Here’s the Question I’d Have if I were Just a Normal ‘Pro-life’ Person

It’s obvious from comments that the Governor has made and David Fowler has made that they always intended to defund Planned Parenthood across the state. This has been in the works for a long time and been their dream for even longer.

So, here’s my question. It’s a question that would give me great pause if I were just a normal ‘pro-life’ person and it gives me minor pause as a pro-choice person. Why didn’t these guys have a big fundraiser for CCHS this spring? Then, heck, another one planned for right now? They know how much money it takes to provide free healthcare to poor people in Memphis because they know how much the Title X grant is–$400,000.

So, why didn’t they just raise that much money for CCHS in the spring? Let them start offering full-service healthcare that fits their philosophy? Give them a chance to gear up on their own terms for going after that Title X money? That way, there wouldn’t be this gap between when Planned Parenthood’s money ran out and CCHS was ready to see patients.

I mean, sure, $400,000 is a lot of money, but you get a lot of regular pro-life people giving $10, churches maybe taking up a special offering, and, oh, I don’t know, some rich businessman governor to cover the rest and it’s pretty easily taken care of. Shoot, maybe you’d only have to raise $200,000, since you’d just be covering the time from the spring fundraiser until CCHS took over the Title X program.

You think that between the Republican party apparatus and David Fowler’s network, they can’t raise $200,000?

So, why didn’t they?

Why not fund a pro-life free health clinic and let the people of Memphis decide which one they wanted to use while the Title X stuff was getting hashed out?

I have my theories why. But I’m curious as to whether this tickles uncomfortably at the back of any ‘pro-life’ person’s head? Are you, as a person who thinks abortion is wrong, starting to worry that, for folks like Fowler and Haslam, this is more about punishing political enemies than helping women have healthy children?

I mean, there’s David Fowler, crowing about what a great victory this is, apparently completely unbothered by people not having access to needed healthcare right now.

Just makes you wonder what their agenda is, exactly.

Monsters in America

I am enjoying Scott Poole’s Monsters in America so much that I both want to be finished with it right now and am sad about how close I am to the end of it.

Here’s a paragraph from the beginning, which I love:

The American past, this book contends, is a haunted house. Ghosts rattle their chains throughout its corridors, under its furniture, and in its small attic places. The historian must resurrect monsters in order to pull history’s victims out of what Alice Walker calls “the mud of oblivion.”The historian’s taks is necromancy, and it gives us nightmares. Or at least it should.

I want to high-five Poole just for that paragraph.

It’s a great book and monsters are a really interesting lens through which to look at American social history. The thing I like about it especially is how he shows how we, as a nation, are constantly working to construct a narrative of who we are and our monsters, the things we find monstrous, constantly work to undermine that narrative.

I also think his take on why Freaks wasn’t a hit when it was released is spot on. He says that, basically, lynching was so widespread and the rhetoric about the men who were lynched was so focused on framing them as monstrous that a movie that asks us to sympathize with monsters and to see their revenge as justified was just completely and utterly rejected by a culture killing its “monsters” for its own amusement.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying it. I’m almost done, but I took a break to eat dinner and I guess to type this. If it starts to suck at the end, I’ll revise, I guess.

My Back is Old

I planned to spend the morning gardening. I wanted to cut down the peonies and clear the front left bed of trees. Mission accomplished. I even fell a little in love with the holly, because I realize that, in another year, they will crowd out the more problematic parts of that bed.

But, in the middle of all this gardening, I had to spend a good ten minutes sitting on the front steps waiting for my lower back to quit acting like an asshole.

What the fuck, back? You carry around two huge boobs all the time. I feel like I should have the core strength of a ninja.

Obviously, though, my back disagrees.

I have half a mind to pull up all my plants and plant bushes instead. Who needs flowers?