There's a lot of stuff that Republicans in Congress say that, whilst it's obvious bullshit, I can at least understand what might be going through their heads. "We need to end employment benefits so as to dissuade leeching" is a vile sympathy-wasteland of a statement, but I can at least comprehend what is making the people who espouse it tick.
At other times, though, parts of my brain just shut down in confusion. Take this, for instance; the video, not the article. King makes three points here, which I'll introduce in order of how much they made my head hurt. Note that the quotes below are my paraphrases.
"Contraception should not be called a medicine." In the narrowest sense, this at least is arguable. Of course, plenty of women do take contraception medicinally, and preventing oneself from acquiring a sexually transmitted disease seems like a process for which "preventative medicine" fits perfectly. I think King could actually phrase this better and at least approach what I think his main point is; that contraception cannot be automatically considered a medicine, preventative or otherwise, and he doesn't want to have to pay for what we'll call for the purposes of this post "exclusively recreational use".
Of course, if such use was covered by US health insurers, I'd be pretty surprised, and if it did, that would be where to aim the argument, rather than attempting blanket bans. At least arguably, though, on this he's not crazy, merely wrong.
"Some people don't or can't have sex, but are being asked to fund contraception anyway". This is crazy, though. Show me where I can get the NHS form where I can tick a box labelled "Give none of my taxes to smokers with lung cancer. If some idiot goes skiing and breaks his leg, I won't have a penny of my money spent on setting the bone. Because these fuckers chose to be at risk."
The NHS is not the American system, of course. But either a private US insurer will offer coverage for smokers, and for skiers, and for those who offer reasons why they need access to contraception, or they won't. The idea that the government should get to stick its nose in and decide certain offers cannot be allowed seems... well, as hypocritical as anything else these supposed lovers of freedom spout off about every few hours.
This, though, is my favourite.
"Contraception can't be medicine, because if we used it too much, we'd die out as a civilisation."
Arrrgh! Brain... dying! Starved... of... logic!
What does Steve King think will happen if we used too much paracetamol? Or insulin? Hell, I hear Viagra isn't something you want to mess around with.
Second, how could we ever get to a point where King's argument is of relevance? Sure, if humanity gets itself bitch-slapped by the Cylons and we end up with less people than show up to the average Boro away game, then we might want to think about easing back on the dick-sheaths. But can we at least all agree that whatever else the US is having problems with right now, it has no need to worry about only surviving because they're above a critical number of unwanted babies being born each year?
Because that would be a start, at least. Once we've gotten that out of the way, we could move onto, ooh, basic arithmetic, or something.
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