6,753 douchebags: a post in which I swear a lot, even in Finnish

That is the number, as of this posting, of the people who have actually voted "yes" to the current CNN online poll question: Should information about women who get abortions be posted online? Fortunately, they are in the vast minority on this one. As much as America has been slouching toward lunacy in the past eight years, at least most people have an appropriate sense of clarity on something this deranged. Still, that's a lot of fucking douchebags!

In case some of you are wondering with slack-jawed horror what might have prompted this poll question in the first place: yes, it's true. The great state of Oklahoma — home of Silly Sally Kern (read up on her by doing a search over at Abbie's); the state where they were so offended by Richard Dawkins' speaking tour that the legislature introduced a resolution telling everyone how offended they were, as they'd already eradicated all crime and poverty in the state and therefore had plenty of downtime that week — yes, Oohhhhhklahoma wants to pass a law...

that will post information online about women who get abortions in the state -- an act critics say would be harassment and an invasion of privacy....

"We're not trying to embarrass anybody, hurt anybody or make anybody's identities known. That's not the purpose of the legislation," the Republican lawmaker says.
"We want to collect hard data that can be a useful tool in helping prevent future unwanted pregnancies."

You know, I was going to call this bullshit, that being what it is and all, but it occurred to me that mere English profanities were not sufficient to convey the totality of the bullshittery on offer here. So I did a little Googling and discovered that "bullshit" in Finnish, which is a lovely lyrical language, is ja vitut! Nice! Just kind of rolls off the tongue. So having logged "bullshit" in my multiculti swearing lexicon I began a desperate search for "motherfucker," but the best I could come up with was runkkari, which evidently only translates to "wanker" but which I'm also assured is "extremely offensive." Great, I'm sold! Now, setting aside the fact I know bugger-all (see, I can do it in Cockney too!) about proper tenses and grammar and such in Finnish, I'm just going to cobble the thing together and proudly announce that I've come up with exactly the thing to say to any right-wing runkkari who tries to tell me that their new "harass teh wimminz" law is all in the interests of looking out for their delicate well being. Ja vitut, runkkari!

(And I'm not kidding about the lyrical qualities of Finnish profanity, people. Wikipedia helpfully informs me of the magnificent phrase Vittujen kevät ja kyrpien takatalvi!, "paraphrased, 'Oh fucking shit!' or literally 'The spring of cunts and the late winter of dicks!'" That simply leaves me reeling in awe. It's like the kind of album title you'd get if Marilyn Manson ever went emo.)

I mean, I could tell these idiots how to prevent future unwanted pregnancies. Just drop millions of free condoms from low flying airplanes! Or just pass some kind of comprehensive sex education to inform all those poor redneck kids of yours that inserting Knob A in Hole B usually results in Lump C unless sensible precautions are taken. This suggestion perhaps unfairly assumes a measurable percentage of Oklahomans are sensible, but please, won't someone think of the children!? Anyway, there are any number of easily-implemented ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies if that's what they really wanted to do up there, so if you try to tell me you're taking down women's private information and posting it on the goddamn Internet, for chrissakes, in order to help these women, then you're just olla naama norsun vitulla. (Yeah, look that one up, kids. Har!)

So the wingers are of course trying to lie about their real motives, which is to frighten women out of exercising their reproductive rights entirely, and claim that...

The measure specifies women's identities will be protected. "Nothing in the Individual Abortion Form shall contain the name, address or information specifically identifying any patient," it says. "Nobody's identity will be made known," Lamb says.

Which naturally prompts the question of why do it at all then? What exact scientific information that is helpful to anyone will be gleaned from looking at a bunch of questionnaires and determining, "Well, X thousand women had abortions last year, and of those, 25% were due to health dangers, 10% were due to interfering with their lifestyles, 20% were due to being raped by their dads in the back of the singlewide when ma's off doing church bingo, and the rest were due to the women realizing their kids would grow up to be dumbfuck rednecks from Oklahoma and they simply couldn't bear the shame." None of that is necessary to get you to the simple realization that you could have spent all that time and energy simply dropping condoms from airplanes!

It will be interesting to see how badly this crashes and burns, although when the wingers get motivated, watch out! There are no guarantees. In the meantime, just remember: Ja vitut, runkkari!

So do Finns have a word for "douchebag" anyway?

PS: I've actually met a lot of nice people from Oklahoma. I have. Really! :-)