When I used “humour[British Spelling] without consequence” in my earlier blog post, I that thought it was quite a snappy summary of the long drawn out discussion about the differences between British and American humor, apart from the spelling of the word, obviously.

Ricky Gervais has a useful blog entry on the subject, here. I just googled for “Humour without consequence” to see if it was an original phrase, and it appears to be. One search result though leapt out at me, Sex without Consequence, in a blog post on the Daily Kos by Dave Robbins. It totally sums up my discomfort with the current US non-debate about contraception and abortion, that I’d felt uncomfortable about but hadn’t worked out why.

The way the current debate is framed, typically by the right, and mostly by the religious right, is against abortion, against contraception, etc. etc. One small victory recently was the push back that happened against the Susan G. Komen Foundation when it announced it was cutting ties with Planned Parenthood. They tried and tried to position and rationalize it, but when you looked back at the time line, it ultimately seemed it was a religiously and politically motivated attack on an organization for whom abortion is a tiny percentage of what they do for women. And that’s the point, it’s not a for or against abortion post, it’s how comes this always comes down to an attack on women?

Dave’s post nicely calls out the fact that Men have to take at least 50% of the responsibility, and often much more. Nothing is without consequence.