You can’t miss it these days, the “Americans Against Food Taxes” commercial. The one in which a maternal-looking actress pushes a shopping cart while griping that Washington is “trying to control what we eat and drink”—by taxing soda and other sugary soft drinks. Lovingly placing a huge bottle of pop on the checkout conveyor, our heroine delivers her kicker line:
“Government is just getting too involved in our personal lives.”
(AAFT, by the way, calls itself a “coalition of concerned citizens – responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses;” according to SourceWatch, published by the Center for Media and Democracy, it’s merely “a front group funded by the beverage industry. We’re shocked—shocked.)
Anyway, the No Sugary Soda Tax lady is royally pissed over Big Government’s intrusion into her shopping cart, and her right to fatten up her kids with Mountain Dew. Just as Sarah Palin is steamed over Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, a Kenyan Socialist Muslim attack on our God-Given right to heart disease, stroke and having our diabetic legs amputated as the Founding Fathers intended. Also.
With the Health Care Reform debate, the ascendancy of the Tea Party and all its corporate enablers, we’ve heard a lot of anti-Big Government bloviating over the past couple of years, culminating in the Great Midterm Shellacking of 2010. “Death panels,” “pulling the plug on Granny,” “Keep your Big Government hands off my Medicare and Social Security” (a statement so breathtakingly stupid on so many levels, where do you begin?).
And there’s always that evergreen, the NRA’s “Keep your hands off our guns.” Or “Keep your hands off our high-capacity ammunition magazines used only for mass murder.” Yes, for the ever more extreme rightist Republicans in Congress, Big Government (read Barack Obama, Reid, Pelosi et. al.) is your enemy.
There is one topic, however, on which the GOP’s anti-government zealotry takes a little ideological sabbatical: Reproductive rights. Granted, I miss a lot, but I’ve not yet heard archconservative Republicans shout, “Keep your hands out of my uterus!”
Doesn’t have quite the same ring, I guess. Perhaps it’s since some main sponsors of Congress’ current tsunami of anti-choice legislation, like Rep. Chris Smith, from my native state of NJ, and Rep. Joe Pitts, of Pa., do not, to my knowledge, possess uteri.
In any event, the GOP House is keeping its promise to address our nation’s joblessness crisis by…focusing on eliminating abortion.
Protecting zygote rights.
To paraphrase the “No Tax on Sugary Soda Lady,” Big Government is getting way too involved in the most private aspect of a woman’s personal life.
It’s happening at the national level, and in states all across the country. And much of it arises from the evangelical Religious Right, whose application of unyielding, unquestioning, fundamentalist Christianity to government represents totalitarianism in its purest form. (And this goes for all faiths in all nations). At least when it’s forced on those who don’t share their beliefs.
And so for any pro-choicers—especially young women—who chose to sit out the 2010 Midterms (after all, you could have been watching Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars that Tuesday night), well, elections have consequences.
Two of the new GOP bills, HR3 (Smith) and HR358 (Pitts) have sparked special outrage. HR3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act, caused a firestorm over language that redefined rape and incest. Even more heinous, if possible, is HR 358. The so-called “Protect Life Act,” is an amendment to the 2010 health care reform law modeled on the so-called Stupak Amendment, an anti-abortion provision pro-life Democrats attempted to insert into HRC. Those of us who oppose 358 call it the “Let Mommy Die” act: The bill would allow hospitals, on “moral” grounds, not only to refuse a life-saving abortion to a dying woman, but also refuse to refer her to another provider.
Somehow, this can be construed as “protecting life.” Then I guess we should have given Ted Bundy the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that between 1990 and 2008, the number of American women who die in childbirth annually rose from 12 to 17 per 100,000 live births)
HR 3 and the even more ghoulish 358 are violent—perhaps fatal— Big Government assaults on women’s bodies. But they’re only the most outrageous weapons in the GOP attack. This from Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler:
“The GOP’s plan to ban tax-payer money from funding abortions includes giant tax hikes for businesses. More specifically, it would eliminate tax incentives on employer-provided health care benefits if those benefits cover abortion as a medical procedure.Supporters of the bill say those incentives essentially constitute federal spending on abortion….Republicans, says Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) are trying to limit “private choices by private individuals and businesses in the private insurance market.”….Ultimately, the impact of tax like the one in the Republican legislation would likely be to phase out abortion coverage in the private insurance market… “The Republicans in the House are proposing tax hikes because they don’t like a health plan a private-sector business chooses,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). “What they want to do is essentially make abortion unavailable.”
Not as sensational as Let Mommy Die, but effective, nonetheless.
Last night, Rachel Maddow aired the profoundly moving tale of Wyoming state legislator Sue Wallis—a Republican in the reddest of states—who opposed an anti-choice bill that would have required doctors to inform abortion patients that they could view ultrasound images of their fetuses before the procedure. Wallis gave an impassioned floor speech telling her personal story. Here’s the AP summary of her comments:
“I’m going to tell you a couple of things that are none of your damned business,” Wallis said as she addressed the committee.Wallis said she’s been pregnant five times and has given birth to three children. She said she lost one baby two weeks before it was due to be born and once underwent an abortion, something she said she had never before revealed in public. Wallis said proceeding with the abortion was the best decision she ever made. She said she has spent time counseling young women and said they already know what the implications of abortion are when they visit a doctor.
As Wallis’ Republican colleague, Lisa Shepperson, also declared on the floor of the Wyoming House:
“When I go to the doctor, it is the most private thing you can imagine. I want myself, I want my husband, and I want my doctor there. I don’t want any government.”
I don’t know what kind of soda Reps. Wallis and Shepperson drink. But I do know that anti-choice tyranny is forcing its Kool-Aid down the throats of American women.
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