The Right Wing's Idea of "Freedom"

[paft.livejournal.com]

From Statepress:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.


‘I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,’ Lesko said. ‘So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.’

Jezebel points out that Arizona is an “at will” state. This means that bosses in Arizona will be able to fire women for being depraved enough to take birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.

As we all know, what made the Soviet Union infamous were not the gulags, its treatment of dissidents, and the rigid control over the press, but the fact that women could take pills for the purpose of contraception without fear of losing their jobs over it.

Yes, here it is -- the right wing's idea of "freedom" is a society where a woman has to ask her boss' permission to use oral contraceptives.

Does anyone else find this more than a little weird?

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

Comments

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Ah but did the general public know that?

Apparently not if someone assumes one of the biggest threats the Soviet Union had was... the morning after pill?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

At the time, yes, actually people did realize this and were extremely depressed about the outcome of the 20th Century. The USSR falling apart at the speed and pace it did was one of the biggest twists in the entire 20th Century as on the surface the USSR was in the process of supplanting the USA as the global superpower. And at the time the US military was incapable of beating boy scouts in a war game, much less the Soviet Armed Forces in the Big One, so the USA didn't even have its military to salve its conscience.

It's the greatest irony of the 20th Century: totalitarianism was actually winning on a global scale until its own contradictions destroyed itself, and democracy had nothing to do with it at all.

Albeit in hindsight it makes a lot of the US rhetoric of the 1980s seem extremely foolish and ridiculous which is why you never see, for instance, the original Rambo III when he fought with the proto-Taliban against the USSR. Nowadays that's a very bitter thing in hindsight, but at the time with the USSR in the process of supplanting the USA, it really didn't seem that a bunch of Muslim radicals were a worse threat than Mikhail Gorbachev.