GOP Anti-Sex Lunacy

Ever since the Christofascists hijacked the GOP base, the Republican Party has become obsessed with all things sexual and wants to regulate women's wombs and relations between same sex couples.  Meanwhile, of course, the Bible Belt has the highest divorce rate and the most unwed teen pregnancies.  Perhaps these "godly folk" need to spend less time monitoring the sex lives of others and pay more attention to their own screwed up lives.  A piece in Salon looks at the Christofascist sexual obsession and dysfunction that has overtaken the GOP and the delicious surprise in the effort to indict Planned Parenthood that resulted in the indictment of its detractors/slanderers instead.  Here are highlights:

It was a moment of justice so delicious that we need a new German word for it, as schadenfreude isn’t impactful enough. A Houston area grand jury was convened, under the orders of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to investigate allegations that Planned Parenthood was running a black market for-profit fetal tissue trafficking ring. After perusing the evidence, the grand jury exonerated Planned Parenthood, but then turned around and indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, two of the people that helped create the hoax videos that took this lurid right-wing urban legend out of the world of email forwards and into the mainstream media.

The entire episode, however, is a stunning illustration of how far the Republicans have gone when it comes to embracing even the most ridiculous and fringe right wing causes.

That Daleiden and Merritt are facing criminal charges is, in itself, no surprise. The videos they made under the auspices of the Center for Medical Progress used heavy editing to make it seem like Planned Parenthood employees were saying things they clearly didn’t say.  Most notably, they made it seem like they are profiting off fetal tissue when they explicitly say in the unedited footage that Planned Parenthood does not profit off fetal tissue. That people who are willing to do something so deeply deceptive and unethical are also willing to cut legal corners is the least surprising thing in the world, . . . Their lies have also been implicated in the deaths of three people who were murdered by a self-proclaimed anti-choice warrior who cited the hoax videos as cause for shooting up a clinic.

What should be surprising is that Lt. Gov. Patrick, with the full support of Gov. Greg Abbott, were stupid enough to force this investigation in the first place. From the get-go, it was self-evident that the accusations against Planned Parenthood were false. 

It’s not just the red states that have gone all in on this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It’s become mandatory for every Republican candidate to pretend to believe that these discredited videos are some great expose, and Carly Fiorina got so excited about this that she just started making stuff up about what she saw in the videos. They’re lying about lies now, a veritable vortex of right wing bullshit.

This absurd situation perhaps became inevitable, however, when mainstream Republicans decided to embrace what used to be a fringe right wing campaign against Planned Parenthood.

 Anti-choice activists have long hated Planned Parenthood, believing that its sex-positive vibe and mission to make sex education and contraception easy to get was going to turn this country into a biblical Babylon.

This isn’t the only evidence that the anti-contraception fringe is calling the shots now. Republicans have used the fact that Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover contraception without a copay as a pretense to throw a nationwide fit, making wild accusations that they’re being forced to pay for playtime for a bunch of sluts.  

Just a few years ago, the idea that someone would use her insurance to pay for birth control was non-controversial for Republicans, just as it was non-controversial for the government to give money to Planned Parenthood so they can offer low cost Pap smears and birth control pills. But all it took to demonize a service that nearly all women, including conservative women, use was to declare that it’s “liberal” and link it to Obama.

If you want to know how politicians who want to shut down the IRS or ban Muslims from traveling into our country became mainstream Republican presidential candidates, look no further than this. If a bunch of wackos who want to shut down access to contraception, a service used by nearly all women, can get make their agenda a priority, any fringe belief has a shot.