Packaging

by digby

I’ve been meaning to post on this “packaging” problem confronting the Obama administration in their quest to find “common ground” on … contraception. Yes, that’s right. Now that the mushy abortion reduction crowd has convinced the Democrats that social conservatives will vote for them in droves if they will only stop treating abortion like a right and instead treat it as tragic female irresponsibility, it seems the right isn’t altogether impressed. I know this will come as a shock to you, but while they are perfectly happy to have the government help women bring their unwanted pregnancies to term, they insist that any efforts to “reduce abortion” with birth control is unacceptable. Who’d have thunk, huh?

As I said, I was going to write about this and was working on one of those boring posts about the “pincer” strategy and overton window blah,blah,blah, but when I came across this, by Charles Piece, I just decided to lift it:

Matthew Y is a very smart young man, especially now that he apparently has given up on the Sisyphean task of explaining why the Washington Wizards ever will be any good. But this, alas, is unicorn-shopping at its most gullible. While I have no doubt that it is remotely possible that the nice lady across the street with the pro-life bumper stickers on her car may very well not give a damn who’s buying condoms where, and how old the people are who are buying them, the organized political structure of the pro-life movement has been demonstrably anti-woman and anti-sexuality from the very first mailings it ever sent out. It has been financed and organized by religious organizations devoted to a truncated and joyless view of human sexuality. It has as its formal legal basis a philosophy for which the true target never has been Roe, but Griswold. It does not believe in a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy in any sphere, abortion just being the most obvious and inflammatory one. And, most important, none of this will change. Ever.

No it won’t. Ever.

And this common ground effort is designed to advance socially conservative policy, period.

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