Needless to say, when considering the impact of President
Obama’s speech supporting health care reform, the temptation to simply make fun
of Joe Wilson and call it a day is strong.  After all, Rep. Wilson did manage to spout off an
interesting near-paradox: His accusation that the President was lying was in
and of itself a lie.  And that
personally bothered me more than the act of yelling at the President.  Indeed, I think a little more yelling
at public officials would help reinvigorate American politics by making it more
interesting.  It wasn’t the
shouting, dear reader, but the lying that bothered me.

It’s a peculiar symptom of everything wrong with our
political system that Wilson’s lie managed to grow legs, despite being based
strictly on right wing paranoia that has no relationship whatsoever to the
actual bills being kicked around in Congress. Conservative
Democrats were sadly inspired by Wilson’s outburst to find ways to make it
even harder for illegal immigrants to purchase health insurance than it already
is, but the good news is that as most illegal immigrants are Mexican citizens, there’s
a strong chance that they’ll be able to access coverage through Mexico’s public
insurance.  Not that there was
much of a reason to think that illegal immigrants are lining up to buy into an
American system.  Your average undocumented
worker errs on the side of avoiding authorities and officials, because they’re
not exactly eager to take the chance of being turned in and deported.

But there was more to the speech than denials of inclusion
of illegal immigrants and denials of those denials.  The speech was the sort of thing supporters of health care
reform wish we’d heard months ago from the President.  He’s finally come around to admitting that conservative
opposition has no intention of having a conversation about how to best address
the health care needs of all Americans, but instead are doing everything they
can do just to shut down any attempt at reform. He acknowledged that the only
argument against the public option is that which holds corporate profits for
insurance companies over human lives. 
He acknowledged that the United States is the only country in the world
as advanced as ours without universal health care.  Sure, he had to take a swipe at progressives for our
unfortunate habit of being right all along, but at this point, we have come to
accept the mindless denunciations that come at you for being know-it-alls.  On the whole, the speech was
great.  We just needed it sooner.

Of course, the President was forced to confront the right
wing lie that health care reform will somehow render the Hyde Amendment moot
and return us to the era when the federal government paid for abortion.  Denials like his cause pain for those
of us opposed to anti-woman discrimination in health care, because while it’s
true that the right wing accusations are lies, it’s also true that
the Hyde Amendment is discriminatory to the point of punishing certain people
for the "crime" of being poor while female.  At the time of the speech, I was happy
to note that the President felt no need to talk about the larger issue of
reproductive health care.  Is it
possible that anti-choicers have completely given up any hope of blocking
coverage for contraception under health care reform, I thought hopefully to
myself.

Not quite, it turns out.  Some people will never give up being appalled at what they
see as the federal promotion of sexual activity in women through government
programs to make fertility control affordable.  As Sarah
Posner documented, the Christian right is trying to rally the base against
health care reform by floating generic scare stories about Planned Parenthood
opening auxiliary clinics in all public schools.  Of course, they dodge the accusation that they’re
anti-contraception by flinging the word “abortion” around a lot, trying to
create high emotions that they can use to distract people from the fact that
contraception prevents abortion. 
For instance, Jordan Sekulow tossed the word “abortion” around a lot to
raise phony concerns about Planned
Parenthood coming into schools. 
Even though the claim is preposterous, it’s also interesting to note
that Sekulow is either literally trying to get you to believe that health care
reform means they’ll be squeezing vacuum aspiration abortions in between
classes at high schools, or more likely, he’s using the fallback right wing
position of using “abortion” as a catch-all phrase to describe all reproductive
health care and education.  It’s
true that some high schools try to work with students to improve contraception
education and access, and some use Planned Parenthood to help them with this,
but only in right wing la-la land is that the same thing as abortion.

The conflation of abortion and contraception in right wing
hysteria-talk makes Liberty Counsel’s claim that school-based health clinics have
a personal vendetta against your potential grandchildren that they’re out
to “abort” even funnier. Most parents generally aren’t eager to have their high
school age children start providing them grandchildren, but once you wade into
the panic over health care reform, I guess visions of pregnant 15-year-old
daughters move from being parental nightmares to what every parent is supposed
to want.  The right wing enthusiasm
for using the word “abortion” to shut down all rational thought might be an
overreach in this case.  I just
can’t imagine that most parents are really going to lose their minds to find
out that the schools want to find ways to keep their daughters from getting
pregnant in the first place.

Let’s hope the President’s speech helps further expose how
the right wing protests against health care reform have become completely
unmoored from reality.  Or maybe
I’ve got too much confidence in my fellow Americans, since I believe most
people have to react to visions of between-class abortions with respectable
levels of eye rolling.