Turning the Clock Back on Birth Control

Ann Gerhart in today's Kaplan Daily:

"Who says you can’t turn the clock back?

"Decades ago, near the end of the Age of Aquarius, a Republican congressman from Texas argued passionately that the federal government should pay for birth control for poor women.

"'We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political stepping stone,” said George H.W. Bush. “If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.'”

"Title X, the law he sponsored that still funds family planning for the poor, passed the House by a vote of 298 to 32. It passed the Senate unanimously. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, enthusiastically signed it.

"That was 1970.

"This is now: The issue of birth control has suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. To many observers, it seems that the clock has indeed been turned back."

Remember when conservative Republicans were sane?

Valentine's Day "Head"-line

"In birth control fight, Catholic bishops take hard stance on Viagra" -- Daily Kos. Well played.

Cartoon of the Day, Part Deux

(Click to enlarge)


(Mike Luckovich, via gocomics.com)

Quote of the Day

"They needed to be humbled, unmercifully, until the hubris was wrung out of every damn one of them. Now, a woman working a low-income service industry job under the supervision of a Catholic boss will have her access to essential health-care truncated by a discredited encyclical to which no Catholic has paid any heed since the administration of Lyndon Johnson. These bastards needed to be broken, publicly, and into a thousand pieces that were scattered to the winds. Instead, they are 'voices of conscience' again. It is to weep." -- Charles P. Pierce in Esquire.com today, referring to the right wing Catholic establishment, which is now seeking to deny all American women, regardless of their faith, access to birth control, according to the U.S. Conference of Bishops' general counsel. Now who's trying to impose their beliefs on others?

UPDATE: And where do Americans, and Catholics in particular, stand on the access to birth control issue? Check out the polling. Even pro-choice Rethugs (wait, what? - there are pro-choice Rethugs?) are warning that this would be a disastrous fight for the Rethugs to engage in. Oh well, anything for a Culture War!

Holy Hypocrisy!

The conservative Catholic hierarchy -- aided and abetted by the Rethug outrage machine -- is raging against the Obama Administration's initiative to insure that employees of Catholic universities and hospitals have access to birth control as part of their health care packages. Now we see that some Catholic universities -- including DePaul, Georgetown and Fordham -- already include birth control in their health benefit packages. This is in addition to the 28 States that also have such provisions for Catholic institutions in their States. Keep in mind that employees of Catholic institutions are of different faiths, too, not just Catholic.

One would have hoped that the various Bishops and Cardinals, morally outraged against something that 98% of Catholic women practice, would have been as proactive in halting their despicable role in shuffling pedophile priests around from parish to parish for decades. Odd how when it comes to men in the Church, different rules apply.