Had a couple of potential blog posts started when someone linked this on Facebook. The short version is that a negligent school employee (or possibly volunteer) illegally violated a teenager’s medical privacy and let the fact that she took birth control pills become public knowledge. Since every class apparently comes standard with the kind of people whose only joy seems to be causing misery in others, she’s been hearing how she’s a slut who wants to fuck everyone because Rush “Illegal Viagra” Limbaugh said so.

I’ve already written about this a bit, but I thought this was worth passing along because it brings such a human face to the sort of petty cruelty that’s behind this bizarre birth control argument. It also illustrates something genuinely terrifying: People listen to this asshole.

Think of the implications of that. It’s difficult for me to think about it without feeling sure that it must be a symptom of something terribly wrong with our culture, some sickness that we need to understand and cure.

Here’s a short excerpt from a comment by FishOutofWater at the Daily Kos link above:

Limbaugh is an abuser who encourages others to abuse.

This really strikes me as an accurate description not only of Limbaugh, but of many prominent voices of the American right-wing. It really feels like what the Republican party has been turning into. For all the rhetoric about jobs or fiscal responsibility, the actual platforms of the party candidates seem to be almost entirely based on dehumanizing and taking away rights and freedoms from people, while insisting that it’s for their own good, or that the only people it affects aren’t really people.

The loyalty this party inspires baffles me. This isn’t a Ford/Chevy conflict, some harmless name-brand attachment that gets passed down through the family, this is our home, our nation, our society. The choices we make in our government have long-lasting, far-reaching implications. It affects the entire world. This is our future, and the future we leave for our children. The only way it makes any sense to me is a sort of abusive codependency, like the woman who bails her husband out of jail when he’s in there for breaking her arm because his dinner was cold.

Haven’t they hit you enough?