Make every member of Congress speak frankly about birth control

When I see articles like this one at Huffpo, I am reminded that there are members of Congress who would like to keep women and men from deciding whether and when they will have babies. This impulse is often the result of a religious belief that it is their duty to discourage people from having sex unless they are trying to have babies. And sometimes, as indicated in the Huffpo article, it's motivated by a belief that other people should be compelled to have babies they would rather not have. Maybe my memory is foggy, but I don't remember this power of Congress being spelled out in the Commerce Clause or in any of the enumerated powers. I realize that the Huffpo article concerns health insurance coverage, but reading it reminded me of my recurring suspicion that many members of Congress are incurably meddlesome when it comes to other people's sexuality. [caption id="attachment_18928" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Image - Creative Commons"][/caption] It is my belief that people who feel these compulsions are engaging in warped sexual fantasies of their own. They are getting off on keeping others from getting off. I suspect that there are many of these pleasure police and it's time to OUT them. Let's force them to make their repressive sexual agendas explicit. Here's how I would do it, if I had my way: Make every member of Congress stand up at a podium, one by one, and answer a single simple question, but first they would be read the following explanatory prelude:

"The following question concerns only those pills and devices that are used prior to or during sex to prevent pregnancy. This question does not concern abortion."

Now, here's the question:

Every American adult should be entirely free to purchase any

currently available pill or product to prevent pregnancy.

Yes or No?

This imaginary spectacle would allow Americans see who is for personal liberty and who is for meddling. Let's make it all public. Let's allow The People to see who "represents" them:
An estimated 98 percent of sexually active women in America have used some form of birth control at some point in their lives. According to a recent Thomson Reuters/NPR poll, 77 percent of American voters believe that insurers should cover the cost of birth control with no co-pays.
Alas, my proposed thought experiment will never occur. For the foreseeable future, the meddlesome members of Congress will continue to express their aversions to other people's sexual pleasure only indirectly, for instance, by voting in wacky ways on insurance issues. I wonder whether Rep Steve King is against requiring people who have health insurance pay medical premiums that cover appendectomies because there are many people who won't need to have appendectomies. He's a real piece of work. At least he's already stepped up and declared his position: I like to meddle with other people's lives.

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Blunt Language From Missouri Senator About Abortion

I fully participated in the recent campaign to prevent the move to cut funding to the the organization that prevents more abortions than any other, Planned Parenthood. Even though Republicans held to that partisan budget pittance to the point of shutting down the government, the health services for poor women provided by Planned Parenthood will continue to get that dollar per citizen for another year. Yay. But along the way, I wrote to my Senator, Roy Blunt. Weeks later, he wrote back. Here (in part) is his response:

"Thank you for contacting me about funding for Planned Parenthood"

"I am deeply opposed to the practice of abortion and do not support federal funding for any organization that performs or promotes abortions, which includes Planned Parenthood. An unborn child is a living human being and abortion ends the life of that child. Throughout my time in the House I worked hard to protect the lives of the unborn.

"I am proud to have the highest possible pro-life voting record according to National Right to Life, and, as I begin my time in the Senate, I will continue to support efforts to make adoption more attractive for parents and prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion."

Either he is ignorant, or tacitly lying. Three percent (3%) of Planned Parenthood's activities are abortion related. Of those, none (0%) have ever been taxpayer supported. The prohibition against tax money for abortions is still in effect from the 1976 Hyde Amendment. Only under very rare circumstances does this act allow any federal money to be involved in an abortion. Lawmakers can posture all they want to; it is already illegal for tax money aid poor women who must resort to that tragic choice. I'm not a single-issue voter, nor do necessarily I oppose his position every issue. But his ignorant formula response to my request has cemented my opposition to his reelection.

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Conservatives working hard to increase the number of abortions

Congressional conservatives are working hard to strip all federal funding from Planned Parenthood. What will be the effect? USA Today reports on a study by the well-respected Guttmacher Institute:

Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program. The data are in a report being released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank whose research is generally respected even by experts and activists who don't share its advocacy of abortion rights.
Some have characterized this as but one item on an ongoing Republican war on women. I see it as a war on almost everything but warmongering. For instance, the House just voted to de-fund the IPCC, a celebrated international Nobel Prize winning scientific organization providing definitive information about the state of the climate. The $13 million/year federal dollars that supported this organization is the equivalent of the money we waste every hour in Afghanistan.

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The Hellhound and HeLa: Recent American Historical Writing At Its Best

The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.

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