Downward Course; Full Speed Ahead

Billboard in transition. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
John Vachon, 1939
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

Thanks to "the party from another planet," the election continues to be about slut-shaming. Because, as Steerpike says—

Medical decisions, including birth control, abortion and sterilization, are deeply personal issues, and should be confidentially decided between a woman, her doctor, her husband, her God, her clergyman, her family, her Facebook friends, her co-workers, her supervisor, her boss’s boss and his wife, the board of directors, shareholders, their clergymen, and of course her insurance company and their shareholders, clergy and various advisors, the Republican Party, knowledgeable pundits, TV commentators and bloggers as well as their readers, viewers, Twitter-followers and their clergy...

But we sure as hell don't want some government bureaucrat interfering!

Once upon a time, this was simply good public health policy—

New Hampshire has required contraceptive coverage in all prescription drug plans since 2000. The law was passed by a Republican Legislature and signed by a Democratic governor. Nobody at the time, it seems, saw the policy as a blow against religious liberty.

Just as in bygone times, fundamentalist Protestants took no stance on abortion, due to an even more bygone stance of staying clear of politics.

During this particular bit of heightened right-wing insanity, came the sudden departure of "the Joseph McCarthy of the digital age."

McCarthyesque he was, in the pleasure he took in destroying the careers of people better than himself, and in celebrating the death of an object of his hatred.

If the careers of his acolytes fail, as TBogg predicts, the backers will have no shortage of new Breitbarts to present to a receptive media.

And time rushes on: this Virginia story (on alicublog, for example), is already a couple of weeks old. And montag's comment on the alicublog thread says it all—

Ah, well, anyone not anticipating that the wingnuts would gin up the culture wars during a general election on behalf of the biggest collection of mental and moral jackdaws ever assembled just wasn't paying attention.

That women would be paying a high price in that war should not be a surprise, either. They've been prime targets of opportunity for the snipers on the right for a long, long time. Unfortunately, what has not yet sunk in for the people not paying attention is that this is just a part of a reactionary extremist desire to take the country back to the 1890s, to undo every goddamned right that ordinary working people shed blood and sweat to achieve and what has been counted by most as "progress," and that effort is being funded by the very same avaricious fatcats that owned the country and its government 120 years ago. Different names now, to be sure, but exactly the same people.

So, if the mainstream media won't call it state-sponsored rape, someone better call it that, because it's not only literally true, it's an apt metaphor for what's going on all around us.