Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more