Will Bunch explains the conservative backlash and the Tea Party movement. Also, Ken Cuccinelli makes a bid for anti-choice relevance, and a discussion of how young people are delaying adulthood, in part thanks to contraception.

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Links in this episode:

Ben Quayle’s comical scandal

Cuccinelli recommends going around the law to attack abortion providers

Rachel Maddow covers the Cuccinelli anti-choice attempts

Cuccinelli’s vendetta against a climate scientist quashed

Glenn Beck getting all messiah on us

On this episode of Reality Cast, Will Bunch will be on to talk about the conservative backlash movement we call the tea partiers.  Also, Ken Cuccinelli makes a play to close down abortion clinics in Virginia and people are talking about the pattern of young people growing up more slowly.

There are many hilarious stories coming out this election season, as in every election season.  But for my money, this one might be the most hilarious.  Ben Quayle, Dan Quayle’s son and candidate for Congress in Arizona, was outed as a guy who wrote dirty stories for an erotica website under a fake name.  He’s trying to weasel out of it.

• quayle *

As usual, I’m torn.  I don’t like stigmatizing people for normal enough sexual behavior like writing erotic stuff.  On the flip side, I don’t like hypocritical politicians getting away with moralizing about others doing stuff they themselves do.  The obvious solution is for politicians to stop moralizing on this stuff so that I can defend them with a clean conscience when it gets out.

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Ken Cuccinelli.  He’s the attorney general for Virginia, but he’s also a man of high ambitions, and his preferred route to obtaining his goals is to be as conservative as humanly possible.  Which in turn means that he has the stink eye pointed in the direction of women’s rights.  In all the media chaos dedicated to chronicling the awakened and grumpy conservative obsession with race, Cuccinelli managed to break through and grab headlines by getting back to some old-fashioned beating on women’s rights. 

• cuccinelli 1 *

As you can imagine, the supporters are lying.  They are anti-choicers, and they wake up and go to bed with lies on their lips, so of course their feigned concern for women’s health has nothing to do with this.  They have two major goals: 1) Convincing the public that abortion is an evil procedure that is as dirty and scary as they claim it’s immoral, and that the doctors who perform it aren’t professionals and 2) Shutting down abortion clinics.  Considering that anti-choicers are, at the end of the day, demanding a legal regime that would stuff the hospitals full of injured and dying women who tried to perform abortions on themselves, I think their claims to care about women’s health are not just ridiculous but insulting.  There is only one real stance for people who care about women’s well-being, and that’s to be pro-choice.  End of story.  Anything short of that is wishing injury and death on women for wanting to control their own fertility. 

The regulations Cuccinelli wants to impose by fiat instead of going through the legislation are ridiculous.

• cuccinelli 2 *

There are 21 clinics in Virginia that offer abortion.  The estimate is that 17 would be closed by these regulations.  There’s no reason whatsoever to consider abortion a surgery that’s serious enough to require hospital level regulation, since it’s basically done with not cutting and in about 5 minutes without anesthesia besides some pain medication.  Oral surgery that is done in-office is more dangerous.  An abortion is functionally the same thing as a D&C, and Cuccinelli isn’t going to require all doctors who do D&Cs, which are basically all gynecologists, to be subject to these same regulations.  It’s all an attempt to keep women from getting abortions. 

If you don’t believe me, check out Rachel Maddow’s coverage.  Tarina Keene of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia explained the issue on the show.

• cuccinelli 3 *

But the ugly truth is that Ken Cuccinelli is indifferent to things like facts and reality when these things stand between him and his ideological stances.  Believing that abortion is somehow dramatically different than other minimal outpatient procedures, even ones that are identical to it, is just one example.  Cuccinelli has also waged war on scientists for having the nerve to be right about global warming.  He specifically sued a UVA professor who had the temerity to be right about global warming.

• cuccinelli 4 *

Luckily, Cuccinelli’s legal harassment of an innocent man was seen for what it was, and a judge quashed it pretty much immediately.  On the abortion front, all we have now is an opinion and a lot of press coverage, but no immediate reason to think Cuccinelli is going to get away with his war on women and on doctors.  But he’s someone to keep an eye on, because clearly he’s not a man who lets facts, decency, or the law get in the way of his vendettas.

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insert interview

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So, a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had an interesting magazine feature on the not really that new theory of emerging adulthood.  This was something that caused a lot of whining when Generation X was young and out of jobs and delaying marriage, but now that it’s the millenials that are doing it, you’re seeing a little more sympathy for it.  Still, I fully expected when the Today show covered the phenomenon that it would be in negative light.  This is especially because while the economic factors that are making it so that people in their 20s put off certain adult responsibilites, there’s also an element of choice.  Especially sexual choice, as their expert Jeffrey Arnett explained.

• emerging 1 *

While the lifting of the taboo has multiple factors, I think it’s important to understand how much effective contraception and the belief that women have a choice dramatically changed what age people get married at.  The old model, where you tried to delay having sex, failed, got pregnant, and married young simply isn’t in play any longer.  Contraception allows people to have many years, often decades, between when they first become sexually active and when they get married and have kids.  If they do that at all.  Even if people do have accidental pregnancies and have the babies, they’re less likely to feel like this means that they have to get married.  The result of all this is that people have the freedom to make mistakes and learn lessons in a lower risk environment, which is why the divorce rate is lower than it’s been in decades.

In general, I don’t see this trend as a bad thing, even if it means some living with your parents.  It gives people time to get an education and find what they really want to do, and it minimizes the damage of youthful mistakes.  What did surprise me was that this was what the panel on the Today show also thought.

• emerging 2 *

Nothing’s wrong with it!  It’s interesting, because all this change in how adulthood looks is, I believe, what’s fueling a lot of the sex panic and the anti-choice movement.  A lot of older people want to believe that something is wrong with all this because it’s different than what they expected growing up, and frankly they’re a little jealous and resentful that young people might have more choices.  The result is a mish-mash of impossible expectations.  They wag their fingers at young adults and tell them not to screw around, but they still don’t want those young people to rush into marriages, parenthood, and unfulfilling careers.  They instead seem to think it’s possible for young people in an experimental phase of their lives to simply get through it without experimenting.  It doesn’t work that way.  We should be glad young people feel like they can hook up or cohabitate while they’re finishing growing up.  It’s simply better than the alternative of creating marriages that are usually destined to end badly after the growing up is done and the growing apart has happened.

* emerging 3 *

He’s speaking about a very privileged class of young people, but the emerging adulthood thing seems to be true in my experience of people who actually do need to draw income during these years because they don’t have parents supporting them.  A lot of less wealthy young people still go through this phase of finding themselves.  They flip through a bunch of entry level jobs, maybe pay rent to their parents, or shack up with friends or lovers.  Eventually, many of them find a groove.  For our purposes, the important thing is that open access to contraception and yes, even abortion has made it a lot easier for them to be able to experiment without getting into a situation they can’t discard without major consequences.  And so when they are able to make more lifelong commitments, they do so with an clear head and an open heart, putting them in a much better position to be successful than if they were shoved into adulthood too young by an oops pregnancy and a shotgun wedding.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, the teabaggers are so anti-choice religious fanatics edition.  Part of the common wisdom around this conservative backlash is, as I discussed with Will, the notion that it’s not especially religious or interested in traditional fundie issues like abortion or gay rights.  Glenn Beck put the final nail in the coffin of that narrative over the last weekend, making statements like this. 

• beck *

For right wingers, this is a whole cloth thing.  Racism, corporatism, nativism, and sexism are all part of one big shebang. And they aren’t afraid to claim that they’re speaking for god when they promote these odious values.