Hello, sluts and friends of sluts and slut-adjacent Lady-Americans. Today, instead of getting our righteous rant on about the most despicable attack on our lady rights this week—because, as per usual, there was a lot of that going around—we're going to try something a little different.
We're going to read Playboy. For the articles. No, really:
To get a preview of what might be in store for you, sexually speaking, take a tour of today’s Republican-ruled lands. Start in our nation’s capital, where the House spent one out of every seven days focused on America’s lady parts, where Senator Rand Paul tried to attach a “life begins at conception” rider to the National Flood Insurance Program while Florida was bailing out from Tropical Storm Debby. Head north to Wisconsin, home of Paul Ryan, where recall survivor Governor Scott Walker and the GOP legislature defunded Planned Parenthood, ended the state family-planning program and, for good measure, repealed the state’s equal-pay-for-women law. Travel through the heartland and over the Rockies into Salt Lake City, where in the shadow of the Mormon Tabernacle a Utah lawmaker defended censorship because saying the word condom to students was like encouraging them to “mainline” heroin. End your journey in Texas, where the Republican Party officially declared the separation of church and state to be a “myth” and called for outlawing no-fault divorce.
Flash forward a few years. The Romney-Roberts Supreme Court has overturned Roe and Griswold. Abortion is illegal in most of the country and the morning-after pill is no longer an approved FDA drug. When the Defense of Marriage Act came before the Court in 2014, Justice Scalia used the occasion to restore the government’s power to outlaw sex acts deemed immoral by overturning Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the landmark 2003 decision that tossed out antisodomy laws. The Affordable Care Act has been repealed by the Republican Congress on the rationale that Obamacare’s mandate to buy insurance was a tyrannical intrusion on American liberty. Meanwhile, a national law requiring women seeking abortions to undergo compulsory transvaginal ultrasounds has gone into effect. The records of their abortions, their sexual partners and the names of their doctors are being stored in a national database.
With the constitutional rights to privacy and abortion wiped out, absolutely nothing stands in the way of the antisex crusaders. Birth control has become less like Viagra and more like medical marijuana: expensive and a bit complicated to procure. Few health insurers cover contraception, tube tying or vasectomies anymore; the government paperwork and personhood protests in front of their corporate offices make it too politically costly to attempt. Condoms have disappeared from store shelves in states where laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage have been enacted. [...]
Now it’s 2016. As Americans ready themselves for another presidential election and watch the Rio Olympics, most of the old porn-friendly computers have been sent off to the scrap heap of history.
In half the nation abortion is illegal and birth control is rare. The average age of marriage has plummeted to 20. The notion of casual sex is a fantasy, the sexual revolution history. The sexual counterrevolutionaries have won.
Welcome to the future of your sex life. Welcome back to 1950.
I got nothin' to add except this: Let's make sure that doesn't happen.
Please give $3 to each of our Daily Kos-endorsed women candidates for the House and Senate so we can end the War on Women.
This week's good, bad and ugly below the fold.
- Because nothing says "family values" like passing on lessons from dear old dad about which girls rape easy:
Prominent Republicans in Wisconsin quickly dropped their support for state Rep. Roger Rivard (R-River Lake) after he told a newspaper that "[s]ome girls rape easy." But much like after Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) made his controversial comments about "legitimate rape" and lost the backing of the GOP establishment, social conservatives and at least one "family values" group are rushing in to help.
On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Family Action PAC -- which bills itself as committed to "strengthening and preserving marriage, family, life and liberty" -- endorsed Rivard.
- This is what we call rape culture:
A flier found inside the men's room of a freshman co-ed dorm at Ohio's Miami University offering tips on how to "get away with rape" has students concerned, but university officials less so.
- Because this totally save lives, which is all "pro-lifers" really care about, right?
An anti-abortion activist group notorious for its undercover "sting" operations on Planned Parenthood is currently attempting a similar secret investigation of the family planning provider and at least three other progressive advocacy groups, Planned Parenthood told The Huffington Post on Monday.
Live Action, which most recently tried to catch Planned Parenthood facilitating sex-selective abortions in April, sent a woman posing as the owner of a Malibu, Calif., abortion clinic to meet with at least four women's health advocacy organizations -- Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, EMILY's List and Priorities USA -- during the first week of October. The woman called herself "Wendy Reed," presented a business card with that name on it, and promised to make a "substantial donation" to each organization if they agreed to meet with her and answer her questions, the organizations confirmed to The Huffington Post. [...]
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president for communications at PPAF, said the woman raised PPAF's suspicions by asking "kooky questions" about abortion policy that a donor would not normally ask. [...]
"[Live Action has] a history of hoax videos, but now they've added that they will even impersonate a medical provider and mislead people out in the world with this fake website," Laguens said.
Live Action did not return a call for comment.
- No, Jesus did not say you should slap a woman if you don't like her politics:
Politics and religion have collided at a Burlington church after pamphlets encouraging voters to remove an Iowa Supreme Court justice were made available at a Sunday service.
A woman who attended the City Church service on Sept. 30 told a pastor she believed it was illegal for a church to display material that promotes specific political action. That pastor told her it wasn’t illegal, and in an Oct. 7 sermon another pastor, the Rev. Steve Youngblood, castigated her for raising objections about the pamphlets that back the removal of Justice David Wiggins. [...]
In his Oct. 7 sermon, the audio of which was posted online, Youngblood speaks of the woman who complained, saying he’d “like to slap her” and that her husband should rise up and “correct her.”
“What makes me madder is that this person’s husband won’t correct them,” he said. “I don’t like rebellious women. I don’t like rebellious men, either. They’re even worse.”
- Good news:
You can rest easy, folks. Apparently protecting our daughters from the HPV virus — and, by extension, the threat of cervical cancer — won’t turn her into a raging slutmonster. A new three-year Kaiser Permanete/Emory University study published this week in the journal Pediatrics reveals that girls who’ve been vaccinated with Gardasil at ages 11 and 12 showed no higher rates of pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and contraceptive use than girls who hadn’t.
- No. Just ... no.
- It would be nice to see more people take a stand like this:
In a polite but pointed letter, Dr. Karen Remley, the Virginia health commissioner, resigned Thursday over her opposition to the state's newly imposed abortion clinic rules. The resignation is effective immediately. The clinic rules were approved by the state board of health Sept. 26 and immediately certified by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Among other things, they require all abortion clinics to meet the same health and construction standards as new hospitals. That means everything from doorway widths to room sizes.
- By the way:
Hours after former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s death was made public, word went around suggesting that he had quietly, belatedly repented for one of his most notorious moments — serving, back in 1991, as Anita Hill’s chief inquisitor and then voting to confirm Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “Years after Thomas hearing, Specter felt badly about how he had treated Anita Hill (see video below), and sought my help in arranging a reconciliation,” wrote Robert Reich, in a widely circulated tweet. [...]
As recently as last year, Specter told Newsweek, “I have no regrets. I think I did a professional job, and I continue to believe the core conclusion that Anita Hill’s testimony was not a disqualifier.” In 2004, he told the New York Times, “I’ve gone back and looked at every frame of the videos on Professor Hill, and I did not ask her one unprofessional question.”
- Your oh-sweet-Jesus-please-tell-me-you're-joking headline of the week:
Christian Bookstores Refuse to Sell Lady Bible Book Because of 'Vagina'
Now go forth, sluts, and raise hell. And don't forget to donate.