Maybe the abortion’s supposed to create the barrenness? I don’t know.

Way upthread Kimberly O. hit the nail on the head on one of the major reasons I detest Palin – her hypocrisy.

But her hypocrisy isn’t all of it. It’s one facet. The anti-intellectualism is disheartening. The way she’s all about rebooting the Republican Party without actually offering any sort of new ideas (how can you reboot the party without changing it? I’m very confused by that), the willingness to make use of feminist theory when it suits her and to scorn it in the same conversation, and on and on and on.

But she’s folksy and has a vagina, and that’s all the Republican party thinks women who aren’t on-board with their platform need. And the sad thing is that my aunt ended up being a woman who went from proudly supporting Clinton (and even after the Vice Presidential debate said she liked Biden pretty well despite not being entirely sold on Obama) to voting for Palin specifically because “It’s about time we had a woman.”

I love my aunt dearly, but voting for a woman simply because of the parts she has doesn’t help anybody. On the other hand, her husband (a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army who had never voted anything but Republican for his whole life) voted for Obama because he finally realised that the Republican party did not give a rat’s ass about him and that it would take a while for the party to find its way back to some semblance of intellectual integrity.

DRST, I’m with you there. Reproductive choice was actually the last things that I became militant about when it comes to feminism. When I was a teen, I started out as rather anti-choice, actually – despite being very feminist in other ways. It was hearing arguments that talked about choices other than abortion – or in addition to abortion – that really convinced me and helped me think it all through more clearly.

I can’t speak for everyone else, but for me, the reason why it works is because it helps sidestep the trap of assuming that people who make choices that are wildly different from mine are automatically bad mothers/people.* That is what I used to do when I was younger, and I can hear the same ideas in they way a lot of anti-choice people frame their arguments.

If you tie in abortion access to not only birth control access but also to things like home birth and the right to refuse a cesarean then it becomes much more clear that what is really being discussed is a wide array of health care rights and allowing individuals to make private choices privately and with minimum state intervention.

I think that part of what makes that clear is that the rhetoric of the anti-choicers is right in line with the rhetoric that has been used in the past to take children from unmarried women and that is still used today to dictate borthing choices, etc. Also, the more you delve into reproductive health care as a whole, the more you realize that 1) giving women more options and more support means healthier, happier women and families. 2) motherhood is a tough job that involves tough, personal choices; it is not some picture on a Hallmark card and it is not something that is right for everyone. and 3)PREGNANCY is a potentially DANGEROUS job that involves tough, personal choices.

“Take abortion away and I venture to guess that many moderate Republicans are on board at that point with something much closer to a broad pro-choice than what they will currently support. ”

Keep abortion IN and most moderate Republicans – especially the ones like my sister – are already on board. In fact, take it out – or be wishy washy as they always are – and you’ve lost one of the few things my sister thinks the Dems have going for them.

*yes, I know that woman =/= mother, but part of why the anti-choice argument is so compelling is not just because people hear fetus and think baby, but because they also hear “(pregnant) woman” and hear “mother”. And you know, every (good) woman wants to be a mother yes?

Of course! Bitch was jealous! So she made Palin look like an uneducated and delusional demagogue out of jealousy! [eyes rolling out of head]

Also, heal up, and we’ll catch up later. :)

A laudable goal? Really? yeah, I say fuck that, basically.

Az, I think I see some of what you’re saying, because I think it’s really easy to slip from disliking Palin’s politics to hating on her for being a bad woman/token, and a lot of people who are generally very progressive have done that a lot. I try to be aware of that. But I do think DSRT and AE and others are right that it is still absolutely acceptable to dislike a politician for their politics and behavior and it’s perfectly okay to [vociferously] criticize them for those things.

That’s interesting, brooklynshoebabe. The things I have felt for McCain have been much closer to irrational hatred based on his personality and what he symbolically stood for than was the case with Palin (his nasty bullying behavior, temper tantrums, pettiness, documented physical abuse of strangers; ridiculously privileged patriarchy and spinelessness on political issues), and I had to struggle to ignore those feelings when evaluating his political stances. (Luckily, I hated his political positions, too, so it didn’t really affect my ultimate choice.) Thinking about that again makes me feel a little more sympathetic for people who irrationally hated Palin for her personality and what she symbolically stood for, even though in that case I still think I need to be far more careful to make sure internalized mysogyny isn’t also affecting my feelings.