Not to bludgeon my armchair psychiatry all over the place, but sometimes I wonder if the religious right isn't suffering from a big collective case of borderline personality disorder. Or at least the splitting symptoms--you know, where you find it difficult to see shades of grey, where things are either entirely one way or entirely the other and there's no in between.

Because most of the time when I hear conservatives chime in on an issue, they push it to its most extreme possibilities. Gay marriage? If everyone were gay, there would be no babies! Better make sure no one is gay so that our species doesn't die out. Same with abortion--if we kill all the babies, there will be no more babies. And the same logic applies, evidently, to contraception.

I wish I were kidding. But Rep Steve King (R-Iowa) used this very logic on the House floor. "If you applied that preventative medicine universally, what you end up with is -- you've prevented a generation," he said. "Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That's not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below replacement rate, we're a dying civilization."

You guys. We are so close to running out of babies in this country it's ridiculous. If every woman doesn't have babies all of the time, we might run out of America. So no gays, no condoms, no pills for you. Just lie back and think of the founding fathers. Keep on multiplying like a good girl.

Seriously, do people buy into this? Do we really think there is a baby shortage in this country? We don't have enough jobs for the people that are living here. Even if we maintained a steady population instead of inflating it with newborns, we'd still have a few too many folks kicking around. Fewer kiddos--especially fewer unwanted ones--is not a bad thing. People are still going to want to make little people with their faces on them. It's not as though women never breed on purpose.

I love how King's language makes it sound as though birth control is something that will be forced on the people by the government. Greg Gutfield of Fox News shares his totalitarian fantasy. "If you're talking about free birth control, who's going to use free birth control? The people who can't afford it. So the left has figured out a way to eradicate the poor!"

Wait, what? So then why do the rich keep having babies? They've been able to afford birth control all along. They've even been using it plenty. Does Gutfield think that the poor ravenously consume anything that happens to be free? Does he really not know the difference between providing a service and forcing people to use that service? Why is he making it sound like the left is busy concocting a genocide of the impoverished? 

Well, because people eat that stuff up. People love hysteria in their news media. It's just how we are. All across the spectrum, we love it. I'm a fan of the concept of "eradicating the poor" as a stand-in for improving quality of life across the economic bottom of this country. Want poor people to have more money? You want to eradicate the poor! As though being poor were a protected class, and how dare we take their poverty away from them. Might as well kill them, or at least thin their numbers by forcing them to wear condoms at all times.

I think I'm going to start splitting in my political discussions too, just to see if it works. See if conservatives will notice when their own logic is turned around on them. Death penalty? But if we kill everyone, there won't be anyone left! No more America! Tax cuts? If there are no more taxes, who will pay your overpriced politician's salary? Who will pay executioners to deliver lethal injections?