Excerpt From This Link: The more Republican candidates pitch for social conservative votes, the more we see the misogyny of America's religious right
Rick Santorum... has cast America as fighting a
spiritual struggle against secularism and Satan.
Republicans and their Tea Party shock troops say they want to "take America back". Progressives think they mean back to the 1950s, back to when men were men, women were ladies, and black folks only got into the White House by the back door. But Republicans are thinking big: they actually want to take us back to the Middle Ages, back to the "good old days" of sexual repression, regulation (ON SOCIAL ISSUES) and punishment.
Forget the economy: this election is becoming a referendum on women's bodies, since it's women (according to the Republicans' Book of Holy Misogyny) who like to have sex without wanting to get pregnant, and, if they do get pregnant, might want to have an abortion; women who demand, as former Senator Rick Santorum says, a "license to do things in the sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to be."
You know, "sluts".
Republicans in Congress have launched a dubious investigation of Planned Parenthood, the century-old women's health organization, and tried to take away its funding. The Senate narrowly defeated an amendment that would have allowed employers to deny insurance coverage for anything the employer found morally or religiously objectionable: contraception, certainly, but perhaps also lung cancer treatment ("you should have stopped smoking"), HIV/Aids testing ("homosexuality is an abomination"), and pre-natal care for single women ("nice girls get themselves a husband before they get themselves a baby").
The history of child
welfare for neglected and dependent children in the United
States traces its roots to Elizabethan Poor Laws from the
1600's and British common law that came to America via the
colonists. Up until the 1800's, abandoned and neglected
children were placed in workhouses, and sold into indentured
servitude or industrial labor, alongside destitute adults.
Poor children often also ended up in poorhouses/almshouses
alongside adults. In Robert L. Geiser's book, The Illusion of
Caring, (1973: Beacon Press, Boston), he says in 1795, there
were 622 paupers in the New York City Almshouse and 259 of
them, over 40 percent, were children under the age of nine.
He goes on to write, "In 1821, in the Boston Almshouse
were 78 sick persons, 77 children, 9 maniacs and idiots, and
155 unclassified inmates, mostly old and decrepit…In
1834, the Boston Almshouse (originally intended to be a
workhouse for the able-bodied poor) now contained 134 sick
persons, 132 children (104 of school age and 28 at nurse),
and a distressing 61 persons insane or idiotic…"
(p. 152). Eventually public outrage over conditions for poor
children in adult work and poverty institutions removed
children into specialized child institutions, which
eventually gave way to a foster care revolution, ushered in
by Charles Loring Brace, in the mid-1840's. The 1800's saw an
economic depression, and the U.S. government began getting
involved in child welfare, in addition to existing religious
and private organizations devoted to the cause for differing
reasons. By the mid-1900's, foster care had begun to replace
institutional care for dependent children. Yet even in 2008,
we are experiencing what some call a "broken foster care
system," with children dying in foster care regularly,
without proper state supervision. Hundreds of thousands of
children have gone through American child institutions and
foster care placements. The problem of
what to do with abandoned, impoverished children is one as
old as America herself. 
I just can't
help but wonder, (another past-time for those pesky BRAIN CELLS
with not much to do) WHO ARE OUR LEADERS? Are they the educated
folk that we elect OR are THEY the unenlightened, scared to
death, small minded ignorants who complain and throw hissy-fits
because we have come a long way from the puritanical pathetic
people of yesteryear (YOU KNOW THE ONES WHO USE TO