Wayne wrote this morning about last night’s victories for openly gay candidates around the country, which is fantastic. It was even more than that, though. Last night there were several crucial victories, messages sent to the whackjobs who have taken over the Republican party that “we are sorry, but the American people aren’t like you and won’t let you ruin our country.” Mississippi voted its infamous “personhood amendment” down, and in Ohio, voters told Republican governor John Kasich exactly where he could put his union-busting SB5 law. In this clip, Lawrence O’Donnell and Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz [D-FL] discuss the results.
In the clip, O’Donnell mentions that Ohio voters also rejected the individual mandate in the healthcare law passed under this administration, but Schultz also points out that a very conservative Republican judge upheld the HCR law as constitutional yesterday, which is another smackdown to extremists.
The vote is today. If you haven’t been following the progress of Mississippi’s proposed personhood amendment, which would grant fertilized eggs as well as embryos and fetuses the legal status of human beings, you should brush up. Though a similar measure has already failed at the polls twice in Colorado, this one has been heavily pushed by religious groups, and it’s expected to pass. If it does, said the New York Times, all forms of abortion and some forms of birth control would effectively become murder in the state. Yes, that includes abortion for rape. Some people worry that women who experience miscarriages could be subject to criminal investigation under this law; it will also make in vitro fertilization a very different process if doctors are prohibited from discarding some of the embryos, as is usual now. There are a host of other possible implications, too, as Slate’s David Plotz waggishly wrote:
* Tax deductions for dependent embryos
* “Anchor babies” whose parents had sex in Mississippi, conceived, then went back to their own countries to deliver
* The products of fatal ectopic pregnancies being prosecuted for murder-suicide
According to the Times, even anti-abortion legal experts believe this amendment is a bad move. It will probably be declared unconstitutional, and in the process, they fear, laws allowing abortion may be strengthened. Others, though, hope that the Supreme Court will not only uphold it but overturn Roe v. Wade while they’re at it. On the other hand, opponents fear it will seriously hamper medical care and contraceptive efforts in Mississippi while it grinds through the courts.
Incidentally, Mother Nature regularly wages a holocaust against fertilized human eggs. A huge proportion–something like 50%–either never implant or spontaneously abort.
Here’s what arose during our dinner conversation on this topic: If the Founding Fathers knew of the existence of abortion, which as educated men they surely did, then why did they (a) decline to outlaw it in the Constitution and (b) declare that those eligible for the presidency had to be born in the United States, rather than merely conceived there? Might one not conclude from (b) that they viewed birth as the beginning of legal rights? Just sayin’.
Occasionally it’s good to check in and see what our favorite anti-gay hate groups are up to when they’re not hating gay people. Lest we fail to understand that the fights for LGBT equality and reproductive rights are inextricably linked — they are both about the ability of fundamentalist Christian men to control the bodies and sex lives and autonomy of anyone who doesn’t look like them — let’s take a look at the “personhood amendment” being debated in Mississippi right now.
If you’re not familiar with a “personhood amendment,” it goes like this:
Garden variety “pro-life” people tend to be concerned with stopping abortion, and favor using the law to enforce that, rather than actually fighting for things like economic freedom for poor women and sex education, things which have been proven to reduce the need for abortion. [Those are the things the pro-choice movement works toward.] However, there is a subset within the activist anti-choice movement which seeks dominion over all female bodies, and will go to any length to achieve it. A “personhood amendment” would codify in a state’s Constitution that human life begins at the point of fertilization and grant that embryo all the rights of an actual human being. This is patently insane to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the human reproductive process. By this definition of “personhood,” millions of people “die” every day when embryos which haven’t yet implanted simply don’t turn into actual pregnancies. They aren’t even miscarriages.
The result of such an amendment would, of course, go around Roe v. Wade and ban all abortion in a state, but it would also put in danger lots of other things 99% of women take for granted in the United States. Irin Carmon has a great piece in Salon today which exposes what Mississippi is trying to do right now:
[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.
On the chopping block: the morning-after pill, IUD’s, most forms of in vitro fertilization and, according to some, the regular old birth control pill. Moreover, the door would be open to investigating women who have recently miscarried. It happens in lots of countries.
You may be reading this and thinking, “that is insane. Nobody is that insane.” Have you met Fundamentalist Christian men before?
But a Colorado-based Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, is more than willing to publicly take things to their logical conclusion. He wrote on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page that after abortion is banned, “the penalties have to be the same [for a women as well as doctors], as they would have to intentionally commit a known felony in order to kill their child. Society isn’t comfortable with this yet because abortion has been ‘normalized’ — as the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”
[...]
At several public forums organized by the secretary of state to discuss ballot initiatives, resident Scott Murray’s statement was typical: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.” So was Stephen Hannabass’ assertion that “we’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”
You see, if Mississippi just “repents” and “turns back to God,” there won’t be any problems anymore! Left unmentioned by these men, of course, is the fact that Mississippi has one of the worst infant morality rates in the nation, as well as one of the worst rates of child poverty. For these people, life truly begins at conception and concern for it ends at birth, especially if you happen to be a woman.
Irin explains that this measure [which was once supported by most Mississippians, until they actually heard the details of it] didn’t really have legs until one of our favorite hate groups got involved. Yes, the American Family Association is an anti-gay hate group, but it’s also an anti-woman and anti-family hate group:
It was the American Family Association endorsement that put media muscle behind the movement in Mississippi, with email blasts, radio PSAs and interviews, promotions on its own website, and combined with the grass-roots energy, the state’s anti-choice groups took notice. Suddenly, people who had previously focused on incremental change – parental consent laws, waiting periods, ultrasound laws – were ecstatically heralding an end of the “murders.” Mike Huckabee keynoted a fundraiser and even presumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney to endorse the concept on his show.
Ta-da! When they’re not letting Bryan Fischer lie shamelessly about gay people and screaming and crying about hardware stores being mean to them, the AFA is quietly working to take away most of women’s fundamental rights over what they can and cannot do with their bodies. I cannot imagine what the next step would be, should something like this ever pass. Once they have women’s reproductive systems firmly in their hands, will they move on to controlling what they eat or when they speak? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Please, do yourself a favor and read Irin’s whole piece. The part about how this could affect the treatment of ectopic pregnancies will make you sick. There is a good chance that, as the details of the Personhood Movement, and their true goals, come to light, that this will go down in history as one of the patriarchy’s grand overreaches. I hope so. Again, 99% of women think birth control is just great.
And remember — groups like the American Family Association don’t just hate you as an LGBT person. They hate you in any way you might be different from their poorly conceived, bastardized fundamentalist “Christian” view of how people should live.
UPDATE: Two more things. First, here is the video from Freda Bush, a proponent of the amendment, who is also an OB-GYN. Watch as she lies through her teeth about what this bill is about.
Her lies are solidly refuted in Irin Carmon’s piece.
John wrote this morning about Herman Cain’s inexplicable belief that homosexuality is a choice, something that can be washed off on a whim. Indeed, just this morning I woke up and washed the gay right outta of my hair. It was back within thirty minutes, and I’m already back to making musical theater references, but y’know.
But in the same Piers Morgan interview John referenced, Herman Cain revealed that his attitudes toward choice go a bit further than that:
No, it comes down to is, it’s not the government’s role — or anybody else’s role — to make that decision. Secondly, if you look at the statistical incidents, you’re not talking about that big a number (abortion because of rape – LHW). So what I’m saying is, it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president. Not some politician. Not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t try to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive decision.
. . .
No, they don’t. I can have an opinion on an issue without it being a directive on the nation. The government shouldn’t be trying to tell people everything to do, especially when it comes to a social decision that they need to make.
Uh oh. The new frontrunner for the GOP nomination is, um, ahem!, pro-choice. As in, about abortion.
Well, that was a nice run for Herman. Back to the old pizza stone…
It’s been 38 years since Roe v. Wade, and the fundamentalists resent every minute. Just watch Jesus Camp. They’re teaching the date to their children and praying that pro-life judges will be “elevated.” If they get their way, abortion will soon be made illegal or impossible in the US.
They’re making progress, doing what the right does so well: nibbling away at the issue at the grass roots, state by state. The Nationdetails the legal strategies involved, and The New York Timesreports the right’s stealthy success in passing a flurry of recent laws so restrictive that in some areas abortion might as well be “a right on paper only”:
[The map shows states that] have enacted five of the most harmful restrictions: mandatory waiting periods; demeaning “counseling” sessions lacking a real medical justification; parental consent or notification laws that pose a particular hardship for teenagers from troubled homes, including incest victims; needlessly onerous clinic “safety” rules governing such things as the width of hallways and the amount of storage space for janitorial supplies; and prohibitions on abortion coverage in insurance policies. States in lighter shades have fewer of these restrictions. Twenty-seven states have enacted three or more of these laws, while only 12 states, shown in white, have none….Sixty-one [major state abortion restrictions] were enacted during just the first eight months of this year — nearly triple the number in all of 2010, and more than double the previous record of 28 set in 1997. …[The graphic] fails to capture other negative developments, like the big decline in the number of abortion providers. In 1982, there were 2,908 providers nationwide. As of 2008, there were only 1,793. In 97 percent of the counties that are outside metropolitan areas there are no abortion providers at all.
Just as they wish homosexuality would just go away, the right presumably hopes abortions will end if they’re outlawed. That isn’t true, of course. Throughout history, many women who do not want to be pregnant have tried to do something about it–overdosing on chloroquine, inserting a coat hanger, or jumping from a height being just a few of the many methods of choice. (And why, moreover, is the right not crying out to reduce the natural miscarriage rate?) Just as pretending homosexuality isn’t legitimate can lead to gay youth suicide, so the lack of access to abortion services will simply lead more women to seek unsafe illegal abortions. Which, as we all know, often kills them.
When the news began to fill up last year with stories of gay kids committing suicide after being bullied relentlessly, did you immediately think, “You know who’s really getting bullied? Blastocysts.” If you did, you are a wingnut. Here is a letter by a Stephen M. King, a professor at Southeastern University, which started sort of reasonably:
Sue Carlton of the St. Petersburg Times lauded (op-ed column, Aug. 17) the community responsibility ethic of some of the Tampa Bay Rays’ players, and some fans, who made a video. The effort is titled “It Gets Better,” and is aimed at bringing attention to the abuse and bullying endured by teenagers who practice homosexuality and lesbianism.
While I applaud the Rays’ players, front office and fans for bringing to the public’s attention the ever-increasing use of bullying in today’s public school system, and for their encouragement of the bullied teenagers to stay encouraged because “the world gets bigger and more accepting,” I do not agree with their efforts to highlight only a fraction of students who are bullied.
See now, this is where I thought this was going to go: He says “I don’t agree with their efforts to highlight only a fraction of students” who become victims of bullies. I thought he was going to say, “I wish, along with the emphasis on anti-gay bullying, we could really find ourselves with a renewed emphasis on all bullying, regardless of why.” That would make far too much sense, right? I would probably not have even written about it, but if I had, I would have agreed but pointed out that, sadly, it’s taken the well-publicized suicides of gay kids to really ignite a focus on bullying, in general. That, as a result of programs like It Gets Better and increased anti-bullying protections as a result of what’s been going on, all kids are likely to, ultimately, be safer in school.
Oh, but no. Here is where King went instead:
Why does the Rays’ organization, and other professional sports’ organizations and players, for that matter, want to bring attention to the bullying of teenagers who practice homosexuality and lesbianism? Because it is the chic and politically correct thing to do.
Would the Rays or other sports organizations, or other professional sports figures for that matter, come out strongly and enthusiastically for making a video for the protection of unborn life? Would they come out and make a passionate plea for protecting the natural right to life, to bring the public’s attention to infanticide? No, I strongly doubt they would.
Protecting life, or even advocating for the protection of life, such as former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow has done, is not politically correct.
Yeah, Tampa Bay Rays, why aren’t you making misogynistic videos about sluts like Dr. King wants you to? And why aren’t you standing up for poor, poor failure Timmy Tebow?
Because no one — NO ONE — gets made fun of more at school than Tim Tebow. And unborn fetuses. They get teased all day, and for the dumbest reasons.
It’s always useful to point out just how much wingnut men hate women, because that, dears, is deeply intertwined with their hatred for gay people. Take this guy, Kansas state representative Pete DeGraaf. He is, of course, a pastor, so he speaks as a man of the cloth when he defends his position on banning abortion coverage even in the cases of rape. You see, he feels that, if a woman wants to be able to get an abortion after being raped and impregnated, she should have to have an “abortion-only” insurance policy! I mean, you have a spare tire in the back of your car, just in case the road brutally rapes your tires, right? No, really:
Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican who supports abortion rights, questioned whether women would buy abortion-only policies long before they have crisis or unwanted pregnancies or are rape victims.
During the House’s debate, Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a Mulvane Republican who supports the bill, told her: “We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?”
Bollier asked him, “And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy?”
DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, “I have spare tire on my car.”
“I also have life insurance,” he added. “I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.”
Oh, by the way, this bill is actually about to become law, because that’s what happens when you actually elect childish, hateful wingnuts into office.
So yeah, ladies. You need to spend your hard earned dollars on a separate insurance policy, just in case someone decides to brutally rape you and you end up pregnant. I mean, it was probably your fault anyway, and even rape babies are blessings, according to Republican Jesus.
As I said this morning, sometimes I wonder why I read the internet.
Pat Robertson, Boy Genius, strikes again, claiming that liberals support reproductive health/rights in order to make lesbians feel better about not being able to have children…what, lesbians can’t birth babies? I had no idea.
At 0:36, when Pat says the word “lesbian” and then pants like he’s out of breath…well, let’s just say I cackled.
It takes some kind of stupid to actually believe that the majority of the country which supports keeping Roe v. Wade intact does so because they are all chomping at the bit to kill babies.
But maybe he’s right! Maybe the librul agenda really is about making lesbians feel better! For instance, we fight global warming because we don’t want lesbians to get too hot. You’ll thank us later, Pam Spaulding!
Gov. Jan Brewer on Tuesday signed into law House Bill 2443, which makes it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion based on the sex or race of the fetus.
Opponents of the measure have questioned whether such a practice was really occurring.
Haha, Republicans confronting a problem that actually exists? Riiiight.
Republican supporters had said that statistics show a high percentage of abortions are being sought by minority women and that abortion clinics intentionally locate in minority areas.
They said statistics show that some populations are increasingly seeking abortions based on the fetus’ sex.
Democrats argue that statistics show that neither is happening.
Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park, said he pushed the legislation because of fears women would choose to abort because they didn’t like the gender or the race of the baby.
Rep. Katie Hobbs, D-Phoenix, said the only proof Montenegro offered was a magazine article on such practices in China and India.
Okay, now you know how asinine this story really is. It’s very simple. Just as Maggie Gallagher only talks about black people when black churches are riling people up to vote against gay people, these wingnuts only “defend” black people [term applied very loosely] when it serves their patriarchal goals. I could say more about this, but I don’t need to, because Angry Black Lady’s rant on the subject is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on the internetz:
First of all, how dare these Teabilly assholes pretend to care about the plight of the Negro, when the very same Teabillies are gutting and intend to further gut the social programs on which black and brown women rely in order to keep their babymakers in check? I mean, Jesus F. Bieber—how can they defund Planned Parenthood on the one hand but then deem the abortion rate in the black community to have reached such critical levels that it should be called genocide? How can they not see that these issues are directly related?! What the hell is wrong with them?! (That’s a rhetorical question.)
Second of all, how in THEE hell are they going to get inside an abortion doctor’s head to determine whether or not s/he would have been less inclined to perform the procedure had the fetus been of a different race? Are there scads of “Black Baby B’Gone” clinics from which this law is intended to protect black ladies?
Looky here: You’re not fooling anyone, assholes. It is plain that you are using this “black genocide” angle to push your anti-abortion agenda. How stupid do you think we are?
Furthermore, how stupid are you? If your little plan works, and brown women have fewer abortions, we’re just going to outbreed you! Yeah, let that little nugget of OMG! sink in for a while. You need to decide which you hate more: Brown people or dead babies.
I swear, I’m going to go have a half dozen babies tomorrow – out of spite.
“Black Baby B’Gone” = genius.
I’ve often pointed out that wingnuts are never wingnuts about just one thing, but that they tend to have insane beliefs about several things at a time. I’m upping that, in light of The Way Republicans Are These Days. Wingnuts are just insane all the way around. All of ‘em. And they’ll believe absolutely anything their Daddies tell ‘em, ‘cuz they’re dumb like that.
