Permission Slips for Women
By Via Pandagon, the Obama Campaign posted this image to their tumblr that really highlights the absurdity of the idea that an employer can veto your medical decisions:
As Amanda points out, this fight is about whether you get to spend your money as you wish. This week Rush Limbaugh, the addict who came back from the Dominican Republic with a bottle of viagra in someone else’s name, attacked the woman who was forbidden to testify at the sausage-fest Congressional hearing about contraception coverage.
He mendaciously accused her of “having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills,” which means he believes that the more sex a person has, the more birth control they need (which also speaks to the level of familiarity with a subject these blowhards have condescended to achieve).
He went on to say that “Three thousand dollars for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex — and, she wants us to pay for it.” Strangely, Rush did not specify how many dollars a year of sex women are entitled to.
Again it must be said that this fight is about using misogyny as a smokescreen to roll back anti-discrimination statutes and labor rights. Women are being actively shamed for needing women’s healthcare – which, for those playing at home, is essentially the same as for being women – by the loudest screechers in the Republican party in the hopes that we’ll be too humiliated to stand up for ourselves. It’s also in the hopes of dividing men, persuading the ones who hate women to give up a fundamental right (to use compensation, including healthcare benefits, they earn at work as they see fit) in order to punish some sluts.
It’s fantastic that the Obama campaign has produced this image. It’s distant, bureaucratic, and unsettlingly dystopian. The whole idea that an individual would have to discuss their contraception with their boss, who currently does not enjoy the privilege of grilling an employee about any part of their health status, is horrifying.
