Stupid, Mean and Condescending Stuff

First up, Rick Santorum, former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and presently a Republican presidential candidate, has this to say about food stamps and obesity: "'If hunger is a problem in America, then why do we have an obesity problem among the people who we say have a hunger program?' Santorum asked." Joann Glamm, "Santorum: 'Town crowds are getting a little bigger," LeMars Daily Sentinel, posted 6 December 2011. 

Here are some answers, Rick Santorum, to your question, from study done by Prof. Patricia Smith, professor of economics at University of Michigan-Dearborn:

• "..[F]ood stamps’ contribution to obesity among the poor is minor, accounting for only about 5 percent of the cases of obesity among poor Americans."
• “'Food stamps may enable women to buy more calories or the once-a-month distribution schedule may lead to disordered eating patterns, tempting women to feast on calorie-dense comfort foods when benefits arrive at the beginning of the month and then fasting at the end of the month when benefits have run out,' Smith explains."
• "Smith also finds compelling evidence that poverty contributes to weight gain by limiting the poor to neighborhoods with reduced access to nutritious lower calorie foods, fewer facilities for physical activity and greater exposure to stressors such as crime and pollution."
• "In addition, childhood abuse, family violence and disability can increase both the risks of poverty and obesity, according to Smith."

And, evidently, obesity is increasing in upper-income groups, too: "Obesity Rising Among the Rich", CBS News Healthwatch, 2 May 2005.

So get your facts straight and your heart in a better place, Rick Santorum.

Next up, Concerned Women of America opposed Senator Jeanne Shaheen's amendment to the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow military women access to government-funded insurance for abortions. Since 1981, women who serve in our military have been denied government-funded insurance for any abortion that didn't "endanger" the health of the mother. In other words, women who serve our country are refused insurance in their medical plans for abortions caused by rape, when pregnancies caused by rapes are a big problem in the U.S. military.

"Women already have access to abortions at a military facility in instances of rape or incest. However, American taxpayers have not been forced to pay for those abortions," Concerned Women of America gripe in a letter signed by their CEO and president, Peggy Nance.

Oh, please....our taxes provide medical insurance for civilians who work for the federal government and for rape victims in federal prisons, medical insurance that pays for abortions caused by rape or incest. Why provide less for women who serve in the military?

But the most grievous sentences in Nance's letter are these:

"Pregnancies under such circumstances need an extra measure of compassion and support. We need to remember that these women are victims of a heinous crime. But our priorities should be placed on preventing these crimes, punishing the perpetrators, and not covering up a crime by merely dealing with the physical consequences. Women deserve better than simply being given abortion as a 'cure-all."

So condescending to women who find themselves in "such circumstances"!

Women who find themselves in "such circumstances" should be the ones to decide what course of action they should take--and they should have the means to do it, the insurance to cover the abortion if they so choose.

Oh, and a vote on the amendment was blocked in the Senate.

What gets me is that the same people who would refuse abortions to women under ANY circumstance are often the same people who fight against providing sex education and access to birth control. bleh!

Morning Reading, Morning Thoughts

My morning's reading:

• Ryan Lizza's "Leap of Faith," about "the transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race," in The New Yorker. I found this article particularly interesting because, like Michele Bachmann, I was early influenced by evangelical Christianity; only for me, that influence was in a country Southern Baptist Church that my paternal grandmother helped establish. I also read Francis Schaeffer's works in search of an intellectual way to verify my beliefs, and for a time, the church in which I was a member focused on eschatology and most specifically on Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. So there is nothing in Michele Bachmann's far-right views that is unfamiliar to me. The difference is that I rejected those views. Brain-washing* is a peculiar thing: when you're under the influence, you don't realize that you are being manipulated--or if you suspect, as I did, you search for ways to justify your continued adherence to the views of your group while also fearing the rejection that will come when you leave the group. When you shake yourself free--not easily and not unassisted--you are appalled by your emotional and rational--and even moral--submission to views you now find untenable. Having been under the influence of far-right Christianity as a youth, I certainly don't want to experience being under that same influence as a citizen. While I find much to admire in the teachings of Jesus, I find much to abhor in how those teachings are expressed in far-right Christian theology.
  
  
• "Your Head on My Shoulder: Parasitic Twins and other Half-Formed Siblings," by Jesse Bering, in Slate--This article was interesting in its gruesome descriptions of parasitic twins, in which one twin is born healthy and another is mal-formed, incomplete, and attached to the healthy twin. And, also, the author's comments at the end connect to the current movement in this country to ban abortions. We have leaders advocating banning abortion of any kind, even if the young woman is a victim of rape or incest. Evidently, these same people would ban abortions of mal-formed twins (some of which are just a jumble of parts) though such intervention might promote the health of the fully-formed and viable twin. When Michele Bachmann and others such as she say they believe in "liberty," they don't mean the liberty for women to make their own reproductive decisions, even when those decisions are based on sound science and/or compassion.
  
  
• Dave Weigel's piece in Slate, "Republicans for Tax Hikes (Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people)"--My previous post responds to this crazy turn of events in the Republican party. But Weigel's analysis points out that there is a method to this madness: Tax the poor more so that they will support lowering taxes for everyone. That way, there is more support for keeping taxes low on the rich.

  In 2002 and 2003, long before it got Huntsman in the room, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that poor people who didn't pay income taxes were "lucky duckies." The poor slob with a low income and child tax credit would get a small or nonexistent tax bill, not one that would "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." The problem here wasn't that the poor slob wasn't paying any taxes; the problem was that his meager tax bill failed to foment enough anger to reduce taxes on other people. Tax cuts for the rich—tax cuts for anyone, really, but the Journal has always been concerned about tax cuts for the rich—require a broad base of outrage.

  Diabolical. And I don't mean that in an admiring way.
  
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog post, "Affirmative Action for Colonial White People," on The Atlantic's website--Actually, I read this piece last night, but it seems to me that what Coates points out here about how slaves (black) and servants (mostly white) were manipulated to prevent their finding common ground speaks to how people continue to be manipulated by those in power in order to prevent those without power from uniting against that power. (See above.)
  
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  *"Brainwashing" may be too strong of a word to describe my experience in the Southern Baptist Church, but the message I got as a child was full of fear and loathing--loathing for the physical self, fear of damnation--and it was sometimes delivered in scary ways. We had preachers who would get all worked up about sin and hell until they were shouting and stomping around the pulpit. At the close of sermons, at what is called "altar-call," we were asked to close our eyes and raise our hands if we felt we needed forgiveness. "Don't worry," the pastor would say, "Only I and God can see your raised hands." But then, once we would raise them, he would tell us that if we had raised our hands, we now needed to come forward publicly and make a confession, implying that we fell "short of the glory of God," in the Apostle Paul's words, if we didn't have the courage to do so. Guilt was a mighty tool. And that time we were studying Hal Lindsey's books was a very dark time, full of foreboding. I had nightmares about Jesus coming back in the clouds and my feet not being able to leave the ground to join the throng of believers in the sky. And one of our pastors would get so excited when our church's gospel quartet sang "The King is Coming," that he would begin screaming. Really.
  

Outrage Fatigue

Reading the news online these days gives me outrage fatigue. Today I got out of bed at 4 a.m. because I couldn't sleep. Now, four hours later, I'm exhausted and would like to stay in bed all day to recover. Here is my day's quota of outrage:

• First up, a list of banking crises and bailouts in Paul Krugman's and Robin Wells' article in The New York Review of Books has me wondering why we can't learn from our mistake of not regulating the banking industry (and larger financial industry) more vigorously: The Busts Keep Getting Bigger. Why?". Clearly, some people have been getting very, very rich through insufficiently regulated speculation and trading, but millions of Americans have suffered because of the greed of a few:

  what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America...[T]the vast sums of money channeled through Wall Street did not improve America’s productive capacity by “efficiently allocating capital to its best use.” Instead, it diminished the country’s productivity by directing capital on the basis of financial chicanery, outrageous compensation packages, and bubble-infected stock price valuations....And what has happened in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 crisis is still worse: all the evidence suggests that the United States is on track to spending the better part of a decade experiencing high unemployment and sub-par growth blighting millions of lives—particularly the old, the young, and the economically vulnerable.

• Next up, an article about how a law to protect pregnant women from domestic violence is being used to criminalize women who have miscarriages: Ed Pilkington's "Outcry in America as Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges," The Guardian, 24 June 2011. Women whose addictions may or may not have caused them to abort are being arrested and charged with murder. And this is in a country where abortion is still--theoretically, at least--legal. Now, I believe in a woman's right to have a legal, safe, medically-arranged abortion, a right that is becoming increasingly difficult to attain in states that are throwing up more and more legal barriers. Personally, I don't think abortion is the right way to practice birth control; I would prefer that women and teenagers have cheap and easy access to birth control. However, the same folks who would refuse abortions to women who seek them (or women who require them for medical reasons) also fight to prevent easy access to birth control. I believe that women have the right to make their own decisions about reproduction, and I'm not really sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of cells can have "rights" from the moment of conception. Yet that seems to be where our current anti-abortion groups are leading us--to a place where women's bodies become their prisons, their fetuses--at whatever stage--their jailors. It's difficult for me not to see misogyny in how this law is being pursued:

  At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.
  
  South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy. (my emphasis)

  Once again, we have a law whose consequences folks just weren't far-sighted enough to imagine.

• Even David Brooks is calling out the Republicans for obstinancy: "The Mother of All No-Brainers," The New York Times, 4 July 2011. Brooks describes the fanatic movement that has taken over the Republican party as unwilling to compromise, "no matter how sweet the terms," as lacking "moral decency," as deniers of facts (refusing to believe scholars and impartial experts), and as unfit to govern. This is DAVID BROOKS, not some lefty. What I don't get is why so many citizens are influenced by these same fanatics. And I found Michael Lind's article "The Three Fundamentalisms of the American Right" useful, too, in understanding my own outrage at today's conservatism--because today's conservatism isn't the conservatism that I grew up with: it's fundamentalism, not Burkean conservatism. And just as I grew more and more outraged as the Southern Baptist Church, the church in which I was born and reared, became more and more fundamentalist, I have become more and more outraged as conservatism has become fundamentalist. And that makes sense. For, as Lind points out, one cannot have a civil discussion with people who think they are always right--and therefore Good--and anyone who disagrees with them is always wrong--and therefore Evil:

  The rise of triple fundamentalism [Protestant fundamentalism, constitutional fundamentalism, and market fundamentalism] on the American right creates a crisis of political discourse in the United States. Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

Enough outrage for the day. It's mid-morning; I can still salvage the day.