Contra-contraception: An Opening For the Democrats?

Let the babies have their lollipop, I say. Make abortion and contraception completely illegal. Soon the situation become so worse, the Government will be forced to overturn those laws, like the UK had to when it found out so many women were killing themselves from illegal, unregulated abortions.

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That reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt when he was one of the Police Commissioners of New York. There was a Sunday blue law, which all the taverns ignored. Teddy began enforcing it very thoroughly, and the tavern owners and patrons howled. Eventually, the ordinance was repealed. Teddy commented that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.

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nimh wrote:

Setanta wrote:
What i disagree with is what i see as the rather quixotic contention that the Democrats can make a productive and useful issue for themselves out of this, politically speaking. It's either gonna be a yawner and a big "Huh?" for most voters, or its gonna piss off the religious right. It's not as though the Democrats need to hunt up issues on which to piss off the religious right; it's not as if this would fire up the voters who haven't the same prejudices as the religious right.

So what is the alternative - ignoring the issue? I dont see how, when you're being battered on an issue, pretending its not there is gonna help you in any way. (Remember Kerry's "rope-a-dope strategy"?).

Trying to find and push an alternative angle that might change the framing of the debate in your favour seems like a sensible enough thing to do.

It might be a good idea to address the issue so as not to have it as a liability--that by no means authorizes a contention that the Democrats can use such an issue effectively in a campaign strategy. Once again, i'd say most voters just wouldn't care that much. Read again the response of JPinMilwaukee. Most voters wouldn't care, in my never humble opinion.

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I don't know how the "religious right" got brought into this but most of the people that I know that would fit that description don't have an issue with contraception. I know from my stand point I would rather have huge amounts of contraception handed out and used properly then abortion used as birth control.

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I have just realised I've misquoted a cliché. The more astute amongst you may realise that I should have said, "let the babies have their bottle."

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Wolf_ODonnell wrote:

Let the babies have their lollipop, I say. Make abortion and contraception completely illegal. Soon the situation become so worse, the Government will be forced to overturn those laws, like the UK had to when it found out so many women were killing themselves from illegal, unregulated abortions.

A number of nonwestern societies, particularly in Polynesia , before the advent of European empires in the 19th century practiced human sacrifice. This was particularly likely to occur at the beginning of some large and complex activity that might result in the death or injury of one or more of the participants. The argument was that the gods were going to demand "blood" so it was wiser to select someone (generally a low status slave) and satisfied the gods demands before imbarking on the enterprise.

I have a question for you. Your logic is basically the same, so how many deaths of women do you think are necessary before an abortion/birth control ban should be lifted.

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Acquiunk wrote:

I have a question for you. Your logic is basically the same, so how many deaths of women do you think are necessary before an abortion/birth control ban should be lifted.

No idea.

I'm tossing between the morally better idea of "the less the better" or "the more the better, so as to ram the message home".

Obviously, we don't want these mothers to die. However, it may be better for society in general if the anti-abortionists were shown how dire their choice really is; so the more deaths the better.

All I know is, I wouldn't want to see abortion made illegal.

Furthermore, no contraception is a bad idea. Better contraception and better use is the best idea ever.

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I completely agree, Baldimo.

And your post here (thanks!) is part of why I think this could be a powerful issue for the Democrats.

What I'm suggesting is that the Democrats do exactly that -- make contraception (availability, education about, etc.) a sizable part of their platform. It's well within the pro-choice philosophy, and if it is made a signal issue, it can easily backfire on the kind of Republicans who have been relying on that section of the religious right to get into office. If it's made a signal issue, Republicans will have to either come out and say they're for contraception -- which is cool -- or be explicit about their ties with those who are against contraception, which I think won't fly with mainstream voters (and therefore would hurt those Republicans' chance for office).

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On the subject of birth control, without reference to party politics (i think you're obsessed, Soz), there is an aspect of opposition to birth control which is not often dicussed. That is crypto-racism. There has been a notion which was more popular in the past, when the expression of casual racism was not unacceptable, that the "white race" ought to breed in larger numbers. When Margaret Sanger began her pioneering work in birth control, she was condemned by no less a luminary than Theodore Roosevelt (arguably the most popular Republican President in our history) as a "race traitor." The thesis is that the "white race" ought to produce as many babies as possible, in order to maintain a position of dominance in the world. After the United States had won the Spanish War, Rudyard Kipling wrote The White Man's Burden as an exhortation to Americans to take up the responsibility for governing the "childish" races of the world. The first stanza of this poem reads:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

The full text of this poem can be read here. One of the things which has made me think of this is the allegation against a Fox "News" pundit, which is discussed here.

It would be interesting to know (and it is likely unknowable) how many people oppose birth control because of a hidden racist motive. I don't think this impinges politically on the discussion, because there is no reason to think that people who oppose birth control for racist motives would necessarily be revealed if such a position were made an important part of the Democrat's agenda.

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Obsessed?

Good point about racism, though.

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

I suppose - and I'm not even being sarcastic at all - that there are numbers which show this is not true, which you will be glad to present, Sierra?

Cycloptichorn

Quote:

Finally, as recently as May 22, 2005 , Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean also asserted on NBC News' Meet the Press:

Dean:You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was President ?

Dean's "statistic" went unchallenged by moderator Tim Russert, so millions of viewers probably got the impression that Dean's very specific 25 percent figure was correct. But Dean was wrong -- and by a wide margin.

We asked the Democratic National Committee repeatedly where Dean got his 25 percent figure, but we got no response. Even if Stassen's estimate of 52,000 additional abortions were correct, that would figure to an increase of less than 4 percent. And in any case the rate is going down, not up, according to the most authoritative figures available.

http://www.factcheck.org/article330m.html

Personally, I don't think the abortion issue was prominent in either side's platform in the last election (except for Kerry wanting to go on record saying he's Catholic and believes life begins at conception, but is pro-abortion, which when you think about it, makes him pro-murder).

As we all know now, no one paid much attention to anything Kerry said, so very little was made of his hypocritical remarks.

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sozobe wrote:

The article is rife with explicit and implicit connections to politics; this is just a sample:

Quote:
<snip>

An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as "enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex."

Er... what's wrong with consequence-free sex? If I could have consequence-free chocolate, I'd be all over it....

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Heh!

I know the article is long, this is kinda the center of it (and gets at what some people think is wrong with consequence-free sex):

Quote:

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. "The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage," says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. "Whether it's emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they'd like to see obliterated," Smith says.

Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, an abortion rights Republican who has sponsored legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraception, has seen a major change. "Two decades or more ago, I don't think there was much of a divide on contraception and family planning," she says. "It was one area both sides could agree on as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Now it becomes embroiled in philosophical disputes."

The Guttmacher Institute, which like Siecus has been an advocate for birth control and sex education for decades, has also felt the shift. "Ten years ago the fight was all about abortion," says Cynthia Dailard, a senior public-policy associate at Guttmacher. "Increasingly, they have moved to attack and denigrate contraception. For those of us who work in the public health field, and respect longstanding public health principles that condoms reduce S.T.D.'s, that contraception is the most effective way to help people avoid unintended pregnancy it's extremely disheartening to think we may be set back decades."

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Conservatives are evidently desperate to hold on to the support of the Christian right. They intend to desecrate the constitution by adding an anti-gay provision.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, and likely prohibit civil unions and other forms of domestic partnerships. S.J. Res 1 -- the so-called "Marriage Protection Amendment" -- passed the committee on a 10-8 party-line vote after Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA), who said he was "totally opposed" to the bill, voted for it. The vote took place in a room just off the Senate floor that was closed to the general public. Instead of acting on the issues that most Americans indicate they are concerned about -- Iraq, gas prices, and stem cells among them -- the Senate is moving ahead with a divisive bill that growing numbers of Americans oppose. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the committee's ranking member, said the measure is "part of an election-year political agenda" to satisfy the right wing. "The Constitution's too important to be used for such base partisan politics." The Constitution has been amended to eliminate slavery, to give women the right to vote, and to secure for every person the equal protection of the laws. It has never been amended to mandate discrimination.
--AmericanProgressAction

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DrewDad wrote:

Er... what's wrong with consequence-free sex? If I could have consequence-free chocolate, I'd be all over it....

Because consequence free chocolate is immoral. Laughing

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Yes, Advocate makes a good point. The US is a tolerant country but when hate groups which want to persecute innocent gays who want only to love and be left alone, when the fundamentalist right wing religionists work against the distribution of condoms and the right of choice which would relegate many women to the old category of being"barefoot and pregnant" , it is time for a Constitutional Amendment.

If the right wing can present Constitutional Amendments on the idiocies like "Flag-Burning" and the repression of American citizens who happen to be gay, then there can certainly be an amendment to void the FIRST AMENDMENT WHICH HAS CAUSED SO MANY PEOPLE TO SUFFER IN THE US. IT IS TIME TO CHANGE THE AMENDMENT WHICH SAYS:

"Article I"

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF"

The founding fathers did not know how many so called religious hate groups would use that second part of the Amendment to terrorize and persecute other people.

When will the people of the US rise up against these intolerable hate mongers who call themselves fundamentalist believers.

Religion is acceptable but not when it preaches HATE!!!!!

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Did anyone else smell something?

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I did catch a faint whif of irrelevance.

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Free Duck-- Irrelevance? This thread is about the efforts of the right wing fundamentalists attempting to deny contraceptive methods to decent hard working American citizens who have a constitutional right to the use of Contraceptives( seee Griswold vs. Connecticut).

Freedom of Speech is not absolute. No one has the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theatre. The freedom of your fist stops where the point of my nose begins.

If you don't think that the fundamentalist right is yelling fire in a crowded theater when the try to limit the use of contraceptives, you don't know what terrible things can happen when thousands of unwanted children are born who cannot be properly fed or educated.

That is why we must begin to revise that section of the first amendment which speaks of "prohibiting the free exercise thereof". The founding fathers had no idea that this clause would provide an excuse for intolerance, racism, ignorance and hate.

Contra-contraception: An Opening For the Democrats?

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