First, go read this, by OldMotherChaos on LiveJournal.

Now, I’d like to introduce you to the tediously-named Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. You can find it here on the UK Government website: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmbills/111/06111.1-4.html

You probably haven’t heard of it before, unless you’re a habitual political activist. You should have, though. The Bill had its second reading in the House of Commons this week, where just a handful of MPs barely got the chance to debate it. It’s now winding its way through towards quietly becoming a hideous turning point.

The Bill is actually written rather simply, for a piece of law. It’s not very long. Have a look for yourself.

Under the terms of the Bill, a Cabinet Minster may alter any piece of UK legislation — or draft an entirely new piece — by issuing an “Order”. That’s right. The Bill grants Ministers the power to pass or amend laws almost as they see fit.

This world gets a little scarier every day. It’s getting to the point where I wake up, make my morning coffee, turn on my computer, and flinch. Entirely aside from US government shenanigans like the PATRIOT Act, we have things like the South Dakota abortion ban (PS: Go read this, from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Now you’ve learned a new word. Learn it, love it, use it often. You’re welcome.), followed by similar crap legislation in a few other southern states, and – this just in – Missouri cutting funding for contraception. LiveJournaler SeeksAdventure says:

Logic, in Missouri’s government? Never! We’ll protect all women and children from thoughts such as sex is not a negative thing when women do it and it’s better to be educated and try to be safe than to have unprotected sex and get pregnant and sick.

It primarily would have affected women who lack private insurance but who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, which provides contraception under federal rules.

Yeah, hi. That’s me.

“State taxpayers should not be required to subsidize activities they believe are immoral or unethical, relating to contraceptives or abortions,” said Larry Weber, executive director of the state Catholic Conference.

But state taxpayers should be required to support schools when they don’t have children? State taxpayers should have to support the waste of money going into stadiums and unnecessary buildings?

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with the world, today? The fact that we, en masse, have not risen up and descended in all our wrathful glory upon our seats of power, bearing pitchforks and torches, to bring down our governments, is a constant amazement to me. What does it take for you people to realize that there is a gi-hugh-normous government cock in your asses?
Ladies and gentlemen, just so you know, just so you can’t say you weren’t told, we are getting fucked on.
Were you people not paying attention in history class? You know what happens when you give shit-tons of unlimited power to the people in charge. When you do that, you invariably get fucked on. When you start taking away the checks and balances that keep the Big Men under our collective thumbs, they go fucking crazy, and start oppressing us. Things like this bill in Great Britain, and like the PATRIOT Act, and like letting Dubya get away with his illegal wire taps and government-sanctioned torture camps, and so forth, things like that – well, shit, folks, you might just as well drop your drawers and bend over. Make things easy for the Big Men.
I don’t know if you all have noticed, but there’s this “crappy economy” thing going on. In fact, for quite some time, the average household has required two earners to keep afloat. IE, both the partners in a given relationship have to work in order to keep the bills paid. In fact, in many situations, one or both partners have to work two or more jobs. Hell, my husband and I both work fifty or more hours a week, at jobs which are considered good paying currently, here in Michigan, and at least once a week, I kick around the idea of picking up a second job, just so we can get a little extra breathing room. And, y’know, it’s not like me and Art are going crazy with the money, here.
So, the economy sucks, currently, and on top of that, we’ve had to have two-earner households for quite a long time, now. The days of the menfolk bringing home the bacon whilst the wimmenfolk cleaned house and wiped the kids’ asses at home are over with. We can’t get them back. They’re gone.
If, into our new reality, you introduce things like no abortion and contraception that is, at best, difficult to get your hands on, you are seriously fucking up the equation. Entirely aside from the fact that single folks should be able to get their rocks off with one another safely and easily, your average married/partnered couple is not in a situation where the female half of the partnership can spend a lot of time and money gruntin’ out youngins. We need to keep abortion safe, legal, and rare, and we need to keep contraception cheap and easy.
By not doing so, you are putting a whole hella lot of families in a whole hella lot of financial hardship. Pregnancy is expensive, and usually requires at least six weeks off from work, usually more. For most of us, that’s six weeks or more where we aren’t getting paid. Most of us don’t have any insurance, either, so now we’ve wracked up thousands in medical bills.
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s thousands of your tax dollars, multiplied by hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people in that position, that has to come out of your tax dollars, to pay for these unwanted pregnancies. And I’m just talking about the married, monogamous, working class here. I’m not talking about all the single mothers and so on that the Krazy Kristian Konservatives are getting so worked up and pissed off about. I’m talking about decent, likely Christian, hard-working, married, monogamous working people out there who are barely making the house payments as it is, and who have no health insurance to speak of. By denying them safe, inexpensive contraception and safe alternatives when the contraception fails, we are creating hundreds of thousands of millions of more dollars that are going to have to be spent out your ultra-conservative-Christian paychecks to take care of those families and those babies.
In short, and to put it into terms that these folks can understand, this is going to cost a fucking fortune. It is cheaper by far to fund inexpensive contraception and Planned Parenthoods.
Duh.
Let me break it down for you. By allowing the Big Men and their Ivory Tower constituents get away with shit, we give them the idea that they can get away with more shit, which leads directly to crap like Intelligent Design being taught in schools, abortion bans, higher taxes for those who can least afford it, endless, unwinable wars with body counts in the tens of thousands – several thousand of which are our own — and Bill O’Reilly being taken seriously on tv, which is in and of itself a crime against nature. We gave them an inch, they took a mile, and now, ladies and gentlemen, we are all getting fucked on.
These actions and policies and turning the rich/poor divide into a gaping chasm, and there are a hell of a lot more of us on the poor side than the rich side. When you force people into poverty with bad laws and policies that no one opposes, you are creating a population of desperate people. Desperation leads to crime, and shit-tons more money being spent, and likely, more bad policies and laws, which only makes things worse.
This is what we refer to as a “vicious circle”. We need to put a stop to it, and we need to do it right fucking now, while there is a slender possibility that things can still be corrected.
Ladies and gentlemen, may I now refer you to your local November elections, and ask you to remember the vicious circle?

Playing the Popularity Game:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Politics, Ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.