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" For a brief second, it seemed like Ron Paul, principled independent attack Basset for the Romney campaign, was preparing to Make Some Sense in the middle of the He-Man Women Haters Club portion of last night&amp;#039;s debate, when they were all talking about how the Pill is the greatest threat to religious liberty since they slaughtered all the Huguenots. (And let us pause for a moment to recognize a staggeringly hysterical use of our favorite wingnut trope: the utterly psychedelic historical analogy. A provision of a law democratically enacted and properly signed &amp;quot;recalls&amp;quot; a story from &amp;quot;the second century B.C., the foreign tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes decreed that all Jews should be forced to violate their religious consciences by publicly eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. &amp;quot;If any were not willing to eat defiling food, they were to be broken on the wheel and killed&amp;quot; (4 Maccabees 5:3). It was a command of gratuitous forced submission as a sign of Antiochus&amp;#039;s supreme authority to compel obedience by a subject people.&amp;quot; And our old friend, Clio, Muse Of History, also known by her Marvel Comics superhero identity as The Proclaimer (!), gulps a shoebox full of Xanax and slowly works her way through a 30-pack of Heileman&amp;#039;s Special Export.) However, Dr. Paul soon blazed his own unique trail all the way back to the ensemble slut-shaming that was going on: But sort of along the line of the pills creating immorality, I don&amp;#039;t see it that way. I think the immorality creates the problem of wanting to use the pills. So you don&amp;#039;t blame the pills. I think it&amp;#039;s sort of like the argument \u2014 conservatives use the argument all the time about guns. Guns don&amp;#039;t kill, criminals kill. So, in a way, it&amp;#039;s the morality of society that we have to deal with. The pill is there and, you know, it contributes, maybe, but the pills can&amp;#039;t be blamed for the immorality of our society.  Women and their contraception are morally analogous to criminals and their firearms. Yeah, he&amp;#039;s a real progressive hero, he is. This is the kind of nuttiness that should keep the Republican party out of power until it sobers itself up. I keep hearing what a big winner it is for the Democrats. But the fact remains that it cannot be a big winner unless the Democrats make it a big winner. (Digby caught a very unpromising news story on this front from Washington state.) It&amp;#039;s already deeply embedded in the mainstream dialogue. Far from me to tell the president what to do, but now would be a really nice time to fire up the old speechwriting team and produce a direct and unequivocal defense of women&amp;#039;s rights in the field of health care, including a full-throated defense of the right to choose as defined in Roe v. Wade. No hemming. No hawing. No other hands. No olive branches to &amp;quot;people of good will on the other side.&amp;quot; Just a direct statement that the Democratic party stands against lunatic public misogyny, whether it comes from under a mitre or not.I think that part of his base without which he cannot win would like to hear that. I know I would. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12870/a-speech-the-president-should-give/>