Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [71]
I want everyone reading this book to stop repeating this Big Lie. And to help you break this habit, I am going to give you the simple, indisputable facts. What I am about to share with you is not information that comes from liberal think tanks, the pages of the People’s Daily or my handlers in Havana (to whom I report on an hourly basis). It is from sources that are as straight and mainstream as the Gallup Organization and as American as the members of the National Rifle Association. The polls were taken by organizations including the Harris Poll, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Harvard University, National Opinion Research Center, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News and, yes, Fox News (for the complete list of poll sources, see Notes and Sources).
Please, allow me to introduce you to your fellow Americans:
Fifty-seven percent of the American public believes that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Fifty-nine percent think abortion should be decided between a woman and her doctor, while 62 percent don’t want to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, a solid 53 percent think the legalization of abortion was a GOOD THING for the country (compared to just 30 percent who thought it was bad), and a full 56 percent of us want to leave a woman’s access to an abortion as it is now or—get this—make it easier!
No wonder the right has lost its marbles—THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS ARE BABY-KILLERS!
Since it became legal in 1973, there have been 40 million abortions in this country. One in three women will have an abortion by the time she’s 45, and of those who do, almost half will have more than one.
What does this mean to conservatives? It means that women are deciding when life will be brought into this world. Women are in complete control of this decision. That is a tough pill for conservatives to swallow; after all, it’s only been eighty-three years since women were even allowed to vote. To give them the power to decide which of us will get to be born—whoa! That means the next Sean Hannity might be getting flushed down into some medical waste jar right now as we speak! Imagine how helpless this makes right-wing men feel. We Impregnate, You Don’t Decide. That’s the way it always was until just a few years ago. A multi-millennial change takes some getting used to.
A whopping 86 percent of the American public say they “agree with the goals of the Civil Rights movement.” Four out of five Americans say “it is important for colleges to have racially diverse student bodies.” Hell, even the U.S. Supreme Court has come around on this one! And more than half of us believe affirmative action is necessary to help those who have been historically denied these opportunities. Seventy-four percent disagree with this statement: “I don’t have much in common with people of other ethnic groups and races”—which puts us ahead of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, when the same question is asked in those countries. Seventy-seven percent of us would adopt a child of another race, and 61 percent say they have friends or family members who are dating or are married to someone of another race. And, in fact, in the last twenty years, the number of interracial marriages has more than doubled, from 651,000 to 1.46 million.
THAT’S RIGHT! WE AMERICANS ARE A BUNCH OF RACE MIXERS AND RACE TRAITORS!
Oh, you can just see the conservative blood boiling, can’t you? What happened to everyone knowing their own place and sticking with their own kind? J.Lo! That’s who’s responsible for this! Taking all the good, white men with her. Next they’ll start having kids and we won’t know how to identify them by race, and if that happens, we might realize how ridiculous race is and start working together on the problems that really matter. And that, my friends, does not include much that is on the right wing’s agenda.
Eighty-three percent of Americans say they are in agreement with the goals of the environmental movement. Three-quarters