02.24.12

Rick Leprosy & the GOP Fundamentalists

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism at 10:34 am by George Smith

The GOP has the candidates it deserves — personally repugnant white men who pander to voters who have only one desire: to be rid of everyone not like them. It’s a party of annihilation.

And its new big target is women. What will they do next week, one wonders? It will take all by surprise in its audacity of awfulness.

Here’s a cartoon of Rick Leprosy at DailyKos. “Click for larger uterus” it helpfully adds. You’ll see it’s quite enough as is.

Rick Leprosy can be always counted on to outdo himself. Here’s a baffling news story, repeated thousands of times, resulting from Leprosy’s appearance with Glenn Beck, one in which he decried college because it indoctrinates young people into the secular life.

This basic extremist GOP story is old. Young people don’t vote Republican anymore and something must be responsible for it.

Therefore it is universities which are to blame, brainwashing them into leftist thinking and, by logical extension, corruption.

Universities, Leprosy says, are destroying America. They are incubators of bad values and worse morals.

Unsurprisingly, Rick Leprosy is the favorite candidate of the Lehigh Valley Conservative.

All the ills of the country can be attributed to moral decline, of simply refusing to be upstanding people like Rick and his colleagues.

It’s helpful to look at what Carl Djerassi, one of the chemists who discovered the pill, had to say years ago on the matter.

Of This Man’s Pill, a book of Djerassi’s reflections, a reviewer writes:

“Until 1969, I would have described myself as a `hard’ scientist, the proudly macho adjective employed by chemists and other physical scientists to distinguish their work from the `soft,’ fuzzy fields such as sociology or even psychology,” writes Djerassi, whose historic synthesis of a steroid contraceptive in 1951 revolutionized human reproduction. In this learned memoir, he describes the turning point as the publication of his first public policy article in Science magazine, an event that he says marked the beginning of a life change attributable ultimately to the pill. The first part of this memoir is a well-reasoned apologetic on the pill’s origins and its benefits to women, where Djerassi follows familiar debunkings: of fundamentalists, on the one hand, who regarded the pill as “a symbol, if not an agent, of what they perceived as a pervasive moral decline …”

For PBS, Djerassi described the revolution caused by the pill could not have happened if his research hadn’t occurred just prior to a very unique time in American history:

Question: What if the pill never existed?

Djerassi: Well, that is an interesting question … one that I [mulled over] in my book, “This Man’s Pill.??? But of course, for me as a chemist I see the birthday as being 1951 and not 1960. What people forget is that the 1960s was also the decade [that gave birth to] the sexual revolution, drug culture, rock and roll, and, most importantly, the women’s movement. All these had a great deal to do with sexual liberation, and this was an ideal window of opportunity. If we had done our chemical work 15 years later, in other words instead of 1950 but in 1965, the biologists would have then done their work in 1968, and the clinicians in the early 1970s, and you would have no pill. Absolutely no question.

It’s tempting to laugh at Rick “Leprosy” Santorum because he so obviously yearns for a country where progress never happened and the nation’s life and mores were freeze-dried in the Fifties. The pill would not exist as one of the great inventions of the world, women would still know their place — bringing a highball or martini to their men, abortions would be illegal, and sex a marker of criminal depravity unless using it to make babies.

But he’s just too damn appalling.

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Rick Leprosy — from the archives.

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