When dawn breaks over the East Coast of the US tomorrow, November 24, 2007, there would be a political execution half a world and 15 time zones away in Australia. All the indications are that the execution of George Bush's ally John Howard and his Liberal-National party would be carried out by the Australian people. A new day would dawn.

Well, my dad got a needed organ transplant, so I'd say it was pretty good. :D

Spongebob? Why watch that when there is Enterprise marathon on Sci-Fi!  :-)

Watched Inconvenient Truth as family; we somehow missed last Thanksgiving and X-mas sitting together to watch it before though we had planned to; turkey day was fun cooking having a chance to catch up;

[In the Land of Puritan GOP Mysogynists -  take that you ungrateful dirty female gender - sinners all of ya ]

CROSSKOS:

The Idiocy of The Anti-Sex/Pro-Pregnancy Right Wing

by huntsu Fri Nov 23, 2007

Someone slipped a little known provision into the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that forbids pharmaceutical companies from selling prescription contraceptives to college and community clinics at steep discounts, causing prices to double or triple for people at the lower income ends.

   "What happened here is what happened everywhere: The price went up," said Jeanne Galatzer-Levy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We are a state institution, so we're not in a position to do something different."

   At the University of Montana, the price of a NuvaRing, another birth control method, rose to $36 from $18, said Allyson Hagen, the state director of Naral Pro-Choice America. "This is a state school where people are on Pell grants and don't have huge amounts of spending money," Ms. Hagen said. "For them this is like a choice -- groceries or birth control."

   * huntsu's diary :: ::
    *

We're not talking about abortofacients here, but oral and other contraceptives that simply prevent pregnancy.  For anyone who still thinks that that "pro-life" crowd is just anti-abortion, this is more evidence that their goals are far broader and more sinister.  They want to impose Scarlet Letter morality on the country, making sex a punishable offense.  If they have to do it with obscure passages in unrelated laws, they'll do it.  

In short, they want you to stop having sex unless it has a good chance of resulting in a pregnancy.  If you are married they want you to have kids in the double digits whether you can afford it or not.  If you are not married they want you to suffer for your sinful orgasms, saddled with a baby you can't afford and the kid's quality of life be damned.

Buried in the middle of the article is one of the central hypocritical tenets of the anti-sex/ pro-pregnancy right: if you make contraceptives or abortion less convenient people will stop having sex.

   Others said low-priced, easy-to-attain contraception might encourage a false sense of security about sex.

   "From our perspective, this does bring to light a public health concern, but for a different reason," said Kimberly Martinez, the executive director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, which advocates abstinence from sex until marriage. "These young women are relying on this contraception to protect them. But contraception isn't 100 percent -- for pregnancy or for disease."

Because, as we all know, 100 percent of the reason why college students have sex is cheap contraceptives.  It's not the fact that they are likely at their most beautiful point of life, or fitter than they'll ever be again, or in a safe environment with hundreds of other horny people the same age just getting away from Mom and Dad.  It's 'cause the pill is $12 a month instead of $50.

People were having sex out of wedlock looooooooong before Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo when the odds of getting pregnant were a hell of a lot better than 1.3 percent and the consequences to health and social status were far greater.  Do Martinez and her ilk really believe that sex will stop over $38 a month when we have better medical care, fewer social strictures and far more community support than back in the old days?

They don't.  They know the numbers, the know the horniness of your average 19 year old, they know the beer and liquor levels, they know the odds.  Martinez and the rest of the crowd are hoping that $456 a year contraceptives will cause women to stop taking them, then get pregnant and suffer the consequences.  They want these women to be object lessons to other young women, punished for having sex, to have their lives made drastically harder and their children have fewer resources than they would when born via choice rather than chance.

Hell, maybe that's why the right hates gays so badly, and seems to care so little about HIV/AIDS.  Gays get to have sex without the risk of pregnancy, and that just galls these folks.  Then HIV came along and there was a different punishment for having orgasms out of wedlock.  The right wing celebrated by saying God had called down this curse on the gays and did everything they could for years to block research money and social support.  

But back to the doubling of the price of contraceptives, this is not just about college campuses.  This new law also doubles or triples the price for contraceptives in Federally Qualified Community Health Centers, often the last place for a family fallen on hard times to find primary health care.  Poor families with two, three, whatever mouths to feed have to choose between contraception and food on the table, and that extra $456 a year is as much as two week's take home pay.

So what happens when they choose to feed or clothe their kids rather than use a legal, safe and medically sound contraceptive?  They have another kid, or an abortion, or worse.  Jobs available to women working poor are usually hourly, and they don't take kindly to missed days due to OB appointments or morning sickness.  Every hour not worked is dollars not coming home, and ever dollar not coming home is a worse life for those children.  More kids means more costs and more work, further depleting already meager resources.

Martinez's glee over the price increase is sick.  She knows the outcomes, that more people will drop out of college to face economic hardship for their families, that more working poor families we are supposed to revere will slip into true poverty.  She just doesn't care at all ...

... because maybe, just maybe, there will be a couple fewer orgasms this year amongst the unmarried, and Martinez can sleep better at night.