Conservatives Finally Realize Straight People Fuck. A Lot.
Pam Spaulding over at Pam’s House Blend brought up a discussion worth having:
While it’s about time that conservatives like Mary Matalin feel they can safely (as in, don’t feel intimidated about pissing off Rush) take marriage equality out of the sure-fire rallying cry, it’s interesting how easily she shifts blame for the ills of society on all of you heterosexuals out there fornicating and procreating out of wedlock.
On ABC This Week, Mary Matalin, the Republican strategist, had this to say:
People who live in the real world, say, the greater threat to the civil order are the heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies. That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married. I find this important dancing on the head of a pin argument, but in real life, looking down 30 years from now, real people understand the consequences of so many babies being born out of wedlock to the economy and to the morality of the country.
Yeehah! The great state of Texas is certainly anticipating the birth pains of that epidemic moral and financial crisis. By blocking $73 million from from family planning services, Texas made sure Planned Parenthood didn’t get any funding. (Because you know, along with providing general health care, men and women’s sexual health care, STD testing, LGBTQ counseling, cancer screening, prenatal care, and birth control–Planned Parenthood also provides abortions, though the Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas receiving state funding did not provide abortions. But Planned Parent still lost their Texas funding.) The thing is, with a population of 26 million, Texas has a lot straight people. And not all those straight people are married. And while some of those unmarried, straight people may be celibate and/or not of reproductive age, a whole lot of of them will be doing what Mary Matalin says:
Making babies.
Making babies out of wedlock and contributing to the economic and moral downfall of Texas! Millions of straight Texans are going be having sex without birth control, lots more sex without birth control, because they now have lots fewer places to get birth control, because you, oh great state of Texas, cut off your noses to spite your faces and threw out the baby with the bath water.
Except that bathwater splashed back into your conservative laps, and each little droplet is making another baby, and your noses are growing back longer and longer because you, oh legislators and people of Texas, are lying to yourselves when you think that denying access to birth control–be it condoms, pills, IUDS, morning-after pills–is gonna keep people from fucking. People fuck. It’s a fact of life (and let’s not forget that all that fucking without condoms can spread sexually transmitted diseases, ones like syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia that have gotten so bacterially buff that they are harder and harder to cure, and require way more expensive antibiotics. Plus herpes, genital warts/HPV, Hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS; the latter two are illness which can require escalating and expensive levels of care and medication, plus HPV can led to cervical, anal, and penile cancer. Yes, oh great men of Texas, PENIS CANCER. Because you banned Planned Parenthood.)
Here’s another lifetime issue that’s also expensive which comes from fucking: BABIES.
The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control. The additional cost to taxpayers is expected to be as much as $273 million — $103 million to $108 million to the state’s general revenue budget alone — and the bulk of it is the cost of caring for those infants under Medicaid.
Math is hard, but basically, by cutting $73 million to Planned Parenthood, Texas will now have to spend an additional $200 million underwriting the cost of caring for almost 24,000 unplanned babies. And then there’s the cost of medications for sexually transmitted diseases–Texas has the highest rate of uninsured Americans in the United States (and a woefully weak Medicaid system facing a shortfall), so really what will happen then? Will Texas celebrate the arrival The Great Satan in the form of Obamacare? Oh, the bitter irony….
Texas Democrat, Representative Donna Howard politely refrained from calling her more conservative colleagues dumb-asses:
I know some of my colleagues felt like in retrospect they did not fully grasp the implications of what was done last session. I think there is some effort, they’ll be willing to make to restore whatever we can.
Any restoration of funding to family planning would exclude Planned Parenthood, because even though they don’t provide abortions in Texas, they do elsewhere, and gol-dag-nabbit, Texas isn’t gonna help abortionists, even if they ain’t doin’ abortions in their state. Since a lot of politicians–or their constituents–seem to lump birth control, like condoms and pills in with abortion, it’s hard to say if any funding for family planning/birth control can be put back into the budget. Especially because, as Republican Senator Bob Deuel points out, Texas has a certain attitude:
I’ve debated this in Republican clubs with people — people who say it’s not the government’s role to provide family planning. Ultimately, they’re right. But you have to look at what happens if we don’t.
Babies happen. STDs happen. Penis cancer happens. Deuel should know–he’s a family physician. And just one more reminder, Texas: Straight people fuck. A lot. And that makes babies. Babies being born out of wedlock which will carry, per Matalin, consequences to the economy and to the morality of the country.
