Home | Away

White House announces new Social Security plan

WASHINGTON—White House press secretary Scott McClellan said today that President Bush would soon unveil a revised plan for saving Social Security, one that ties the concept of “progressive indexing” to the Food and Drug Administration’s recent ruling that any man who has engaged in homosexual sex in the previous five years should be barred from serving as an anonymous sperm donor.

Under the new plan, an individual’s Social Security eligibility would be calibrated on a sliding scale which establishes an inverse relation between qualifying for future Social Security benefits and participating in anal sex. 

McClellan called the FDA ruling an “inspiration” for the President.  “President Bush has always believed that gay sperm are a threat to the American family,” he said in today’s press briefing.  “Now we’re prepared to show that gay men are a threat to the solvency of Social Security as well.  Without progressive indexing for gay sex, Social Security will collapse.”

Gay-rights groups immediately denounced the plan.  Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal, called it “policy based on bigotry.”

The White House, however, denies that the plan is discriminatory.  “We’re not saying that gay men aren’t eligible for Social Security,” said one high-ranking official.  “It’s pegged very specifically to individual behavior.  If you have anal sex half the time, say, you still qualify for fifty percent of your Social Security benefits.  And if you want your full benefits, all you really have to do, under this plan, is say no to sodomy.”

Treasury Secretary John Snow, in a separate statement, pointed out that the Social Security system will be “bankrupt” in 2042 unless critical steps are taken now to “strengthen” the program.  “The fact is Social Security will go broke when our young workers get ready to retire,” said Snow.  “Every year we wait the problem becomes worse for our children.  The time to act is now, to make sure that today’s anal-sex-havers do not drain the system and necessitate benefit cuts for the rest of us.”

At the same time, Secretary Snow insisted that “all options are on the table,” including a provision exempting gay Republican officeholders from the plan, on the condition that they oppose gay rights.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.- Tenn.) lashed out at the Administration’s critics.  “The Democrat party is denouncing this plan even before it’s been officially announced,” he said.  “They don’t know any of the details, and they’re already playing politics with this issue.  Where is their plan?  What are liberals doing about the anal sex crisis that threatens Social Security?  All they say is ‘there is no anal sex crisis.’ That’s not a plan, and the American people know it.”

One White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Administration is still unsure of what to do about lesbians.  “We figured out that we don’t have to worry about them as sperm donors,” said the official, “but Social Security is a whole different ballgame.  We’re thinking of maybe making every other lesbian eligible, and letting them fight it out.  We think that would be hot.  But right now we just don’t know.  Everyone here has been focused exclusively on anal sex, and we don’t really have a plan for lesbians.  All we know is that it was terrible that John Kerry said that word.”

Posted by on 05/10 at 12:12 PM

  1. I’m thinking any sex with a Neo-Con Republican counts as anal sex. And I’m wondering what this policy would look like if Rick Santorum had participated in the “deliberation.” Funny stuff Michael.

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  01:35 PM

  2. No quote from Ana Marie Cox?

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  01:44 PM

  3. This reminds me of the guy at UT Austin who asked Anne Coulter what she thought of anal sex 100% of the time in heterosexual marriage (though he expressed himself more vividly than I just did) before promptly getting arrested.

    Posted by Jon S.  on  05/10  at  01:53 PM

  4. People who ask Ann Coulter about anal sex should also be ineligible for Social Security benefits.  I’ll mention this to one of my senators.

    And who’s Ana Marie Cox?

    Posted by Michael  on  05/10  at  02:09 PM

  5. I’m very proud with how effortlessly you snuck “pegged” in there, as if you K-Y’ed your diction.

    AMC is better known as Wonkette, whose love for drink is only matched by her obsession with butt sex.

    Posted by George  on  05/10  at  02:18 PM

  6. Maybe we need a sliding scale for different sex acts. Anal sex is only one act that could be deplored; how about man-on-dog sex, oral sex, frottage, anything other than the missionary position? I think it would be great fun to see that legislation argued over. We should just ask Rick Santorum to provide a ranked list.

    How about just making non-procreative sex anathema? Not only would that get the gay males and the lesbians, but we could also punish all those sluts who use birth control.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  05/10  at  02:34 PM

  7. Would guys that masturbate horses get double their benefits?

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  02:58 PM

  8. Look, we told you it was a crisis, and since we repeated the lie long enough, it has officially become the truth.

    Now are you going to be an obstructionist or are you going to come up with your own plan to exile gay people to Greenland after sterilizing them? We’re proposing the use of retired garbage boats and low-intensity microwave devices, but we’re open to ideas. Just don’t sit there and say “no, no, no” like some stubborn child refusing to eat lima beans.

    Posted by norbizness  on  05/10  at  03:02 PM

  9. More to the point - gay sex can’t produce offspring.  Less offspring, less kids paying into your benefits.  It make sense...sort of.

    The big question is how much coitus will a gay man of age 40, whose squandered his best ‘natural-love-making’-earning years, have to engage in per month in order to qualify for 50% benefits by his age of retirement…

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  03:14 PM

  10. The issue “should” get serious debate! I suspect that, “President Bush has always believed that gay sperm are a threat to the American family,” he will froth at the mouth when dealing with the meat of the issue!

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  03:32 PM

  11. In an otherwise fine post, Michael, you made the almost unforgivable mistake of not once inserting the phrase “precious bodily fluids.”

    Or is it, rather, that “precious bodily fluids” were in the spaces between the sentences? Were you engaging in a sneaky deconstructionist end-run around the seemingly obvious imperative to use “precious bodily fluids”?

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  03:51 PM

  12. What with Senators Santorum’s legislations to preserve the sanctity of marriage and combating HIV/AIDS, he will fall in behind Bush on this initiative!

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  04:17 PM

  13. So, is “oral” still okay or not?

    Posted by Desperately Need to Know  on  05/10  at  04:24 PM

  14. I’m with PZ - while the administration does seem unnaturally focused on anal, any good Christian will tell you that missionary is the only “God-sanctioned” position.  I think the proposal should branch out to include all of the heathen deviants.  That way the well-behaved God fearing Americans can really get their due, you know?

    The problem, as I see it, is monitoring.  Hmmm… something analogous to the ankle-based electronic bracelets, perhaps?

    Posted by Marita  on  05/10  at  04:38 PM

  15. Everyone here has been focused exclusively on anal sex

    Priceless

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  05/10  at  04:55 PM

  16. Marita: ankle bracelets are inadequate. We need full video coverage, broadcast constantly into the basement of your local church, where an army of evangelicals will monitor and make note of your every eroticism.

    This could be expensive, so the first video monitors should be attached to nubile, attractive young women, since they are obviously the vectors of all sin.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  05/10  at  05:17 PM

  17. While it’s certainly necessary to have full video and audio coverage of this debauchery that is destroying Social Security even as I type this…

    Hang on a minute....

    Okay, back.

    Taking Marita’s idea, how about just electronic RFID cock rings for starters? Then in a later bill we can introduce the video cameras which will be broadcast on CSPAN 4 on a loop so that citizen militia members can monitor the goings on during those long nights out guarding the borders.

    I’m not as funny as Michael or any of you. I just wanted to bring up the idea of RFID cock rings which makes me giggle. I have no idea why.

    Love,

    Hanna

    Posted by Hanna  on  05/10  at  06:04 PM

  18. Never underestimate a good RFID cock ring joke, Hanna!  It makes any party sparkle.

    As for other forms of nonprocreative sex:  as far as I know, no one in the Administration has considered the “oral” issue.  Word is that they’ve outsourced that one to Rush Limbaugh, who’s given far more thought to the matter.

    And I’m putting PZ in charge of those monitors!

    Posted by Michael  on  05/10  at  06:19 PM

  19. In preparing his remarks, Mr. McClellan handed out this summary of the latest research.  As he did so he continued to sniff at the air around each of the male members of the press corps, and rejected any attention whatsoever to and from the three remaining female reporters.

    “Using a brain imaging technique, Swedish researchers have shown that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that the gay men respond in the same way as women.

    The new research may open the way to studying human pheromones, as well as the biological basis of sexual preference. Pheromones, chemicals emitted by one individual to evoke some behavior in another of the same species, are known to govern sexual activity in animals, but experts differ as to what role, if any, they play in making humans sexually attractive to one another.”

    The press secretary reiterated the importance of this finding, that indeed there appeared to be a genetic preference for his own needs, oops, the President’s plan to identify and track the gay gene through the Social Security system.

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  07:07 PM

  20. Actually, the ‘sliding scale’ is the preferred method of sex by most bloggers. Buggery is confined to broadcast media types, who’ll do just fine with reduced Social Screwity.

    Still, I just don’t get why the Bushites are so fired up about anal sex. Cracking down on that is only going to hurt them in the long run. Or do you think their parents forgot to tell them where baby Republicans come from?

    Posted by Kevin Hayden  on  05/10  at  07:28 PM

  21. "Everyone here has been focused exclusively on anal sex.”

    Film at 11.

    (I like the idea of having to press the Submit button to post my comment. Just saying.)

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  08:03 PM

  22. Wonder whether Neil Horsley can donate:
    http://www.newshounds.us/2005/05/06/bizarre_sex_habits_of_the_extreme_rightwing.php#more

    Posted by  on  05/10  at  09:45 PM

  23. Lance,

    That is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.  I need to again re-assess what I thought I knew about people from the rural south.  Every time I think I’ve heard the most fucked up shit ever, it’s outdone, and it’s outdone in style.

    Posted by thehim  on  05/11  at  12:09 AM

  24. PZ’s right, it’s gotta be non-reproductive sex.  In fact, really, the best plan is just to get rid of social security altogether.  Then it can be on the backs of the children to support their parents, just like god intended, and all the birth-control using sluts and homosexuals and like that will have to starve in the streets.  Or maybe we could bring back workhouses, so they wouldn’t clutter the gutters.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  05/11  at  12:42 AM

  25. PZ Meters said:

    This could be expensive, so the first video monitors should be attached to nubile, attractive young women, since they are obviously the vectors of all sin.

    And if the women are white, we can get the media to take the issue seriously.

    Posted by mikez  on  05/11  at  12:47 AM

  26. Criminy! Give the president credit where credit is due! Linking future SSA entitlements to proclivity for anal sex makes MUCH more sense than, say, basing said entitlements on things such as previous promises made over the course of decades by our government, or trivial technicalities such as THE LAW!

    Posted by DK  on  05/11  at  08:21 AM

  27. Could the video monitoring of nubile, attractive young women include Mary Cheney? (Hadn’t really thought about it before, but Mary Cheney IS cute.) ‘Course, now that Cheney has signed her memoir up with Simon & Schuster for a reported $1 mill, she’s won’t have to worry about any proposed changes to Social Security if she can sock that stash away till she retires. Her editor will be none other than S&S’s new hire, Mary Matalin. In that book, maybe we’ll hear one insider view about how the GOP manages the contortionist’s act on sexual preferences from the very woman who, as Hank Stuever wrote in his Wash Post piece this past October (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43375-2004Oct18.html), seems “trapped in a tower circled by bats.”

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  10:23 AM

  28. what happens to the benefits of hetero but bent-over boyfriends? (i was gonna say ‘straight’ for ‘hetero’ but you see the problem there.)

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  10:31 AM

  29. what happens to the benefits of hetero but bent-over boyfriends?

    I think they get screwed (a cheap pun, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t help myself...)

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:51 AM

  30. Ana Marie COX !!! MUST CREDIT ANAL SEX! MUST CREDIT ANAL SEX! MUST CREDIT ANAL SEX!

    Or not!

    Oy, I am just so tired of taking it in the . . with this administration of . . . I think I’ll just sit down on my . . . . but . . . it’s too painful. . .

    Oy.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  12:49 PM

  31. In an effort at compromise, moderate Republicans have come out with a modified plan in which homosexuals can “earn back” social security benefits percentage points:

    +5% for each opposite-sex, penis-to-vagina missionary encounter
    +3% for each opposite-sex, penis-to-vagina, non-missionary encounter
    +2% for each opposite-sex oral encounter
    +1% for each encounter not classified above, as long as it is with the opposite sex

    Species of opposite-sex partner is optional.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  03:12 PM

  32. OK, so I pore through all 54 comments on Balls to the Wall, and you beg people to ask you to fill in the details on Beavis and Butthead’s response to a video by that title, and someone begs you, pretty please with sugar on top, and yet I see no details.  Where the hell are the details?  I want details!  It’s been, what, nine years since B&B departed the airwaves, I’ve been in withdrawal this whole time (I’ve been filling my need with King of the Hill, so I suppose it’s just withdrawl), and you promise sweet relief and then fail to deliver?  C’mon, Berube, step up to the plate!  And don’t leave us hanging again merely because I just made a horrible pun.

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  03:22 PM

  33. I was sorry to hear the new proposal doesn’t exclude abortionists, disobedient women trying to get abortions, pharmacists that provide birth control pills, irresponsible women that try to get birth control pills, married or unmarried couoples that don’t have children, anybody that voted for Kerry, Gore or Clinton, anybody not found to be contributing to the Family Research Council or Focus on the Family, anybody found to be on David Horowitz’s page of anti-American ingrates and academic elites, and, finally, anybody lacking a Support The Troops bumper sticker.

    Posted by Bulworth  on  05/11  at  04:09 PM

  34. Anyone who even thinks of Ann Coulter and sex, in any variation, should be ineligible. And probably committed.

    Lefty

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  04:10 PM

  35. Here’s the ultimate nightmare for the future of Social Security:  lesbians having anal sex.  Aieeee!  Say it isn’t so!

    Once we’ve persuaded the Repubs that such things do sometimes happen, I’m sure they’ll agree that the only rational reaction is to take all such anal-sex-having lesbians into custody and film them doing this terrible deed, and then use the revenues from selling the videos to bolster the Trust Fund.

    (Wasn’t it a common Seventies legend that the feds were running the drug trade?  Could the same be true of the porn industry?  It makes sense in so many ways ... hypocrisy, misogyny, irony ....)

    Posted by Anderson  on  05/11  at  04:15 PM

  36. OK, so I pore through all 54 comments on Balls to the Wall, and you beg people to ask you to fill in the details on Beavis and Butthead’s response to a video by that title, and someone begs you, pretty please with sugar on top, and yet I see no details.  Where the hell are the details?  I want details!

    Oops, Mr. Navigator, you’re quite right.  Lee asked me for details in comment 32 (May 3, 11:17 pm), and I completely missed it.  And here I was thinking, “jeez, I generously offer to do a rigorous close reading of the Beavis and Butthead ‘Balls to the Wall’ bit, and no one takes me up on it.” It’s been Self-Pity Week on this blog, it really has.  But there it was, all the time.  Clearly, I was distracted by the image of spraying Kevin Costner with pesticide.

    OK, I owe everyone a post on that scene, and a few related remarks about B & B as well.  Sorry about that.

    Posted by Michael  on  05/11  at  05:59 PM

  37. I am confused. PZ is talking about sex, and forgetting to mention squid.  Who is this imposter?

    Posted by  on  05/11  at  11:44 PM

  38. When’s Ken Starr going to be subpoenaed as a key witness to deviant acts that compromise our Purity of Essence?  I’m sure he’ll get to the bottom of it.  He could talk to Gannon --that guy’s got all kinds of accesses.

    Posted by Joley  on  05/12  at  01:45 AM

  39. “We figured out that we don’t have to worry about them as sperm donors,” said the official, “but Social Security is a whole different ballgame.  We’re thinking of maybe making every other lesbian eligible, and letting them fight it out.  We think that would be hot.  But right now we just don’t know.  Everyone here has been focused exclusively on anal sex, and we don’t really have a plan for lesbians.  All we know is that it was terrible that John Kerry said that word.”

    ----

    Look out lesbians. I think the WH took that “fight it out” seriously. My sources say that in the last 24 hours there’s been a “special appropriation” by the Department of Homeland Security of two tons of Jello powder and about one hundred inflatable kiddie pools.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  06:57 AM

  40. Well, here is one Bushie who’s going to have a *big* problem with this proposal.

    Posted by Anderson  on  05/12  at  01:25 PM

  41. So, what, fisting gets a free pass? And what about strap-ons? This plan has more holes than...Gannon?

    (Sorry. All the best jokes were taken a day or two ago.)

    Posted by Orange  on  05/12  at  09:42 PM

  42. I dunno, Orange, those are pretty good.  Hard to improve on “Fisting gets a free pass?” for sheer economy of expression. . . .

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  12:10 AM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: Details, details

Previous entry: A league of their own

<< Back to main