George W. Bush, the infamously anti-gay and neoconservative former U.S. president who invaded Iraq on a lie, has criticized congressional Republicans for threatening to defund the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a largely successful African HIV-prevention program that he launched back in 2003. “There is no program more pro-life” than PEPFAR, he wrote.
Though PEPFAR is estimated to have saved over 25 million lives, its funding is set to expire on September 30. Congressional Republicans are falsely claiming that the program promotes abortion and using its re-funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations. Republicans have threatened to defund the entire federal government at the end of the month unless they’re allowed to slash military diversity programs and military aid to Ukraine and to increase anti-immigration measures at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We are on the verge of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic. To abandon our commitment now would forfeit two decades of unimaginable progress and raise further questions about the worth of America’s word,” Bush wrote in an a Wednesday opinion article in The Washington Post.
They’re pro-birth. “Pro-life” is just marketing.
They aren’t pro-birth. If they were pro-birth they would be for universal healthcare coverage of birth expenses.
They are pro-controlling women’s bodies.
Universal healthcare would also give women access to birth control.
They want women to have babies for some combination of a various number of reasons. There are some who view it as a means of breeding a cheap compliant labor force, some who think it’ll reinforce a more traditional family role on them and diminish their influence on society, and those who see it as a way to punish women for sleeping around. It’s about more than just their bodies, it’s about controlling society and women’s place in it.
I think it’s about causing poverty and an endless supply of hopeless, low-wage workers.
These people aren’t pro anything specific, they just get off on causing as much suffering as possible. They are pure evil.
I’d say they’re more anti-sex, but also not really, because most conservatives I’ve talked to on the subject just pretend it doesn’t exist.
They just kind of bury their head in the sand. There’s no way their daughter might have sex on Prom night. Don’t talk about it, it might put ideas in her head. There’s no way my son and his girlfriend would have sex; they’re Christians. Talking about contraceptives will just pervert their young, pure minds.
It’s not about controlling women’s bodies, it’s about ignoring women’s bodies. Banning abortion or eliminating sex education just helps to ensure that no conversations happen.
I think a lot of people miss this. Most of the voters, at least among the religious base, are just useful idiots who don’t put any thought into it because thinking is scary. Those with actual malice toward women, or a desire to control them, are a minority, even among those who get to write the laws.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” or something like that.