Fisking the STrib Village Idiot, Katherine Kersten, Again - Part 2

Kersten as
right wing sock puppet

In part 1, addressing Kersten's most recent "Weaponizing the well-being of women" dribble, er, drivel ... I mean both, she first tries to promote the notion that women are succeeding more than men are.  Given how poorly women are paid compared to me doing the same jobs, regardless of education or experience, and given that mothers with children make less than unmarried men, and that married men with children make even more than unmarried men, unmarried women (with or without children) and more than married women with children, this is another example of the worst kind of cherry picking by Kersten. 

She is ill informed and intellectually dishonest; she habitually misrepresents fact in order to spew the conservative party line.  This is only credible to other low information consumers who don't know any better, or to those who have already been successfully propagandized into stupidity.

Kersten then goes on to misrepresent the efforts to gut contraception and other reproductive services by the GOP.  There is no need for a religious exemption from contraception coverage.  Religious choices are personal; they do not extend to one person (in the case posited by Kersten, an employer) making a decision for another person.  The government does not exist to enforce one person's religious preference on another - or a religious institutions religious beliefs either.  The notion that this is in some way legitimate respect for religion is bogus; employers do not dictate that employees conform to the religious beliefs for the employer as a condition of employment, or employment benefits.  We don't let them pay one person differently from another on the basis of religion, neither should we do so with benefit packages. 

It is one more example of the 'smaller government' and 'that government governs best that governs least' hypocrisy AGAIN, intruding into the private lives of women in a way which is backwards and regressive.  We will NOT go quietly into the darkness of the period in our history when contraception was illegal.  Margaret Sanger --- YES, THAT Margaret Sanger, the feminist heroine who fought against contraception being illegal, who personally funded the development of the birth control pill and who founded Planned Parenthood to provide low cost health care - including reproductive choice - for women.

Kersten then goes on to grossly misrepresent the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act,  the Paycheck Fairness Act, and to make a completely unfounded claim about a potential explosion of suits without merit against employers under this legislation.

 

There is no evidence that we currently have a problem with unjustified or unwarranted suits in courts against employers.  The standards and thresholds remain high for employees to claim discrimination under both legislative provisions.  This was the same claim - protecting employers from frivolous suits - used by the right wing idiot Glenn Grothman, who considered the uninformed opinion of media whore and harpy Ann Colder, er, Coulter as definitive that women didn't care about money and didn't really want to be paid equally with men for equal work, when he pushed through the repeal of an equal pay for equal work law using the conservative legislative majority in Wisconsin in conjunction with the unpopular Governor Scott Walker.  Wisconsin is a state with some of the worst gender inequities for compensation in the nation.  It is worth noting that Grothman also tried to make it criminal child abuse to be a 'non-marital' single parent in Wisconsin.  This is the height of intrusive government practice; this man is a neanderthal, and it is just one more example of what is wrong with the right wing thinking.  They want men to earn more than women, and for women to be dependent as a result on the financial aspects to coerce them into marriage and children.

A HuffPo article on Grothman noted:

the cartoon blond should be
barefoot and pregnant, the way
the GOP wants women to be

According to the recent Shriver Report, women are the primary or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families — but continue to make 23 cents less than men for every dollar earned.

Traditional families, with Ann-Romney-stay-a- home-moms-who-don't-work, have nannies and au pairs, and house keepers, are a choice.  But it is not the choice that every women would make, even if they could afford it. Most people don't have those choices. Many women work hard to get an education in order to have careers, and they care about those careers as much as any man does.  Men don't get asked to choose between working or being fathers.  The right has been trying to take away choices from women, while ignoring the fact that women are either the primary bread winners or the only bread winners in many families, and an important financial contributor in many others.  They wish to limit choices, and they ignore all facts about their assumptions to the contrary.

Biology is not destiny, and what conservatives posit is a one-size fits all world which does not take into consideration any variation from their notions of traditional gender roles - notions which were already outdated in WW II.

We will not go back to what the right glorifies as the good old days; they were in fact for far too many people the 'bad old days', which is why we changed how we live and especially why we changed the options to make them more equal for groups who were treated unfairly - on the basis of gender, race, religion, disability and sexual orientation.

Kersten then goes on to try to blame Obama for the Republican fiscal irresponsibility that engaged us in two wars, one of them, Iraq, unnecessary and ill advised, based on lies, without funding either war. 



These are the bad capitalists who want to continue corporate welfare and reward job outsourcing overseas. These are the same bad capitalists who lie, and lie and lie about how the ACA, aka Obamacare will impact women.

What the provisions of Obamacare will do is to eradicate women paying more than men for health care.  It will guarantee that certain minimal health care testing, ranging from mammograms and pap smears to testing for STDs is more available, to make it easier and more cost effective for women to be diagnosed for health problems earlier.  This paragraph by Kersten simply repeats the GOP big lie:

Obama assures us that American women want "choice." But women can wave goodbye to choice with Obamacare, which will steadily strip control over family health care decisions from women and their doctors and hand it to federal bureaucrats.

Obama's policies have been heavily obstructed by the GOP. We have unprecedented use of filibusters, unprecedented refusals to approve appointments.  The Republicans would rather sabotage and impair the appropriate function of government, than to properly do the jobs they themselves were elected to do, if it means sabotaging Obama, even when he is championing policies that were either Republican originated and supported, or bi-partisan supported.  It is the GOP that has been dysfunctional, corrupt and rabidly partisan.

With sock puppets like Katherine Kersten replacing factual information with fact free propaganda garbage, it isn't hard to see how that happens.