Amanda’s got a post on Bush’s latest dog whistle phrase:
This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.
This is from a letter from HHS in response to Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s inquiry regarding Bush’s stance on access to birth control.
I think that while Amanda’s right that the term “responsible adults” opens up all kinds of cans o’ worms (why only adults? who decides who’s “responsible” enough to make their own decisions?), this isn’t really a dogwhistle. A dogwhistle, by definition, is one of those terms that is understood by the target audience but makes no sense to or simply goes right by those who aren’t in the target audience and who might be horrified if they were aware of the real agenda conveyed by the dogwhistle. So, when Bush started talking about, of all things, Dred Scott during a debate, moderates, independents and liberals all scratched their heads while the conservative religious types nodded and understood that this was code for Bush supporting a ban on abortion.
But the “responsible adults” phrase doesn’t really cut it in dogwhistle terms because the seams are showing — it’s laughably easy to know that something’s up. This is lawyering and politicking, pure and simple.
The real interesting bit, I think is in the next few sentences of the letter:
The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.
Now, this isn’t what Maloney asked. She was interested in access to contraception for all women, not just those women who have to get their services through HHS. And even if a woman gets her contraception paid for through Medicaid, it doesn’t do her any good if she can’t actually get her prescription filled because of a disapproving pharmacist? Moreover, what exactly does “family planning services” entail? It doesn’t appear to be the same thing as contraception, which was mentioned separately.
And then there’s the question of abstinence-only education:
Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Because as we know, young people never have sex and they never grow up. And they never do anything less than 100 percent effectively.
What the bloody blue blazes does Dred Scott have to do with abortion?!
Kyra: It’s a belief that embryos and fetuses are just as human as the rest of us, just like we believed that slaves weren’t human at one time, we will come to understand that the unborn are humans too. Or something. I dunno. I haven’t had nearly enough alchohol yet tonight to start trying to untangle anti-choice rhetoric.
As for the birth control thing–I think it’s the weather-balloon so that they can start talking about putting age requirements on contraceptive purchases.
It declared Dred Scott to not be a person. It denied slaves as having full citizens’ rights. Because the right sees Roe as judicial wack jobs denying fetues the full rights of citizens they draw a direct analog. Dred Scott is code for Roe, so when he talks about America moving past its prejudices and law making the Dred Scott decision irrelevant he is directly calling for lawmakers to ignore Roe and just let it all get sorted out again when there’s a new court which there is now.
They really did blow it on that one. Instead of being being invisible, the words might as well have been flashing in neon.
Well I’ll make two guesses:
1)That as the Dred Scott case has been considered a horribly historic miscarriage of justice and bad rulings. So the wing-nuts and pro-liars like to think Roe v Wade to be the modern century’s great miscarriage of justice that all right thinking people want overturned.
2) That the Dred Scott case was but one reflection of what many southerners and wingers like to think the civil war was all about: state’s rights over big gubmint intrusions in good people’s business. In that the wing-nuts see the way to overturn Roe v Wade is through state by state legislation – a winger rallying cry for years, that the big gubmint keeps good (in control groups) people from running things right.
They’re stupid.
“Unborn bayybeeees are human too, so let’s make them entitled to stuff that no other humans are entitled to. For equality!”
*is mildly sick*
Sorry. Am sort of spoiling for a fight just now, and not finding anything good to rant at.
Full citizens get the right to other people’s bodies?
*considers the conviction rate for rape*
Oh.
And so therefore the irresponsible and the juvenile should be forced to breed? What kind of logic is that?
Scorpio, they are not being forced to breed, they are being
punished for having teh sex.
Simple, isn’t it?
wow when I posted my guesses last night, I was #2, now I’m down the line from those who knew the right answer.
May seem trivial, but to salvage my pride, I wouldn’t have written that had I seen the other, more knowledgeable posts.