Missouri Family Values

by hilzoy

From the AP, via Atrios:

"An attempt to resume state spending on birth control got shot down Wednesday by House members who argued it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.

Missouri stopped providing money for family planning and certain women's health services when Republicans gained control of both chambers of the Legislature in 2003.

But a Democratic lawmaker, in a little-noticed committee amendment, had successfully inserted language into the proposed budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 that would have allowed part of the $9.2 million intended for "core public health functions" to go to contraception provided through public health clinics.

The House voted 96-59 to delete the funding for contraception and infertility treatments after Rep. Susan Phillips told lawmakers that anti-abortion groups such as Missouri Right to Life were opposed to the spending.

"If you hand out contraception to single women, we're saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that," Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview."

Apparently, Rep. Phillips is under the illusion that monogamous married people don't use birth control. Wrong. Imagine you're a poor woman, happily married, who thinks that your five wonderful children are enough. Or who has serious health problems during pregnancy. Or who is barely making ends meet with her husband and herself making minimum wage, and doesn't see how they can afford to raise a child. Or someone who is not married but in a committed monogamous relationship, and just doesn't want to have a child at this point. According to Rep. Phillips, these non-promiscuous people just don't exist. That's why she only has to worry about sending a message of support for promiscuity, not a message of callous indifference to these women, their partners, and their children: not about the possibility that children will be deprived of their mother when she dies in a complicated pregnancy she did not seek; or about the arguments over how to pay for raising a child that will mar that child's life and break its family apart; or about the wasted promise of two young people who have to drop out of school to raise a child they had not planned to have.

Since I've been talking about morality recently, I should add that what Missouri has done has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. Thinking something is morally wrong is completely different from thinking it should be illegal or unfunded. There are lots of things that are illegal that would not otherwise be wrong. Driving on the left, for instance. There are lots of things that are widely agreed to be immoral that are not illegal (and, according to most people, shouldn't be.) Being needlessly mean, for instance: it's only illegal in very special circumstances -- e.g., when it involves violence or damage to property. Likewise, lying is only illegal when it involves fraud or libel, or you're under oath, etc. What we think of as "normal" lying and meanness and even cruelty are, according to most people, wrong, but they are not illegal, nor should they be.

Morality does require, however, that a legislator not pretend that whole swaths of the population -- e.g., those non-promiscuous people who need contraception -- don't exist. And if she pretends they don't, hopefully they'll get together and vote her out of office. In this case, they could probably get the support not only of anyone who cares about them and their needs, but of those people who think either that promiscuity is not wrong per se, or that the state should not get involved in "signalling" or enforcing its wrongness at the expense of its citizens' real needs.

Comments

[trilobite]

Every now and then, I see a "rational" conservative or a naive liberal saying, well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have abortion rights restricted or removed, because then the religious right would be deprived of a core issue and if they try to shift ground to contraception it will be much harder for them to make the case.

But as seen here, the religious right doesn't say, "Give up birth control!" They say "we don't want to encourage promiscuity." Well, gosh, who could argue with that, right? And if they can, they'll chip away at birth control in the name of limiting promiscuity, until effective, available birth control is so rare that people don't really know what they're missing... and THEN they'll try to outlaw it. Look for a massive, nationwide, ongoing campaign about the dangers of promiscuity for young women, decent housewives (you know, the kind without jobs), and most of all, children. Look for badly-done studies linking promiscuity to disease, crime, prostitution, divorce, unwed motherhood, alcoholism, drug abuse, and terrorism, and promising that chastity can cure these ills.

Invest in burkah stock NOW.

[Sara]

Phillips is literally breeding votes against her. Not a winning strategy.

[bob mcmanus]

Driving on the left is always an affront to the Laws of God and Nature, whether done by people who speak American badly or the ones in front of me in the passing lane.

Umm, how public do the wingnuts have to get before the "inevitable backlash" begins? I may get started on a diatribe about the "women's movement" any moment. Hey, Democrats get 90% plus of the black vote. Even rich blacks have a loyalty and a sense of community, shared interests, empathy.

How are NARAL and NOW doing? What the hell have y'all been doing for thirty years?

[bob mcmanus]

For a second while writing a glimmer of hope ran thru my head, with the 60% of law students being women. Naw, ain't worth much if 2/3 are white-shoe-firm Republicans.

[Jackmormon]

This is just so damned stupid. If you're a woman under the age of, say, 45, the basic prescription you need unless you actually might have a medical problem is birth control. Unless of course you're actually promiscuous, in which case you need an unlimited quantity of condoms, dental dams, and very regular STD testing, all of which I'm in favor of.

What's probably operative here is two-fold: a desire to pander to those who believe BC pills to be immoral or early abortions, and a a desire to pander to those who want to limit "entitlements" and perceive BC as representing more of a cost than it actually does.

Also, OT: hilzoy and Charles, I tagged you with a meme, if you hadn't already noticed.

[lilylily]

Actually I am glad that this sort of measure is passing because it shows what the GOP really is. They will lose the middle over this kind of legislation.

[hilzoy]

Jackmormon: I've been to 41 states and DC. (And in less than a month, I'll be up to 42 -- conference in Idaho.) It would take a while...

[Jackmormon]

Just one wafer-thin sentence?

[liberal japonicus]

It actually goes a lot faster than you think, hil. Just get a list of all the states from a webpage and go down and quickly write one thing that sticks in your mind. The harder states are the ones where you have lived because you have to pick and choose.

[CaseyL]

I'll take a wild stab here and say Missouri's also not keen on funding housing, health, and food assistance to low-income families.

What is it about RW panty-sniffers? Why are they obssessed with other peoples' sexuality? At what point did "Christian morality" degenerate into being about nothing but sex? I don't remember Jesus nattering on and on about sex; are there entire chapters of the New Testament I'm unfamiliar with?

A woman who's in my vanpool was telling us about one of her clients, another woman who works for the US military in a civilian capacity, who just came back from a 6-month stint in Kuwait. Arabic Muslim countries are as sexually repressive as the RW would like America to be, and this woman had some fascinating stories about how the people of Kuwait live with that.

You've probably heard about some of this; how women in Arab countries wear burkhas in public, but have Western clothing underneath for when they go to clubs. In Kuwait, the "clubs" are giant hotels which are more like self-contained resorts. Women and men go to these resort-hotels, and cast off their social strictures along with their culturally-mandated clothing. Married women pick up foreigners (men or women, most often Americans) at the poolside and vanish with them into their rooms; their husbands do the same thing. And this, mind you, in a country where the penalty for getting caught is likely to be death, esp. for the women.

Repression doesn't work. The more repressed a culture is in public, the more people act out once they're in private. The Victorian era was (in)famous for its public-decorum/private-depravity.

I don't wonder why professional prudes keep forgetting that. For one thing, most of them don't live by the standards they insist on for others; they're so bent themselves they can't think clearly at all. What I do wonder is why society at large keeps forgetting that, and keeps insisting on restrictions that don't work, never have worked, and mostly have the opposite of the allegedly-intended effect.

[Jackmormon]

One of the running jokes I see on is that Dubai is where wealthy Saudis go to escape the religious strictures they help support in order to preserve their privileges.

Increasingly, though, I'm beginning to think that the public health vs. first-principles morality arguments, which are being conducted before the public health costs of the results of the first-principle legal strictures have been made clear, have been totally fantastical. Instead of debating principles with anti-abortion, anti-contraception activists, I really do think that women who would like to have the right to legal abortions or subsidized birth control should resort to historical and sociological lines of argumentation.

[Jackmormon]

Oh no! Did that close the link to 'Aqoul? If not, oh moderator, help?

[Alonzo.Quijano]

I Don't see the problem, this is what the fine people of Missouri voted for.

[Jesurgislac]

Jackmormon: This is just so damned stupid. If you're a woman under the age of, say, 45, the basic prescription you need unless you actually might have a medical problem is birth control.

Heh. *waves*

There is also the option of becoming a lesbian. Perhaps we should start active recruitment in Missouri. *makes note to order more toasters*

[ajay]

Er, toasters? I am baffled.

[Jesurgislac]

Toaster ovens!