Newsletter:Aspirin between her legs

2012_2_17 Newsletter: Aspirin between her legs

It is hard to believe how adept the Republicans are at shooting themselves in the foot and how they can guess wrongly so often. The candidates and their allies in Congress have decided to reignite the culture wars of the 1990s, following the lead of Catholic bishops and other coreligionists who are up and arms about contraception—yes, birth control, believe it or not, something 99% of American women have used at some time in their life—and what they say is an assault on their religious freedom. 28 states are already abiding by the mandate to provide free birth control services even if they are hospitals with religious affiliation. Suddenly this has become an issue when Obama moved to extend the mandate. The dust-up has thrown grit in the eyes of conservatives everywhere, as if birth control was still a burning moral issue in America. Conservatives are saying it is the other half of the bad apple called contraception/ abortion, which is mixing apples and sour grapes. The two things are not equivalent. Birth control has been considered “family planning” for a long time and as such a morally permissible thing. Rick Santorum is especially hot on these issues as a social conservative; but I would remind people he was beaten in Pennsylvania by 18 points running on the same basic agenda. Why he thinks he can use it as wedge issue at this point amazes me. The drift of opinion is in another direction.

Foster Freiss, the wallet that is feeding Santorum’s campaign, brought the topic of contraception to a new level of gross hilarity and ridiculousness when he dumbfounded Andrea Mitchell yesterday by saying birth control in his day was a woman “putting an aspirin between her knees.” I happened to see him say that and I don’t recall ever seeing a veteran journalist like Mitchell be both embarrassed by a guest on her program and absolutely flabbergasted he would say something as offensive as that on national television, which he later excused as a joke, which is a common tactic with airheads on the right.

But the right doesn’t pay much attention to what isn’t on FOX NEWS and talked about by Rush and his progeny on talk radio. They are too busy looking in the mirror of the own making to put their wet finger in the wind to see how the other half might feel about things. Santorum, the bishops and the rest of the foaming-at-the-mouth coreligionists still believe that birth control and abortion and same sex marriages constitute a wedge issue the GOP can win on. I got news for them. Those things were indeed a wedge issue for the right three decades ago, but they aren’t any longer; indeed, all indicators show that the reverse is true; they will be a wedge issue for the left, women, the young and independents. Plus many Catholics don’t follow what their bishops recommend. There is a telling generation gap among Catholics. Many go their own way these days. Every poll worth its salt says the drift nowadays is in a live-and-let-live direction. Read and weep you folks on the right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The dust-up in the House yesterday was a revelation to all with the eyes to see just how blind and insular and exclusionary the Republicans are these days. They just don’t get it. Their panel to investigate contraception was five clergymen, without a woman in sight, not even a nun. The photo of these five grim black-clad men looked like the tribunal that was going to serve at the Salem witch trials. The women in congress have seen to it this photograph has gone viral. It says so much unintentionally. They’d love to put women in their place, which is not at the table with them, to return them to second class citizenship and, if you are catholic, to bondage to a religion that is badly eroded in the Northern hemisphere and currently heading toward Africa where it hopes to get a new start. Adios and good luck. If anyone doubts these facts please look up the books of Philip Jenkins, a professor of religion at Penn State University who has be studying these trends for twenty years. In particular I would recommend The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.
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