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Moving the Overton Window on birth control

The vast majority of women in this country — in the 90th percentile — have used artificial birth control for one reason or another. That includes (same kind of numbers) Christian women, including Catholics.

So you'd think the whole birth control thing would be a done deal. Wide use, legal (and sanctioned by SCOTUS), something everyone expects to have available, and, even for folks whose religious leaders officially frown upon it, simply not a concern or moral quandary.

And yet, here we are. Because some people actually don't approve of birth control, for a variety of reasons. Now, as a fractional minority, they shouldn't have any influence over the rest of us. Indeed, they shouldn't even be able to make a "debate" about it.

Ah, but there's the Overton Window — the social idea of the bounds around which it's acceptable to discuss certain topics. The trick is, the Overton Window isn't fixed. It can be moved over time, if you work at it. So, for example, homosexuality went from "the love that dare not speak its name" to "something we talk about (mostly to condemn or joke)" to "hey, maybe it should be legal" to "hey, maybe folks who are gay should be treated the same as the everyone else" to "marriage equality". If you'd raised the idea of gays being legally and religiously sanctioned to marry in 1950, you'd have lost your job, been kicked out of polite society, and quote possibly arrested. Ditto for, say, interracial marriages — where now the Overton Window has shifted far enough over that to speak against them has become the socially unacceptable (legal, certainly, but liable to get you disinvited from most dinner parties or political campaigns).

This is often seen as "progress" — but it can be turned in the other direction, too. And we're seeing this with the Rush Limbaugh / GOP Birth Control thang. The "birth control is anathema to us" crowd makes their feelings known — but do so by framing it as a religious freedom issue. Rush makes outrageously crude slut-shaming remarks that are widely condemned — but it does start up a debate in some quarters over whether people should have free and easy access to birth control, or whether doing so leads to — well, we won't say (yet) sluttishness and promiscuity, but maybe to unwise and self-indulgent decisions that have a harm on society.

And suddenly the question of whether birth control should be easily available shifts the Overton Window into questions of whether it should be available at all. We haven't yet gotten to the point of levying additional taxes on birth control, preventing doctors from discussing it, or only discussing it in conjunction with the Horrifying Health Risks involved, requiring a 72-hour waiting period between a request for birth control and getting a prescription, or requesting the Supreme Court to revisit the decision … yeah, those all seem beyond the pale so far, but, as with abortion, the Overton Window of what's considered crackpot or unmentionable and what's not is being shifted in that direction.

Plan your arguments now. #ddtb

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The GOP Has Not Become (More) Stupid, Just Unconstrained
There has been some surprise that the Republicans and movement conservatives let themselves get dragged down by the whole contraception ‘controversy’*. But this shouldn’t have com…

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