressively promoting right wing politics, is just so relentlessly awful. I mean, it's obvious why the Christian right has developed oxymoronic terms like "Rock For Life", which is right wing code for "Rock Against Sexual Liberation". It's the same reason they try to get hot women to be the spokeswomen for abstinence and they put nubile teenage girls at the front of their parades. They want you to think that being anti-sex is so very, very sexy.
But who falls for this strategy? The music fails to convey the message. Fundamentalism is about draining yourself of all the things that give rock music its spark. It's not just sex, but having a sense of humor and a willingness to play around with gender and generally to thwart the rules set by the uptight establishment. They don't call it the devil's music for nothing.
- fundie rock 1 *
From what I can tell of the lyrics, it's the same old anti-choice themes they use to lure in the sad and the lonely. Everything's a play on this existential terror and fear of death, with a not subtle implication that banning abortion will resolve your existential dilemmas. That's why anti-choicers like to both ask what would happen if you were aborted and to tell people that they'd have all these great friends if abortion wasn't legal. Illogical assertions, of course, but effective on people who probably do have a strong fear of death and/or are lonely. This song even uses imagery of breathing to play on these fears, even though fetuses, of course, do not breath.
I'm completely unshocked that fundies gravitate towards Cookie Monster metal as a genre. Most of rock history has been marked with having a sense of humor, sexiness, and a sense of playfulness with gender, from Little Richard's outrageous costumes to David Bowie's androgyny to Kurt Cobain's willingness to wear women's clothes and write songs exploring feminist themes. For men who want to rock out but have a lot of gender anxiety and misogyny, then, you see these forms of heavy metal that are all about masculinity displays that are so over the top that they're funny to outsiders, though deadly serious to the men who like this stuff.
It's completely unshocking, then, that anti-choicers would be attracted to this grim, over-serious form of cock rock.
They had some segments on the podcast, including some hysteria about this podcast, but I'm kind of more interested in the really horrible music. Here's another stinker they highlight, a band called Venia:
- fundie rock 2 *
Yeah, you heard stuff about heart beats in there. This band reminds me of every terrible wannabe hard core band I've been subjected to, and yeah, the atmosphere at a cock rock show is usually incredibly hostile to women. I can't say, however, that I've ever heard anything as nasty as this. The band seems to think that they can just scream at women until women submit. Most bands I've ever heard like this have audiences that are about 99% male, reminding me of a friend of mine's argument that if your band doesn't have any female fans, it's probably because you suck.
But it's not all bullying and terrible heavy metal. There is plenty of room for whiny and terrible would-be indie rock. Just because you don't scream like Cookie Monster doesn't mean that you can't find entire other ways to be silly and overwrought.
- fundie 3 *
Obvious? Check. Humorless? Check. Playing on people's loneliness and fears of rejection? Check. All-male? Check.
This is all very depressing, but I thought I'd end on a cheerier note. The podcast I got these songs from is called Rock For Life, which is an obvious rip-off of Rock For Choice, an effort to raise funds and awareness for abortion rights that was started in 1991 by a band that most decisively doesn't suck, which is L7. Really, they're one of my favorite all time bands, and are everything that these bands I've profiled aren't: sexy, fun, and full of humor. So here's one of their songs:
- l7 *
Oh yeah, and they're all women. Rock for Choice has had tons of shows, and the Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop, Bikini Kill, Joan Jett and Liz Phair have all played it.
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, sounds like a fantasy to me edition. Congress is trying to overturn a ban on abortion funding in the District of Columbia, over the protests of conservatives who think that being poor means that you absolutely must be punished with mandatory childbirth. Representative Todd Tiahrt got a little carried away fantasizing about women who are fiending for the pleasures of having their uteruses vacuumed out for fun on the government dime.
- Tiahrt *
He also mentioned Clarence Thomas, imbuing his comments with a racist sentiment that was more revealing of his prejudices than he realized. I love the idea of a financial incentive, by the way. Does he think that people would get other kinds of surgery for the hell of it just because it's free? Like if we started giving away free dental care, people would want their teeth drilled even if they don't have cavities, because uncomfortable medical procedures are just that fun?
