Bad Shoes, Free Birth Control, and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell

Leora Tanenbaum talks about bad shoes and the women who love them. Also, looking at the impending reversal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and how the health care reform bill will start helping women prevent unintended pregnancy….eventually.

Leora Tanenbaum talks about bad shoes and the women who love them. Also, looking at the impending reversal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and how the health care reform bill will start helping women prevent unintended pregnancy….eventually.

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Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them

Rand Paul vs. immigrant mothers

78% support for gays in the military

DADT repeal moving along

Christian right goes nuts

Opposing the repeal is out of step

Free birth control?

NAE supporting contraception

Recent grads face health care gap 

Health care = slavery?

On this episode of Reality Cast, Leora Tanenbaum will be on to talk about bad shoes and the women who love them.  Also, looking at the impending reversal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and how the health care reform bill will start helping women prevent unintended pregnancy….eventually.

Rand Paul claimed he was against the Civil Rights Act not because he’s racist, oh no.  It’s because he claims that a strict reading of the Constitution and property rights meant that the act was unconstitutional, even though the courts disagreed.  So what does the strict constitutionalist Rand Paul think about native born citizens born to immigrants?

  • paul *

Since this automatic citizenship is granted by the Constitution, I’m afraid we have to say that Rand Paul’s strict reading of the Constitution seems not to include those instances where said strict reading breaks in favor of racial minorities.

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With the looming possibility of Republicans taking either the House or the Senate or possibly both in the 2010 election, Democrats have gotten a little more hustle when it comes to knocking some easy wins off the agenda and hoping that improves their showing in 2010.  And with 78% of the country supporting the right of gay people to serve openly in the military, repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is at the top of the list. 

  • dadt 1 *

Of course, it just goes to show how in thrall of a conservative minority DC is that this repeal is still a compromise bill, even with more than ¾ of the country supporting it.  The repeal won’t go in to effect until after the Pentagon has finished some review process, which sounds okay on paper but leaves me concerned that a few homophobic bureaucrats could hold the whole process hostage.  But what’s really amazing is that some politicians are also flouting the majority opinion and acting like this wildly popular repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the harbinger of the apocalypse. 

  • dadt 2 *

I think this has to just be political posturing, though.  Filibustering this would mean filibustering all defense spending, which would basically shut down the military.  I’m highly skeptical that even the most homophobic politician would let himself be the guy who shuts down the military just to make sure that gay people serving have to stay in the closet.  But these politicians are in between a rock and a hard place.  They serve a base that is both obsessed with the military and uses that obsession to shore up their own psychological issues about masculinity.  To them, the point of having a gazillion dollar super fancy military is to make them feel like they’ve got a symbolic version of the biggest you know what on the block.  Thus, letting gays in destroys the illusion for them.

Of course, for the rest of us, having a military is about national defense and oh yeah, those two wars plus change we’re fighting.  But as Keith Olbermann documented, Christian right groups are pulling out all the stops.

  • dadt 3 *

I think there’s some confusion about how HIV is spread going on.  That, or Cliff Kincaid thinks that allowing gay soldiers to come out of the closet will result in non-stop orgies of unprotected anal sex.  And let’s face it; he probably does think that. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  • dadt 4 *

That’s what we like to call wishful thinking.  It’s kind of funny, actually, how much projection is going on.  The ugly truth is that Nazi Germany agreed with the Christian right about gay people, and therefore the Nazis gathered gay people up and gassed them in the concentration camps.  Which is a little different than the claims that Hitler put together the homosexual army to destroy Europe.

Catering to these fanatics is just a bad idea, and you’re getting more and more Republicans who want to stay in the mainstream clueing in to this fact.   Former Bush advisor Matthew Dowd was on ABC’s “This Week” and talked about how his son, who is in the military, says that the support is all on the side of repealing the ban on gays in the military.

  • dadt 5 *

The only reason for anyone in either party to stall on this issue is that they’re in the thrall of a fanatical hard right minority that shouldn’t have their ear in the first place.

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insert interview

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The health care bill passed in to law, and I think at this point many people are ready to wash their hands and move on.  But just because the bill became law doesn’t mean that the ever so slow rollout of all the various provisions will proceed perfectly and smoothly.  For the time being, health care is going to be political, and not just because ever other challenger candidate this season is running on it.  It’s also because there’s various parts of the law that are going to require a lot of interpretation and handling.  Starting with birth control, as the AP reported.

  • health care 1 *

You can already hear a thousand anti-choicers trying to explain how Planned Parenthood is asking the federal government to cover women’s pill prescriptions is just a matter of Planned Parenthood trying to make more money.  They haven’t been thwarted from using the “only in it for the money” argument against Planned Parenthood because they’re a non-profit, and so I don’t imagine they’ll be stopped by the realization that Planned Parenthood is actively agitating for the government to reduce the income they make from selling contraception. 

Or maybe not, for once.  As Robin Marty at Rewire pointed out to me, this possibility that health care reform will mandate free contraception comes right as a major break could be opening up in the anti-choice movement between the hardline anti-contraception folks that dominate the movement, and the National Association of Evangelicals, who has tentatively decided that if contraception reduces the abortion rate, they’re going to swallow their antagonism towards sexually active unmarried women and begrudgingly support it.  The NAE stepping away from the hard line anti-sex message and supporting contraception access has to be a big blow to the anti-choice movement, but it could make the path towards making contraception easier to get and afford that much smoother.

To make it even harder on opponents of contraception, the amendment that could make this possible was written with contraception specifically in mind.

  • health care 2 *

The changes go into effect on September 23, and that means they’ll be rolled out into all applicable health care plans by January 1st.  At the same time, we’ll be facing another change being rolled out.  This time it’s the provision in the law that requires insurance companies to cover their policy holders’ children until those children are 26.  Previously, once you graduated college, you were out.  For even healthy young women, getting kicked off when you graduated college could be a big problem if they were some kind of prescription birth control.  Under this new law, they’ll be able to continue getting their prescriptions covered without a break.  But that benefit hasn’t kicked in yet, as NPR explained. 

  • health care 3 *

Usually, this kind of government foot-dragging wouldn’t be such a big deal, but in this case, I think there’s a good reason to be concerned. We are in the middle of a recession, and that means that jobs aren’t easy to come by for recent graduates, which means that many more of them will find themselves uninsured.  When it comes to pregnancy prevention, this is going to be a huge burden.  Already you’re seeing demand for abortions going up, and abortion funds are reporting a huge jump in the number of women asking for help.  What’s going to happen when you dump a bunch of newly uninsured women at the peak of their fertility out there? In some cases, the insurance companies are just going ahead and starting the coverage in June.  But in others, not so much.

  • health care 4 *

That’s a lot of months to wait for health insurance.  And it’s not just the people graduating now, but also anyone under 26 who will be eligible then but isn’t right now. Young people are a huge percentage of the uninsured, so when this is all finally resolved, we’ll start to see the effects on health outcomes for this group, including young women at risk for unintended pregnancy.  But it seems like we can’t even start observing the major changes until January of 2011.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, getting to see a doctor is just like slavery edition.  Or that seems to have been Glenn Beck’s point, when he said this about health care reform.

  • beck *

The public is already beginning to see how much reliable health care improves your freedom to do things like change jobs or get more education, so Beck’s trying to redefine that freedom as slavery.  Very 1984, and kind of bizarre, considering that it’s not like they’re going to get this law overturned by complaining about it on Fox News.