S.T.F.U.G.O.P.

I've been saying it for years, and after last week I'm going to say it again: the GOP needs to shut up. I mean it. The GOP has got to slow down its descent into political madness. I'm a new blogger -- I can't keep up! I've got drafts of six posts that I had to abandon because the GOP embarked on some new round of idiocy before I was able to finish any of them.

But really, it's time for the GOP to take a moment. The middle-aged, white, male legislators of the GOP need to quit talking about contraception. It's embarrassing.

This whole mess over birth control is an embarrassment. Someday they will look back on it with that same feeling of humiliation and regret that tends to follow an especially festive night at the bar. Does the GOP really think this will end well for them? It won't. They're not going to win, and when they lose this battle, they'll also have lost what little credibility they had left with women.

Do they not hear themselves? Do they not cringe every time one of their party opens his mouth -- or holds a hearing? Women were told on national television (to a female interviewer, by the way) that family planning should go back to "keep your legs together." GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum thinks that the pill is "harmful" to our society, that "if [sex is] not for purposes of procreation, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women." Are we really having this conversation in 2012?

Questions for Santorum, and let's include other Republican men for good measure:
  - Do you really feel diminished by all those people out there having sex who aren't married?
  - Are you so insecure in your own marriages that you feel diminished by the sexual relations of other couples?
  - And you, Mr. Santorum, expect people to believe you won't feel diminished by, say, China? Pakistan? Iran?

When we were younger and a kid on the playground was being mean, some adult usually told us that the other child was upset about something else. Putting other kids down was a way for the bully to cover up insecurities, to create a distraction from the real problem.

That's what I feel like is happening here. We're back on the playground. Congressional Republicans know that they can't win on real issues, like jobs, the economy, taxes, etc., so they throw themselves into these social non-starters, like birth control. It's a lot easier to stand up in a "hearing" and call unmarried women sluts than to work with Democrats to help the middle class. In Tennessee, it's easier to throw the gay kids under the bus than to work on our state's unemployment numbers.

Here's some advice for Rick Santorum in particular and for the GOP in general: Get some therapy, because you are seriously repressed; quit worrying about what other people are doing in their bedrooms; and until you get those feelings of inadequacy worked out, just shut up.