If only I had realized

[thewayne]

that the election results would result in 2 or more years of Sarah Palin's blathering, I might have shot myself on Monday.

"Despite your view -- and policies -- that government must lord over women, in keeping with radical liberalism, you have to fake support for our equal rights; so you do it in a militant sort of way to compensate for your confusion. On pretending to know what's best for us you've got nothing but a silent scream demanding, 'Hear me roar!'"
—Sarah Palin on President Obama

This is the woman who has no problems with her daughters getting pregnant at young ages and eschews birth control. This is the woman whose entire family initiated a drunken brawl at a party.

This is a woman whom I could happily never see or hear another word uttered from again for the rest of my life.


Speaking of family planning, I was listening to a two year old Fresh Air podcast talking about the origins of Planned Parenthood by Margaret Sanger. There were a couple of interesting things, such as Sanger was anti-abortion but pro-contraceptive, a view point that I can thoroughly get behind. I know why, but can't understand their logic, that people are opposed to both because of mainly religious reasons, I just don't understand that they can't see that increased availability of contraception will dramatically cut the number of abortions. The other interesting bits were that they were heavily supported by the Republican Party of that era, not to be confused with the current RNC. And there was a lot of talk about eugenics, though I didn't follow the connection with Sanger.

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I think the people who would deny both contraception and abortions are motivated by two things: increasing the numbers of the church and keeping women constantly pregnant so they are too exhausted and busy to step out of their "proper place," which also leaves them entirely dependent on men.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

And there you've nailed it, the disproportionate influence of religion and the "Religious Right" on American polltics.

We really need a significant string of women and minority presidents while the old guard dies out in order to hope to improve things here.

[silveradept]

Lots of eugenics proponents will advocate for contraception, because Those People, the undesirable ones, should be required to use it.

The people that oppose both contraception and abortion are more interested in punishing women for unapproved sexual behavior than they care about life, no matter what they say.

Also, I'd like to know what policies Palin is taking about.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The podcast was interesting because Sanger was most popular among married women who didn't want to have more babies, especially during the Great Depression. She was accused of being a eugenics supporter, I remember one of the debates that she she had with a strong eugenics supporter was because he thought she was promoting contraception among the Right People who should have been breeding, not among the Wrong People who are diminishing the purity of the gene pool.

Speaking of the gene pool, there are a couple of books that you might enjoy, both by the same author. The first is Bimbos of the Death Sun, the second Zombies of the Gene Pool. They're amusing murder mysteries that revolve around a physicist (IIRC) who writes a fairly serious scifi novel and then the publisher changes the name of the book to Bimbos and it becomes a best seller. IIRC, the first book won a Poe.