While watching television Friday evening, I was shocked to see my state’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, in a campaign ad. After all, this is New York and she’s a Democrat, which translates into anonymity for her opponent and her enjoyment of about an 87 point lead in the polls (okay, I lied; it’s only 43), and air time in NY’s market is pricey. Perhaps, I thought, she just wanted a tax write-off or vanity compelled her to put her face on TV. Then again, maybe she just wanted to see how many elements of propaganda could fit into a 30-second political spot.
It’s not that she opens the ad describing herself as “one of the only young mothers serving in the Senate” (Gillibrand is 45 and had her first child at 36); hey, she looks good and pulls it off. It’s that her little spot, titled “Standing Up for Women,” is, like her, style over substance. And what really struck me was her closing line: “Because if 51 percent of the Congress were women, we wouldn’t be debating contraception; we’d be debating jobs and the economy.”
First, if 100 percent those who governed were women such as her opponent, Wendy Long, we wouldn’t be discussing contraception because the phony diversionary issue wouldn’t have been manufactured in the first place and Uncle Scam wouldn’t be forcing us to pay for others’ birth control. So let’s be honest, Kirstie, what you really mean to say is, “If 51 percent of Congress were women like me.”
But then there’s something about this contraception matter that, as far as I’ve seen, hasn’t been mentioned.
Why accept it as a women’s issue?
After all, there’s male contraception, too, and any insurance plan that didn’t cover birth control for women wouldn’t cover it for men, either. Besides, correct me if I’m wrong, but no one uses contraception unless there’s the possibility of conception, and the latter is strong indication of a man’s involvement. Contraception is always used by both sexes.
Some may now say, “C’mon, Duke, you know the burden of birth control generally falls upon women!” Well, not so fast. Haven’t the feminists insisted for decades that men should take 50 percent of the responsibility for such things (of course, they don’t propose that men should have 50 percent of the authority when deciding what will happen to a intrauterine baby that carries 50 percent of his father’s DNA)? So why do they now weave the inherently “sexist” supposition they’ve long criticized into their pitch for government policy?
But why ask why? The truth is, the contraception issue has been seized upon so that statists who have nothing to run on can now run on at the mouth and away from the economy. In fact, it perhaps was even conjured up for that very reason.
I’m referring to a theory Dick Morris posited a while back. To wit: The Democrats know that polls show the nation trending pro-life, so they needed something other than abortion to rally women voters. So they purposely pushed the contraception mandate knowing it would create a firestorm of opposition, which they then could cast as an attack upon women’s “reproductive freedom.” If this theory is valid, the libs certainly have been Machiavellian, but I’m inclined to think that they simply seized upon an opportunity. Whatever the case, I thought it worth mentioning.
What is certain is that the left is very good at casting their cultural attacks as the new default, and those who oppose them as the aggressors.
Consider the issue at hand. Contraception has long been available and cheap, and no one was proposing outlawing it or even, as is the statists’ wont when they find something objectionable, taxing it to discourage its use. No one was even thinking about it. So what do the liberals do? They propose an unprecedented imposition — forcing the wider society, including religious institutions, to pay for other people’s birth control. Then, when traditionalists have the temerity to object, they ask, “Why are you making an issue out of contraception?”!
The left does this with sexuality as well. They insert pro-homosexual propaganda into schools and try to “undefine” (click here for an explanation) the millennia-old institution of marriage. And what happens when traditionalists simply defend the tried-and-true status quo? The Left says, “Why are you so hung up on homosexuality? You people are so repressed!”
This is much as if a man were to approach another, start raining down blows upon him and then, when the victim raised his arms to block, ask “Why are you getting so violent?” The Left continually starts fires and then calls the firemen pyromaniacs and the water gasoline. Unfortunately, because conservatives are conservative instead of bold and the media complicit instead of truthful, this ploy never fails.
Of course, though, ploys don’t have to be too clever in New York if you’re a Democrat. Gillibrand, for example, is a woman who used to represent a congressional district in rural upstate NY and say that she slept with two rifles under her bed. She became a gun-controller upon entering the Senate, however, because, writes Newsday, “she learned of ‘gun-violence issues in New York State that weren’t as prevalent in [her] old district.’” Yeah, I mean, who ever heard of crime in N.Y.?
Let’s just hope that on November 6, the rest of the nation isn’t in a New York state of mind.
