Nerd is my Gender
What's yours?
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Republicans Think of the Children
Cross-posted from No Lords, No Masters.
Last night, my Bencakes and I decided to turn the CNN Republican Presidential Debates into a drinking game. He suggested “Big Government”, but as I didn’t want to die of alcohol poisoning halfway through, I suggested we drink to thinking of the children.
And what a game it was! They all opened up citing their RepubliCred, and all of them made note of how many children and grandchildren they have. Now, I’ve got nothing against being proud of family, I have a son I’m proud of, but there was something strange about how they were presenting their children. It’s almost as if they were using them for personal gain… naw, must have just been my imagination.I found the official transcript of the debates online, and did a word search for “children” and “kids”.
Let’s start with Michelle Bachmann:
I also believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. I carried that legislation when I was a senator in Minnesota, and I believe that for children, the best possible way to raise children is to have a mother and father in their life.
Now, I didn’t come from a perfect background. My parents were divorced. And I was raised by a single mother. There’s a lot of single families and families with troubled situations. That’s why my husband and I have broken hearts for at-risk kids and it’s why we took 23 foster children into our home.Loving couples want to share equal protections afforded all man/woman couples? The children! Think of the children! It’s better to parade 23 of them through one house than to ever let them settle into a stable home life lacking both a mother and a father united in holy matrimony.
Not to be outdone, Mitt Romney stepped up with his own appeal to the innocent youth of our nation in response to a question about the auto industry bail-out:
There is a perception in this country that government knows better than the private sector, that Washington and President Obama have a better view for how an industry ought to be run. Well, they’re wrong. The right way for America to create jobs is to — is to keep government in its place and to allow the private sector and the — and the energy and passion of the American people create a brighter future for our kids and for ourselves.
Not only do Washington and Pres Obama think they know better than the Invisible Hand* how to run this nation, they’re ruining the future for our kids!
Then later on, when moderator John King asked him about federal disaster relief, he again expounded on this theme:
We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
If only we loved children the way Romney does, then we’d stop this senseless disaster relief. After all, only adults are ever affected by natural disasters. Government intervention is clearly an attack on childhood as we know it.
I think Herman Cain takes the cake, er pie (he’s the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza), with his thoughts about his grandchildren:
The reason we’re in the situation we are today with Medicare and Social Security is because the problem hasn’t been solved… You know that commercial where they have demagogued the whole thing with medi-scare and having grandma tossed off the bridge? If we don’t fix this problem, it’s going to be our grandkids in that wheelchair that they were going to be throwing off the bridge. We have got to fix the problem.
I clutch my pearls at the very thought.
His final words about what he learned from this debate touched me, however, because I think I learned this lesson too:
What I’ve learned is that all of these candidates up here share one thing in common. And that is, it’s not about us. It’s about the children and the grandchildren. We’re not that far apart on all of the big issues.
You’re right, Mr. Cain, you’re not that far apart on all of the big issues. A vote for either of you would be as worrisome to me as a vote for the next. But hey, at least you’re thinking of those children, because if you won’t, who will?
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*Republicans: always looking to invisible beings for guidance.
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Well done, Republicans!
Amanda Snarcotte* FTW:
Blunt amendment. Let’s take a tally of how that worked out for you.
1) It kept contraception on the radar, which gave the mainstream media plenty of time and opportunity to make it clear that Rick Santorum is an anti-contraception nut who, if elected, would almost surely do everything in his power to keep women from getting access to contraception.
2) It forced Mitt Romney to set the land record in flip-flopping, first defending a woman’s right to use contraception and then back-tracking and saying, no, actually, you think her employer should get a vote when it comes to how she conducts her private sex and reproductive life.
3) It revealed to the world that your party thinks it’s appropriate to exclude female voices from a discussion about women’s health care.
4) It set your most popular spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, on a multi-week rant about how 99% of American women are “sluts” and “prostitutes”.
5) It’ll probably be a factor in Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe’s seats turning blue.
6) It made those in the media who apologize for your anti-choice views realize that actually, this really was about sex all along and had nothing to do with fetuses.
7) It made you the butt of jokes from “Saturday Night Live”, “Funny or Die”, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert.
8) And then the amendment that all this effort was put behind died with a whimper on the Senate floor.
*I say with affection.
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I love how the narrative has suddenly turned it into “my tax dollars are paying for you to have sex.”
No. Insurance has to cover birth control without a co-pay.
This is a big reason I get so frustrated with conservatives, they are always twisting shit around like this.
Yes, but also…
It’s okay to have sex, it’s okay to take the pill for the sole reason of avoiding pregnancy while having sex (in any context), and it’s okay for public funding to provide that because the benefits of reduced unplanned pregnancy actually do benefit all taxpayers.
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Black unemployment is 14% right now, compared to 8% of the total USA population.
So WHITE PEOPLE are refusing to hire blacks. But when it comes to taking care of the people whose lives we’re destroying, how dare they “demand” “handouts” so they can “continue” to be “lazy”. Calling black President Obama the “food stamp president” was DELIBERATE. And now Republicans are trying to cut food assistance. WHITE PEOPLE are refusing to hire blacks, and now they’re openly pursuing a RACIST agenda to refuse to feed the blacks they’re refusing to employ.
Death to the kyriarchy.
Genderqueer with a touch of happy humanism.
