Late last year, the New Humanist podcast was taking nominations for their Bad Faith award, given to the most “deluded fantasist” of the year. It was my honor as one of the Americans on the roster to nominate our very own Sarah Palin.
Either I was extremely persuasive or my nominee was so patently fit for the award that none could oppose her. Sarah Palin wins! I am very pleased to say that it is the only thing she has won, and that it is well deserved.
If you want to see the consequences of the recent wave of attempts to endorse “provider conscience rules”, in which health care providers are permitted to freely exercise their whims and biases in providing clients and patients their services, read this story. As usual, it’s all about controlling the reproductive choices of women: we’ve had politicians blocking access to Plan B contraception; laws that would allow doctors to deny care if it was against their religious beliefs; and pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Beyond simply passive denial of giving a patient what they need, though, we now have gone to the next step: wingnuts actively removing birth control devices against the patient’s will. Nurse practitioner Sylvia Olona of the Presbyterian Medical Services Rio Rancho Family Health Center in New Mexico has been taking it upon herself to yank out the IUDs of patients in her care.
Having the IUD come out was a good thing [because] I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don’t know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them. …What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus.
What Olona is doing is a violation of ethics, a consequence of shameful ignorance, and ought to be criminal. At the very least, she ought to be fired.
That is not what an IUD does. An IUD is a small, typically T-shaped piece of metal or plastic that is inserted into the uterus, where it interferes with conception. In essence, what it does is induce a low-grade, local inflammation in the reproductive tract that causes changes in cervical mucus, hindering the passage of sperm. The device itself also seems to block sperm activity, and some IUDs also slowly release progestin, a hormone that suppresses ovulation. It is not an abortifactant. It is basically a kind of barrier method. Most of the uninformed complaints about the IUD are built on the fact that it also induces changes to the uterine lining which would inhibit implantation if sperm somehow managed to fertilize an egg.
How about firing this bozo because she is ignorant about the facts of her job?
Olona is a serial offender. She is currently being sued by a woman who went in for a trivial adjustment of the IUD, and instead had it completely removed by Olona…by ‘accident’, the nurse claims, but she apparently has a reputation for doing this.
Everyone in the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose because I am against them, but it’s not true, they accidentally come out when I tug.
Ladies, welcome to your future. A future in which others will decide whether you may have children or not. Don’t worry, though: they will never say “not”. And don’t feel like your choices will be taken out of your hands, you still have a choice. If you don’t want to get pregnant, just never have sex, you slut.
It’s inauguration day, and in a fine old American tradition, every event must be associated with a commercial tie-in. Krispy Kreme dougnuts is offering a free choice of a doughnut in honor of the change in presidents.
Did you hear that? Free choice of a doughnut?
Get it? Choice?
Yeah, I know, most of you aren’t obsessive lunatics, so it’s not obvious. You need to see the press release sent out by the American Life League.
The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that ‘choice’ is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of ‘freedom of choice’ is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.
Buying a doughnut is now interpreted as endorsing abortion. This is insane.
Unfortunately, another fine American tradition is the compounding of the insanity. Krispy Kreme caved and rewrote their advertising copy to carefully spell out at the end that “the Inauguration Day promotion is not about any social or political issue.”
I’m sorry, world. Some Americans are flaming morons, and the rest of us fall ass-over-ankles to cater to them.
I hope most of you are well past your lunch or breakfast now, because this story might ruin it. Never forget that our country is still ruled by a superstitious lot of kooks, a mob of witch doctors wearing suits and ties. This video, which is way too long and boring, shows a Georgia Republican and a pair of clerical loons chanting and nodding and praising each other while they daub a door with magic oil. Seriously.
It’s the door Obama will walk through on his way to giving the oath of office. Apparently, a god will be especially pleased with him if a set of true believers grease the lintel first. Awfully petty of an omnipotent being, don’t you think?
Here’s a phenomenal suggestion you can promote to the Obama administration: shut down the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s a huge boondoggle, a fat earmark for low-quality pseudoscience, and it’s money that would be better spent on real science and medicine. Sign up at change.gov and vote it up!
The Buffalo Beast’s 50 most loathsome people of 2008 list is out. Don’t worry, the viciousness is bipartisan.
I was startled to see that John McCain hasn’t been retired to the WaxWorks Museum of Irrelevant Political Figures yet — he’s still making speeches. Could somebody tell him that he’ll never, ever have a shot at the presidency again?
Anyway the subject of his speech was to sneer at fruit fly research again, and mock lobster research. What’s with the hatin’ on invertebrates, Mr McCain?
At least we don’t have to care what he says anymore: he is officially nobody, a washed-up politician who let himself get upstaged by his airhead running mate.
Short summary: unimpressed.
But then what else could you expect from a running dog reactionary old guard supporter of bourgeois ideology?*
*Let us not linger over the uncomfortable fact that I actually agree with him in this case.
Thankfully, these are the waning days of the awful, incompetent, no-good Bush/Cheney presidency, years we will try to forget in the decades to come. What will help is that we don’t have a good name for this decade — The Oughties? Bleh — and we’re just going to have to refer to them as the years with a couple of zeroes in the middle.
This odious administration is not going out gracefully, however, but is instead leaving with a flurry of last-minute knifings of our country. Some are exploitive efforts to pay back interests to whom the conservatives are beholden, such as the stripping of environmental protection laws (which the next administration may be disinclined to roll back). Others just seem inexplicably arbitrary and petty, the work of small-minded tyrants who want to get in one last poke while they can.
Here’s one such example: the Department of Justice is redefining “service animal”. They’ve redefined “animal” to mean “dog”! I’ve got nothing against dogs, but there are people who use non-canine animals as service animals, and suddenly they are going to be stripped of the legal rights associated with service animal use.
Don’t ask me why. I think it’s just because they can.
It looks like Obama has picked Sanjay Gupta to be surgeon general. He seems a bit of a lightweight, to me — he’s mainly known as a congenial talking head on television news. He’s also an apologist for US health care, which does not give me any confidence that we can expect the slightest effort towards health care reform. I suspect Obama has just picked a pleasant smiling face to act as a placeholder, and that disappoints me.
We’ll have to see how that ol’ conservative, Orac, reacts to this news.
