It's all coming undone

The House of Representatives today voted on a bill that would write into federal law a right to purchase and use contraception.  The bill passed on a nearly party-line vote, 228-195, with only eight Republicans joining Democrats voting to make access to contraception something that the Supreme Court may not one day deny to Americans by overturning their 1965 decision in Griswold v Connecticut, which found a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment that the court said guaranteed the right of couples to decide to employ contraception when they engaged in sex.

The vote on contraception today followed votes on two bills last week that would ensure access to abortion.  Those bills also passed largely along party lines with only three Republicans joining Democrats in voting for one bill, and even fewer for the other.

All three bills passed by the House face stiff opposition in the Senate, where votes on cloture to consider the bills are sure not to reach the 60 votes necessary to move the bills forward.

Republican opposition to abortion has been universal and long-standing, dating back to the years following the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision which made abortion legal in all 50 states.  But opposition to contraception has always been a kind of sideline wish of the abortion opponents and has been rarely emphasized by Republicans who were never quiet about opposition to abortion. 

I remember attending a Planned Parenthood rally in New Orleans back in the mid-1980’s listening to Heather Locklear tell the crowd that “they’re coming for contraception next” and thinking that sure sounded like a stretch.  The anti-abortion movement in the South was strong and vocal, but I had never heard any of them talk about going after the right to contraception.

But Heather Locklear was right.  Within a few years, I started seeing stories of the anti-abortion people going after certain birth control methods as “abortifacient” because they interfered with the implantation of the early stage of an embryo called a blastocyst on the wall of a woman’s uterus.  That’s what they said in public. 

If you listened to the railings going on from the pulpits of fundamentalist churches, however, they didn’t care about blastocysts.  What they cared about was sex – the having of sex, the enjoyment of sex, the spread of sex and sexuality through popular culture, even talking about sex in public schools -- not gay sex, which they hadn’t gotten around to being paranoid about, but sex in general as it was discussed in sex education classes in high schools and even public universities.

The puritanical streak that was always lurking in the anti-abortion movement was embraced by the Republican Party in full, and now it has reached its fullest growth stage on the current Supreme Court, where five Republican appointees are Catholics and one is an Episcopalian who was raised as a Catholic.  All the finger-waving of priests and nuns that was once limited to the Catholic religion is now being done to the entire country, not only by the six radical religionists on the Supreme Court, but by the Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate.  No more pills for all those girls and women seeking to choose whether or when to get pregnant, and no more condoms for those boys and men who don’t want to spread their seed or protect themselves from disease.

They said they’re against abortion, and now they’ve come right out and admitted they’re against contraception, but what they’re really against is women having the right to control their own reproductive life. What the Republicans voted for in the House today was really to take away a woman’s right to control her own reproductive life right where it begins, with her decision to take a pill or use an IUD that will prevent her from becoming pregnant.  That contraception has always reduced the number of abortions is beside the point to these people.  What they don’t like is women having the freedom to go out and have sex without risking the consequence:  pregnancy.  They really do see having a baby as the punishment you get for living a wanton lifestyle.  Babies are not God’s will, they’re God’s wrath.  

It makes you ask yourself, what could be next?  Repealing the laws that were passed against marital rape, giving back to men the “right” to impregnate their wives any time they want, without the women having the right to say no?  

Everything we’ve fought so long and hard for is being ripped up and thrown away by a Republican Supreme Court and the Republican Party.  It’s as if the 20th Century never existed, and let’s not even consider what they’ve got in mind for this century.

They’re not turning back the clock, they’re turning back the calendar.  All that stands between us and the 19th Century is the Democratic Party and our votes.