I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. Texas is doing something mind-numbingly stupid [quelle surprise!]:
Texas is preparing to give college students and professors the right to carry guns on campus, adding momentum to a national campaign to open this part of society to firearms.
More than half the members of the Texas House have signed on as co-authors of a measure directing universities to allow concealed handguns. The Senate passed a similar bill in 2009 and is expected to do so again. Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who sometimes packs a pistol when he jogs, has said he’s in favor of the idea.
Texas has become a prime battleground for the issue because of its gun culture and its size, with 38 public universities and more than 500,000 students. It would become the second state, following Utah, to pass such a broad-based law. Colorado gives colleges the option and several have allowed handguns.
Supporters of the legislation argue that gun violence on campuses, such as the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois in 2008, show that the best defense against a gunman is students who can shoot back.
Yes, because in the hysteria of a mass shooting, when things are so disorienting that it’s hard to tell where the gunfire is coming from until long after the bodies are down, what we need is MORE ARMED PEOPLE.
And one of the speakers for the gay wingnut contingent is referring to this as a, wait for it…
“Victory for Gay Rights”!
Uh…
This is great news for gay people whom many believe are more vulnerable than straights for harassment based on our sexuality. If a potential bashers know that gay students might be packing, they’ll be less likely to attack. And if they do attack, gay people will better be able to defend themselves.
Kudos to Texas legislators for considering providing gay men and lesbians with an important tool to protect against ourselves against those who would do us harm. Let’s hope gay organizations in Texas and nationwide push the legislature to act speedily on this important gay rights measure.
Mind-blowing. And people, I’m not anti-gun. But this doesn’t have a damn thing to do with gay rights, nor does it have anything to do with changing the climate that would lead people to attack gays and lesbians in the first place, and moreover, lots of gays and lesbians have guns already! This has never been a deterrent to hate crimes in the past, so why the possibility that a member of the GSA at the University of Texas might have a gun on campus would somehow deter an attacker in the future, is beyond me. Indeed, most of the massacres we’ve seen in the past several decades have been carried out with guns purchased legally, so as far as I can see, the only thing this changes is that, if a malcontent headcase decides to open fire on a college campus in Texas, he can rest easy knowing that it was perfectly okay, thanks to Governor Goodhair and the intellectually slowest governing body on the face of the earth, for him to waltz onto campus with that gun.
This is what Stockholm Syndrome looks like, people. It’s sad.
Evan-
If protecting oneself from a hate crime BEFORE it happens ISN’T a gay rights issue… then please enlighten me as to how aborting babies IS a gay rights issue?
I would give you a full response, if I hadn’t written about this many times in the past. Women’s reproductive health and gay rights go hand in hand because the opposition to both stem from the same exact place. Start here, and read:
http://www.truthwinsout.org/tag/abortion
and then click any link you find that goes to Pandagon.
Actually, no, that’s the wrong tag, excuse me.
Go here:
http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2010/10/12410/
and here:
http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2010/03/7393/
And please, spare me the “aborting babies” thing. Anyone who actually cares about “unborn babies” and has access to Google can easily learn, within five minutes or so, that legality of abortion has no correlation to the abortion rate…it only affects whether or not they’re safe. Moreover, worldwide, the only policies that actually reduce the abortion rate are the policies that reduce the NEED for abortion, which are pro-choice policies. All of them. Look at abortion rates around the world. The lowest rates are in Western Europe and Scandinavia, where abortion LAWS are the most lax, but access to family planning, reproductive healthcare, economic empowerment, etc., are all the highest.
The highest abortion rates in the world are actually almost uniformly in countries where the procedure is illegal, but yet women have little to no access to contraception, family planning, economic advancement, etc.
Don’t they realize that the bullies will also be allowed to carry guns? And in Texass, nobody really cares if a few queers get bumped off for being queer. Hell, the shooters might just get a party thrown for them.
Details, details, Buffy!
It’s useful to remember that gay conservative ideology is almost uniformly wingnut talking points with the word “gay” inserted every now and then, inexplicably.
As in Bruce’s question above: they make up some weird nonexistent reality where screwing women over — let’s remember for a second that the gay conservative movement is mostly white men — somehow magically results in more babies for gays to adopt, as if all the unwanted children right now have homes, as we know they do not.
Thank you, Evan! That is exactly the gay conservative platform. They still believe that women’s bodies should be controlled–and all the rest of the anti-human agenda of the GOP. It’s all about their wallet.
Until I see evidence to the contrary, to me “gay conservative” is an oxymoron.
They came out of the closet, but they kept the patriarchal framework that wishes they had remained there.
Blatt may have single handedly killed the Texas bill.
Please stop acting like we are all some kind of violent neanderthals just waiting to go postal all the time. And please post this sign on our campuses and at the state border.
“Our next door neighbor BLUE states want to ban all guns. Their citizens are not armed. Out of respect for their opinions, we promise not to use our guns to protect them. Thanks for visiting. Love, dont-mess-with-us Texas”
As far as abortion goes, the facts stated above are not accurate.
Public funding increases the rate of abortions, and that is an easy statistic to measure. A 1994-1995 survey of abortion patients found that in states where Medicaid pays for abortions, women covered by Medicaid have an abortion rate 3.9 times that of women who are not covered, while in states that do not permit Medicaid funding for abortions, Medicaid recipients are only 1.6 times as likely as non-recipients to have abortions.
As far as your google claim that unsafe abortions increase (dont make me get out the hidden camera)…
Because Planned Parenthood is corrupt and finagles death certificates, it has been revealed that they do not report their deaths to the CDC so they can claim they are safe. Here is your evidence. From 1989 through 1992, the CDC reported zero abortion-related deaths in the state of Maryland.
* During 1989 in the state of Maryland:
- Erica Kae Richardson (16 years-old) was admitted to an emergency room on March 1st with a punctured uterus from an abortion carried out earlier that day. She died shortly after midnight on March 2nd.
- Paramedics arrived at an abortion clinic in Suitland, Maryland on July 12th to find Debra M. Gray (34 years-old) in cardiac arrest after being administered anesthesia without the presence of an anesthesiologist. She was taken to a hospital and died three days later.
- Paramedics arrived at an abortion clinic in Suitland, Maryland on September 10th to find Susanne Renee Logan (32 years-old) in cardiac arrest with an oxygen mask placed upside down on her face. It was found that she had been given anesthesia without the presence of an anesthesiologist, and when she reacted to it, was given another drug not indicated to mitigate the effects of the anesthesia. The paramedics resuscitated Ms. Logan, she stayed in a coma for four months, and was generally paralyzed until her death in 1992.
* In 1987, the New York City Commissioner of Health wrote a letter to abortion clinics warning them to be careful about using too much anesthesia. The letter stated: “During the period between 1981 and 1984, there were 30 legal abortion-related deaths in New York City”
* For the same time period, the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health reported a total of 42 legal abortion-related deaths in the United States.
* If both of these numbers are accurate, it would mean that 71% of the legal abortion-related deaths in the United States occurred in one city where about 3% of the population lived.
Seems PP and their supporters are lying. Apparently Google is lying too, which should not surprise anyone.
- Gladys Estanislao, a 28-year-old college student, was found lifeless on a bathroom floor 17 days after undergoing an abortion procedure at a clinic in Bethesda, Maryland. Her autopsy revealed that the pregnancy was not in her womb, but in her fallopian tube, which caused it to rupture and resulted in her death.[171] [172] [173] This condition, called an ectopic pregnancy, is screened by a blood test or ultrasound, has a mortality rate of 1 in 2,000, and is typically diagnosed on the first visit to a gynecologist.[174] [175] [176]
Jules, given the lying that is so typical of your side I don’t believe anything you say.
Lolol Jules, I like how you list women who died from an ECTOPIC PREGNANCY as “abortion-related” death. I also like how you claim that all these deaths were at the hands of Planned Parenthood when nothing you say anywhere suggests such a thing. Logan’s death in particular was at a woman’s hospital and not a Planned Parenthood clinic. And wow, forty-two deaths out of how many? You realize there’s an element of risk in most medical procedures, including outpatient, right? How many women die from tubal ligation (4 in 100,000) or hysterectomy (1 in 1000) complications? What about dental surgery?
Oh s**t, 71% in one city. Really, I’m not sure why you think that helps your case, because if 71% of the deaths are happening in one city (in the same clinic, perhaps? What’s your resources say about that, bucko?) then that only makes the other deaths even RARER.
Also, PP defrauds, Google lies, and the whole world is wrong but you are not, and we are to believe it because you say so.
Riiiiiight.
And holy s**t, making it easier to afford safe abortions means that more (potentially empoverished) women are going to have them? GEE WIZ WHODA THOUGHT! How many of those non-Medicaid states also had laws against abortions or crazy loops to jump through to get one? And yet no comment from you on Evan’s point about how pregnancy prevention programs lower abortion rates, or how the highest rates of abortion are in places where it’s widely illegal and pregnancy prevention is poor, or the fact that he didn’t say anything about the affordability of abortions.
Hey, you got any resources that are a little fresher than two decades ago, or is that all you got? I just found a report from the CDC that says only seven women died from legal abortion complications in 2004. Pretty good odds, eh?
By the way, I wonder why there’s such a focus from you lot on the (very tiny amount of) abortions that Planned Parenthood dishes out compared to the mountains and mountains of aid in women’s health, STD prevention, contraception, breast and cervical cancer prevention, etc. etc. they give. Could it be because you actually don’t give a s**t about women’s health?
Speaking of Texas, how’s that Fifth (Fourth?) Highest Teen Pregnancies In the Nation thing going? Or that Second Highest Teen Birth Rate? So much for the successes of abstinence only education. EL OH EL.
As far as I can see:
1) Erica Kae was trying to get aroun the parental consent laws, meaning she would have to go to an abortionist that was well less than on the up and up illegal deaths of course would be higher.
2) The Susane case was illegal through and through, they were unlicensed again a good reason to do some checking into the doctors your going to but with information being distorted as it is by who? Oh that’s right anti-abortion people this will continue to happen.
The rest, oddly, I can’t find however based on these two gross misrepresentations and looking at a timeline I would have to say the 1987 that with the lack of information available a lot of unlicensed practitioners were willing to keep everything hush hush and rush the whole processes. Which is of course illegal and why full legalization and monitoring of doctor’s licenses are very important.
Wait, I got all this info from google, so does that mean I lied? Should I use yahoo, or ask jeeves or any other search engine?
Jules, you are aware that lots of liberals have guns, right?
We’re just not NRA-worshipping morons who see them as penis substitutes. That’s all.
Also, Jules, your comment about the hidden camera is stupid. You do realize that the abortion doctor who just got caught would never have gotten away with what he did if women had more access to reproductive health services. As it is, many women were left with no other option.
The “pro-life” side never ceases to amuse me, though, with how they pretend they care about unborn babies and stuff.
“Jules, you are aware that lots of liberals have guns, right?”
Hell, I got a real nice .410 handed down from my grandfather. Does a marvelous job of putting food on the table. Pretending it’s an awesome ‘phobe deterrent is just stupid.
Lolol, pretty sad when an FTM doesn’t need an exploding steel penile supplement as bad as the big men in Red Texas.