Could it be that some people who used to work in some devastated industries and are now unemployed or working shitty poorly paid jobsn, had better working conditions and more job stability, wish to return to their former situation? Could they feel that the USA is in decline and be afraid of the future for their children?
Well, of course not. When they vote, their only motivation is “will I be able to opress Black people?” because that’s what they think about all day long. And this is totally not a caricature. It’s of course impossible that someone would vote for Trump because he promised to rapatriate jobs in the USA. It’s solely because he hopes that he will put sluts back at their place (and of course, no woman voted for Trump, well maybe except self-hating women who think all other women are sluts).
I begin to realize that this kind of statements aren’t even exaggeration for effect. Many of you really believe that the only motivation conservative types have is their hate for gays, women and black people.
Believe it or not, this explanation has been explored as a potential explanation for Trump voters. It’s been explored quite extensively! People tried their best to make the data stretch to fit this explanation. And they just couldn’t make it fit.
Leaving aside the “black people” bit (which is less “outright hostility” and more “nasty subconscious and cultural biases”)…
Looking at the anti-LGBT movement, there’s not even a fig leaf. Their actions make no sense if they are not motivated by anti-gay animus, and most of the time, they don’t even try to fucking hide it, unless they’re worried their statement is going to end up quoted back to them in court. Maybe there are a handful of incredibly stupid people who are legitimately worried that their rights to hold their faith is under threat, but by and large, the people actually pushing anti-gay legislation know full well what this is about. And there’s no shortage of people willing to say the quiet part out loud.
We’ve tried giving them the benefit of the doubt. It turns out that was a mistake. They really are as cartoonishly fucking evil as they look. Again, this may be hard to believe if you didn’t grow up in the US, but this is the reality.
By the by, on the subject of Lysistrasa, from what I’ve seen on the left, basically everyone agrees this is a bad idea that was poorly-thought-out and even the twitter celeb who was pushing it has moved away from it. The discussion has been amplified for some reason (can’t imagine why something that makes the left look stupid would be given ample airtime :rolleyes: ) but the conversation around it is mostly “this is a stupid idea and an own goal, stop it”.
It’s not quite the statement I made either. And, sadly, it **is **a typical behavior which is evidenced by the long, long list of bills Republicans have put forward - and occasionally passed - with the intent to obstruct access to abortion, contraception and women’s health services, often involving instigating intentional emotional trauma. Remember that whole thing about intravaginal ultrasounds? Do you understand what the purpose of that was? I have many other examples - how many will it take?
Perhaps you should be asking why they’re opposed to contraception, which drastically reduces the amount of unwanted pregnancies and thus abortions. Unless, of course, what they really want is to punish women for having sex. Then it all makes sense.
It’s not about “facilitating abortion”. It’s about a concerted campaign to deceive pregnant women, provide them with - what was the term you used? - bad propaganda about the medical elements of abortion, and to emotionally traumatize them as much as possible. This is another perfect example of malignant behaviors resulting in active harm, and here you are blithely handwaving it away. I mean, sure, if you ignore all the examples that support my position, my position appears unsupported. Funny about that.
No, it’s when people do things that actively harm the population of poor single mothers and their children who are also most significantly affected by restricted access to abortion and affordable contraception, I have to question whether they really care about those women and children. I only think they think those women are sluts when they say it out loud. Which, in various ways, they do more often than you seem to want to admit.
I note that you are ignoring my caveat and hyperbolically rephrasing what I said, so perhaps before you accuse me yet again of caricaturing other people’s positions you’ll stop doing the same to mine.
But whether they consciously vote with the intention of hurting other people - and some of them do- the end result is the same.
(Parker Molloy, for those wondering, is an editor at Media Matters. Click through and you’ll see all manner of charts and graphs detailing exactly how clear this is.)
Like, even in Alabama and Georgia, two states that recently passed these extreme anti-abortion laws, not even 1 in 4 people want to see a complete ban on Abortion.
Slight caveat: it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that the average republican voter is stupid, rather than evil. There’s a reason the Koch brothers pay substantial amounts of money for pieces talking about how far-right figures are “silenced”; why Dave Rubin tries to guide every conversation towards the reaction to right-wing speakers on campus (as though it were the most important issue, or indeed as though it mattered at all). Talking about policy is a loser for republicans, so they talk about literally anything else. Or they lie, that works too - see also: the main republican policy message on Obamacare for about a decade.
Do you think a majority of legislators who supported HB 481 realized that they were subjecting women who self-terminate to murder charges and all these grave consequences?
No. This has been a problem across the board up at the General Assembly. Everybody thinks that the majority of people up there are lawyers, and that’s not true. We don’t even have enough lawyers to fill the Judiciary Committee in the Senate. That’s problematic. To really understand HB 481, you needed to look at the entire statutory regime. It references back to different statutes. It’s almost like a puzzle you have to put together. If you’re not a lawyer, you don’t know how to do that. If you don’t know how to do it, you rely on the team mentality. “The Republican leadership and the governor say that this is what we have to do as Republicans and this is going to save lives.” There’s no independent research. Republican legislators rely on folks telling them this is great, there’s no problem, we need to vote for it. But if you do a deep dive and see what the implications are, I can’t see how any rational person would think that this is a good idea.
**The weird consequences certainly go beyond punishing women.
**
It’s fantastical. What about women pregnant in prison? Now you’ve got a baby that hasn’t been given due process and is in prison? It sounds ridiculous because it’s ridiculous. If you see a pregnant woman eating sushi, do you call the Division of Family and Children Services and make a complaint? It’s that kind of stuff. If you’re pregnant, you’re driving in the HOV lane, and an officer pulls you over, do you say, “Don’t worry, officer—me and my zygote, we’re good.” The Office of Legislative Counsel told us that if an undocumented immigrant in the state is pregnant, that fetus is considered a Georgia resident, a citizen, and a person entitled to all the aid and health care a Georgia resident is entitled to. But the mother herself couldn’t get any benefits.
This law is so irrational. It just doesn’t make sense because it’s so absurd. When I first read it, it was like, Come on. No way. This isn’t happening. There are so many problems with this. But now it’s the law, so we need to tell people and educate women in terms of what could happen.
These people are badly misinformed. They’re manipulated. Some of them are exactly as evil and malicious as their handlers. How many? Ultimately, I don’t give two shits, because the end result remains the same - they vote for politicians who implement horribly unpopular policies that are bad for them personally and for the nation as a whole - hence the “leopards eating people’s faces party” memes. They need to stop.
I’m not a fan of the “free speech gambit”: just because it is legal to say something doesn’t mean that the opinion expressed is correct. In fact if it is odious enough one could even say one “should not” express this opinion without impinging on the other’s free speech, excepting the marginal chilling effect when the person saying that a certain type of speech is wrong has governmental power to compel someone else to not say it.
(I myself wouldn’t put it that strongly that her opinion ought not to be said, but I do think it’s a silly statement for all the other reasons pointed out in the thread.)
If political effectiveness is the goal, a converse strategy might be more effective. If women decided to seek out congressmen those who vote against the bill, and have sex with them it is ethically and even philosophically equivalent (although perhaps not legally) but likely to change more votes.
Tris
Isn’t it odd that the advice of people who say what they are paid to say is important to so many of us who claim to support “free” speech.
Do you really think that every man is willing to have sex with every woman who he thinks looks good? That (even aside from differences in who’s sexually desirable to the individual) it doesn’t matter to any man whether he’s in a supposedly monogamous partnership, whether the woman is, whether she’s trustworthy, even whether her only motive is blatantly revenge?
Yes, I’m sure there are men who don’t care. But there are a lot of men who do.
Planned Parenthood does at least half of all the abortions in the US. They provide a minuscule fraction of the birth control used in the US. If they closed down tomorrow there would still be plenty of places to buy condoms, the pill, or IUDs.
If abortion is outlawed people will switch to other forms of birth control and some more people will carry their babies to term. There will not be vastly larger numbers of abortions, there will be vastly fewer.
The Missouri Family Health Council, which has been serving as the sole administer of Title X dollars in the state, says it’s waiting to learn its funding award for the new grant cycle set to begin April 1 and to see whether the courts block the new rules before deciding if it will stay in the family planning program. It currently distributes money to Planned Parenthood clinics that serve about 34 percent of the state’s Title X patients, meaning either entity’s exit could dramatically affect care in a state where family planning clinics can have a wait list of four to six weeks for new patients, according to Michelle Trupiano, the council’s executive director.
“When we say the safety net is already stretched to the brim, that is what we mean,” Trupiano said. She added: “When you take out a large provider from that safety network, the entire net is going to break.”
In Arizona, the nonprofit Arizona Family Health Partnership receives most of the state’s Title X money and distributes it to several different providers. Though Planned Parenthood only runs 17 percent of the Title X-funded clinics, it served 53 percent of the program’s patients in 2015, according to the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute.
Take that support away, and the result will be a whole lot of people who simply do not get those services. And so, you’ll end up with more unwanted pregnancies, and more abortions.
Now granted, this doesn’t count the number of abortions that would be prevented if Planned Parenthood was no longer around to perform abortions, but… There’s a reason for that. And that reason is:
…You’ve got this exactly backwards.
• Legal restrictions on abortion do not affect its incidence. For example, the abortion rate is 29 in Africa, where abortion is illegal in many circumstances in most countries, and it is 28 in Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds. The lowest rates in the world are in Western and Northern Europe, where abortion is accessible with few restrictions.
• Where abortion is legal and permitted on broad grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is illegal in many circumstances, it is often unsafe. For example, in South Africa, the incidence of infection resulting from abortion decreased by 52% after the abortion law was liberalized in 1996.
There’s little to no indication that TRAP laws have done much of anything to lower the abortion rate - as opposed to expanded sex ed and easier access to birth control, which have absolutely done a whole lot to lower the abortion rate, by lowering the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
This may be counterintuitive, but there’s good evidence that PP’s non-abortion services are irreplaceable, and little to no evidence that PP’s abortion services are similarly irreplaceable.
But… the people against Planned Parenthood? They, by and large, just straight-up do not like birth control. Or sex education. Or, indeed, any of the other things you can do to reduce abortions.