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Crotch Politics

I cannot understand the Republican obsession with crotch politics.

Republicans hate big government.  Right?  Sure they do!  There is nothing nastier than government intrusion into our personal and private lives, according to the Republican Catechism.  Grover Norquist, the so-called "Field Marshall of the Bush Plan", said:  "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Forget, for the moment, what a glorious place we would be without fire, police, medical, research, education, military, and military pensions, and everything else civilized societies do after they get out of the cave.  Focus just on the desire to have a smaller government, even a much smaller government.

In the last few days, when it appeared that Grover Norquist and his Tea and Republican Party supporters might get their way, if even just for a few days or weeks.  The government was on the verge of a shutdown.  Even if you take a stiff drink to help you pretend, for a moment, that the Republicans were really standing firm for budget cuts, the fact is they weren't arguing about budget cuts.  Democrats and Republicans had agreed on the size of the budget cuts:  $38. billion.  The Republican in the House were fighting to get rid of Family Planning.  Not abortions:  federal money cannot be used to fund abortions.  That battle was settled decades ago.

They were arguing about condoms, and pills, and mammograms, and cervical cancer.  Republicans are fascinated by crotches!  They want government to regulate, even to decree, what women can do with their crotches.

How can we understand this . . . this willingness to shut down the whole United States government in order to get rid of family planning!  It isn't about abortion.  Nothing lowers the abortion rate more or faster than educating young people about contraception, and how to plan for families, and how to avoid it if that is what you want.

It is a religious issue.  The issue is the role of women in families, in schools, in society.  It is a religious issue, and the Republicans are willing to use the whole damned government to control women, if they can.  They will threaten to shut down the government if that will enable them to control women's crotches!

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are a family of religions, and in those religions, almost nothing is more perverse than the attitude they have toward women.  (I say this as a former clergyman, so I know a little about those traditions.)  Consider:  Mary is said to have conceived while keeping her crotch immaculate.  Jesus never married.  All of the apostles were male.  Chastity is said to be an ideal.  Men are to be heads of their households as Jesus is the head of the church.  Women have only reluctantly, and spottily, been admitted to the priesthood.  They--not men--have been required to keep their heads covered in church.  Nuns and Muslim women used to, and some still do, cover their whole bodies, head to foot.  (Nasty, nasty stuff, women!)

Politically, we only pretend to be arguing about budgets.  When the budget issues are solved, we want government to control women's crotches.

It is humiliating.  Shameful.  Embarrassing.  Perverse.  A religious issue.

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