"This is an attack on virtuous manhood and a celebration of bad choices by women."

Just in time for Valentine's Day, indeed.

I'm no prude, though by today's seeming (lack of) "standards," maybe I really am. And I'm sure I won't be apologizing for that.

But this obsession with "Fifty Shades Of Grey" just makes me ill, and the writer in that link couldn't have said it better:

"It is evidence of a damaged society, a nation that thinks it is just swell to celebrate the story of a predatory billionaire punk who victimizes a tragically vulnerable woman for his own sick entertainment...And what complements Valentine’s Day like the twisted story of an abusive relationship?"

Don't we have enough abuse and violence against women in this world? Even in this nation? Don't we have enough of women being forced to do things they don't want to do, really, when they are honest with themselves?

Do intelligent, self-sufficient women really get off on what's in that book and will be in this movie? Do men?? I sure don't. And I sure as hell don't want anything to do with any male (can't call him a "man") who, seriously or "for fun," raises a hand, a riding crop, or any object, to me. Beat me? Humiliate me? Not on your effin' life, buddy. I'm no idiot.

This kind of book/movie teaches women the absolutely wrongest of wrong things:

Count off the lessons from a film to be consumed by proud American women this weekend:

— Soulless sadism is hot.

— If the sadist is attractive and wealthy, his violent appetites will be met with approval.

— Such self-absorbed victimizers can force themselves on young, innocent women, and it is kind of awesome.

— Women should tolerate such sexual violence, even find a way to develop a taste for it. After all, maybe you can change him.

Excuse me while I go puke up a lung.

How can any woman who likes this drivel honestly hope or expect to get anywhere, to even try to earn dollar for dollar what men earn for the same quality and quantity of work, when you're willing to accept this kind of depravity as "good?"

Or to put it another way, do you think Hillary Clinton thinks this stuff is good for herself, or for any woman?

I'd bet not.

On the related subject of forcing women into submission of other kinds, a politician in my state, Rep. Alfred C. Adinolfi, R-Cheshire, has introduced a "bill titled 'Prevent Coerced Abortions' (H.B. 6193), which has been referred to the legislature's Judiciary Committee":

AN ACT CONCERNING COERCED ABORTIONS.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Assembly convened:

That the general statutes be amended to create criminal penalties for anyone who forces or coerces a woman to have an abortion, to require mandatory reporting of suspected forced or coerced abortions and to create civil penalties against employers, educational institutions, social assistance agencies or medical personnel who threaten a woman with the loss of employment or other opportunity for refusing to terminate her pregnancy.

Statement of Purpose:

To prevent the coercion of a woman to have an abortion.

It's sad that we have to even think about enacting a law to protect women from this, but it's a fact that we do. I strongly doubt, knowing my state, that it will become law however. At least, once Planned Parenthood and N.O.W. apply their pressures onto the politicians here.

In this Feb. 6 article in the Waterbury Republican-American, Bill O'Brien writes of "a 2007 case involving a 15-year-old Bloomfield girl who was missing for about a year until found by police in the West Hartford home of a 41-year-old man who had impregnated her and had her get an abortion at Planned Parenthood....[and last month] in Florida, a man was arrested after he allegedly used his car to try to run over his seven-months-pregnant girlfriend. Before the 'accident,' he reportedly asked her on the phone, 'Are you ready for your abortion date?'"

He also writes how "Homicide is one of the top three causes of death of pregnant women. On New Year's Eve in 2001, a Connecticut woman was shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend when she was eight and one-half months pregnant. That's an abortion by other means."

We've become desensitized. No, check that, we've desensitized ourselves.

George Will, in a recent column on the subject of why the economy isn't as rosy as we want to think it is, wrote this and it applies to the subject of "Fifty Shades of Grey" and to forced abortions as well:

Two phrases that [Democrat] Daniel Patrick Moynihan put into America’s political lexicon two decades ago are increasingly pertinent. They explain the insufficient dismay about recent economic numbers.

Moynihan said that when deviant behaviors — e.g., violent crime, or births to unmarried women — reach a certain level, society soothes itself by “defining deviancy down.” It de-stigmatizes the behaviors by declaring them normal.

Isn't that just what people are doing with this book and movie? Declaring it "normal?"

Isn't that just what people are doing when they learn of forced abortions? Declaring them normal, telling themselves that it just has to be the woman's choice, despite what they read in the media to the contrary?

Moynihan's second phrase has more to do with abortion in general, but it is this: "And sometimes, Moynihan said, social problems are the result of 'iatrogenic government.' In medicine, an iatrogenic ailment is inadvertently induced by a physician or medicine; in social policy, iatrogenic problems are caused by government."

Pro-choice folks are fond of repeating, "Keep the government out of our bedrooms!" But it was the Federal Government that inserted itself in our bedrooms in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in the first place, declining to decide when human life begins, thus punting that question down the road and not allowing it to ever be answered in the public/political realm, though it scientifically has been answered since then but routinely ignored.

So, Moynihan was right again: the social problems of abortion, and in particular forced abortions, were caused by our Federal Government, the Supreme Court, and thus are iatrogenic problems.

And I dare anyone to stand up and say they think forced abortions are not a social problem. You are living under a rock, if you do.