Dana Stone on a recent encroachment on women’s rights in Oklahoma, the aftermath of the abstinence-only hearings, and more coverage of the march towards universal health care. Also, why you’re a twit if you worry about Rachel Maddow’s sexuality.

 

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Links in this episode:
Ecuadorian sex rights
Ecuadorian sex rights 2
Shelby Knox’s testimony
Pam Stenzel
The Global War In Your Pants
Insurance card marriages
Marc Ringel on insurance card marriages
Clinton on universal health care
John Gibson lesbian-baits

 

Transcript:

This week on Reality Cast, an update on abstinence-only
miseducation in light of the recent Congressional hearings, more on universal
health care, and an interview with Dr. Dana Stone about a recent bill in Oklahoma. Also, John Gibson can’t argue with Rachel
Maddow, so he lamely calls her a lesbian.
The thinking world responds: so what if she is?

 

Is something lost in translation with this story reported by
Keith Olbermann?

 

• insert
  sexual happiness

 

Actually, it seems much of the reason for all the hyperventilating
over the bill is not that women might have more orgasms, god forbid. According to the BBC, Vela’s aim with the
bill is to create the groundwork for women to have healthier, more responsible
sex lives. In other words, she’s trying
to create a right to reproductive justice as much as anything else. Not so
silly after all.

 

***************

 

Recently, as I’m sure you know, my home state’s beloved
comprehensive sex education activist Shelby Knox testified in front of Congress
about what a massive failure abstinence-only education is. It fails our kids on various levels, from
failing to protect their health to failing to be honest and kind and decent to
them, a failure that’s much harder to measure but just as serious.

 

Well, let’s let Shelby
talk.

 

• insert
  Shelby one

 

Abstinence-only education is based on what is best described
as a lie. They get the funding by saying
that this is about keeping kids from getting sick and then proceed to try to
encourage already sexually active students to get sick! You can’t tell me that telling kids not to
use condoms isn’t directly aimed at getting kids not to use condoms, which is a
direct road to pregnancy and disease. I
hate to accuse anyone of trying to get kids sick or pregnant to punish them for
having sex, but sometimes the evidence is just stacked that high.

 

As Shelby is about to describe, the contempt that
abstinence-only proponents have for people, well women really, who have sex
outside of marriage is such that it’s easy to believe that they want us to
suffer miserably for being so disgusting.

 

• insert
  Shelby two

 

How does someone get involved in abstinence-only
miseducation? Well, some people just
love to lie, I guess. Some people have
massive sex-phobias that should be a cause for concern, but instead get all
this social acceptance because they have a place in religious dogma. Misanthropy seems to be a common thread. Abstinence-only miseducators seem to get off on
humiliating and hurting teenagers in their classrooms. You have the ones who like wagging a dirty
toothbrush at a girl and impy she’s a dirty slut. And you have the ones who like to rip tape
off kids or dangle bricks over their genitals.
And then they give them information that will get them pregnant or an
STD. All under the guise of caring!

 

If you want to be chilled to the bone, check out a video of
abstinence-only educator Pam Stenzel. Sadistic lying is raised to an art form
with this woman, and when she says that she’s flown around the world spreading
her lies, I felt sick.

 

• insert
  pam stenzel one

 

No one has been in a monogamous relationship and not
paid. No one has gone on a date and not
paid. Even if your date pays for dinner,
you probably paid for the nice clothes and make-up you wore. People who believe in the abstinence-only
line are being set up to pay a lot. If
you believe sex makes you dirty, a normal breaking up and moving on process is
probably 100 times worse.

 

And then she encourages teenage girls to have babies. No, I’m not kidding.

 

• insert
  pam stenzel two

 

This is a favorite piece of anti-choice propaganda, that
pregnancy isn’t a disease. Once again,
they replace semantics for meaning.
Evolution is a theory, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s "just a
theory". And unplanned pregnancy isn’t a
disease, but neither is a broken leg.

 

She lists off a bunch of STDs, but of course isn’t about to
tell you that you can avoid most of them through safer sex practices, and that
many of them, despite their alarming names, are probably not the stress and
misery factor that unplanned pregnancy presents. You know, you’re pregnant and you didn’t plan
to be, you have a soul-searching choice whether or not to abort ahead of
you. Most people don’t soul search about
whether or not to take the penicillin.

 

She then moves onto lying to girls in order to get them
pregnant, by telling them birth control is dangerous, though of course she’s
pretending that pregnancy is a walk in the park.

 

But hey, the pro-choice side is getting our narrative into
the mainstream media. And "The Daily
Show", which covered what they called "The Global War In Your Pants".

 

• insert
  jon stewart one
• insert
  jon stewart two

 

I feel better already.

 

****************

 

• insert
  interview

 

****************

Usually in the intersection of the politics of sexuality and
the politics of health care, we like to talk about universal health coverage
and access to reproductive health care.
Especially when you come from a reproductive justice perspective, as I
like to think I do, the question of coverage is central. But there’s other places the issues
intersect, as a recent story in the L.A. Times demonstrated. According to a
survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 7% of Americans admitted that
someone in their household married last year to obtain health insurance.

 

It’s probably not as severe an issue as it sounds—I’m sure
most of the couples marrying for insurance are in love. But still, it’s a sign of the times, as this
recent podcast by Dr. Marc Ringel gets at.

 

• insert
  marc ringel

 

Obviously, it’s a problem that people are making decisions
about marriage and work based around health care, which is limiting. I do worry
that this trend will make conservatives less likely to embrace universal health
care, if they think it’s a way to strongarm the unwilling into marriage.

 

Recently, Hillary Clinton submitted to a sit-down interview
with Bill O’Reilly, and he tried to claim universal health care would bankrupt
the country. I liked her reply, so I
thought I’d share it with you.

 

• insert
  Clinton
  health care

 

Working in reproductive rights, it’s really clear how
universal health care would save money over the long run. I can’t see a more straightforward version of
how a penny of prevention spent on contraception and condoms prevents a hefty
bill of cure for STDs and unplanned pregnancy.
Why that kind of common sense is lacking in the debate is beyond me.

 

***********

 

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. Rachel Maddow has been all over the TV,
kicking butt and taking names and gaining fans.
It was just a matter of time before desperate wingnuts resorted to
irrelevant attacks on her based on sexual orientation. John Gibson of Fox News went there. First he played a clip of Maddow talking, and
instead of addressing what she actually said, he did this.

 

• insert
  gisbon attack
• insert
  Gibson attack 2

 

I’m sure Gibson thinks that we should all listen to what he
has to say by virtue of what he does in bed with who.