Please Join Me in Encouraging Tom Coburn to Get Up Off His Inexplicably Anchored Ass

Lesson one: nobody gets shit done like Oprah. She has mobilized her hundreds of thousands of viewers to push the Senate to bring SB 1738 (the Protect Our Children Act) to a floor vote, where enough bipartisan support is already lined up to pass it and provide a billion dollars of funding for law enforcement dedicated to prosecuting the subhuman assholes who rape little kids and circulate the resulting video and photos around on the internet. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? I mean, who could be against protecting children from the most hideous abuse you can imagine?

Oh. Tom Coburn (R-Hell) can. Coburn has put a hold on this legislation, hoping to string it out until the Senate recesses on September 30 so it will die without seeing the floor. Mr. Family Values hisself thinks it's less important to stop people who would anally rape an infant and then post the video along with how-to instructions in a chat room than to stop discretionary spending that hasn't been pre-sourced down to the penny. He doesn't like the fact that it will cost a billion dollars.

Yo, Tom: bring the guys home from Iraq a day and a half earlier than planned and voila, there's your billion right there.

Fucking asshole.

I know far too many women who were raped as children by their male family members. Full stop. So I get enraged to the point of murder when I hear someone brushing off the issue of child rape, particularly when it's a person who's in a position of power to make a difference. This is not a time when it's okay to do some partisan grandstanding for your own profit. If you live in Oklahoma, please call Senator Coburn's office and politely ask him to get his head out of his ass and let the Senate proceed on their first, best duty, which is ensuring the well-being of the American people. Promise to talk to them about the abortion thing later, if you must, but for now, remind the senator that it's really a good thing to protect the most defenseless among us who have had the sad fate to have already been born into a family where they are treated as disposable sex toys rather than as children. If you don't live in Oklahoma, call your senators and ask them to turn the screws on Coburn if they're Republicans, or on Harry Reid if they're Dems. Ask them to act like goddamn adults for once and do the right thing. And do it quickly.

Thank you.