Valencia Robinson talks about the ACLU lawsuit against Mississippi’s HHS. Also, the Values Voters said some weird stuff, and why health care reform is a woman’s issue.

 

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TMI!

Playboy makes boys gay

We wanna watch!

92% of Iowans agree that gay marriage didn’t hurt a bit

Michelle Obama on health care reform

Domestic violence is considered a pre-existing condition

The worst states

Tom Delay gives me more nightmares

 

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing
Valencia Robinson about the religion-heavy abstinence-only program in
Mississippi and what the ACLU is doing to fight back. Also, the Values Voter
Summit is a pile of laughs, and why health care reform is a women’s issue.

 

Most of the time, I would like to applaud people who get out
there and push for more and better sex ed for young people.  But I’m afraid that this former
schoolteacher who testified about the importance of sex ed at a Texas Education
Agency hearing missed the mark and went straight into TMI territory. 

 

• tea
  speech *

 

Unfortunately, the topic that night was history curriculum.
So this woman admitted her virginity for no reason whatsoever.

 

********

 

Over last weekend, America was subjected to yet another
year’s Values Voter Summit. The values they believe in can be summed up in one
word: patriarchy.  Okay, well there
was also a huge dose of racism on the side, making the religious right’s interest
in not being seen as a racist institution seem all the more a pipe dream.  But most of their attention was on sex,
and how all these people just out doing it without permission is laying ruin to
good Christian white manhood. 

 

It’s hard to say if the Values Voter Summit was nuttier this
year than last.  It certainly seems
so, but then again, everything to do is so nutty that it’s always fresh and
surprising.  It’s hard to pick my
favorite moment, but I think this one sticks out for sheer incoherence.  This is Michael Schwartz, who is
Senator Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, talking about a supposed ex-gay friend of
his.

 

• values
  1 *

 

 Yes, he said if
you tell 11-year-old boys that looking at Playboy will make them gay, they’ll
stay away.  I’m personally
skeptical of his story, as I often am when someone slips into sermonizing like
this.  His mystery friend owns a
hospital, and he implies that he mostly helps men with AIDS die, which made me
realize that anti-choicers stop screaming about so-called death panels the
second that it’s gay men dying. 
But ex-gays exist more in mythology than in actuality, so I’d like to
see some documentation of this guy’s existence.

 

Right Wing Watch did a bang-up job of putting up videos of
some of the speakers at the Values Voters Summit.  I was particularly weirded out by Lila Rose, who spun a
fantasy of punishing women who have abortion with some old-fashioned,
titillating public shaming. 

 

• values
  2 *

 

When you hear something like this, it’s easy enough to
conclude that the Christian right would love it if we returned to having stocks
in the town square.  That way,
women caught fornicating could be put in the stocks and they could throw eggs
at them, and then go home and masturbate furiously while thinking of the hot,
forbidden non-procreative sex. And then whip themselves for being dirty. Fun
for everyone, but the woman put in the stocks.

 

You can really tell how high level intellectual this whole
event is by the sort of people that are held up as the real heroes of the
event.  For instance, you have
Stephen Baldwin, who is about a year away from insisting he didn’t get an Oscar
for "Bio-Dome" because Hollywood hates Christians.  And of course, you had Carrie Prejean, a hero for
inarticulately saying homophobic things straight to a gay man’s face during a
beauty pageant. Maggie Gallagher introduced her and the excitement was
palpable. (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/maggie-gallagher-introduces-carrie-prejean-values-voter-summit)

 

* values 3 *

 

I suppose they all aspire to speak insulting gibberish while
wearing 8 tons of make-up and competing in an anachronism. Maybe next someone
will rant about how the feminists are out to take their male heirs while doing
Civil War reenactments.  But I love
how Gallagher literally cannot speak for 15 seconds without being
dishonest.  It’s true that the
voters are increasingly disinterested in gay marriage.  But that’s evidence that they are
increasingly for it!  They don’t
think it’s right to interfere if your neighbor wants to get married.  92% of Iowans have decided that gay
marriage doesn’t really affect their lives. 

 

The only people being inexplicable here are Gallagher and
her homobigot crowd, because they are fighting gay marriage tooth and nail,
while most of the public is moving on and realizing that it’s not a big
deal.  Unless of course you’re
gay.  Then it’s a big deal to be a
second class citizen.  That the
public doesn’t fret about it means that Maggie Gallagher is the weirdo who
needs to just let it go, not that the rest of us need to start getting our hate
on.

 

*********

insert interview

 

*********

 

The Obama administration employed Michelle Obama to press a
new tactic in selling health care reform to the public: Discuss how health care
reform is a women’s issue.  I think
her points are well taken and effective.

 

• women
  health 1 *

 

These past couple of weeks have been good for highlighting
how women face discrimination through the current insurance system.  A lot of credit goes to SEIU for
digging through the various ways that insurance companies label something a
pre-existing condition, and then use that as an excuse to deny you coverage,
even after you’ve been handing them money for years. For instance, did you know
this?

 

• women
  health 2 *

 

The profit motive here is, if you look at it from a cold,
cynical, inhuman way, understandable. 
Domestic violence is a major cause of injury for women, but more to the
point, it’s a major cause of repeated need for health care.  If a woman is hit by a man, he’s likely
to do it again.  If he hits her
hard enough that she gets care and the insurance company finds out, then it’s
likely been going on for a long time and he has her trapped through financial
dependence and lowered self-esteem. 
This means she’s at a strong risk of being hit again.  In an actuary table, she’s a high risk.

 

From a human standpoint, however, giving up on women in
abusive relationships is monstrous. 
It’s not their fault!  And
if they can just get away from the abuser, they often get better.  The fact that this isn’t even a
disease, but something that another human being caused makes it even
worse.  How come the victim is held
responsible, and not the abuser?

 

The Rachel Maddow show got into the program, looking at the
various statistics on women’s health care on a state by state basis.  HPV vaccinations, infant mortality,
teenage pregnancy rates, that sort of thing.  The states with the worst outcomes were mostly concentrated in
the South, unsurprisingly. 

 

• women
  health 3 *

 

Insurance has a lot to do with this.  Across the nation, around 15% of Americans
are uninsured.  But in Mississippi,
that percentage climbs to 18%, and in South Carolina it’s 19.4%.  Obviously, with these high rates of
uninsured people, you’re going to see women with poor health outcomes.  Reproductive health care is
concentrated quite a bit on prevention, but prevention is what uninsured people
tend to skimp on since it’s not a pressing need.  Less prevention means more cervical cancer, more premature
births, and higher infant mortality.

 

Less access to contraception also means abortion, but
unfortunately, those stats are hard to track by state because lack of abortion
access often means that women have to leave the state, go underground, or
simply go without abortion. 

 

*********

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, you must share my pain
edition.  Tom Delay is on "Dancing
With the Stars".  Of course, you
already knew this, but like me, you may have been in deep denial until you
actually saw the travesty.  Here’s
a clip. 

 

• please
  god no *

 

His homophobic comments about his feminine side were
appalling, but the trainer intrigued me. Not teaching Tom Delay to swivel his
hips strikes me as a good idea, but not to spare him. To spare the rest of us
from having to see that should be her first priority.