Speaking of shame, I feel a deep sense of shame that this man ever held public office.

Remember when pregnancy meant an unwanted baby and forced marriage? Shit I miss that.

I wonder if he was aware that he was visibly ashamed of this speech as he was making it?

I think he's my least favorite candidate so far (Romney was my least favorite last time).

This was a good speech. Too bad his brother wasn't listening.

hahaha

like a fucking villain in a john waters movie.

Let's go back to the days when I didn't realize not everyone thinks exactly like I do.

Every time I see a Bush, I sneer with disgust.

Hey, Jeb, remember that time you tried to adopt that brain-dead woman so you could prevent her husband from complying with her wishes by having her feeding tube removed?

Because I do.

Here's what I was referencing in the description.

www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8751955/jeb-bush-scarlet-letter-mothers
When Florida legislators crafted this provision, their goal was to ensure that a biological father would be informed before a single mother placed his child for adoption. They inserted it into a massive overhaul of Florida adoption law after some well-publicized cases in which children of single mothers were placed for adoption without the knowledge of their biological fathers, leading to years long court battles and uncertainty for the children involved.

But the approach the legislators chose for addressing this problem — requiring women to list every sexual encounter that could have produced their child in newspaper ads, so as to track down biological fathers in advance of the child being placed for adoption — was a disgraceful and humiliating violation of privacy. Here's how the New York Times described it in 2003:

"The Scarlet Letter law required women to run advertisements disclosing their names, ages, height, hair and eye color, race and weight as well as the child's name and birthplace and a description of the possible father.

It also required the women to provide details of the dates and places of sexual encounters that might have produced the child. Women were required to run the advertisements once a week for a month in the community where the child may have been conceived...."

Jeb and his pals have restored plenty of shame to our society, just not in the way he's talking about.

iz wall:

I don't like to do the "two types of people" thing, but I'll bust one out here. There are two types of people in the world: those who take everything people say at face value and those with a functioning brain.

Jeb's story of being in an elevator with someone and bothering them with his moralizing about What's Wroth With Society and getting a curt answer in response reminds me of something that occurred to me back in high school. I was in a work-placement program doing some work for an accounting firm and was taking the train back and forth from home. One time, coming home I was sitting beside some guy that decided he was going to convince me, a visible teenager and otherwise stranger who has expressed no desire to communicate, of some huge problem (environmental damage, racial discrimination, or some other liberal cause which I agreed with but had no fucking desire to debate the guy over). So, I made the decision that the quickest way to get out of this without creating a conflict or hurting the guy's feelings was the "I don't have an opinion on this" stance. It took maybe six solid "no comment" responses before he would put the issue to rest. However, there was this fucking guy (50s or so, and this is a white-collar transit train, so he's solidly middle-class or better) that started snorting after my 4th or so "I have no opinion on that," in a "the kids these days are so stupid" way. I became furious, and found myself in an interesting situation. On the one hand, I could react instinctively and cause a scene on a crowded train while also revealing to the guy bugging me - who probably thinks he's doing some great thing trying to get people involved in his cause - that I'm not as ignorant as I'm pretending to be about whatever the issue was and just wanted him to go away or just deal with it and let the asshole continue to fucking judge people on the basis of his shitty, poorly-thought-out assumptions. Keep in mind, of course, that I was a shy teenager on a train packed with working adults.

Jeb's stupid fucking story just triggered all that to come back. I still kinda wish I had lashed out at the guy.