Subscribe to RealityCast:
RealityCast iTunes subscription
RealityCast RSS feed
Links in this episode:
Rachel Maddow interviews Dr. Leroy Carhart
On this episode of Reality Cast, I'll have an interview with the director of a documentary on women and first sexual experiences. Also, why are abstinence-only programs out there slamming divorce? And why are news segments about the health care crisis ignoring the health care crisis?
If you're not following Rachel Maddow's hard work making sure anti-choice violence doesn't slip off the mainstream media radar, well you should start now. Maddow covered the anti-choice protests slash targeting of Dr. Carhart, and she had him on to talk about it.
- carhart *
Operation Rescue obviously thinks that they can target doctors for violence, and egg on people who are threatening violent action against health care reform, and no one will do anything about it. I sure hope the FBI is doing more about this problem than they appear to be doing.
************
Thanks to Joe Sonka for his dogged willingness to dig into the depths of the abstinence-only world to point out the ongoing depravity funded by your tax dollars. Well, hopefully not anymore, with the new budgets, but there's always the fear that even in the absence of federal money for abstinence-only, states will still hand these charlatans cash they don't deserve to promote unhealthy ideas. (His blog post about a well-funded Ohio abstinence-only group called Operation Keepsake caught my eye, because he reprinted hilarious excerpts from a quiz called "Are you a treasure or a target?", which is just more evidence that abstinence-only proponents are happy to threaten non-compliant girls with rape. I rooted around their website and found that Operation Keepsake, like most abstinence-only programs, doesn't even try to hide that they're not about health so much as pushing a very patriarchal view of marriage. The very first video I looked at took a view I'd imagine is pretty controversial in mainstream America.
- divorce 1 *
Now, if you're out there peddling a message about how teenagers shouldn't be having sex, that's an easy sell, because the only people who tend to strongly disagree are powerless teenagers. But this whole thing about how you're supposed to stay married no matter what? Look, Americans may say they don't like divorce, but Americans actually like getting divorced. Or keeping that option available. Much harder sell.
What I want to know is how on earth does this fit into a public health campaign? I was always led to believe the official reason for abstinence-only nonsense was not that they were using government money to push religious dogma about marrying young and not divorcing ever. After all, that would be illegal. Oh no, it's supposed to be about health, except that it's obviously not.
- divorce 2 *
If they're so against divorce, why do they oppose the best prevention? If you never get married, you can't get divorced, and no one can make a mournful video about how selfish you are because you decided that divorcing your spouse might be more merciful than smothering them in their sleep.
- divorce 3 *
Well, that means that all those kids basically don't have to go through a divorce. Anyway, I'd like to know who this supposed demographer is. Interesting how he doesn't have a name or any information to verify that he's real and he's not some crank writing right wing screeds out of his basement. Probably because following up would verify one of those two things. The imperial Rome thing is the kicker. Wingnuts are obsessed with the idea that we're going down like Rome because we, like the Romans, have discovered that sex feels good. They rarely note that Rome's decline occurred not as the orgasm rate went up, but as the rate of Christian conversions went up.
But I really like the idea that we can just tell that the old way of doing marriage, where you get married young and it's hard to escape, was just automatically better, because it was older. People who think like this probably wouldn't want to roll back the clock as much as they'd think they would. They'd miss the air conditioning, for one thing, and they'd probably not love the high polio rates or the outrageous levels of car fatalities because they didn't use seat belts in the good old days. When they claim that all of human history is better than what we've got now, you have to remember they're talking about slavery, feudalism, and torturing people for religious heresy. Also, they're talking about an entire human history that had lower hygiene standards than we enjoy now. Smelly!
************
insert interview
************
I know this is going to be hard to believe right now, because it seems like it's covered in every news hour on TV, but right now, the disaster of a health care system that we've got right now is just not getting enough coverage. Part of the reason is that most of the coverage of the health care reform debate is horse race stuff---will the Republicans be able to block it, will blue dogs get concessions, will the crazies with guns showing up at town halls scare the Democrats into giving up, that sort of thing. You're not getting much in the way of coverage about what is actually in the potential bills, and what that would do for you. And nor is the mainstream media doing the work of showing why health care reform is so critically necessary.
They aren't even doing that story when they do that story. For instance, MSNBC had a short segment on the growing trend of women who treat their ob-gyns as their general practioners, and somehow the question of whether or not their health care coverage might have something to do with this was mostly dodged.
- ob gyn 1 *
You know, I don't doubt that has something to do with it. But from experience, I can tell you that it's more the result of the insurance industry. I even had a gynecologist once joke to me that they use the pill as bait to get women in for cancer screenings. Well, he wasn't really kidding. He was just telling the truth, but in a twinkly way. But basically, you have to go to an ob-gyn to get birth control and cancer screening that is the most regular health care young women get. And you really don't want to have to go through the hell of combing through the insurance paperwork to start up a relationship with another doctor, so when you get the sniffles, it's tempting just to call your ob-gyn.
Which isn't to say that they ignore the issue of insurance all together. They dedicate one entire sentence to it.
- ob gyn 2 *
Of course, what goes unmentioned is how many women don't even have the luxury of a co-pay, because they're uninsured and have to pay for all this out of pocket. But either way, the co-pays are too high or you have to pay out of pocket completely, and at this point the temptation is high to stick with the doctor you know, or to have him check out that persistent cough while getting a Pap smear.
- ob gyn 3 *
Another consideration, when it comes to insurance, is concerns about whether or not they'll even pay or if they'll find some small print somewhere that says they don't have to. Most of us have no way of guessing what the insurance company is going to do in the future, so we try to manage the risk by sticking with what's worked in the past. If the insurance company has paid your ob gyn without much fuss in the past, then it seems like the easiest thing to do is stick with him. You know that he takes your insurance, too.
The real story here that's not really being explicitly addressed is that this trend points to a new for health care reform. In fact, they not only didn't explicitly address it, they basically glided right past that. I wonder if the doctor and patient they interviewed were more explicit. I'd think so, because when they mentioned the doctor talking about co-pays, they didn't quote him directly, but just paraphrased him.
**********
And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you utter and total sleaze edition. This is more from Rachel Maddow's show. She read the Operation Rescue statement on their protests targeting Dr. Carhart in an effort to shut him down.
- carhart 2 *
Except that Dr. Tiller's clinic was closed down when he was murdered, which is illegal, whether Operation Rescue believes that or not. They do take advantage of the government's allergy to pursuing domestic terrorists as they should, but I wouldn't call it legal and I certainly wouldn't call it peaceful to single out individuals who provide health care, call them murderers, and then play innocent when someone cracks and shoots them. Taking credit for shutting down a doctor who was shut down by murder certainly demonstrates that there's nothing peaceful about it.
