Sometimes, I Think the Goal is to Wear You Down and Keep You Stupid

Tom over at Functional Ambivalent has a post about the thing that annoys me most about the South–that strain of folks who take pride in being willfully ignorant (not that there aren’t a whole lot of people all over the nation who aren’t willfully ignorant–there are–I’m just not familiar with any other part of the country where the folks who are willfully ignorant are so proud of it, like it’s an accomplishment to refuse to learn) and, because they are willfully ignorant, who are so damn easily to manipulate.

I bring that up in relationship to Bill Hobbs (and can I take a moment to give a terrorist fist jab to Jim over at Progressive Nashville, who cracked me up this morning?) because today he’s all gloating at the TNGOP’s ability to cut off funds to a private source of healthcare for women by funding governmental sources.  Yes, America, the Republicans, who you may recall position themselves as the party of small government and reliance on private entities, are all for bigger government when it means they get to tell you what to do.  And what the TNGOP really wants you to do is not have an abortion.

Okay, fine.

I give up.  Really.  I don’t know what to say.  I mean, how many times can you ask “Bill Hobbs, how many children have you adopted?” or “If every woman who gets pregnant carries that pregnancy to term, are you going to pitch in your tax dollars without complaint to provide services to that baby?”

I mean, my god, this is the party whose members DON’T EVEN WANT TO ISSUE BIRTH CERTIFICATES to the wrong kinds of Tennessee babies.

And yet, they get to feel like superheros to themselves for opposing abortions.  It boggles my mind.

I quote Bill Hobbs:

The organization served 3.14 million clients in calendar year 2006, killed 289,750 babies, and referred only 2,410 clients to adoption agencies – that’s 0.07 percent of clients referred to adoption agencies, 9.2 percent given abortions.

And I repeat the part salient to my point: 3.14 million clients, 289,750 abortions*.

So, to Hobbs, it’s fine to deny affordable (often free) healthcare to 2.85 million women because you don’t like what three hundred thousand of them have done.  That somehow makes you good.

I don’t know how many times a woman can say, this is my body, not yours and I have the last say in what happens to it.  If you don’t like the choice I’m making, give me better options.  But then butt the fuck out.

I think they just figure if they keep saying it long enough–that they have the right to decide for you what kind of healthcare you need–they can wear you down into no longer fighting it.  And yet, mark my words, folks, we will see Bill Hobbs screaming holy hell against national healthcare.  He and the TNGOP want to dictate who provides you what services and who pays for them, but that’s okay, because you’re just a woman and you need the goverment’s guiding hand.

It’s somehow different.

How, I’m not sure, but it is.

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*According to the TN Right to Life, there are 1.3 million abortions a year.  According to Bill Hobbs, Planned Parenthood provided about three hundred thousand of them.  And yet Planned Parenthood is supposedly “America’s largest abortion factory.”  And yet, according to the numbers provided by the anti-abortion folks, they account for only about a quarter of the abortions provided in this country.  This can only mean one of two things–either the TN Right to Life is lying about how many abortions women are having every year or Hobbs is misleading voters into believing that defunding Planned Parenthood would come close to ending abortions.