A Sex Ed 101 curriculum for conservatives
Recent national kerfuffles over abortion and contraception access bring up many important questions: Should employers retain control over your wages and benefits after they sign them over to you? Is contraception, a service used by 99 percent of American women, really so controversial? How much state regulation should there be over women’s most private decisions? But amidst all those questions is one overarching one: Do conservatives need a crash course in sex ed?
Usually, when we think of the sex education debate, we think of junior high and high school kids putting condoms on bananas. But recent events indicate that this country needs remedial sex education for adults, specifically social conservatives who wish to hold forth on reproductive rights without seeming to know the basics regarding who has sex and how it works in 2012. With that in mind, I designed a quick curriculum for these surprisingly necessary courses.
Intercourse 101: It Takes Two to Tango. After voting for a mandatory ultrasound bill that serves no other purpose than to shame abortion patients for their sexuality, Virginia delegate David Albo complained in the legislature that he’s not getting the sex he feels entitled to from his wife. CNSNews columnist Craig Bannister shamed women on the pill for being “sex-crazed co-eds” who exhibit too much “sexual zeal” — before ending his piece by wistfully wishing he could have sex with all the sexually active women he just insulted. Rush Limbaugh, who is on his fourth marriage and is an admitted Viagra user, called Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who testified before Congress about her use of contraception, a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
In this first section of the remedial sex education course, we will discuss this sexual double standard: When having sex, men are behaving well and women behaving badly. The midterm will be an essay on the following prompt: “If women are supposed to say no to sex, whom do you propose straight men sleep with?”
Contraception 101: History as Prologue. Many conservatives appear to believe that prior to the Obama administration requiring employers to fully cover contraceptive care as part of their health plans, contraception wasn’t considered a medical service, but something more like a party item you pick up with your beer and cigarettes. Tina Korbe of Hot Air argued that supporters of the new regulation “labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.” Limbaugh argued that health insurance covering contraception means women are “paid to have sex.” The reaction on the right suggests that this is the first time in history someone has suggested that contraception care be included in general health benefits.
During this portion of the class, we will look at the history of medicalized birth control. Students will learn (in conjunction with another mandatory class, The Pill 101) that the birth control pill has always been controlled by doctors and pharmacies, and that insurance companies treat it as medical care by offering the drug with a co-pay. Special attention will be paid to the 28 states that already require contraception coverage, the existing Medicaid coverage of contraception, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision that found that contraception coverage is a normal part of women’s healthcare that should be covered by healthcare plans.
The lucrative business of Obama-bashing
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.
“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails.”
The remark set the tone for a steady stream of unbridled and often bizarre criticism from Limbaugh and like-minded radio and TV commentators, several of them working for Fox News, the network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Obama responded four days after his inauguration, telling a group of Republican congressmen they needed to break away from a mindset of confrontation.
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”
What followed should have helped the new administration to reflect on the wisdom of singling out a media critic. But it didn’t. Limbaugh promptly portrayed himself as a man of such pivotal importance that the president of the world’s only superpower needed to pay personal attention to his tartly-worded opinion.
The controversy over his ill wishes for the president caused, as he put, his ratings to go “through the roof,” a reassuring development for a man who makes $38 million a year under an eight-year contract that runs through 2016. The score of that early skirmish: Limbaugh 1, Obama 0.
I’d say that all news networks in the US are pretty horrible. They all have their agendas, biases, and official lines of reporting. I do like Reuters as it seems more objective than the others. But just as the liberal media did with Bush bashing why would it be unfair for conservative media to bash Obama. The viewership for Fox is higher, because it’s normal that when the curent president is a liberal, the liberal media won’t report objectively on him. Same is true of conservative media and Bush… The sad part is that current administration is so vocal about their dissatisfaction with Fox. It makes them look petty. Especially during present times when people are eagerly expecting results, from a president who promissed so much.
Obama, Elvis and America’s birthers
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own. – Nobody ever landed on the moon, the televised images are a hoax. John F. Kennedy was murdered in a complex plot involving the Mafia and the CIA. Elvis Presley lives. Barack Obama was born outside the United States and therefore is ineligible to be president.
All these claims stem from conspiracy theories and myths born in the U.S. and they throw a question mark over the long-held view of experts that such ideas flourish most in societies where news is controlled, access to information difficult and barriers to independent inquiry difficult to overcome.
This kind of restrictive environment applies to many Third World countries – conspiracy theories are particularly abundant in the Middle East and Africa — but not to the technologically and economically advanced United States. Yet there is a parallel universe inhabited by millions and millions of Americans immune to facts, logic and common sense.
Some of the myths are harmless, such as the notion that rock-and-roll king Elvis Presley did not die in 1977 and instead went into hiding. (The reasons vary depending on who tells the tale).
There have been thousands of supposed Elvis sightings and a 2005 book says there’s DNA evidence that he is still alive. While the Elvis-in-hiding theory appears to fading (though it is far from dead), the hoaxed moon landing continues to run long enough to prompt a Newsweek magazine article that debunked the story on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo mission to the moon in July. Perhaps not surprisingly, early skepticism about the moon landing came from the Flat Earth Society, based in California.
The Flat Earthers have their own website, unlike the latest addition to America’s wide variety of conspiracy cults, the “birthers.”
They insist that President Barrack Obama was born in Kenya and that the certificate attesting to his birth in Hawaii is a forgery. Unlike the Flat Earthers, the birthers managed to find Congressional sponsors, all Republicans, to introduce a bill meant to block non-eligible Americans from becoming president in future.
Hawaii uses two, and only two forms of authentic papers concerning someone born in Hawaii. Sorry birthers.The two are Certificate of Live Birth and Certification of Live Birth. I’ll repeat this…both are acceptable. The difference between the two is readily available, do the research if you wish. Google State of Hawaii. Go from there. There is no form called “birth certificate” in Hawaii. No one is guarding some vault somewhere, hiding a mysterious paper, saying “Barack Obama’s birth certificate”, some form that no one else in Hawaii ever got.The President’s certificate is the only documentation there is. It’s the only documentation needed. Where his mom lived, where his dad lived, where the certificate says they lived is unimportant as long as his mom, a United States citizen from Kansas, was in Hawaii at the moment of the President’s birth. She was. Endo. Fini.Right wing pundits earn their living on the backs of others. It’s a small group, hayseed in nature, and easily led around.People who cannot and will not accept a black Democrat as President are desperately grasping to a straw that leads nowhere. right wing pundits, charlatans to the core, cruelly feeds on their ignorance, their hate, and their fear of a black president. It’s their way of making a living. It’s what they do.I’m not defending the morons that buy this schlock. They are lazy beyond imagination and beneath contempt because a tiny bit of education would allow them to see the President’s documentation is adequate…indeed it’s all there is.Or….their ignorance is purposeful. It’s the last hope they have to hold on to their vision of “America the way it should be”. You can easily figure out what that means.The second possibility is more likely.
>”But to require a private employer to act against their moral conscience and provide a benefit they otherwise would not include or support is UNCONSTITUTIONAL”<
No it isn’t. You have no understanding of the constitution and the first amendment. Your “morality or religious” beliefs don’t play into it at all. We don’t govern this country by bending to the individual morality of 300 million people. Obviously if we did, society couldn’t function. Everybody could claim a moral objection to anything they don’t like.
The First Amendment reads; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercize thereof”. And it seems that your objection to everything is based upon the second (Free Ex)clause. The problem with your argument is that the sentence “congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof” makes absolutely no sense. The “Thereof” refers back to the first clause to get its meaning. Therefore, logically and grammatically, whatever counts as religion for the purpose of free exercize, must also count as religion for the purpose of establishment. The establishment clause says that Congress may make no law respecting an establishment of “religion,” while the free exercise clause says that Congress cannot prohibit the free exercise “thereof.” Again, logically, the word “thereof” must have the same content as the object to which it refers. Accordingly, what counts as “religion” for one clause must count as “religion” for the other.
Birth Control Pills are not a religion. But if you are going to use them for the purpose of free exercize, then you must logically use them for the purpose of establishment as well. The state, for example, abridges free exercise when it tells students they cannot pray during school, even if it allows them complete freedom to practice all other aspects of their faith. Similarly, the state cannot tell a church it must provide contraception coverage even if the church is otherwise left free to use its property as it wishes. The Obama Compromise deals with this. Private prayer and contraception are protected by the free exercise clause despite the fact that neither of these practices constitutes religions in and of themselves.
If prayer and contraception count as “religion” for the purposes of the free exercise clause, they must also count as “religion” for the purposes of the establishment clause. Just as the state abridges religion when it tells a student she cannot pray, so too does it establish religion when it requires prayer to be said in the schools. Just as the state abridges religion when it tells a church it must provide contraception coverage, so too does it establish religion when it makes a law that would deny contraception coverage to people based on a religious exemption to those outside the realm of the church at public expense. The state does not cross the line to establishment only when it goes to the trouble and expense of setting up a state church; it crosses that line when it sets up any religious practice that constitutes “religion” for the purposes of free exercise. To the extent that Republicans want to read the “thereof” in the free exercise clause broadly, they must also accept a broad reading of “religion” in the establishment clause. That’s basic logic. Logic isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing. It has no bias to it. You can’t ignore this fact, without illustrating yourself as an irrational putz.
The Blunt Amendment is an absurd and totally transparent attempt to undermine the Affordable Care Act. It opens a loophole that you could drive a battleship through. It gives a religious or moral exemption to anything an employer may object to. If an employer decides that prayer cures all, then he could deny any kind of health care to his employees based on a religious or moral objection. It introduces government mandated discrimination based on religious or moral objections outside the title VII exemption of the Civil Rights Act for the church. If held as valid, then logically that same argument could be used for denying a veteran a job because the employer doesn’t believe in War, and it could also introduce discrimination based on a host of other moral or religious objections.
We cannot function with 300 million people making decisions over what laws they will follow based on moral or religious objections.