Hyperbole?
Maybe.
Then again, maybe not.
If you, like me, have found yourself reduced of late to blubbering, incredulous bewilderment at the GOP and religious right’s incessant, ever-growing attacks on the ability of women in the USA to manage their own fertility and health issues - it’s likely because you -like me- didn’t really get the big picture.
While I understood (yet did not agree with) the opposition to abortion, I truly could not wrap my head around what on earth some of these folks were thinking with their insistence that women not be allowed to terminate pregnancies even in cases where they were raped(!), or were victims of incest (!!) or both (!!!).
And I certainly could not grok the notion that in 2012 there were still men who believed that women should not be allowed access to contemporary methods of family planning, even in situations where the ancillary medicinal benefits of things such as birth control pills were in fact the main goal, as opposed to stopping pregnancies.
Until now, that is.
I realize that I was naive. I massively underestimated the scope of the opposition to such things, because I honestly assumed that this was all about some folks’ disgust and disdain for abortion.
That’s why it made no sense whatsoever to me that many abortion foes were waging a cultural war against contraception - which, if used properly, would automatically prevent thousands if not millions of abortions every year.
I just didn’t get it, and now I do.
For while there are plenty of straightforward and honest folks who sincerely and emphatically oppose abortion on a variety of defensible grounds, many of the folks at the core of this movement, many of the politicians and religious leaders and theocrats and blowhards and busybodies and holier-than-thous and other Stone Age-fetishists are MUCH MORE interested in SOMETHING ELSE entirely.
For them, abortion and contraception are merely symptoms of a much larger illness.
An illness which must be treated, prevented, and -ideally- cured and wiped off the face of the earth forever.
The name of this illness?
For the sake of brevity, I’ll simply quote the late, great guitarist, songwriter and world-famous wife-beater Ike Turner:
“WOMENS BE THINKIN’ TOO MUCH!”
While you’re digesting the chilling and prescient article found by clicking on ol’ Ike’s politically incorrect mantra, you can listen to this chilling and prescient song by the great and not-so-late Camper Van Beethoven, and, in the words of the wise sage Johnny Cash, “Meditate on it.”
As always, I welcome comments below on my blog. Unless you wanna start a nasty fight of some sort, in which case I might play along for a little while, but I certainly won’t welcome it.
