Daily Archives: May 5, 2008

May 5

The Oklahoma Legislature are a Bunch of Sadistic Perverts

In general, I’m a live and let live kind of gal when it comes to funky things that turn people on.  If you want to only have sex with one man, ever, in your whole life and you want that sex to take place within the confines of marriage, full speed ahead and good luck to you.  You sit alone at your computer furiously masturbating to stories about bad, slutty girls who want abortions and are punished by kindly abortion doctors who are being forced by someone powerful (with whom you identify) to insert things into the bad girl’s vagina just for your satisfaction, which is not sexual, oh, no no no, just don’t tell me about it, is all I ask.

But there is a line for me and that’s when folks cross over from pretend and inflict their will on people who are helpless to resist them.

Like, say, for instance, the Oklahoma Legislature, which now requires doctors who are performing abortions to stick what is basically a dildo into women’s vaginas, not for any medical purpose, but just because Oklahoma wants women to be clear that we might think we can say what goes into our vaginas, but we are wrong.

This is vile.  It’s so vile it’s almost hard to get your head around, but let me spell it out for you again.  If you want an abortion in Oklahoma before 12 weeks, which is when most abortions take place, along with all the medical stuff that you have to go through, you have to have something shoved in your vagina for no other reason than that the state demands it.  No exceptions, no mercy, even, for women who are the victims of rape or incest, who probably don’t need one more thing shoved inside them without their concent.

This, my friends, is why I cannot see how to compromise with the anti-abortion crowd.  For every one person who believes that abortion is wrong, but is moved to mercy and understanding for what brings a woman to that decision, and who is working to ease the pressures and burdens that make aborting a pregnancy look like a woman’s best option, there are whole legislatures full of sadists like this who feel so righteous in their cause that they’re willing to do this to women in order to try to convince women not to have abortions.

If a woman’s boyfriend or husband said “If you want an abortion, you have to let me put my dick or my finger or this dildo inside you first, until I’m satisfied you understand what you’re doing,” we would have no problem–I don’t believe there’s a person reading this who can’t understand how wrong that would be–no problem at all calling that the evil it is, regardless of what you believe about abortion.

And yet, when a state does it, folks applaud it.  Let me be frank.  If you think that forcing things into a woman’s vagina is okay in the service of the greater good (in this case “the babies”), you have lost your way morally.

Really, you have.

And it may be time for you to take a step back and ask yourself just where the hell you got off track.  I mean, seriously, that the National Right to Life people can put out a press release with this in it–

Today, the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Senate overrode Governor Brad Henry’s veto of SB 1878. Among other things, the bill requires that at least one hour prior to an abortion, an abortionist perform an ultrasound and display the image of the unborn child so that the mother can view it if she chooses.

–when they know what that entails…

What do you even say in response to that?

Yes, they want everyone to think they’re just talking about the doctor slathering a woman’s stomach and rubbing on it a little, but they know, they know that, in order to get an image of a fetus under twelve weeks, you almost always have to go into the vagina to get it.

But they gloss that right over, don’t they?  Sure, they’re all about “making sure women know the truth about abortion” but they sure are happy enough to let folks just assume we’re talking about the kind of ultrasound we all imagine when someone says “ultrasound.”

Because they have to know that there are a lot of women out there who might consider themselves anti-abortion who would still be outraged to learn that a woman has to endure a state-mandated violation before she can get one.

May 5

No Matter How Many Times You Say Women Can’t Be in Combat, War Doesn’t Seem to Care

The military serves a couple of important functions in our culture, aside from the ones it’s officially charged with.  One is giving poor folks a way of seeing the country and the world and encountering a lot of different people and cultures and the other is revealing stupid bullshit between groups in our own society for what they are.

I think I told you about the Mississippi vet I talked to in the airport a while back, who was going on about how it was the Army that taught him that racism was stupid, because, when the Grand Ole Opry came on and all the white guys from the city started making fun of him, calling him hillbilly and hick, it was the black guys from Mississippi who sat with him and listened with him, because they, too, back home on Saturday night listened to the Opry.

And, also, one only has to look at the dates to see how desegregating the military gave added urgency to desegregating the rest of the country.

In other words, even though we tend to think of the military as a very conservative institution, it has, in many ways, been the catalyst for a lot of progressive change.  That, I think, is one reason the fight over gays in the military has been so fierce, because both sides know that, if gay people are allowed to serve openly, it will mean shifting a lot of people’s fundimental attitudes.  They won’t have to like serving next to gay people, but they will have to get used to it.  And once they’re used to it, many of them are going to find it damn foolish to worry about working and living next to gay people when they get home.

All this brings me to women in combat.  The arguments against letting women serve in combat have ranged from the criminally stupid (“Once a month, women are more prone to infections!”) to the old tried-and-true “It’ll ruin unit cohesion” to whatever else folks can think of at any given moment so that a fog of “women can’t/shouldn’t be in combat” shrouds the land and prevents us from looking at the truth:

Women are, right now, in combat zones–civilian women and female troops.  There they are.  Fighting and dying and living and going about their jobs, just like the men.

And it’s become so ubiquitous that Dick Cheney himself can put a silver star on Monica Brown, give her the third-highest combat medal, before anyone realizes that means she’s been in combat.

What are you going to do?

We don’t line up in great big swaths just a few people deep and stand on either end of the field from each other waiting to see if our opponant is going to mow us down before we mow him down any more.  Why we did that in the first place is too stupid to even contemplate, but it’s over, it’s done, and has been for decades.

There is no front line now.  There is no safe “non-combat” place for a person in a war zone to hang out.  That’s not how war works.  And keeping up this charade of not allowing women into combat serves only two purposes–to give the appearance of protecting male soldiers from girl cooties and to make people too invested in chivalry feel good.  Both of those are bullshit reasons.

Women are in combat.  It’s time to let go of the dream of keeping us out of combat.  We’re there and we’re serving along side our fellow soldiers and it’s not the end of the world.

Here’s what change looks like:

“I didn’t want to leave,” Brown said, after being pulled from the platoon. Robbins said he and his men, who called Brown “Doc,” also wanted to keep her as their medic.

“I’ve seen a lot of grown men who didn’t have the courage and weren’t able to handle themselves under fire like she did,” said Staff Sgt. Aaron Best of Canton, N.C., Robbins’s gunner that day. “She never missed a beat.”

May 5

Slaughter at Sunrise

Note from the Butcher: Sorry.  I spaced on getting you cereal last night.  Here’s five dollars for breakfast.

Note from me: Keep your blood money, you breakfast murderer.  I’ll just eat these saltines.

Voicemail from the Butcher: It would have been better if you’d have called me a cereal killer.

May 5

News Flash

When your state ties its tax revenue to sales tax instead of income tax, your state will face financial hardship when folks curtail their spending.

And, when your state is facing financial hardship because people are spending less, this is, quite possibly, not the time you should be cutting jobs.  Don’t you need as many people as possible to be working and, you know, spending?

And why are we still having sales tax holidays?  We’re talking about cutting folks’ jobs and we’re still having sales tax holidays?

On top of that, the governor says we need to run the state like a business.  Well, shoot, we’re already seeing upper management continuing to live their spiffy high-on-the-hog lives, with their party bunkers and their posh wining and dining while workers lose their jobs.

That looks to me exactly like running the state like a business.

Listen, I know there’s not much to be done about the party bunker under the governor’s mansion at this point.  It’s not like stopping construction now is going to bring that money back.  And, lord knows I’m convinced that the Republicans in this state wake up every morning and flip a coin to decide whether they’re going to be dumbasses or evil today.

But they are right about this.

Putting in a multi-million dollar underground banquet hall while at the same time suggesting cutting state workers looks like you are out of touch.  It looks like you are a bunch of snobby, over-entitled assholes who are out of touch with the real hardships people are going through in this state.

You don’t deserve a nice place to wine and dine your friends while other people are going home to sparse tables.  You don’t deserve to use our money to make your jobs easier when you’re making it harder for us to keep our jobs.  You just don’t and shame on the Democrats for not seeing it.

Lucky for you, the Republicans continue to be idiots and they’re focusing on trying to make abortion double super secret illegal in the state and they haven’t yet found a way to spin the party bunker that doesn’t make them seem like petulant assholes.

But if they do?

If they start sending out press releases that read simply “Salary for laid off state employees–XX million dollars.  Democrats’ party bunker–XX million dollars.” or “Cuts to DFS–XX million dollars.  Democrats’ party bunker–XX million dollars.” folks, even folks like me, are going to find that very convincing, to put it mildly.