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| Uncle Sam Shouldn’t Be A Sugar Daddy Posted: 27 Feb 2012 11:28 PM PST
 The devil in disguise? Not every Republican in Florida spends their time stealing elections, it seems. According to Mark Bittman in today’s New York Times, state senator Ronda Storms is attempting to introduce a bill that would prohibit food stamp recipients from purchasing foods containing sugar with taxpayer dollars, a courageous and unusual stand for a GOP member. "It's just bad public policy to allow unfettered access to all kinds of food," Storms told Bittman. Some might find this sort of intrusion into private lives another example of Big Government run amok, but Bittman points out that “the argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They're already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises.” But — is sugar really in a category with alcohol and tobacco? Well, according to Bittman, it’s worse:
And there you have it. It’s not that our government is doing too much; in fact, it’s doing too little. And for my money, Senator Storm isn’t doing enough, either. It’s far too easy for a food stamp recipient to use their own cash to feed their sugar addiction. Just banning the use of food stamps for purchase will do little to solve the problem. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu found to his dismay, we just can’t rely on peoples’ judgment to do the right thing. Even something as obvious as purchasing environmentally superior energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs seems beyond us, and, after the Obama administration’s cowardly retreat, even landmark legislation could not stand up against deeply-ingrained ignorance. We would propose that all citizens be issued a “nutrition ID” smartcard that would be required for all purchases of fructose-bearing foodstuffs. This card would also help enforce another very sensible idea Mr. Bittman puts forward, that “establishing a minimum age for purchase of sodas…would reduce consumption.” The card would identify purchasers who are food stamp recipients, and bar them from purchasing prohibited items, including tobacco and alcohol. This would serve the dual purpose of preventing taxpayer assistance from contributing to ill health and also serve as an incentive – perverse though it may be — for those on the dole to work harder to escape it. Such a card could also be employed to establish a “calorie ceiling” for citizens, which, when reached, would forbid merchants from selling any further foodstuffs, except for items that were fat/carbohydrate/sugar-free, to anyone who had exceeding their permitted daily (or weekly) limit. While enablers could make such purchases as proxies for those still determined to insult their bodies, making such acts punishable by stiff fines and/or imprisonment would certainly deter most of this action. Those who would protest that such policies represent an unwarranted intrusion into private lives would do well to consider the intrusion made into into everyone’s life by the costs of treating nutrition-related afflictions –and to see the notion of state-assisted obesity for the nonsense that is is. As Mr. Bittman, says, we need the government on our side on this, and we can’t wait for vigilantes to do the government’s job for it. For us. And for the addicted, the afflicted, and the unfortunate ignorant. Next: Now, about those light bulbs….
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| Schizo Nation: Same-Sex Marriage Vs. Contraception Posted: 27 Feb 2012 10:52 PM PST  When health coverage doesn't include birth control – Oh, wait a minute... I’ve been thinking about this season’s weird contrast between the continuing advance of gay rights – with Maryland’s legislature becoming the latest to approve same-sex marriage – and the sudden re-emergence of debate over whether women should be entitled to contraception as part of standard health care. We seem to be living in a bizarro-world of strange contradictions. What’s behind it? An answer came courtesy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the religious eminence grise of South Africa, who told an illuminating story of how prejudices get baked into our psyches without our realizing it. Taking a post-apartheid airline flight one day, he noticed both pilots were black, and felt pride and pleasure in that fact – until the plane encountered some heavy turbulence, upon which Tutu felt himself worrying that there was no white person in the cockpit. Could the black pilots could make it through the storm? Decades of being hammered with the idea of black inferiority had left even this highly thoughtful leader with an unconscious prejudice against his own people. Religious objections to contraception have been baked into people’s brains in a similar way. Indoctrination with the idea that the life of a potential human being is sacred from the moment of conception often develops into a conviction so deep that it overrides the notion that women should be able to decide what they do with their bodies and (hence) their own lives. In effect, a prejudice comes about in favor of hypothetical children and against their potential mothers. Though this prejudice against women may be “accidental,” like racial prejudice it is rooted in burned-in ideas. And like racism, these ideas and feelings go back centuries. For better or worse, they’re part of the mosaic of culture. Same-sex marriage is different. Homophobia goes back a long way, of course, but the idea of gay marriage is a pretty modern one. Those who oppose it have formed their convictions only recently, because the concept didn’t exist in mainstream cultural dialogue until the latter days of the modern gay rights movement. So the opposition, while broad and sometimes deep, may not be as fundamental. Anti-abortion and anti-contraception forces, on the other hand, have been with us for ages, deeply rooted and stalwartly arrayed against modern manifestations of women’s rights, and baked into the bones of those who are steered by religious orthodoxy. And thus it is that the old ideas coexist with the new.  |
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