Marshmallows would catch fire and melt into charred blackened goo puddles at my touch right about now.

So angry.

I can't organize my thoughts into articulate arguments right now, so strong is my gut reaction to this. Must pull back. Must breathe. Must look at things logically, recognize the potential for emotional manipulation on both sides.

What, you ask, is she nattering on about THIS time?

The House of Representatives is bandying about the idea of cutting ALL funding to Planned Parenthood. Yes, that's right, the organization that provides low- or no-cost counseling (on relationships, pregnancy, sexual identity, at-risk youth, etc), sex education, and birth control to millions of people who wouldn't otherwise have access to basic information on sex.

Universal human truth: people are going to fuck.

People have been fucking. People will continue to fuck.

And when you're an inexperienced, love-crazed, hormone-fueled young adult, your brain is incapable of comprehending long-term consequences. Your PREFRONTAL CORTEX is still BUILDING ITSELF until you're in your mid-twenties. That little grey chunk of the brain that allows you to consider your entire future more valid than immediate rewards? It's functionally nonexistent. It's offline. It's a bunch of Legos scattered on the floor, not a complex web of interdependent neurons working to establish the logic of causality.

My point?

Cutting funding to Planned Parenthood is an extraordinarily bad idea. As it stands now, their website is a reliable source of open information about sexuality and reproductive health, body image issues, and birth control options. "Abstinence-only sex education" is horseshit. It's also a contradiction in terms, as "don't do it or you'll have unwanted babies and get syphilis and die" hardly qualifies as education. (That's currently the overwhelming majority of the Texas state sexual education curriculum. Schools are not required to give medically accurate information to students in health classes. The most recent bill introduced in Texas legislature that would require information to, y'know, be CORRECT? It died in committee last year.)

More on this later. Too riled up now. Looks like I'll be writing another paper on this, just because it's one of the things I'm happy to research rabidly for hours on end.