Moron – Memphis Flyer

Greg Cravens

About “Labor of Love” cover story on home birth …

I am glad this subject is being given interest. I am planning my second home birth this fall with Full Circle Midwifery. Most women do not realize how advanced midwifery has become as well as continuing to honor such a life-changing experience in a person’s life.

Christina Miller Art

About the Politics blog post “Current, Former Officials Back Wilkins; Cohen Responds with Own List”

Dang, looks more like a eulogy than a campaign presser.

tomguleff

About the Fly on the Wall story on the Washington Post‘s reaction to barbecue spaghetti …

What sources did the writer cite as his primary research? The annual Memphis Italian Festival would be a dandy place to curl his condescending tongue around that elusive tricky balance.

Virginia Davis

About the News Blog post “Memphis Animal Services May Cut Hours” …

Tap-dancing razzle dazzle! No matter how you twist it, the new schedule will be NINE hours less per week for the possibility of adoptions. Thirty-six hours less per month for the public to adopt. More restrictive time does not mean more access or more adoptions.

Linda Baxter, Memphis Pets Alive

About the Supreme Court/Hobby Lobby decision …

What I don’t get, and perhaps one of you perverted libtards can try to babble out an answer, is how in the heck is a birth control pill in any way shape or form related to health care? It is fornication care, and nothing more.

It makes complete sense that antibiotics, blood pressure medicine, allergy medicine, and similar products should be a part of health-care coverage. Those things actually do contribute to a woman’s health. But birth control pills? When a woman wakes up in the morning, how is her physical health in any way infringed upon buy not having birth control pills?

Tommy Volinchak

About the Beyond the Arc post “Are the Grizzlies Getting Better?” …

Anyone who thinks the ZBo contract is a bargain is thinking of 2011/12 ZBo not this past season. He is not a $16 million player. Nor is he going to get better over this coming season and the two extended seasons thereafter. But we believe we need him and signed him. If Marc walks next season for nothing, Zach will be the second-best player on a 35-win team.

Spike

About Addison Engelking’s Obvious Child review …

Everybody reading this knows a woman who has had an abortion, or has had one herself. One in three women has chosen to terminate an unwanted and/or unplanned pregnancy. Just as Jenny Slate’s character, Donna, says in Obvious Child, none of those women is alone. So why is Addison Engelking afraid to mention that plot thread in his review of the film?

Maybe he’s trying to imitate Hemingway in “Hills Like White Elephants,” another story in which the word abortion is never mentioned in a single terse sentence. Such a performance of masculinity — never saying it — is no small part of what perpetuates the “tightness” Bruce VanWyngarden ponders in his Letter from the Editor. …

Politics is downriver from culture, and changing popular opinion is the first step in effecting large-scale change and defeating draconian legislation like the Tennessee General Assembly’s proposed amendment that would allow legislators to repeal state statutes protecting a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion. Running an interview with Planned Parenthood leadership does not mean you have tidily fulfilled your liberal journalistic responsibility. If abortion remains unutterable in an indie movie review in an alternative weekly, then the Flyer should perhaps acknowledge its own complicity in tightening the corset strings on Tennessee’s minds, lips, and women’s bodies. Jayne Gipson

Well, let’s just go ahead and admit it. If Knoxville state Senator Stacey Campfield’s fellow Republicans succeed in purging him, via an establishment-backed candidate, in this August’s GOP primary, we may join in the public celebration that is

almost certain to occur. But we’ll be shamming a little bit.

The fact is, if he goes, we’ll miss Stacey. Who else but Mr. “Don’t Say Gay,” aka Senator “Starve the Children,” is anywhere near as capable of raising to consciousness the most outrageous and unworthy thoughts still extant in a Western Civilization striving to live up to its textbook ideals?

Who else is so good at giving voice to the undeclared agenda that is at the heart of the current Tea-Party-dominated Tennessee General Assembly?

“Starve the children?” Maybe an overstatement — though that’s exactly what was at the core of Campfield’s late, unlamented bill to take state assistance away from households whose children happened to be failing at school. “Ignore the children and starve their parents” is more accurate as a description of an administration and a legislature that have run riot over local school boards’ wishes and made it impossible for concepts such as minimum wage and living wage even to be discussed by the state’s city and county jurisdictions. So, of course, let’s add the concept of “disempower local governments” as an aspect of the overall state GOP mantra.

Campfield is down with all that — and more. But he has begun to offend his masters in the state Republican Party. Why? Because he talks too much (and writes too much on his blog), expressing too candidly what’s really on the mind of his party leaders. He’s blabbing state secrets, as it were.

Campfield may finally have crossed the line this week, however, and in so doing has become a candidate for official elimination. On his tacky/sassy online blog Camp4u, he supplied the following “Thought of the Week” on Monday: ”Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory sign ups for “train rides” for Jews in the ’40s.”

Comparing insurance company sign-ups for health care to the annihilation of Jews in Hitler’s Final Solution? Not one ranking Republican, let alone Democrats and just folks, was willing to follow him there. The statement was, as state Democratic Chairman Roy Herron said, “outrageous, pathetic, and hateful.” To be sure. But what delights us more are almost identical statements by state GOP Chairman Chris Devaney (“No political or policy disagreement should ever be compared to the suffering endured by an entire generation of people.”) and House GOP Majority Leader Gerald McCormick (“[The] disgraceful blog post compared a policy dispute with the suffering of an entire race of people … .”)

And there, in a nutshell (ahem), is Campfield’s redeeming public service: By going so outrageously far afield, he is forcing his party’s leaders — who have done their share of demonizing the political opposition — into admitting that all their public bluster and invective aimed at Democrats is really just policy disagreement in disguise.

Fine, then. Let us henceforth reason together — and be thankful to Campfield for his own (inadvertent) contribution to political dialogue.