[Vision2020] The Bad News Is Good News

[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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March 9, 2012
The Bad News Is Good News By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

There was one brief shining moment last week when Mitt Romney appeared to
be saying something sensible about sex.

“The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about
contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and
wife, I’m not going there,” he told reporters.

This was the way Republicans used to talk, oh, about a millennium or so
ago. The state legislators wore nice suits and worried about bonded
indebtedness and blushed if you said “pelvis.” A woman’s private plumbing?
Change the topic, for lord’s sake. Now some of them appear to think about
women’s sex lives 24/7, and not in a cheerful, recreational manner.

And it turned out that Romney misspoke. He apparently didn’t realize that
the subject he was proposing to steer clear of was a Republican plan to
allow employers to refuse to provide health care coverage for contraception
if they had moral objections to birth control.

He was definitely going there! Mittworld quickly issued a retraction making
it clear that Romney totally supports the idea of getting into questions of
contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman. Particularly
when it comes to reducing health insurance coverage.

Really, what did you expect? If Romney couldn’t even take a clear stand on
Rush Limbaugh’s Slutgate, why would he say anything that forthright unless
it was a total error? This is why we can’t get the dog-on-the-car-roof
story straightened out. The reporters have their hands full just figuring
out Mitt’s position on the biggest controversy of the last month.

We’ve certainly come to a wild and crazy place when it comes to the
politics of sex. Perhaps this would be a good time to invest in burqa
futures. However, I like to look on the bright side, and I am beginning to
think we may actually be turning a corner and actually getting closer to
resolving everything.

All of this goes back to the anti-abortion movement, which was very
successful for a long time, in large part because it managed to make it
appear that the question was whether or not doctors should be allowed to
cut up fetuses that were nearly viable outside the womb.

But now we’re fighting about whether poor women in Texas — where more than
half the children are born to families whose incomes are low enough to
qualify them for Medicaid coverage of the deliveries — should have access
to family planning. As Pam Belluck and Emily Ramshaw reported in The Times
this week, the right has taken its war against Planned Parenthood to the
point where clinics, none of which performed abortions and some of which
are not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, are being forced to close for
lack of state funds.

Or about whether a woman seeking an abortion should be forced to let a
doctor stick a device into her vagina to take pictures of the fetus. The
more states attempt to pass these laws, the more people are going to be
reminded that most abortions are performed within the first eight weeks of
pregnancy, when the embryo in question is less than an inch-and-a-half
long.

And the more we argue about contraception, the more people are going to
notice that a great many of the folks who are opposed to abortion in
general are also opposed to birth control. Some believe that sex, even
within marriage, should never be divorced from the possibility of
conception. Some believe that most forms of contraception are nothing but
perpetual mini-abortions.

Most Americans aren’t in these boats. In fact, they are so completely not
in the boats that very, very few Catholic priests attempt to force their
parishioners to follow the church’s rules against contraceptives, even as
the Catholic bishops are now attempting to torpedo the health care reform
law on that very principle.

Every time a state considers a “personhood” amendment that would give a
fertilized egg the standing of a human being, outlawing some forms of
fertility treatment and common contraceptives, it reinforces the argument
that the current abortion debate is actually about theology, not generally
held national principles.

And, of course, every time we have one of those exciting discussions about
the Limbaugh theory on making women who get health care coverage for
contraception broadcast their sex lives on the Internet, the more the
Republican Party loses votes, money, sympathy — you name it. The Wall
Street Journal/NBC News poll, which last summer found women almost evenly
divided on which party should control Congress, now shows that women favor
Democrats, 51 percent to 36 percent.

The longer this goes on, the easier it will be to come up with a national
consensus about whether women’s reproductive lives are fair game for
government intrusion. And, when we do, the politicians will follow along.
Instantly. Just watch Mitt Romney.

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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