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Pelosi argues theology

Anti-choicers score legit point on Pelosi

Most Catholics are pro-choice

Anti-choice wankery at the DNCC

Neal Boortz calls women "broodmares"

 

This week on Reality Cast, we’ll have an interview with a clinical psychologist on how the right wing exploits paranoia and anxiety in our culture to advance their agenda. Also, more election coverage, and the Today show begrudgingly admits that men have sexual health concerns. But they’re going to laugh those concerns off, of course.

If you’ve been wondering what’s up with the Midwest Teen Sex Show, and I know you have if you have any taste at all, then you’ll be pleased to know that they’re still around and working now for Kold Cast TV. Their latest episode was on fetishes.

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You can find their new episodes at Koldcast dot TV.

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You know, there’s two ways to conduct a conversation in this country about reproductive and sexual health. There’s the grown-up way, where it’s understood that sexuality is a normal part of life and the discussion is over how to best minimize risks and maximize the benefits. Then there’s the silly, childish way, which is to stoke people’s anxieties about sex and turn the entire discussion into a big game of gotcha. Considering that now is the campaign season—dubbed by political watchers as the silly season—guess which form of discussion is dominating the airwaves?

If you guessed that it’s all silly season, all the time, pat yourself on the back. I think that a useful conversation about reproductive health could be had in this country, but right now I can’t help but think most media coverage, at least related to electoral politics, is about creating a distraction. Like Tom Brokaw interviewing Nancy Pelosi, where the whole Catholic thing comes up.

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You know, I can’t put the blame on Brokaw for how this interview went off the rails. He asked about choice, and Pelosi immediately brought up that she’s a believing Catholic. At what point, she tried to imply that the whole thing is more confusing than it is in the Catholic theology, which mean that all the anti-feminist nuts went even more nuts. Once you get into the whole religion thing, people start to think they can bait you into saying that your church’s particular dogma should be law or that you’re a hypocrite.

Instead of getting into silly season stuff like discussing theology on a political program, I suggest that Pelosi defend religious freedom. In this country, people have a right to believe what they want. And they have a right to disagree with the church they belong to. Most Catholics do. Like Pelosi, 58% of Catholics are pro-abortion rights. And like Pelosi, more than ¾ would like to see more support for contraception access.

The silly season stuff continues, with the media continuing to exploit both the horror of late term abortion and a general misogyny in order to deflect attention from the real conversations about the real issues during this election season. Witness Mike Pintek on The War Room With Quinn & Rose promoting the paranoid right wing meme about Obama and infanticide.

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Now, the women he’s slurring here are women that aborted very much wanted pregnancies because the pregnancies went wrong and had to be terminated for safety. But beyond that, think about what he’s saying here. He’s accusing women as a group of being blood-thirsty maniacs who get pregnant for the opportunity to see a dead body. Never mind that the vast majority of abortions are done too early in the pregnancy to produce anything even comparable to a human body. The point is that he thinks women as a group are inhuman monsters. That this kind of unblinking hatred for women is what is passing for political opinion in this country is frightening.

The Democratic National Convention resulted, unsurprisingly, in confrontational protests between anti-choicers and people trying to resist them. I appreciate the people who show up to resist them, but good god, watching the footage gave me a headache.

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The protest is nauseating. They have all these people kneeling by a fence, and the teenage girls are crying. I can’t think of a better symbol for the silly season than someone weeping over an imaginary person while real people die in war and from health care crisises.

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Full disclaimer: I loathe the site Ask Men as a general rule. It’s incredibly sexist, and they’re fond of running articles that presume that women are the second sex, some great incomprehensible, over-demanding other. So when I saw that the Today show interviewed two editors at Ask Men about a survey about sex and relationships that the site conducted, I was expecting something really terrible. Interestingly, the hosts on the Today show seem very disappointed to find that men and women weren’t very different after all.

But what I really liked was that not only the survey look past just sexual customs and sexual stereotypes, but they actually tackled sexual health. And so I have to offer some praise to Ask Men for this. They have a large male audience, and while they usually exploit that audience with sexist stereotypes, this time they stepped up the plate and offered a real service in raising male awareness of sexual health issues. Here’s number one.

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Wow, that segment would have been perfect to show in a media criticism class. Did you see what happened there? Mainstream media types presented with strong evidence against a common sexist stereotype, and instead of adjusting their beliefs for the new evidence, they smacked it down with all these sexist stereotypes. First, the whole notion that drinking beer is a male thing, as if women don’t like beer. Then there’s the outright denial of what the survey found. The survey found men would like a male birth control pill. And the hosts and the Ask Men editor immediately questioned the men’s honesty about that. Must preserve those stereotypes at all costs.

This next clip is kind of disturbing.

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I’m feeling offended at the idea that men simply don’t care if they make women sick. Maybe some men, but do we really have to assume that men are, as a rule, that cold-hearted and cruel? My inclination is to think that men don’t get tested for STDs as much as they should because men are socialized to think of sexual health care as something women get. After all, we have specific doctors for women’s sexual health care. If I want an STD test, I go to my gynecologist. But men don’t really have specific doctors for that region.

I’m skeptical about the claims about peeing in a cup, by the way. I checked the Mayo clinic’s website, and they still indicated that the main form of testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea was the dreaded swab inside the penis test. I hope that it’s getting easier. I doubt I have to really draw your attention to why men might be reluctant to have someone stick a cotton swab inside their penises, and that reluctance no doubt is contributing to the problem.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. Talk show radio host Neal Boortz doesn’t think that women on welfare are people, but in fact a form of domesticated animals.

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I think he’s mixing up cause and effect. Maybe women who have children are more likely to go on welfare because they a) need it and b) you can’t get welfare unless you don’t have kids. But that’s using logic, which is Boortz’s weak spot.

I’m bringing this up because Boortz is one of the few wingnuts out there who believes abortion should be legal. But he’s clearly not pro-choice, because he doesn’t think that women should have the choice to have a baby if that’s what they want. He thinks you should have to pass his test first.