THe land of the free – unless you’re female
Janice turner is on form in The Times today, with an article, which has the headline above.
It is summed up by this early paragraph.
How bizarre it is to watch the United States — the upbeat, future-focused wellspring of all things exciting and new — tear itself apart over contraception. America, capital of the global porn industry, teen pregnancy gold medallist, progenitor of Madonna and Gaga, having its presidential election defined by the morality of birth control.
Apparently, the United States is making it much harder for women to get contraception and has gone totally against people planning their family. Especially if you’re poor.
Even countries as Catholic as Ireland and Italy have seen that contraception is one of those things that creates a better society.
So does the United States want to create a worse country for its poor?
Obviously, they need a lot of male children to fight their wars and female ones to care for the injured.
How Could Anybody Vote For Rick Santorum?
The times has a fairly detailed article on Rick Santorum today and they list some of his beliefs.
He has actually called higher education a liberal conspiracy. Good one that, as does he think that ideas and scientific breakthroughs, like cures for serious diseases just happen without education?
He also says that women ,who get pregnant after being raped, should be made to keep their gift from God. I should think that the only country with similar views is somewhere like Iran.
His views on homosexuality seem to be very much like those in Iran too.
He has also said that working mothers are slaves of radical feminism. That is something worthy of the mullahs of Iran.
I could go on, but I have better things to do, like the washing up, as we widows can’t be choosy about who does the work. Does Rick Santorum have a policy for widows? I suspect it’s God’s gift to those left behind. I couldn’t find his views, but I did find this piece about a widowed conservative Republican, who has a gay daughter. She talks more sense in a minute, than the odious Santorum has talked in the last year.
Show me a white American male with strong religion and I’ll show you a bigot, who believes that a woman’s place is slaving in the home.
The Land of the Free – Sorry Oppressed!
This story with a title of Limbaugh slut slur student Sandra Fluke gets Obama call, on the BBC web site sums up a lot of what I find objectionable in the United States. The first paragraph says it all.
US President Barack Obama has called to offer support to a US law student attacked by radio host Rush Limbaugh for her views on contraception.
Just think what would happen if a talk-show host on a UK radio station, had said similar things to a student in the UK. Limbaugh called the student a slut and a prostitute. They would probably be fired instantly.
What seems to be missing here, is that your health is firstly your own responsibility and if that means you need contraception, then you should be able to get it. No institution has the right to tell you what you can’t do in this area. I always thought, the United States was supposed to be the Land of the Free. Not the Land of the Oppressed!
Would Stings Like This Be Allowed Here?
The BBC has a piece this morning about the rise of the FBI sting. IT would appear that Christopher Tappin, a man with previous good character might have got caught in one and he’s now in a prison in the United States.
I suspect that if the British police used similar techniques, the evidence wouldn’t stand up in a court.
But then our justice system is about justice, whereas the one in the United States is about vengeance.
More Beggaring Belief!
When I wrote the post, This Story Beggars Belief, I just thought it was a one-off, by a total stupido in the US military.
But no! They also managed to lose some of the bodies from the September 11th attack on the Pentagon, according to this story. No-one seems to know where they ended up.
This Story Beggars Belief
The man who ordered this book-burning in Afghanistan has a functioning brain as poor as that of Dominique Strauss-Khan. Surely, he should have known that to burn anything slightly sensitive would have caused a riot. And of course it did!
Today, the day after the Times has leader entitled, Flaming Idiocy, on the subject.
Un-American Activities
The Times devotes its second leading article to their process of shipping people halfway across the world to stand trial without the evidence being tested in a court of law, where the accused has had the opportunity of testing the evidence.
The article finishes with this paragraph.
The national interest of the US lies in living up to its own rhetoric, and demonstrating that, wherever someone lives, the American promise of freedom under the law extends to them. Arresting people and shipping them half way across the world without a fair trial is the sort of thing that the founding fathers made it their life’s work to prevent.
The sooner we call time on this law the better.
What worries me is that I have a common name, which is probably one of the most common in the English-speaking world. Suppose the United States said say, that I was behind some notorious Internet hack, would I get the justice of having the evidence tested in a British Court. Possibly not, because Tony Blair signed my rights away, just as he did to everybody other British citizen, who lives peaceably within the law in the UK.
The Anonymous Widower 