By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s been a confusing and manic couple of weeks for political followers, and I suppose that those who identify themselves as non-political have endured the confusion and mania as well. Friends and family report a kind of creeping paranoia going on out in the trenches; topics long settled have suddenly resurrected, assumptions making an “ass of you and me,” with rumors and whisper-campaigns off their leash. Folks are intruding their personal dysfunctions on each other, pulling on the emotional and physical resources of others like vampires and creating a kind of kinetic anxiety that acts like gravitational pull to suck us all back into old paradigm questions. It’s one more round of homework on the basics, and — oh, Lord! — I hope it’s the last.
Add the tornado that touched down a few miles from the Pea Patch, killing and wounding people and putting me off-line for a couple of days, and all I can say is, it’s good to see this week go. As I write, the winds have taken their mayhem into Tennessee and Ohio, threatening more of us. A bit perversely, there’s something comforting about how immediate these things are. It’s almost easier to put our backs into care-giving and clean-up than to wrap our brains around the hostile nonsense of the contraception wars. It was surreal to chew on the quandary, “Who should decide your health care choices, you or your boss?” as if that were a legitimate question.
Unless we consider the church the ultimate seat of all things moral — a position it no longer enjoys in this century — then talking points on birth control should be less about religion and more about delivery of health care. What if the boss was a Christian Scientist, for instance? Would we get access to prayer-practitioners and faith-healing but not a penny for medicine or hospital care? If Roy Blunt — long-standing Boss Hogg of Southern Missouri, now that former-Attorney General John Ashcroft is in his dotage — and every single Republican Senator except Olympia Snowe had gotten their way, maybe so.