Just when you thought George W. Bush was done with his ability to wreak havoc on women’s reproductive health rights, he drops this lovely parting shot:

The Bush administration announced its “conscience protection” rule for the healthcare industry Thursday, giving doctors, hospitals, and even receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.

“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” said outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.

The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion and other aspects of healthcare where moral concerns could arise, Leavitt’s office said, such as birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research and assisted suicide.

The rule, to be published today in the Federal Register, takes effect the day before President Bush leaves office. (From The LA Times, today)

So, basically, if you’re unlucky enough to stumble into the “care” of a health provider who has “moral objections” to certain options or services, you might never be informed they even exist because the provider can’t be “pressured” into discussing things they object to.

Are you really supposed to need to quiz your healthcare practitioners (and pharmacists, and anyone even tangentially involved in the process) as to their moral views before agreeing to be seen by them? When you’re highly likely to be distraught or in crisis? How are you even supposed to know what things you’re not being informed of?

And yeah, I mean, of course the law can be reversed once Obama is in office, but it’s going to take time to do that, and it just seems like such an egregious, aggressive, move — like what, you’re going to ’sneak’ this in at the last minute on your way out the door and nobody’s going to notice?

Crap like this is making me really wish I weren’t mad at Obama at the moment over this whole Saddleback thing. Aaaagh!

The thing that pisses me off the most about all the digging into Google that Tony is doing isn’t the facts of what he’s finding. It’s my own cynicism.

Like, when he comes into the room and announces that the word ‘clitoris’ returns zero results in Google’s “safe search” mode while ‘penis’ returns 36 million, my first thought is… Duh. This is a surprise? I roll my eyes and Google “vagina”, which gets over 21 million results and my dark, angry brain thinks:

[bitterness] “Of course, because you need a vagina to squeeze out the next generation (for the patriarchy.) A clitoris? That’s about female pleasure, not reproduction — just ask the millions of women worldwide who’ve had theirs removed. [/bitterness]

So, you know, thanks Google, for reinforcing what I already know about “values.” Thanks a fucking lot.

So while Google is busy doing its part to (presumably) keep our nation’s impressionable youngsters “safe” from sexual terminology and content (check out Tony’s blog for more,) I get called upon to explain erectile dysfunction to my nine year old daughter while innocently trying to watch a PG-rated show at 9:00pm on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Hilariously, I’m almost afraid to type the brand name of the product being advertised for fear the Google-bot will find the offending name on this blog and penalize the Comstock Films site as a drug-spamming, malware breeding, den of iniquity. We’ve got enough problems with the Google-bot already, thanks. So let’s just say the commercial was for a drug, name beginning with the letter ‘C,’ famous for featuring attractive and affluent looking middle-aged couples lounging in side by side bathtubs with smarmy faux-cool jazz playing in the background. (Because nothing says intimacy like individual high-walled ceramic pods-for-one, but that’s a head-scratcher for another day.)

So, back to the sofa in the Comstock family den, daughter #1 and I curled up for our weekly dose of implausible science-fictional fun, and whammo: commercial break after commercial break, here comes that smarmy faux-cool jazz and alarming quick-spoken fine print babble about “erections lasting more than four hours.” Wonderful family viewing, piped right into our home, no searching required! Fabulous!

“Mom,” daughter #1 asks finally after being bombarded by these ads, wrinkling her little brow in consternation. “What is E.D.?”

I’m a good little arugula-munching liberal: I’ve talked about sex with her before, she’s got a copy of Where Did I Come From, she’s seen me go through a pregnancy, etc. — she knows the basics. I assure you, none of that made it any less awkward to have this “teachable moment” thrust upon me unawares by the good folks at Eli Lilly and the SciFi Channel while I was just trying to enjoy a little escapist TV.

But hey, this is life as a parent, isn’t it? You don’t always get to pick and choose where your teachable moments come from. Even the best filters don’t always work. Life comes at you and your kids, and you are responsible for seeing them through it. You stay involved with your kids’ lives, you watch what they’re watching on TV, you stay aware of where they’re going online, and you talk with them about their experiences and understandings. Sometimes, you have to explain things that make you uncomfortable. Sometimes, you have to (try to) explain society’s strange hypocrisies and priorities.

For my kids, for my family, this responsibility — no matter the subject — is not Google’s job, it’s not the Sci-Fi Channel’s, it’s not some arbitrary filter’s. It’s mine.

Battling referrer log spam. Oh joy. Because I really don’t have anything better to do with my afternoon than figuring out why our site’s access logs are clogged with hits from bogus sites about horny Russian teenagers with webcams. (Although, to be fair, the party poker and online casino sites are just as bad with this practice.)

As I was muttering curses under my breath researching this phenomenon, it also made me think about the place of porn in our society — how sad it is that sexually explicit material treads almost exclusively in the gutters and bad neighborhoods of our awareness, presenting itself like a marginally criminal enterprise even when it’s perfectly legal. Vice. I realize that for some people, the illicitness is part of the thrill, but when it’s always like that? All the fucking time??? It gets old.

I’d like to be able to tell people what I do, what Tony and I do without it being met with suspicion. I’d like to not be assumed off the bat to be a merchant of sleaze — see Tony’s recent experience on the Ovusoft bulletin boards (Hard times at Ovusoft) for an example that left me seething.

If there’s going to be a revolution, can it start already? Huh?

p.s. for anyone curious about the referrer log spam thing, I found the following article helpful — Proposal on referrer spam with some recommendations for bloggers to help make this practice less appealing to spammers.