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On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Jessica Hopper about her book "The Girls Guide To Rocking". Also, more coverage of the escalating lies about health care reform, and what's with the new TV show "Defying Gravity" and abortion?
Leave it to Stephen Colbert to leave me in stitches in a segment about a Virginia high school teenager who got busted under a zero tolerance policy for the most absurd reason.
- baby poofies *
She was busted for taking her pill at lunch, which is what you're supposed to do. The school claimed she had possession of a controlled substance and tried to expel her. They actually get a representative from the school board to say the pill is as bad as heroin.
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Last week, I covered the way that the euthanasia lie is being trotted out in an attempt to shut down health care reform. But don't let that fool you into thinking that the taxpayer-funded abortion lie is going away any time soon. For instance, Mike Huckabee is all over Fox News telling people that if we get health care reform, there will be coverage for elective abortion paid for with tax dollars. This is a complete falsehood.
- abortion 1 *
There's so many layers of dishonesty in that statement. First of all, anyone who supports the war in Iraq, as Huckabee does, supports using tax money to kill. You don't even get away with that hedge about how the only life you think is sacred is unborn, since I guarantee that the war has taken the lives of some fetuses, as well as the women surrounding them, not that we can get Huckabee to care about that. Second of all, Huckabee carried out the death penalty more than any other Arkansas governor. He not only supports using tax money to kill, he's a cheerleader for it.
But Huckabee's whole schtick during the campaign was about how he was conservative, but he wasn't a monster. He was the real compassionate conservative. Socially conservative, of course, but not against all forms of assistance to the needy. If that's so, then how come he's lying about abortion funding in a direct bid to maximize the number of Americans without health insurance? How come Mr. Compassion is not on the "kill health care reform" bandwagon? Could it be that his compassionate conservative face was simply a façade?
- abortion 2 *
Shows you how shallow the term "pro-life" is. Huckabee would shoot down a bill that would save, at bare minimum, the 18,000 real people Americans that die each year straight up from lack of health insurance. And that's not including all the people that die that wouldn't have to if they had more lifelong health care access. The lives of real people don't count one bit in Huckabee's world. Just the lives of potential people, and then only if they can be used to punish fornicators and oppress women.
Of course, he's lying. The reason not to include the language is that the Hyde Amendment already bans using federal money to pay for abortion. The amendment was a direct attempt to force private insurers not to cover abortion. And, knowing the wingnuts, there was probably an outside hope they could read the amendment in such a way as to make the birth control pill impossible to get or to shut down Planned Parenthood.
Unfortunately, the lies about abortion and euthanasia have grown to the point where it's doing its job, and wasting the time of the serious people out there who are trying to deal with reality. Such as Senator Claire MacSkill, who called a press conference and had to spend a bunch of time debunking the nonsense.
- abortion 3 *
The problem with these lies is that they're easy to understand. Most of the health care debate is complicated, with a lot of policy wonking about stuff most people don't really understand. But they understand women trying to have sex without punishment, and they understand the concept of euthanasia, since most people have put down a family pet at some point. And so they latch onto these lies, because even though they're lies, they're lies that are easy to understand. And being simple and loud is the hand that right wingers know how to play, so they are going to play it. And play it. And play it. No matter how dishonest it is. It's like playing poker with cheaters, except the stakes are the lives and health of ordinary Americans.
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Insert interview
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Thanks to Jessica Valenti for finding, clipping, and posting on ABC's new sci-fi show Defying Gravity. On the show, which is set in 2052, abortion is outlawed, as are pregnancy tests. Of course, the idea that you could render women helpless against pregnancy without a drugstore test is laughable, but to the show's credit, they do establish in the first two episodes that women are smart enough to know what pregnancy symptoms are.
- gravity 1 *
Okay, so far, I'm actually on board with this. It's all very dark and serious, but the law on this show reflects how much laws trying to control women's fertility rest on the assumption that women are incredibly stupid. As if women wouldn't figure out how to tell if you're pregnant without pregnancy tests! They didn't have them throughout most of history, and yet women still managed to figure out that they were pregnant and get abortions early on in the pregnancy. But after that, I have to agree with Jessica's assessment that the show falls into the trap of moralizing about the evils of women who want to control their own bodies after they've had sex.
For one thing, they have the requisite smart-mouthed feminist character who is naturally amoral because she's so smart. Or I think that's the point of this bit of dialogue.
- gravity 2 *
Or maybe I'm wrong, and the show will come around to showing that someone who mistakes a 10-celled embryo for a child is the one who is actually short on morality. I can't think of anything more dehumanizing that valuing a living, breathing child the same as you do something with fewer cells than you lose when you pick off a hangnail. That's an insult to children. It's weird that people who call themselves "pro-life" have so little regard for child life that they'd suggest that it's no more than that of a 10-celled embryo.
Anyway, I hope the show realizes how ridiculous this character is being, and that the scientist is obviously in the right. But I'm not holding my breath. Why not? Because the character in the first clip who was scared that she's pregnant is, as you can imagine, pregnant. And because abortion is illegal in this world, she has to get an illegal abortion. And she's punished---I kid you not---by hearing a crying baby all over the place. She's haunted by a crying baby.
- gravity 3 *
- gravity 4 *
I can imagine every wingnut watching will sagely nod about how this is what happens to sexually active women who are seen as suppressing their maternal side. It certainly plays that way in the clips. But I found myself baffled. Since when is a crying baby an argument for the evils of fertility management? Personally, every time I'm out in public and some baby starts crying his head off and his mother is distressed and trying to shut him up, I both feel bad for her and check to make sure I remembered to take my birth control pills.
I'm not crazy, either. There was a clever German condom ad bouncing around the internet a couple years ago that went with this same idea. A man is shopping with his son, and he denies the small boy a bag of candies. This is what results.
- gravity 5 *
Tagline: Use condoms. But leave it to a bunch of pious, preachy, sexphobic Americans to think that the endlessly crying baby thing is supposed to make you sad that you don't have one.
In interest of fairness to the writers of "Defying Gravity", I'll be putting a link up on the show notes page of head writer James Parriott's reply to Jessica. He claims he wanted to make a pro-choice statement by showing that abortion isn't easy, and that anti-choicers who think it is are in the wrong. Well, it's not easy for a lot of women, but it's also not something that causes crying baby hallucinations. And frankly, sci-fi dystopia's really don't work like that. You're supposed to make the forbidden thing seem like it's important and necessary for people's lives. It's not like the characters in Fahrenheit 451 were like, "Well, we finally got to read some books, and frankly, we found it as distasteful as the government said it was."
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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, why lie a little when you can lie a lot edition. I'm sure you've heard about Sarah Palin's infamous death panels speech, but if not, I have a clip of the host of the Young Turks reading it.
- death panels *
Obviously, that's a level 10 lie. Up until she spouted this, most conservatives were trying to tie their lies to some kernel of truth in order to get away with it, but Palin realized that you can just make stuff up and that will always sound even scarier. And I am scared. But not of death panels, since that's just nonsense.
