So, I'm angry.I'm angry about what's happening in my country. I'm angry at the undercurrents and spillages-over and misplaced righteousness of the right, the conservatives and the Christian Right and the Tea Party, and its war on women across the United States. Between H.R. 1 (House Amendment 95) which strips all funding from Planned Parenthood and other 'family planning' clinics around the country (also known as Title X), which puts millions of women in jeopardy of losing their only affordable access to HIV tests, cancer screenings, contraception (which, ironically, prevents the need for most abortions), pap smears, and basic check-ups (while simultaneously funding contraception for wild horses under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management); to the South Dakota legislature introducing a bill that would justify the killing of abortion providers; to Georgia seeking to criminalize miscarriages and impose the death penalty (!!!) on women who suffer them; to another South Dakota bill which seeks to restrict girls' and women's access to abortion further by requiring that patients to receive (Christian) "counseling," wait at least 72 hours before having the procedure, on top of convincing medical personnel that they aren't being "coerced" into having the abortion; Republicans have gone berserk. Fucking madness.
HOW IS THIS OKAY? How is it possible that in 2011 women's equality is still up for debate? Because that's what's at stake here, and that's what both the Republican lawmakers recognize and their idiot constituents don't - it's not a moral issue, it's not about prohibiting federal funds from paying for abortions, which the Hyde Amendment ALREADY does. No. This is simply small-minded men, intimidated by women's increasing independence, freedom, and choice, seeking to impose their will on half the populace to keep them down. Ultimately, the fundamental right to choose when, with whom, how many, and the spacing of children is every woman's most inherent right. Without this, ladies, our only choice is to stay abstinent, which really means single. And because most women are likely to take the risk rather than to be alone, unwanted, unplanned, and unintended pregnancies will throw off, derail, and, in the BEST case scenario, postpone, women's plans for achievement, success, and power/recognition in society. Once a child or two comes, it's more difficult (in most countries, near impossible) to go back to school, to obtain a high paying job with upward mobility based on performance, and to break the glass ceiling that would finally allow women equal status in this country. And that day is precisely what Republicans are fighting so hard for. Once women have the ultimate freedom and ability to decide their reproductive fate, they are destined to reach equality. Many men, in this country and elsewhere, don't want that.
What's so frustrating and so painful for those of us who realize our rights are being taken away by those elected to 'lead' us and represent our interests, is that they've accumulated so many women supporters! Who ARE these self-hating women who vote to strip rights from themselves and from their fellow women? Show yourselves! This isn't an issue of your tax dollars paying for abortion, as I've heard countless conservatives use as justification to explain the rampant sexism of the House's leadership (namely, that limp dick Boehner, but also Mike Pence from Indiana, whose 'wisdom' produced this atrocity of an amendment). The IDIOCY! You KNOW the Hyde Amendment prevents federal money from funding abortion. So, what again is your problem? Ohhh, oh, you don't want your tax dollars going to pay for someone else's 'mistake.' You get birth control cheaply (because you're lucky enough NOT to be one of the over 60 million Americans who lack health insurance in this country, the richest and most prosperous nation in all of human history) so you don't understand why others don't just use it, right? But your tax dollars go to pay for abstinence education, do they not? The kind that teaches children and adolescents, not ways to prevent pregnancy when they inevitably have sex before marriage. Nah, that'd be too practical. Instead, my atheist tax dollars go to teaching children that God tells them not to have sex before marriage, and thus, they shouldn't. And wa la! No unintended pregnancies, no need for abortion, right? Problem solved?
The outright ludicrousness of this thinking has been proven by the (predictable) rapid increase in teen pregnancy among the generation whose schools supported abstinence only education. Right, but I digress.
The conservatives' two-pronged (1) fiscal responsibility and (2) "not with my tax dollars" argument fails on both accounts. First, for every $1 that goes to Title X funding, the US government saves $4 down the road, in decreased medical costs, decreased costs to social programs (used by women who are forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to full term), and other cost-savings. So, hypothetically, Republicans and other so-called 'fiscal conservatives' should be all about funding family planning clinics, right? Especially because no federal funds fund abortion? But no. And here's where prong two comes in. Many of the very religious conservatives are against not only federal funding for abortion (obvi) but also federal funding for birth control, and, by extension, subsidizing poor women's healthcare in any way. But you know what? My majority of my tax dollars are spent on war, two wars in particular I neither voted for nor believe in in any way; prisons, prisons before schools and educators and social programs which would prevent the need for prisons in the first place (!); subsidies to oil and agro-business (corn and soy in particular, but other GMO crops as well); and a host of other causes I am diametrically opposed to.
However, I accept it because that's the price we pay to live in a civil society. I pay taxes for the privilege of living in a society in which I generally feel safe from civil war, and coups-d'etat, military dictatorship; which provides cops, streets to drive on, and free education through high school. And this means paying for a lot of things I hate. And that is what these misogynistic pricks don't understand about the way life works. You don't get to pick and choose what your tax dollars are spent on. Sorry! That's why we elect representatives that generally protect our interests. However, when they do not, as in this case, and when they aim their animus and misunderstanding and discrimination against a protected and vulnerable class, such as women, we the people are fully empowered to protest, sue, and otherwise prevent them from doing such a thing.
In the wise words of Justice Kennedy, any policy which has the "peculiar property of imposing a broad and undifferentiated disability on a single named group, [is] an exceptional and...invalid form of legislation." Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 632 (1996). Common sense, when applied to the legislation under consideration across state legislatures and even on the federal level, leads any thinking person to this conclusion. However, it never hurts to have a little precedent on your side.
