A commenter the other day objected to my characterization of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum’s position on birth control. Luckily for us, the good Sentator clarified his position last Thursday:
I vote and have supported birth control because it is not the taking of a human life. But I’m not a believer in birth control, artificial birth control. Again, I think it goes down the line of being able to do whatever you want to do without having the responsibility that comes with that…
I don’t think it works. I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated, particularly among the young. I think it has, as we’ve seen, very very harmful long-term consequences to a society. Birth control to me enables that and I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our country.
Video here. Yeah, that’s right, no forced pregnancy = harmful to women. For those of you who think this is idle talk, I’ll remind you that the president himself has been cagey about whether or not he supports access to birth control, has appointed a wackjob of a guy to the FDA who has held up approval of emergency contreception, and has led a government which has blindly promoted abstinence and scrubbed information about condom effectiveness from its websites, just to name a few. Oh, and these antiBC folks are now urging religious pharmacists to claim their “rights” not to do their jobs if they don’t feel like filling women’s birth control prescriptions.
Anyways, the Senator has been making the rounds, and there’s just so much goodness in this interview with George Stephanopolis from this morning that I don’t know where to begin. Read or watch the whole thing, it would be really really funny if this guy weren’t the number 3 Republican in the Senate. Okay, it’s still really funny. In it, he says he would back a constitutional amendment against abortion, and also bashes all those radical feminists who, you know, hate stay at home moms, and then when asked who he’s refering to can only come up with
There’s lots of — no, there’s lot’s of — well, Gloria Steinem. There’s one. I mean, there’s lots of writings out there…It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media…
All us elites in the academy, teaming up with Hollywood and the all-powerful Gloria again to attack the children! When asked to comment on Frist’s latest stem-cell flip-flop, I love how he uses the idea of science trumping politics as a weird sort of save that’s really a smear:
I think, you know, Bill’s a scientist, he’s a physician. You know, I know that that pulls at him a lot in his job. And I think he made the decision that science trumped in this case.
And, oh my God, it’s a virtual epidemic of disassembled dissemblers! A few months back, our good President had a little vocabulary mishap, when trying to criticize Amnesty International for criticizing the Administration’s human rights record based on the treatment of prisoners:
It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth.
Now Sen. Santorum gets in the mix with the opposite confusion of these hard to distinguish words. While discussing the absolutely crucial distiction between Hillary’s “a village” and “a community” that it takes to raise a child, he said:
I’d love to have a serious debate. If she’d like to have a serious debate about her view of how society should be ordered and structured — I believe her view is one that says government and top-down. I believe my view is the view that’s held by most Americans, which means we need strong families and strong communities, and we don’t need government really dissembling those institutions, which I think her view of the world does.
Rarely is the question asked, is our politicians speaking English?
August 1st, 2005 at 2:32 am
Yeah, those right-wing idiots are hilarious. Lucky thing there are no fools like that on the other side, eh? Oops, sorry, I have Noam Chomsky on the line, get back to you later!
August 1st, 2005 at 2:33 am
Wait, am I at the right blog? When did this turn into Dr. B’s place? =).
August 1st, 2005 at 3:04 am
Yeah, those right-wing idiots are hilarious. Lucky thing there are no fools like that on the other side, eh? Oops, sorry, I have Noam Chomsky on the line, get back to you later!
Why do you have to make fun of Senator Chomsky?
August 1st, 2005 at 3:20 am
agm, I’m flattered!
and Mr. F. Uckoff, there’s plenty of left wing idiots, but they aren’t #3 in the Senate and they aren’t trying to take away my reproductive rights.
August 1st, 2005 at 5:03 am
Funny, I ranted about the man way back in May:
http://ruminatingdude.blogspot.com/2005/05/rick-santorum-give-me-break-i-suppose.html
when the Times did a front cover piece on in him the Sunday magazine section.
If ever I’ve had a reason to give money to the other guy, i.e. the one who runs against Santorum, Rick Santorum is it.
August 1st, 2005 at 6:40 am
Great job Risa! Santorum is clearly one of the most odious politicians out there. He’s the kind of person that brings into focus one of my great confusions about today’s Republicans. When people on the left start to spout crazy ideas (and there are a few out there) most liberals I know will criticize them. However, I rarely hear “fiscal conservatives” coming out and condemning how far somone like Santorum is from their worldview.
August 1st, 2005 at 7:51 am
James, even if you don’t particularly care for Bob Casey’s politics, the Casey family is quite popular in Pennsylvania. I don’t think his campaign has really been launched, but Casey is already ahead in the polls.
August 1st, 2005 at 9:02 am
I may be the commenter that Risa refers to at the beginning of the post. I’m writing to admit that I was fooled by Santorum’s comments. Because he said that he didn’t think birth control should be illegal, I took issue with Risa’s statement:
If you agree with Rick that the government should limit your access to legal contraception,…
However, I forgot that the religious right’s position is that birth control should be legal, as long as you can’t actually get it. Risa’s comment is perfectly accurate. Conservatives want the government to limit your access by holding up FDA approval, giving pharmacists the right to deny your rights, etc. Suppression of information about contraception and an large dose of anti-contraception propaganda is also perfectly acceptable government behavior according to this group.
It is good to try to see both sides of an issue, but I need to do it without being such a sucker. Thanks for the clarification. (Also, thanks for the new preview feature. If it is working, this will be my first post where I actually close my HTML tags correctly.)
Gavin
August 1st, 2005 at 9:20 am
Hey Risa,
I hope you don’t think that partial birth abortion is part of your “reproductive rights”. If anything it’s a medical emergency procedure, that much like amputation is not to be performed without a *good* reason.
Looking forward to your leftist spin.
Trevor
August 1st, 2005 at 10:03 am
a little off topic, but…
santorum says, “I think, you know, Bill’s a scientist, he’s a physician.”
i’ve got a problem with this. physicians are NOT scientists. they’re more like highly trained mechanics rather than, say, biologists. i recently read a survey of doctors stating %75 of them believe in god. that should be evidence enough.
not that they don’t deserve respect, of course, but let’s call them something they’re not.
August 1st, 2005 at 10:11 am
I feel myself summoned, as if from beyond the grave….
Trevor, intact d&x is part of reproductive rights, because sometimes women need, as you call it, medical emergency procedures. I defy you to find a single case of a woman who had an intact d&x without a good reason.
August 1st, 2005 at 11:25 am
Trevor: As the bitch (hi!) said, D&X is a spot on the gradient of rights one has by virtue of possessing one’s own body.
I fail to understand where you’re going with amputation – where did that straw man come from?
Please come back when you’ve passed from Trolling 203. Hint – it is important to size up the opposition before you attempt to bait, because it is a high risk strategy – if your opponent fails to take it, you tend to look like an idiot.
August 1st, 2005 at 12:13 pm
i’ve got a problem with this. physicians are NOT scientists. they’re more like highly trained mechanics rather than, say, biologists. i recently read a survey of doctors stating %75 of them believe in god. that should be evidence enough.
mchammer, most physicians do think that evolution should be taught in schools, and I’m not sure why else the 75% figure is relevant. And while not all physicians are scientists, surely they all apply the scientific method in diagnosing and treating patients, and follow the scientific research in their field. (Well. Hopefully.)
However, I would certainly believe that Santorum can’t tell the difference between the two.
August 1st, 2005 at 12:30 pm
i’ve got a problem with this. physicians are NOT scientists. they’re more like highly trained mechanics rather than, say, biologists. i recently read a survey of doctors stating %75 of them believe in god. that should be evidence enough.
mchammer, most physicians do think that evolution should be taught in schools, and I’m not sure why else the 75% figure is relevant.
And since when does believing in god preclude one from being a scientist (ahem, Einstein, for example)?
August 1st, 2005 at 12:46 pm
“And since when does believing in god preclude one from being a scientist (ahem, Einstein, for example)?”
The Einstein thing again. Most readers of this blog have seen it many times. Einstein used the word God as a shorthand for the wondrous nature of the universe, *not* as a shorthand for the Big Daddy in the sky. Read any biography of the man if you doubt this.
Although, come to think of it, we don’t know what the alleged 75% of doctors meant in using the word God. Maybe this is also what many of them meant.
August 1st, 2005 at 12:48 pm
[...] Even in a heightened state of cynicism, this isn’t something I would have guessed. In comments to the Santorum post, Becky Stanek points out that most medical doctors believe that evolution should be taught in schools. That brought me up short — “most”? Shouldn’t it be “essentially all”? [...]
August 1st, 2005 at 2:23 pm
seebee says “And since when does believing in god preclude one from being a scientist (ahem, Einstein, for example)?”
well, i think einstein, along with all other scientist-believers have taken an inconsistent worldview. a scientist is one who seeks out natural explanations to physical phenomena and attempts to build a model with the power to predict the outcome of future observations.
a belief in god, however, requires the believer to say, ok, all this observable stuff is well described by science, but this unobservable part of the universe…well there lies demons (god). so my complaint is, why abandon science for those godly questions when it’s worked so well for our entire observed universe?