9 March 2006 - 10:36pm
No room for birth control in the "big tent"
In the headlines, the reproductive rights battle has been over South Dakota's new forced-pregnancy law. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. digby reports about the Republicans' full-on assault on birth control altogether. First, he quotes from the Kos enterprise:
Today the United States Senate is considering a bill that would have a serious and damaging impact on health coverage for women across the United States. The Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act (HIMMAA), introduced by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) would allow insurance companies to ignore nearly all state laws that require insurance coverage for certain treatments or conditions, such as laws that require them to include contraceptives in their prescription plans.
digby seems to get what's at stake here:
This development is very interesting in light of the new emphasis on birth control among strategists in the Democratic party. The next battle is already being fought out on the edges of the abortion debate. If this goes the way of Democrats' previous brilliant strategies in the culture wars, within five years we'll have jettisoned our argument about Roe altogether and will be fighting with all our might to preserve Griswold, which the other side will be arguing is a matter of states' rights just like Roe. (No "streamlining" necessary.)
You'd think that common sense would preclude this, but it won't. Common sense says that regulating guns in a country of almost 300 million people is the smart thing to do....
...But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.
This is not an issue for tweaking. Let's tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one's going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That's what they are going to do and if we don't recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.
The question is this: Where to we turn to? After all, the "big tent" Democrats -- a favorite meme from the Big Box Blogs of the past year -- are siding with the Republicans:
Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson and U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP Committee), today announced a landmark agreement between key stakeholders on a broad-ranging health insurance bill to provide more affordable health insurance options to America’s small businesses and working families.
Who says Republicans work their nefarious plots alone? Senate Democrats are right alongside in the effort to ban birth control.
I'm sure Bob Casey, Jr. would approve.
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Comments
What's the Matter w/ Kansas for 'progressives'.
No one trusts Bush. We're right back where we were in the 60's and all the ground we worked and sacrificed to get is gain is shrinking fast. At that time, no one ever had birth control or legal abortions, but now that it has been won, I think people (men and women) will fight harder to keep it. I hope.
Nah. I think we're in the 1890s again, with the Iraqis sinking the Maine and all ...
--|PW|--
Well said!
(paraphrase): Any woman who had more than 5 periods is considered a serial killer...
The sad reality, is that it seems the current trend within the US seems to be heading this way...
LOOK out. Pretty soon once young women start their menstrual cycles, they are going to be jailed for murder..
man, the US is turning into a retard camp for politics ...
down the road, 100 or so years, the nation splits. And it will be over individual rights, issues of liberality and libertarianism (small "l" there) and who wants the future vs the past. Maybe hegemonic corporations "split" the nation... whatever, there is a fracture in our future, We never resolved the Civil War. And we have held on to fewer and fewer of the post war advancements. We are getting wind burn as we speed backward...
Integrate the schools.. fine, in a few years begin to ruin the school system county by county. Kozol has written that KY, once they applied themselves, achieved miraculous integration, worked hard at it, and in fact was a model, state wide. Slip slip...
Republicans have shown no timidity to state openly that, for 50 years we had an aberrant SC, and that now "we are going back". Only a sick nation supports that... Sicker to want that
We barely made it, ever, out of institutionalised apartheid, it is written into our beginning. Written into our elections systems with 2 senators per state and the Electoral College running at war with the popular vote. Which for damned sure caught up with us in '00. Democrats did not care, never fought to protect the vote, something women fought for, were tortured for... blacks and whites died for the vote, for the right to organise to register others to vote.
Republicans spent 13 million on the ground in FL. Dems barely spent 4. Kerry hogged his many millions raised for post election legal battles.
THEY DO NOT CARE FOR ANYTHING OR ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES AND THEIR COFFERS.
Making war on women - and Dems capitulate. Mimic the Republicans... all they know to do anymore...
And people who should know better demand "respect" for religion. As we crush the fading Enlightenment.
Gah.
I don't give it that long. As more and more disasters along the lines of Katrina come along, thanks to global warming, expect a wider and wider range of geographic locales in which the already frayed social safety net will lose its last few shreds. With our Nat'l. Guard away fighting war after war overseas, and a probable draft also draining the infrastructure... ?
I expect fractures and fissures much sooner than in a century. Pac NW-ers hereabouts get pretty smug about the South and Midwest, but they shouldn't. A "9" or worse earthquake is predicted in these parts sometime in the coming century. I imagine the epicenter along Portland's riverfront or along the Oregon Coast + the failed social safety net borne of our regressive, nearly "flat" tax system and -- shudder !
100 years to breakup is an optimist's view.
with its fictions. We hve "show" elections already tht the dems are fully a party to, a sort of federal fiction has to continue, if only to fund the wars... To me, now we are in a new era Reconstruction time. Everybody for himself, very much similar to the post Civil War.
Whether it is 50, 100 or whatever years is almost immaterial. Ti's coming.
Atocha proved it to me. They understood what happened, assimilated information quickly and accurately and defied the lying and the cooption. In return they get to move forward in the world. We are not a coherent nation. And to be frank I don't think we ever were. Too big and too intent on expansion from the get go.
To say nothing of the old slave voting states.
I think we wrote our end in our beginning.
That's usually the case with imperial powers, yes indeed...