“Dude, are you watching C-SPAN right now?” That’s pretty much a rhetorical question. Nobody watches C-SPAN, but last Tuesday, they actually had a show worth watching.

Surprisingly, it was a debate.

When the sun enters Aquarius we celebrate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In the red corner, Senior Policy Analyst to the National Right to Life Committee Susan Muskett! Wearing pants on the other side of the ring is Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women. The two women were on C-SPAN 2 in order to work out their differences and determine who was right once and for all.

Having no uterus or remote control myself, I decided to stick around as an interested observer. I watched the debate while engaging in a blog-style conversation with a longtime friend of mine, one who happens to head a major atheist movement up in Pennsylvania. Except for being atheist, he is a good man. They are just as afraid of death as any other living being and claim to be superior because they have logically escaped the concept of hope.

Now, back to television. C-SPAN may have no interesting shows, or any attractive female staff, but the network does know how to handle a debate. You can’t let two people simply argue with each other about fundamentally sacred beliefs. So instead of rational discourse, they went directly to the phones, challenging experts in their fields to deal with the invincible Goliath Quasar Idiotica known to us as the American C-SPAN phone-in-caller public.

A good, honest debate plays well. Teeth flash like weapons. This, however, was more like throwing a naked sheep into a bucket of barbecue sauce and unleashing 65 starved Great Danes who also happen to be on angel dust. Muskett and Gandy ran before the bulls, so to speak.

There’s nothing better than listening to an anti-choice psychopath justify abortion in the case of rape, incest and the occasional “accident” pregnancy, but nowhere else. Incest sounds reasonable; just think of the last time you lost a friend to hemophilia. Life of the mother makes no sense, since it inherently admits the mother has more of a right to live than the child. This forms the fundamental foundation of most anti-life campaigns in the first place. Finally there is rape, which is odd because it admits that a baby you don’t want probably ain’t gonna have a great life.

Here’s a book plug. I read some related stuff in a book titled, “Freakanomics.” Apparently, after Roe v. Wade, the average abortion transformed into a $100 trip to the doctor, widely considered an improvement to the old $500 visit with the deranged Roto Rooter man. The reduced hassle made it affordable to everyone and abortion moved from the rich and famous to single parents and families at or below the poverty line. Go ask any sociologist what life is like for children of single parents at or below the poverty line. Suddenly, kids only happened as a result of either complete idiocy or parents “feeling ready,” which go hand in hand.

Susan Muskett made a few wonderfully thoughtful statements. Why can’t all women simply carry the child to term so that American families can adopt them? Heck, she’s right. How about all those illegal aliens follow suit and go back home to live with their families? Better yet, how about everyone in the world stop fighting, stop thinking bad thoughts, commit no more crimes and be totally, 100 percent honest about everything all the time? I can tell you why: because there are atheists.

There are hopeless grumblers who tear down dreams and fart on your birthday cake. People who live so far into reality that they look at planes and dreams like a single, giant mystical candy bar in the sky. What America needs is a mandated daydream period between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. everyday.

So this gal Gena called in, asking about the right of the woman to decide what her body can do. She called about a woman’s right to decide what her body is used for. You can’t go turning some red-blooded American girl into a gestation chamber for nine months just because someone else had sex with her. One woman, a born-again Christian, had the nerve to call in and explain how her children, one a successful doctor, the other a freshman cheerleader, could never have achieved so much if she had them the first time she got pregnant. She had a really good point until she commented that her previous ex-children’s pregnancy was not her fault by saying, “I wasn’t promiscuous, I was just very fertile.” You know who else is fertile? Britney Spears.

Anyway, the idea led to insults and the punch line was a five-minute shouting match between Gandy and Muskett. Both sides were getting too real for TV.

Then at some point Kim Gandy made the classic mistake of not knowing when to shut up when you’re clearly winning an argument. She calmly turned to the camera and with lazily building drama explained that abortion was about privacy.

What a great point. Phone companies are about privacy, bathroom stalls are about privacy, and abortion might as well be about privacy too.

I disagree. I’d say that’s murder. Third trimester covers a whole bunch of the most terrible stuff imagined that comes up nothing short of an acid trip with German Gestapo.

Listening to the Roe v. Wade audio recordings makes Roe sound so much smarter. To put that in perspective, Roe was the protective name assigned to Texan Norma McCorvey, who, after already putting up two children for adoption at age 21, decided to say “enough.” Who cares?

A man called in with a different point of view. It was truly moving. Instead of that, though, I’ll paraphrase with my own words. Abortion is about responsibility. How hard is it really to just “take care of your business?” You have a kid; now you take care of it.

When you hear, “We don’t want to have a kid, but she got pregnant,” translate that into, “We were having sex and she got pregnant.”

Ru-486 sales are rising to replace abortions, so that’s good. The good thing about any real accident is that if you address it in a timely matter everything can be resolved. The problem comes when some woman, possibly named Susan Muskett, intervenes by trying to help you solve your problems in a way that is just like her.

At this point, you get an insane legal battle over the definition of children. Before you know it, people are throwing bombs at doctors because every human life is sacred. Murdering a doctor so his life will not impair the quality of a child is the exact opposite of the decision that all children should be born because death of any kind cannot please God.

At the same time, I can’t stand hearing about stupid philosophical debates about violinists and blood transfusions. People think way too much into abortion. Everyone can do as they wish, and every woman’s first abortion ought to be paid for by the state. As part of the deal, the woman will have to get a butterfly tattoo burned into her lower back. The man involved will receive a chastity belt.

I can’t stand legal acrobatics regarding the semantics of life.

Here is the true and most pure legal way to perform an abortion. The idea is simple. When the woman is in the hospital and the child comes out, the mother receives a big, sharp knife and has to make a decision.

That is my fact. That is the truth as I see it.