This Is How Nutty Our Discourse Is
by tristero
The New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for re-election. No surprise there, but it does make interesting reading. What especially leaped out for me was this little aside:
[Romney] says he is not opposed to contraception, but...
And that perfectly illustrates how sick and nutty our discourse is today. First of all, notice the binders full of qualifiers. Romneys "says," i.e., he claims - but the Times can't be sure. And notice that they do not say Romney "supports" contraception, just that he is "not opposed," meaning that, at best, Romney "tolerates" birth control. And notice that even this tolerance is immediately qualified with Romney's very big "but."
That's hardly the worst of it. Here we are, in 2012, the 21st century, and a man is running for president whose views on women, morality, sexuality, and reproductive rights are well over 100 years behind the times.
In our mainstream discourse, this country can continue to re-fight all the lost battles and factual errors the modern right wing is obsessed with arguing about - the right to birth control, the fact of evolution, marriage equality, universal health care. If so, we will continue to ignore, to our peril, the very real problems our country faces in the early decades of the 3rd millennium. The alternative is to find ways to marginalize these loons, hunker down, and fashion some semblance of a rational discourse.
A presidential candidate so out of touch with modern realities that, at best, he tolerates contraception? That's just plain nuts. Dangerously nuts.
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