Amanda tackles “The View”, pro-choice conservatism, and abstinence-only advertising. Also, an interview with Melody Rose about abortion access issues and how William Kristol shows his true colors.

Links in this episode:

Abstinence-only ad
Americans have premarital sex
Giuliani 1989
"The View" and abortion
William Kristol and hurting children
Safe, Legal, and Unavailable?

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, I'll be interviewing Melody Rose on abortion access issues, talking about the pro-choice Republican candidate, and reviewing some problematic daytime TV offerings.

Did you know that you're a failure, almost everyone you know is a failure, that the vast majority of Americans are ineligible for success, happiness, a job, or education? According to the new ad put out by the government-run website 4 parents, this country must be a cesspool of utter failure and lifelong misery.

*insert 4 parents clip*

Well, I didn't wait for marriage to have sex and I still have a college degree and know of this happiness. In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 95% of Americans will have sex before marriage. Since this commercial indicates that sex before marriage is the first step down a certain road to hell, surely we'll hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the 95% of Americans living in unending misery right outside this window.

*insert bird chirp*

Huh. I think the ad overstates its case a teeny bit.

Don't forget, if you're between the ages of 15-30, you can push back on this disinformation and enter Rewire's sex ed video contest and have a chance to win a $3500 scholarship. Please visit Rewire dot org slash fresh focus for more details.

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I think the news media might be a little too eager right now to anoint the nominees for both parties, since the primaries are still over 100 days away. That said, I can't help but feel a sort of weird glee watching social conservatives scramble as they realize that Rudy Giuliani is pulling ahead in the polls. Who knew that the Republicans would finally find a candidate with the divisive power to split the people who want to oppress women from the people who prioritize oppressing racial minorities? And they've worked together in harmony for so long, too! I guess that's what Bush meant when he called himself a uniter and not a divider.

But panic is setting in now that Giuliani finds he can't hide from the mountains of evidence that he's not 100% wingnut, like this speech from 1989.

*insert rudy speech*

Hear hear! There's some strong, common sense for you. I still wouldn't vote for him, but it would be nice to hear someone, Democrat or Republican, making this point to a national audience. Choice isn't much of a choice if you're giving birth not because you want to but because you can't afford not to. Of course, given Giuliani's deplorable record on race relations, I suspect that his avid support for public funding of abortions for poor women might not have been borne strictly out of good intentions. It's all moot, anyway, since that video is 18 years old. My, how we've slipped backwards as a nation.

Wolf Blitzer's program had a report on social conservatives who are threatening to leave the Republicans and start a 3^rd party if Giuliani wins the nomination. I'm not sure why they're bothering to threaten—it's not like there's some grand poobah of the party that will respond to their whining and force Giuliani out of the race.

*insert rudy clip*

I LOVE Giuliani's retort. I still won't vote for him, but I have to admire the skillful framing. He's being criticized by a bunch of base voters who he correctly perceives are motivated by misogyny and homophobia. And in order to pander to their instincts, what does he say? Well basically, you need me to keep a woman from being President.

That's going to throw them for a loop. Leave the party on a symbolic strike because they aren't doing enough to oppress women and run the chance of helping elect a woman for President. Dilemmas, dilemmas. To make it worse for them, Clinton in a known entity on the choice issue—she's for it. A lot. Her NARAL rating is 100%. What to do, what to do. I suspect social conservatives will find out that they don't have a lot of choices at this point.

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*insert interview*

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Do you ever watch "The View"? I can't tell if I think it's a trainwreck or an amazing social experiment in adding some gravity to the daytime talk show genre. I think it's a bit of both, honestly. But if you do watch it, you'll know that one of the hosts is the sanctimonious and ill-informed Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who is known to parrot unthinking anti-choice nonsense all the time, and is impervious to anyone speaking reason to her. The subject of abortion came up again on a recent episode, when they were talking about Hillary Clinton's idea for baby bonds. Hasselbeck immediately started in on how they might be a good idea as a way to bribe women into giving birth instead of getting abortions, and Whoopi Goldberg jumped all over her for her ongoing assumption that women who get abortions take the decision lightly.

*insert whoopi abortion party clip*

I don't know about you, but I think nothing goes better with a party than some martinis and a vacuum aspiration. Despite getting a real mouthful from Goldberg, Hasselbeck continued to whine about all the women who get their uteruses painfully scraped out for the hell of it.

*insert elizabeth superficial*

And what evidence do you have that women have "superficial" reasons for getting abortions, whatever those might be?

*insert elizabeth personal feeling*

Better than the facts, I guess. You know, I don't think there's such thing as a superficial reason not to want to give birth against your will. Even if a woman really did just want to keep her girlish figure, I think that the idea of forcing women to give birth by government decree is too horrible to contemplate. In fact, I'd say that the people being superficial in this debate are the forced pregnancy advocates. What's more superficial than forcing pregnancy on a woman because you disapprove of her sexual habits? Or the fact that she doesn't want to have a baby just yet? Even if a woman had an abortion specifically to stay a size 6, someone who wants to punish her for it by forcing her to give birth against her will is by far the person more superficial, the person who needs to mind her own business.

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. Here's a clip of William Kristol on Fox News explaining why he's against expanding S-CHIP, a children's health insurance program, to more needy kids.

*insert kristol clip*

As you might have guessed, Kristol considers himself anti-abortion. Yet he's all for hurting children. I guess the only children that count are the ones that don't exist yet.