Judith Stacey on the diversity of marriage approaches, Rick Santorum tries to capture the religious right vote, and Rush Limbaugh loses his mind over Anthony Weiner.

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Rick Santorum wants to throw doctors in jail

Santorum really doesn’t like birth control

Dan Savage explains Santorum

Stephen Colbert on Santorum

Limbaugh loses it

On this episode of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Judith Stacey about the diversity of cultural approaches to marriage and why we should have maximum freedom.  Also, Rick Santorum is running for President, but he probably can’t get much beyond the extremist vote.  And Rush Limbaugh’s response to Anthony Weiner is getting unhinged.

People can’t stop talking about Slutwalk!  Rebecca Traister was on NPR discussing the protests, the attention they’ve gotten, and some of the criticisms.

• traister *

Seriously, the proof’s in the pudding.  People can wring and wring their hands, but the fact of the matter is that these protests are getting coverage and lots of it, and it’s forcing people to talk about sexual violence and victim-blaming.

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Well, Rick Santorum is officially running for President.  With Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, and Mike Huckabee out of the race, and Sarah Palin probably not in it, Santorum actually may do some damage in Iowa, at least to Mitt Romney’s campaign, though I’m unclear if Tim  Pawlenty will be able to retain all those Iowa primary voters who flock to the candidate who best represents the Christian right.  And the reason is that Santorum is just more hardcore with the anti-woman, anti-gay stuff.  As I noted last week, anti-choicers are up in arms because Tim Pawlenty hesitated to say that doctors who perform abortions should be thrown in jail.  Santorum is not restrained like that.

• santorum 1 *

Anti-choicers hide behind this “we won’t send the mother to jail” nonsense because they think it shields them from accusations of sexism.  Of course, in reality it’s incredibly sexist.  The base argument is that abortion is murder, but women who pay for this murder are too simple and stupid to know what they’re doing and to be held accountable   Plus, it’s a lie anyway.  A woman in Idaho was just arrested and charged for self-abortion, because she supposedly had passed the 20 week mark, and abortion is illegal after 20 weeks there.  Indeed, self-abortion puts lie to the little anti-choice fairy tales about hapless women who are too stupid to know better being pushed into abortion by evil doctors in it for the money.  That’s why antis just try to pretend that self-abortion isn’t an issue.

But I’m going to just go ahead and say that all of Santorum’s blather about fetal life is just a cover for the real reason that he opposes abortion.  I would argue that Santorum opposes abortion because he’s a right winger who objects to women’s liberation and sexual freedom.  The reason I think this is because he objects to contraception as well.

• santorum 2 *

He claims in this clip to legally support it but this is a slippery thing.  In his book, he supported legal contraception for married women, but felt unmarried women should be on their own.  This is not an anti-abortion for the fetuses position, because when you want laws that will raise the number of unwanted pregnancies, even if you’re limited to single women, the abortion rate will go up. So, I’d say the connection between his anti-abortion and anti-contraception position is hostility to female sexuality.  He’s pretty blatant when he says that he simply objects to people doing what they want, which is harmful to society because, apparently, it means that people get to do what they want.  Of course, if you’re pro-people being happy, like I am, then the whole people doing what they want if it doesn’t harm others thing is a pretty good deal.  Some call it by the word freedom, in fact.

Santorum isn’t just anti-woman, but also anti-gay.  So much so that he’s drawn the famous ire of sex advice columnist and gadfly Dan Savage. 

• santorum 3 *

So Dan decided to name some gross sexual thing after Santorum, and ended up deciding on “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the product of anal sex”.  He then started a Google bombing campaign of people using that word and linking to a page that gave the definition.  Now the number one hit when you google “santorum” is the word that Dan invented.  To be clear, of course, it’s not good if your bouts of anal sex generally feature santorum.  You should try to be as clean as possible if you’re having anal sex, because fecal matter is really full of very dangerous germs.  But it does happen sometimes, and now there’s a word for it.  And Rick Santorum has to deal with it.

• santorum 4 *

And that’s the thing.  Even if Santorum somehow gets away from the fecal associations, he’ll still be the guy who wants single women to be forced off their birth control and thinks that two adults of the same gender having sex is the same thing as bestiality.  This is increasingly just not going to work for most voters.  A recent CNN poll that came out, after all, showed that people who think that the government should promote “traditional values” has dropped to below 50% of the population, the first time since they started asking the question. Santorum is becoming a relic.

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insert interview

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Rush Limbaugh is usually just an impossibly sexist pig, but lately things on his show have gotten especially bad.  It’s the Anthony Weiner thing.  It’s clear that Limbaugh doesn’t have it in his heart to feign outrage that a man cheated on his wife or even, as some people allege, was harassing women.  So he finally happened upon a novel solution, which is to blame women for believing we have rights.  He paints a kind of amazing picture of how he believes that Democratic men are, for lack of a better word, pussy-whipped bozos whose wives browbeat them in the name of feminism.  It’s truly amazing.

• Limbaugh 1 *

He claims that Weiner’s reputation as a womanizer and a playboy is stupid, because he insinuates that it was based on those photos and chats.  In reality, Weiner had this reputation before all this came out because of his interactions with actual women.  Which I don’t think would have been much of an issue generally, but he’s since been married, which changes the situation.  Limbaugh glazes over that, which I guess makes sense as Limbaugh’s been married four times.  I can see that he has trouble remembering that marriage is different than being single.  But Limbaugh was so infatuated with the idea that liberal men are a bunch of cringing, emasculated children who let feminists push them around that he ignored that and just kept rolling.

• Limbaugh 2 *

The levels of delusion here are extraordinary, truly.  Let’s start with this image of Obama being served dinner by his wife who is supposedly watching him and nagging him about his diet. Sounds like projection to me!  Obama is the President.  His wife doesn’t cook for him; they have a White House chef.  I imagine his life is nothing like this rant.  This is about Limbaugh assuming his listeners are overgrown men-children who kick and scream and cry that they want steak when their wives dare put vegetables in front of them.  I’ll also note that Limbaugh claims he’s not making excuses for Weiner.  But it seems that he’s defining “being a man” in such a way that it pretty much requires screwing around.  So how on earth is that not making excuses?  Is he trying to say if your wife doesn’t want you to screw around, that’s what causes screwing around?  And that the way women don’t get screwed around on is to roll over when their husbands screw around?  I’m really confused here. Actually, I’m not.  Limbaugh doesn’t give a flip if he makes sense.  He’s just flailing around, trying to blame feminists for things men choose to do. By the way, women cheat, too.  I guess Limbaugh would blame feminism for that as well.

Limbaugh really loved this notion that it’s women to blame for what he considered a scourge of liberal men cheating, and so he doubled down during another part of the show.

• Limbaugh 3 *

He continued to rant like this for awhile, basically painting Anthony Weiner as an emasculated victim who had to cheat in order to regain his manhood after being subject to a bunch of feminist harpies.  Now, what’s funny about this is there’s like 5 conservative sex scandals for every liberal one. For every Anthony Weiner, there’s a Larry Craig, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, Mark Sanford, and Newt Gingrich.  Those men aren’t surrounded by feminists.  So what’s their excuse? 

In fact, as much as Limbaugh would love to blame feminists for everything, this is just the stupidest reasoning roughly forever.  It’s been demonstrated by sociologists time and again that people who embrace feminist values tend to divorce less and have happier marriages.  The reason egalitarian marriages tend to be happier is really complicated, but part of it is that liberals actually value sex as a positive thing and are therefore more likely to address sexual needs in an open and honest manner.  Obviously, that doesn’t mean that cheating is completely eliminated, but it’s definitely less common.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, more Rush Limbaugh edition.  Sorry, I don’t mean to overwhelm you, but Mike Stark called in to Limbaugh’s show when Limbaugh was ranting about Anthony Weiner, and he asked Limbaugh about being stopped with Viagra while traveling to a nation that is know for its prostitution industry.

• Dominican *

Except that it actually did happen.  He was caught traveling to the Dominican Republic with a bottle of Viagra.  Many of the women in prostitution in that country are underage or there under duress or are even non-consenting.  But you know, as Rush says later in his rant, making sure that a Democrat is humiliated by penis pictures is a necessary part of saving the republic.