Emily Zanotti:
If you’re still on social media after yesterday, you’re profoundly masochistic, in need of a stiff drink, or both. Take this moment to examine your Twitter timeline for evidence of the following words: “slippery slope,” “minefield,” “ban,” and “birth control.” Use them as a drinking game and get yourself most of the way into a bottle of Smirnoff. If there were ever an excuse for day-drinking, it’s the amateur constitutional lawyering happening across the Internet. Let’s not mention the Oval Office, where the “constitutional lawyer” in residence stridently disagrees with the professional justices on the Supreme Court.
What has happened over the course of the last twenty-four hours is nothing short of a War on Women. But this isn’t the war that has dominated headlines for its fanatical notion that people do not lose their right to believe in a higher power once they open their organic, locally-sourced artisanal coffee joint in greater Portland. The women who purport to speak as mouthpieces of the feminist movement on the Internet may be the least intelligent consumers of media since the people of Salem took the word of two twelve-year-old girls as gospel truth of demon infestation.
When addressing Internet feminists I use the word “feminist” loosely, since while the term should encompass nearly every walk of life interested in the true rights of women, it seems in this case to refer specifically to someone who is so hapless at financial and reproductive matters that she’d practically prefer bottles of birth control be administered by a government authority that also watches her swallow them. To hear such harpies opine you’d think the Earth had caved in, the bottom had fallen away, and that condoms were going to be placed under lock and key by ruthless and uncontrollable Hobby Lobby executives bent on bringing about a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel.
Absent from the discussion is the notion that the ruling was relatively narrow. It applies provisions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (authored by Senator Chuck Schumer and signed in to law by Hillary Clinton’s husband) to companies that are directly owned and managed by people who have day to day connections to the business. The ruling applies only to the Health and Human Services contraception mandate, and the ruling itself offers a congressional remedy that would serve the government’s purpose of handing out free birth control whilst preserving those First Amendment rights that our country was founded on, thanks to that ragtag band of Plymouth Rock-bound puritanical nutcases.
Such nuanced, yet rather obvious conclusions had to be drawn from the opinion itself, but in order to draw them you also had to read it, something which these Spokeswomen for All Ladies seem shockingly unable to do. Is birth control now illegal? Will women be forced to bleed to death in the streets from endometriosis without the necessary treatment the pious class keeps just slightly out of reach? No. At least sixteen birth control options are still on the table for Hobby Lobby employees, and will be there tomorrow behind the pharmacy counter, unmolested by the creeping hands of corporate hegemony (and even the Catholic Church has no prior objection to your chosen therapeutic treatment).
What results from all of this is a War on Women’s Intelligence where lock-step, conformity-demanding legions with the intellectual curiosity of a lesser Kardashian spread a message to a waiting audience with little regard to its veracity, inciting panic with a campaign of misinformation. Whether this misinformation takes root speaks of the audience, of course, but the mere fact that women in places of influence seem hell-bent on speaking directly to a female audience with nothing but thinly-veiled contempt for that audience’s intellectual capacity is a real killer. Almost without exception, everyone hawking the War on Women thinks women are dumb enough to believe them. And it’s a calculated decision: were we to discuss real policy goals in the service of improving access to women’s reproductive services, we’d be talking market solutions, scaling back governmental regulation to lessen the cost of available medications, and teaching a basic understanding of the female anatomy in our “comprehensive” sex education courses. We would instruct young women on how to know and understand their complex bodies, not merely how to shove a pill down their throat and hope for the best.
You miss the point; the left WANTS a contentious issue. If one is not available, they CREATE one. For instance, most accept that abortion is necessary in cases where the mother’s health is threatened, even including late term, and also in cases of rape. Yet the left INSISTS on wailing on about how anyone not for abortion for any reason right up to the moment of delivery wants to BAN abortion.
I’m no fan of abortion, and despise its use as a mere method of birth control, but I am not anti-abortion. However, like Hobby Lobby providing 80% of what the left wants in the way of birth control yet still being vilified, my attitude towards abortion is still “anti-abortion” because I do not submit my conscience to the demands of leftists.
This is a measure of how desperate liberals now are to cling to their rapidly vanishing power. After a good healthy dose of liberalism, Americans have seen the actual benefits of that ideology and are slowly beginning to come to realize that all those who have foolishly preached that hard work, personal responsibility and dedication to a goal weren’t that foolish after all; that doing the exact opposite of that (Hope and Change) is ruinous. So, desperately in need of a rallying cry, they rally around the evil balsa wood peddlers Hobby Lobby screwing desperate women out of 20% of what they never had before Obama made them take it. It actually is encouraging to see them this desperate, though their stupidity does get on one’s nerves.
Fiorina: Dem’s ‘Shameless’ ‘Baseless’ War on Women ‘Propaganda’
The Democrats continue playing this broken record rhetorical “The GOP has declared war against ______” mantra filling in the blank with every “minority” base they can think of. Why? Because there are a lot of low information voters out their who are so ignorant, that they will assume that what the Democrats say is true and not think for themselves.
If their brains really stopped to exam the truth, they would have to look at what Democrats have done against these very groups. Democrats have held majority control of this nations largest cities for m any decades now:
* Have the ghettos been torn down? No the blighted areas have gotten worse.
* Are the Homeless off the streets? Essentially no, because the typical Democrat way of dealing with the homeless is to bus them out of town to another city’s streets.
* Has the job situation improved for blacks? No Black unemployment under Obama is double what it was before he took office.
* Are more people employed than since the Great Depression? No, the real percentage of unemployed is higher than during the Great Depression. (Retired are not included in the BLS numbers, although for some dishonest reason, unemployed who still receive unemployment insurance are counted as if they were employed, ie. as “in the labor force”.)
* Have the schools in poor communities improved? Of course not, Democrats have been dumbing down the kids who go to public schools.
* Has the percentage of people on food stamps or other subsidized entitlement programs gone down? No, Not only have those individuals not gotten a “hand-up” (as all these programs promised,) more are on the dole than ever before.
* Did the high tech jobs promised by Bill Clinton’s administration and the rest of the Washington Progressives appear? No, and Washington Progressives of both parties are trying to bring in lower wage immigrants to do those existing high tech jobs at cheaper wages under cutting our own high tech college graduates. What’s worse is they want to flood us with illegal immigrant workers to lower wages for everyone else.
* But what about Democrats wanting to raise the minimum wage? What difference does that make when you are hiring illegal workers under the table for those jobs “no Americans will do for slave wages” and you are making taxpayers pay for giving them entitlements.
* Does the American Dream still live? Not for the majority of people, when it takes Two working parents to make relative to what one brought home in the 1950’s.
* Did Obamacare improve healthcare? Of course not, and it’s laughable to claim it did. All it did was raise costs, and spread worsened healthcare out to the citizens.
* Did take home pay improve under Democrats? Of course not. Obama’s energy program is raising inflation across the board while wages stay stagnant, for those Americans lucky enough to still have a job.
* Did Democrats enact equal rights and pay for women? No, not even when they had control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Female White House staffers get paid about 75% less than their male counterparts.
* Are Abortion clinics safer than they were 30 years ago? Apparently not given the news reports.
So what has improved? The financial portfolios of Washington DC Progressives and their crony capitalist friends
I would correct myself regarding:
I meant to say that “Female White House staffers get paid 75% of what their male counterparts are paid”, however on examining closer that percentage is actually 86%. What’s worse is that aside from Valerie Jarrett, who is the highest paid female staffer (and throws off the comparative salary curve,) all other women staffers serve in much more minor positions.