By David Futrelle
Chuck Woolery is probably best known for two things: 1) being the host of the dating show Love Connection back in the 80s and early 90s and 2) his off-brand cartoon superhero head.
In the last several years, Woolery has staged a comeback of sorts, this time as a right-wing podcaster and Twitter provocateur with more than half a million followers. He’s especially fond of railing against the alleged evils of abortion.
Last night, he offered this deep thought on Twitter:
Why, yes, Chuck, it is. And that’s a good thing. It’s good that women can choose to have children, or not, on their own schedule and for their own reasons, rather than having such a major, life-changing decision left to the whims of nature and less-than-100-percent effective birth control. (Or some dude poking a hole in his condom to prove to himself that his boys can swim.)
The ironic thing about Chuck’s current stance on abortion and the sanctity of pregnancy is that, despite his recent comeback, his true claim to fame remains his former gig on a dating show whose original run ended a quarter of a century ago,
The Chuck Woolery incarnation of Love Connection — in which one shallow, attractive idiot chose another shallow, attractive idiot from a menu of three shallow, attractive idiots and went on a date with them — was basically all about enabling casual sex for cheap entertainment. Though they couldn’t talk about sex directly on the show — instead relying on salacious innuendo — so many of the contestants did have sex that the staff had a cutesy term for it: “boink dates.”
Which is fine, of course, but it seems a little out-of-whack with Woolery’s recent ravings.
In any case, with all that sex going on — the show ran through 11 seasons and more than 2000 episodes — it’s at least possible that some of the women who appeared on the show got pregnant as a result of their Love Connection dates.
If you”ve ever caught a rerun of the show, you know what a horrifying prospect that would be; these were lust connections, at best, and it’s hard to imagine that many of the, er, relationships that came out of the show lasted more than one or two more dates. This is exactly the reason why we need to protect reproductive rights in the first place: no one should be forced to raise a child spawned from a casual hookup — especially with someone from Love Connection.
Woolery has other, well, intriguing ideas about reproductive rights and politics in general, the most original probably being this take on the voting rights of babies.
I don’t know about that. But if we allowed babies to vote all of our politicians would probably be kitties. Or possibly big lovable monsters. I’m actually ok with that.
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I have not heard a single sex worker speak in favor of SESTA-FOSTA.
I have heard many sex workers explain how SESTA-FOSTA has hurt them.
The intent of SESTA-FOSTA does not matter. What matters are its effects.
Yes, trafficking is horrible and needs to be fought. But we need to do it in a manner that does not throw an already-marginalized group even further under the bus.
@Allandrel
And I see absolutely no reason to assume any good intent, frankly. When an action has predictable consequences of which the people taking the action are aware, the only reasonable assumption is that they desired that outcome.
And makes life much easier for human traffickers and other predators in fact.
I think the best and only experts on the effects of SESTA-FOSTA on sex workers are sex workers themselves, and, as Allandrel has said, I have only heard sex workers discuss the ways in which SESTA-FOSTA has made their lives worse and more dangerous.
Also adding to the whole “intent is not magic” line of conversation, imagine a birthday party where someone puts sparklers on the cake. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that in a movie or two somewhere. Despite that, do *not* try this, ever.) Result: some of the guests have severe burns which require hospitalization, and the fire department is busy trying to extinguish what’s left of your house.
If you have any experience at all with sparklers, and at least a modicum of intelligence, you might suspect that this isn’t a good idea. If you’re not sure, there are a great many people, both experts and non-experts, who can tell you exactly why aiming super-hot flaming magnesium sticks in any direction other than “down and away from people, yourself included, and over a non-flammable surface” is a recipe for disaster. And maybe tell you about incidents where such disasters have actually happened. All it takes is a little asking around.
But no, all you intended was to make the party more festive, so the consequences can just be written off as “oops, my bad, heh heh?” Losing your house and most of what you own are minor setbacks, there will be no legal consequences, and everyone will forgive you, right?
It’s different in the case of passing bad laws as passing bad laws is not actually illegal in any sense, not even in the “malign neglect” or “depraved indifference” kind of sense, and the majority of the the less politically engaged voters have the memory of a goldfish when the law doesn’t affect them directly. (This is a metaphor. Goldfish do not actually have persistent amnesia.) But at the same time, the consequences can have a far, far wider impact than one person accidentally ruining their own life and the lives of some party guests.
I rarely delurk my pasty ass, but I’m thinking Alan is under the mistaken belief that the US has an actual ‘justice’ system. If the US had anything approaching an actual ‘justice’ system, then SESTA-FOSTA might possibly have been not horrible.
But conservatives in the US have spent decades freezing/cutting funding for the judicial system in addition to cuts to legal aid programs. They’ve blocked the filling of court vacancies when they are not nominating them and packed the courts with unqualified ideologues when they are nominating them. There are few jurisdictions that actually require any sort of legal training/licensing for judges which is much the same as coroners/MEs not being required to have any medical training. Many jurisdictions still elect judges alongside coroner, prosecutor, sheriff, reps, etc. which leads to them touting their convictions to appear ‘tough on crime’ to appeal to the feelings of paranoid white shits who feel more threatened by non-white/cis/het people existing anywhere in their vicinity than corporations dumping toxic waste or driving us fullspeed into the climate disaster. Conservatives also love criminalizing the mere existence of anyone not like them, so there is no shortage of swords that cops/prosecutors can hang over the necks of anyone not paying sufficient deference to their egos, and almost no effective/independent systems in place to ensure cops/prosecutors have not engaged in misconduct.
This combines to create a legal system that is extremely expensive, has extremely long backlogs, and does not guarantee a decent trial even if you can manage the time and money costs of trial. Of course, most people targeted by cops/prosecutors do not have the resources to even go to trial, so end up taking a plea bargain to avoid being remanded to custody pending trial where they will lose their jobs, their cars, their homes, etc. before facing a hostile jury and/or useless judge with an underpaid/overworked legal aid worker to get sent to a private prison where they will face years of torture, lose their voting rights, get branded ‘convict’ that limits future employment options, and possibly be saddled with the state’s cost of keeping them in prison.
Chuck Woolery is still alive? His show was on so long ago, and he looked so old (to kid-me at least), that I thought he’d gone the way of Bob Hope and George Burns. You learn something new every day, I suppose. And we’re supposed to take advice from a guy so relevant, I was surprised to hear he’s still above-ground?