The President's Speech: What Took So Long?

Needless to say, when considering the impact of President Obama’s speech supporting health care reform, the temptation to simply make fun of Joe Wilson and call it a day is strong.  After all, Rep. Wilson did manage to spout off an interesting near-paradox: His accusation that the President was lying was in and of itself a lie.  And that personally bothered me more than the act of yelling at the President.  Indeed, I think a little more yelling at public officials would help reinvigorate American politics by making it more interesting.  It wasn’t the shouting, dear reader, but the lying that bothered me.

It’s a peculiar symptom of everything wrong with our political system that Wilson’s lie managed to grow legs, despite being based strictly on right wing paranoia that has no relationship whatsoever to the actual bills being kicked around in Congress. Conservative Democrats were sadly inspired by Wilson’s outburst to find ways to make it even harder for illegal immigrants to purchase health insurance than it already is, but the good news is that as most illegal immigrants are Mexican citizens, there's a strong chance that they'll be able to access coverage through Mexico's public insurance.  Not that there was much of a reason to think that illegal immigrants are lining up to buy into an American system.  Your average undocumented worker errs on the side of avoiding authorities and officials, because they’re not exactly eager to take the chance of being turned in and deported.

But there was more to the speech than denials of inclusion of illegal immigrants and denials of those denials.  The speech was the sort of thing supporters of health care reform wish we’d heard months ago from the President.  He’s finally come around to admitting that conservative opposition has no intention of having a conversation about how to best address the health care needs of all Americans, but instead are doing everything they can do just to shut down any attempt at reform. He acknowledged that the only argument against the public option is that which holds corporate profits for insurance companies over human lives.  He acknowledged that the United States is the only country in the world as advanced as ours without universal health care.  Sure, he had to take a swipe at progressives for our unfortunate habit of being right all along, but at this point, we have come to accept the mindless denunciations that come at you for being know-it-alls.  On the whole, the speech was great.  We just needed it sooner.

Of course, the President was forced to confront the right wing lie that health care reform will somehow render the Hyde Amendment moot and return us to the era when the federal government paid for abortion.  Denials like his cause pain for those of us opposed to anti-woman discrimination in health care, because while it’s true that the right wing accusations are lies, it’s also true that the Hyde Amendment is discriminatory to the point of punishing certain people for the "crime" of being poor while female.  At the time of the speech, I was happy to note that the President felt no need to talk about the larger issue of reproductive health care.  Is it possible that anti-choicers have completely given up any hope of blocking coverage for contraception under health care reform, I thought hopefully to myself.

Not quite, it turns out.  Some people will never give up being appalled at what they see as the federal promotion of sexual activity in women through government programs to make fertility control affordable.  As Sarah Posner documented, the Christian right is trying to rally the base against health care reform by floating generic scare stories about Planned Parenthood opening auxiliary clinics in all public schools.  Of course, they dodge the accusation that they’re anti-contraception by flinging the word “abortion” around a lot, trying to create high emotions that they can use to distract people from the fact that contraception prevents abortion.  For instance, Jordan Sekulow tossed the word “abortion” around a lot to raise phony concerns about Planned Parenthood coming into schools.  Even though the claim is preposterous, it’s also interesting to note that Sekulow is either literally trying to get you to believe that health care reform means they’ll be squeezing vacuum aspiration abortions in between classes at high schools, or more likely, he’s using the fallback right wing position of using “abortion” as a catch-all phrase to describe all reproductive health care and education.  It’s true that some high schools try to work with students to improve contraception education and access, and some use Planned Parenthood to help them with this, but only in right wing la-la land is that the same thing as abortion.

The conflation of abortion and contraception in right wing hysteria-talk makes Liberty Counsel’s claim that school-based health clinics have a personal vendetta against your potential grandchildren that they’re out to “abort” even funnier. Most parents generally aren’t eager to have their high school age children start providing them grandchildren, but once you wade into the panic over health care reform, I guess visions of pregnant 15-year-old daughters move from being parental nightmares to what every parent is supposed to want.  The right wing enthusiasm for using the word “abortion” to shut down all rational thought might be an overreach in this case.  I just can’t imagine that most parents are really going to lose their minds to find out that the schools want to find ways to keep their daughters from getting pregnant in the first place.

Let’s hope the President’s speech helps further expose how the right wing protests against health care reform have become completely unmoored from reality.  Or maybe I’ve got too much confidence in my fellow Americans, since I believe most people have to react to visions of between-class abortions with respectable levels of eye rolling.

Follow Amanda Marcotte on Twitter, @amandamarcotte