Conservative Hypocrisy Revisited

Speaking of that post from AlterNet (as I was below), "Anti-Choicers Are Communists!," posted by Amanda Marcotte, raises an interesting point, one on which I've reflected myself on occasion, viz., how does a group of people who claim to prize independence and individuality, whose very mantra is "Get government off our backs!," who insist it's every dog for itself out there (no "nanny society," thank you!) justify its constant harangue for government to step in and tell women what they may and may not and must and must not do with their own bodies? How do they justify their slavering desire to have government tell women's doctors how to practice medicine? How do they square their disdain for anything that smacks of helping anybody with their insistence that having the government forbid women from making their own health-care decisions is in fact "protecting" women (from, apparently, themselves)?

Nanny society, indeed.

But the Marcotte post takes things further. She writes:

Now there [Romania] was a state that Leslee Unruh, Phill Kline and the whole cast of panty-sniffing misogynists could really get behind. Modern American anti-choicers make the same argument used in communist Romania to deprive women of basic rights: We aren't having enough babies to sustain the economy! Under Nicolae Ceausescu, contraception and abortion were strictly banned unless you had already had four children and done your biological duty to the state. In a strong echo of our modern anti-choice community's disconnect between what they actually think and what they say they think, it was widely believed that the contraception and abortion ban of Romania mostly functioned as a way for men in power to get off on controlling women. It certainly didn't do anything to lower the abortion rate -- under this regime, they had one of the highest abortion rates in Europe. Highest maternal mortality, too, which was a direct result of the high illegal abortion rate.

That's the utopia they're looking at with their communist-borrowing strategies. A world where a misogynist's nose is in every panty drawer, and women who run the risk of dying every time they have sex.

You should read the post for yourself. It's short, but it links to other posts from which Marcotte draws and which buttress her point, viz., the we'll-do-your-thinking-for-you crowd borrow pretty heavily from the very type of totalitarian Communists regimes that they have always professed to despise.

Might they protest too much?