Hey, remember this one?

Photo from Wikipedia

This, if you don’t recall, is a photo of twelve lawmakers looking on and grinning – grinning – as President George W. Bush signs the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

Mostly I try to put bad memories behind me, and I remember feeling pretty frustrated the first time I saw this photo. I acknowledge that the people in charge aren’t always going to be people I agree with, but nothing has ever stated so clearly to me “the powers that be don’t give a @#$% about your perspective, so sit down and shut up while they decide what you can do with your body.”

Ugly photo. Bad times.

That’s why I was pretty tickled to see a new picture on a New York Times blog last week – one with men, women AND people of color standing behind President Obama in support of health care reform.

I think it’s possible to extrapolate some broad themes from these two media artifacts – an era of prescribed morals (have you heard about health care refusals?) giving way to a movement to make health care more affordable for everyone (and we’ve got a rally on May 30^th to prove it!).

Given that an estimated 8.9 million kids in the U.S. don’t have health insurance , and 52% of working women can’t get health coverage through their employers , it’s about damn time.