Josh is wondering why the Obama admin is doing this.
I don’t know, but I think it’s the usual Democratic Party always-feint-to-the-right thing. Why the Democratic Party has such a thing, I also don’t know, but it certainly does. It’s why I don’t always vote for the Dem candidate for president (and then get in huge arguments that go on for years). It seems to me that the only way to convince them that there is a cost in alienating their own side too is to make it cost.
Or maybe in this case it’s not so much a feint to the right as that other fatal urge to be always seen as more Normal and Average and Majority and Wholesome than those wild-eyed crazy leftists and anarchists and feminists. Girls of 13 weren’t taking the morning after pill on Father Knows Best or I Love Lucy so they’d better not be taking them now, either, at least not without a prescription so that they have to tell someone they’ve been fucking.
Whatever the reason is, it pisses me off, especially when he goes around saying he supports reproductive rights for women. No you don’t, dude. You don’t, so don’t say you do.
It’s what Hitchens called triangulation. Promises to the left and concessions to the right. Keeps you in office.
Possibly he’s reacting as a father. If his own girls were having unprotected intercourse then he’d want to know. It would be in the girl’s best interest for him to know. Therefore all parents should know. So he supports reproductive rights for adult women only.
Except that some girls have damn good reasons not to tell their parents everything. In extreme cases, their lives would be at risk if they told their parents they’d besmirched the family’s honour. In many, many more cases the girls would dither, and cross their fingers instead, and of course many would get pregnant. And of course, many of those would be in states which have made abortion near impossible.
Or maybe he’s well aware of that, and it really is a despicable political calculation.
What the hell?
I will add that if Obama is acting as you describe, he’s acting as a right-wing father who believes his children are more like possessions than people. What evidence does anyone have that it is best if they know whenever their children are having sex? If they are old enough to fuck, then I submit that they are old enough to keep it secret from whomever they like, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. And even if you disagree, that doesn’t get you off the hook from dealing with the fact that teenagers WILL fuck, and they WILL NOT tell a responsible adult about it in many cases, so what are you going to do about that? If that is the motivation, then it is a motivation of ignorance and selfishness and myopia. It really does not make things any better.
@SallyStrange I should have used scare quotes. I think the idea that a teenager having sex ruins the family’s honour is absolutely deluded, but it happens. There was at least one woman in England murdered for texting a man she wasn’t related to. Can you imagine asking parents like that for the morning after pill? My point is that a girl with parents like that can’t ask Mom, but loving parents forget that all too easily.
I understand there is a place for triangulation but there has to be some actual substance somewhere! Eventually triangulation and centrism will fail because as crazy as Republicans can get, at least the people understand they are right wingers. When you elect Democrats but they always act like a crypto-Republicans it is corrosive to the Democratic public image.
And people try to say that the media isn’t biased to the right. If the media weren’t biased to the right, Obama wouldn’t have to keep making these horrible “concessions” to said right…=/
Well, if I had told my mother I was having sex (not that I was, while living with her), the only result would have been an awkward but supportive conversation where she made sure I was up on related health issues, particularly the issue of protection. No negative effect, chance of positive effect, therefore in my best interest. If Obama is a parent like that, then rorshach’s statement would be accurate.
On the other hand, the reason I know this about my mother is because of the preemptive “Here is a box of condoms in the hall closet, use them at need and at will, no need to ask” conversation she had with my sisters and I in our early teenagerhood, which makes the whole question pretty moot. It stood strongly implied that we did not need her knowledge or permission to have sex. Anyway, I very much doubt Mom is in favor of any but purely medical restrictions on birth control. So I’d say that “if Obama is a parent like that” is a pretty dubious assumption. Perhaps he thinks he’s a parent like that.
It doesn’t matter what kind of father Obama is. He can be Ward Cleaver. The point is that children aren’t chattel, and by the time they’re old enough to have sex they’re old enough to decide who, if anyone, they want to ask for advice. End of story.
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The BS about the poor dears needing sage advice from somebody responsible would at least be more consistent if the Obama types also had fainting fits over boys buying condoms without any help.
What makes you think Obama is unhappy to concede?