I know that much of the health care debate has surrounded the government funding of abortion, and we all know where I fall on that debate. However, I had not read how the Senate bill would implement the policy until I read this Washington Times article:

The groups are divided over whether the Senate bill allows for federal funding of abortions. Status quo, as dictated in the Hyde amendment, bans taxpayer funding of the procedure in programs such as Medicaid, except when the life of the mother is at risk or in cases of rape or incest.

Members of the Pro-Choice Caucus say that they don’t like the Senate bill because it requires women who want an insurance policy that covers abortions to pay for the abortion coverage entirely on their own and send two separate checks to cover premiums.

The line, women who want an insurance policy that covers abortions to pay for the abortion coverage entirely on their own and send two separate checks to cover premiums, makes my blood run cold.

The Pro-Choice Caucus infers that there are women out there who pro-actively pay for abortion insurance. Insurance is an economic decision to invest in services that you will possibly need. When you opt into getting a specific policy, you are acknowledging that the odds are against you. For example, if you live on a mountain, are you likely to get flood insurance?

Women who opt for this coverage would make a premeditated decision thinking, “It is likely that I will get pregnant unexpectedly. If I do, I want to abort any child that I conceive.”

Perhaps I’m naive. I’ve always believed that even those who support abortion view it as a worst case scenario. Lately, the left has managed to shock me by endorsing abortion with glee. It’s as though pro-abortion advocates are shouting, “Who cares if abortion is murder? I’m ok with that. In fact,  I’m going to be a cheerleader for it because a woman’s “right” the most important factor. To hell with everything else.”

Just look at Feministing’s response to Mary Ann Sorrentino, former Planned Parenthood executive director in Rhode Island, when she questioned Angie Jackson’s live tweets of her abortion.

Sorrentino’s piece reads like she’s telling Jackson to be ladylike, to be a “good girl.” There are certain things a woman just shouldn’t speak about in public. This isn’t the feminism of a previous generation – it’s an argument that the divides between public and private should be maintained, with women’s experiences kept in the private sphere. It’s an argument for silence, for stigma, and for an appropriate way of being a lady.

This goes against the approach to destigmatizing abortion that I learned from pre-Roe organizers. The Redstockings Abortion Speakout in 1969 began a traditional of women telling their abortion stories publicly to humanize the procedure, to bring it into the public sphere, and to remove shame. These women didn’t listen when they were told their stories should be kept private. Jackson used new technology to share the experience as it was happening, a new twist on an old consciousness raising technique.

In removing the stigma of abortion, feminist forces aren’t justifying this debate, they’re celebrating it. They are reveling in this legal right regardless if it is good for women. Forget the gory details and pain that Angie Jackson’s tweets revealed. She’s raising the collective consciousness of womankind! To hell with anything else. As long as the feminist agenda is advanced, nothing else matters.

Anyone else sickened by this?

Back in August, I nearly bought a t-shirt emblazoned with the Gadsden Flag to wear at the 9/12 rally. I decided not to spend my money and thought “How many rallies could I possibly attend to justify buying this shirt?”

In hindsight, it would have been a good investment in protest attire.

FreedomWorks has issued a call for another protest on March 16 to kill the Obama healthcare bill. The President has declared that the bill must be through the House and Senate by March 18, so he can conveniently schedule a photo-op before he flies off to the Pacific.

Wouldn’t you hate for the overwhelming opposition of the American people to conflict with Obama’s tight schedule? How rude of us.

Despite promises from Obama and a strongly-supported measure in the House, the new version of the health care bill funds abortions. Americans United for Life Action have a new ad urging Congress and Obama to prohibit any federal funding from going to abortions.

Susan B. Anthony List also has more information about abortion and the Health Care Summit last week. This is a major problem. Americans should not be required to fund abortions with tax dollars.

Over and over again, we’ve been told that Obama’s health care policy is the only idea out there. Between his administration and the media, the American people keep hearing that Republicans are out of ideas and the “party of no.” Obama has repeatedly said that he’d read Republican alternatives and insinuates that they’ve not taken him up on the offer.

That’s not exactly true.

The House Republicans have an interesting video debunking Obama’s claims.

Remember the concept of equality? That belief stemming from our Founding Fathers that all men and women deserve the same rights and opportunities endowed from our Creator? Apparently, Rep. Carol Shea-Porter missed that lesson in her high school civics class:

Rep. Shea-Porter is playing into an argument that gender Feminists love to make: women are better at getting things done because we’re natural nurturers. Note what Shea-Porter says at the end: that women are better suited for leadership because they’ve taken care of mothers, mothers-in-law and other family members. None of the men in Congress have ever driven their mothers to a doctor’s appointment or changed a dirty diaper? None of them are concerned fathers or devoted husbands? That’s a rather broad stroke and a huge insult to the men serving in Congress.

This is playing into the “if women ruled the world” fantasy that Feminists articulate in their psychobabble academic papers and books. Their goal has devolved from empowering girls to give them the same opportunity as boys to now tearing down men so that women can assert their superiority.

It’s interesting how feminists talk out of both sides of their mouths. Women and men are equal, and gender is socially constructed unless the situation demands that women are more nurturing and willing to collaborate. When it is convenient to point out the softer side of women, feminists are quick to play the nurture or victim card. When feminists are attacking traditional roles or femininity, suddenly we’re back to “gender is artificially created by an oppressive patriarchal society.”

You can’t have it both ways.

It’s shameful that Shea-Porter is insulting her colleagues based on their sex. As Weasel Zippers points out, had a man said this,  most women’s groups would go ballistic. Sexism works both ways. Women can’t be victims nor can they be superior.

Equality is giving men and women the same opportunities. Equality is not achieving random quotas in society, such as the Shriver Report, which gleefully announces men and women have reached parity in the workplace. Equality has been achieved because women and men now have equal access to the same programs, jobs, opportunities, education, and so forth. Equality doesn’t mean that women must become equal in every single job or segment of society. That will never happen. The fact that women have the opportunity to decide for themselves is equality. Of course by carefully selecting the fields where there is a gender gap (such as STEM fields) gives women’s groups an excuse to stick around.

The Independent Women’s Forum also exposes another popular fallacy that Feminists take:

What bothers me about this isn’t just the double standard, but her implication that all these women-Republicans and Democrats-think alike because they are women and have therefore, of course, been family caretakers. She implies that the GOP women get it, and roll their eyes at all these silly men, who are derailing reform; GOP women are cajoled into voting no on health care reform, but really they know better.

This is going back to the meme from the nineteenth century that women will bond together because we share the same chromosomes. This has been proven wrong time and time again. After the 19th Amendment was passed the National Women’s Party believed that women would solidify as one voting block and take over government. There would be no wars, and all children would be fed and educated. Actually, even the movement for suffrage was marked by countless splits and debates. In the 1970s, feminists believed that women would bond together and demand that the ERA pass. In 2008, Hillary Clinton ran for president under the assumption that all women would vote for her in order to finally get a female in the White House. Even liberal women can’t decide what Feminism is and frequently call it “femininisms” because of the splinters in the movement. Every time this tactic is played, it fails miserably.

Stating that women will agree on something simply because we all have ovaries is demeaning. Men would never utter a something like this about fellow men. This view says women are simple creatures and should come together because we share the same anatomical parts.  The promotion of fellow women is more important than our minds, ideas, beliefs and philosophies. This is sexism directed towards other women, and it is wrong.

IWF also agrees:

Republican women lawmakers should be offended. There are many, many principled reasons to stand against what the Democrats are proposing (for example, see here). And it’s not just Republican lawmakers who reject Democrat proposals: women around the country don’t want a government take-over the health care system as this poll shows.

Somehow it remains okay politically to categorically insult male lawmakers, but in doing so Rep. Shea-Porter dismisses female lawmakers and all the men and women that these Members represent.

So despite that Republican women disagree with the health care bill because of massive government spending, an attack on individual liberty and the funding of abortion, women should vote on it for the sole purpose of showing solidarity? The call of being a woman is more important than religious beliefs or political views?

I’m also insulted that Shea-Porter pulls the stereotype of women going to the bathroom together. When male comedians use this as a punchline, women complain, yet a female Congressional member used it when addressing the House?

As Moe Lane at Red State put it:

162 years since Seneca Falls, and we’ve come this far.

Perhaps the Feminists should just get out of the way and let the conservative women lead. After all, we actually get stuff done rather than spending time whining about it and then spending millions of dollars analyzing the whining.

One of the biggest issues arising out of the socialist revolution, passage of the health care bill in the House was the Stupak Amendment, which barred federal funds from going to abortion. It was a shrewd move by the Democrats to appease the pro-life Blue Dogs. In the aftermath of the bill’s narrow success, conservatives were left wondering, did the Stupak Amendment win the abortion battle but lose the health care war? This gets into the nitty-gritty part of politics. In any defeat, there are always a slough of “what ifs” (like if Jack Ryan didn’t like sex clubs would Barack Obama have won his Senate seat in 2004?) This is a topic that bloggers and graduate students will debate for a long time.

I’ve seen a lot of ire aimed at National Right to Life, particularly for releasing an advisory announcing that they would score “nay” votes for the amendment as opposition to life. This is an extremely difficult situation, and I don’t think that there is an easy answer. The Stupak Amendment created a dilemma that conservatives don’t see quite as often as liberals: party politics vs. issue politics.

National Right to Life is not a partisan organization. While the vast majority of their membership  and likely most of their staff probably vote Republican, they don’t owe any allegiance to either party. Their duty is to ensure that the mission of the organization is carried out and not to toe a party line. In fact on their mission statement page (what a horrible web site!) they explain:

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While catching up on some blogs this weekend, I ran across Jessica Valenti’s post on her own wedding.

Now, I could care less about her wedding and all the hullabaloo of a “feminist wedding.” I’ve gone on the record to state that I have zero respect for Valenti. I’ve read one of her books (I refuse to spend anymore more money purchasing the rest), and found the writing and rationale behind her positions absolutely sloppy. Just because she’s not afraid to drop the f-bomb doesn’t make her fresh and witty and give her a “unique perspective.” Backing up your claims with statistics, examples and other sources goes a long way towards winning an argument than “those f-ing Christians feel this way, so you should believe the opposite.” It’s juvenile scholarship at best.*

I honestly hope she had a happy day that was special for her and her husband. However, I was a bit surprised at this statement:

We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we’d like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about – love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.) [italics mine]

That’s nothing short of rude. It’s one thing to hold a ceremony that is important to you. It’s another to hold a ceremony that pushes a political agenda so that the less “enlightened” members of your family can be exposed to the “truth.”

I hate to break it to Ms. Valenti, but she sounds dangerously close to the Bible-thumping-Bob-Jones-University-types that I knew in high school. If you go far enough to one side, you start resembling the views of your so-called enemies. The politics my be different, but the attitude and expressions are nearly identical.

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