Planned Parenthood, Santorum, and the State of American Politics

I don't even know if I have the energy to rant about this BS anymore. I mean. Really? REALLY?

Politics and incredulousness/sadness after the jump.

Full disclosure time: I was raised in Happy Feminist Land (tm) where couples were equal partners, families were multicultural/ethnic/religious (ok, after Grandma said something racist... usually with regard to her own race...), we went to Lobby Day at the State Capitol every year to support women's rights, healthcare, and social justice causes, I knew where babies came from after I asked at 3 years old* ... Yeah, we're a mix of working, middle, and upper-middle class mostly-white people but discussions of Privilege and Power were never lacking.

After such an upbringing, it is honestly hard for me to accept that some people *actually* believe some of the nonsense that you hear on TV.

I mean... I can grok the abortion hysteria. I mean, just because in my religion and culture the people who are people are the ones who are currently breathing** doesn't mean that I can't understand that for others a fetus is a baby even if it gives me, as a pregnant woman, the nails-on-a-chalk-board shivers. I can even grok the idea that people are weirded out by people who are different from them - I can totally relate. When people do things differently from how I do them or how I was raised to do them, it is weird and can totally throw you for a loop. I get that.  I really do.

It's just... are we really talking about whether or not women should be allowed to use birth control? REALLY? Are we really having a national conversation about the personhood of a blastocyst? You people know that identical twins begin as only one blastocyst right? To say that a blastocyst is a full person is to say that an identical twin is only a half-person. Plus, we throw away fully half of the cells that make up the blastocyst at birth, so identical twins are more like one third or one fourth of a person.*** Did you take High School Biology? Or is understanding how our bodies function somehow sacrilege?

Do people really think that letting gay people get married will harm them? Like I said, I get the whole 'anal sex is weird' squick factor that some people have but... it's not like we're making you try it (though who's to say? You might like it). Did actual lawyers with real law degrees really try to argue that Prop 8 was meant to increase parenting skills and positive child rearing outcomes among heterosexual people? REALLY? I mean. What?!

Are we, as a nation, actually wasting our time on this ridiculousness? What about the economy? Remember how we're still at war? And using drones in that war? Can we talk about healthcare? Can we talk about tax policy? Energy policy? The precarious nature of our relations with Iran? Anything that actually matters? Please?

I don't even know what to think about people anymore.

* I got an amazing age-appropriate, biologically correct answer that I hope to use for my future children when they ask
** and yes, this includes those on ventilators, just not those in anaerobic wombs
*** For the most part though, placentas are destroyed shortly after birth. Some identical twins share a placenta, some have their own, either way they start out as one blastocyst. And we're not even talking about morulas here.