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’.
The Advocate recently wrote about the testimony of lesbians from Ecuador who were forced into “prey away the gay” camps. These women report being raped, starved, handcuffed, and forced to dress like prostitutes during the “curative” process. Thanks to an outcry from Ecuadorian and international LGBT organizations, a few of the clinics have been shut down since the international spotlight has shone upon them, but many reportedly remain open. El Tiempo reports that many victims are reluctant to come forward because they don’t want to denounce their parents, who forced them into the clinics in the first place.
The French website that originally broke the story reported that
clinics have also enclosed gays and transvestites and trans people, but on a smaller scale, “probably because they get to leave the family earlier than girls,” says Tatiana [Velasquez, of the lesbian organization Taller de Comunicacion Mujer].
As if it weren’t hard enough to be gay in a homophobic culture, if you’re a gay woman in a homophobic and misogynistic culture, you’re that much more easily trapped and victimized. Homophobia: a weapon of sexism.
Change.org has begun a petition, which you can sign here (there’s another one at Credo), to get Ecuador’s Minister of Health to shut down the clinics and force his country to stop brutalizing its lesbian citizens in this way.
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.
Lest we forget, the theocratic element in Israel–a modern and nominally secular state–is active and powerful. An ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) group living in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood intends to defy a court order by actually banning women from certain streets during celebrations for Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival. These are public streets, mind you, and the ban extends not merely to Haredi women but *all* women.
Large billboards posted throughout the capital’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods this week forbade women to enter Mea She’arim Street during the celebration.
“Women … are requested to use alternative streets on their way home and to synagogues … to help prevent mingling,” the posters say.
Last year community leaders put up tarpaulin partitions along the sidewalks on Strauss and Mea She’arim streets, creating a narrow path on one side for women to walk on. The other sidewalk and the center of the street were reserved for men. A group calling itself “the neighborhood committee” operated “ushers” to make sure the women were keeping to the narrow path.
Notice the separation doesn’t even make a pretense of being equal.
I once attended Orthodox Chabad services in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood and was directed to the “women’s section,” a screened-off area at the back of a large room. The screen was set so closely against the wall that my knees bumped it, and it was opaque, so I had to peer through a hole in the cloth to see the services. It wasn’t until I found myself poking a finger forlornly through one of the holes like a monkey at a zoo that I got up and left.
The Orthodox are big on modesty and on “preventing mingling,” and, as with all religions obsessed with maintaining “purity” at the expense of actually discussing sexuality in an educated way, their fears of impropriety can paradoxically wind up sexualizing everything they do–from handshakes to prayer to conversation. One shudders to contemplate how they spiritually bulldoze their non-straight members. These theocrats have real power in Israel;* it’s up to us to make sure that their like-minded American Christian counterparts don’t gain more in our country.
* For example, their sons and daughters are exempt from the military service that’s incumbent on all other young Israelis, and adult men are bankrolled by the Israeli state in huge numbers because their yeshiva educations don’t prepare them for the modern work force.
This will probably make you retch if you are a thinking person, so if you happen to be eating lunch right now, I am sorry. But PZ and severalothers found this letter from a devout Reformed Baptist man, describing his marriage to his wife, and let’s just say that if this is what anti-gay bigots are talking about when they extol “traditional marriage,” well, then, there’s a reason divorce rates are so high in more fundamentalist states and communities.
Disclaimer: yes, we know, this is not what all Christians are like. Indeed, these are Reformed Baptists, which, as a recovered Reformed Presbyterian (they’re not that far apart), I happen to know something about. It’s a strange theology, and a cruel one, wherein humans have no say in whether or not they were created in order to be sent to paradise or a fiery hell by their benevolent god. Thanks, John Calvin! As many of the most vehemently anti-gay bigots out there are Calvinists of some stripe or another, I find this relevant.
So anyway, this seems to be a note from a Reformed Baptist man to the guests of his wedding feast to the wife he has procured [you will need to click to embiggen it, probably]:
Okay! So let’s break this down a bit, so we can learn about the qualities of, apparently, some Reformed marriages, which are viewed by these people as The Real Thing, whereas same sex marriage is “an abomination.”
As Bible-believing Baptists who hold to reformed theology, X and I believe that God is sovereign in choosing who will or will not believe in him, having chosen his people before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1), and that his selection is unbreakable and irresistible. If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation. Instead, I asked X’s father for his blessing in taking her hand in marriage. When he gave his blessing, X and I considered ourselves to be unbreakably betrothed in the sight of God. While we had initially intended to consummate our marriage after today’s symbolic ceremony, we instead did so secretly after private scripture reading, prayer, and mutual foot-washing.
Yes, in Reformed theology, humans have no say in the matter. Therefore, as a logical extension, since “marriage” is a picture of the relationship between Christ and his church, it would follow that that sort of marriage would be essentially a transaction between a man and his new chattel’s daddy. And really, she’s just a woman. It’s not like she’s a person or anything! This is, of course, a rather childish understanding of Reformed Theology, not that I expect any more from its typical adherents. In point of fact, if this devout Reformed Baptist man had a wedding and marriage that really went according to the Calvinist “plan of salvation,” there are few details missing. Yes, they believe that their god chooses who will and will not be saved and that humans have no say in the matter. However, they also believe that, by the very act of being called upon by their god, humans come to “salvation” irresistibly. In other words, only those who are chosen are called, and by their god “changing their hearts,” they are impelled, but happily, to freely come to a “saving faith.” Those who are not chosen are simply not called and thus remain hardened or deaf or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days.
So for Reformed Baptist Dude to really make his wedding a mirror of his understanding of the relationship between Christ and the Church, he needs to have coerced her in some way into believing that she has no other choice but to do what he commands, which in this case is marrying him. She must first be bamboozled into believing on her own that she has literally no choice in the matter. I assume that the wife’s father probably helped with that.
Moving, on, his words about how his god hates gays. This, in a letter about his own marriage, again, presumably to his wedding feast guests:
X and I have obtained a marriage license in Hall County, GA to gain recognition from the state, but their recognition does not make us married. The recognition of a civil government cannot marry any two people in the sight of God, and this should be obvious from the state’s recent confusion in “marrying” same-sex couples engaged in the sin of sodomy.
Uh. Yeah, millions upon millions of people know differently. But of course, his statement is essentially arguing with itself, as wingnuts so often do. OF COURSE they want the civil benefits of being “married in the eyes of god!” They want the goodies, because they were chosen, you see! This dude and his chattel’s father were chosen together to trade a particular member of the wimminfolk race from one generation to another, and they’ll be damned (well no, they won’t, as they are chosen) if you’re going to keep gubmint benefits from them. But they want the secular civil government to conform its idea of marriage to their weird notion of matrimony. By this definition, of course, most other Christian couples aren’t really married, and neither are Jews or Muslims or atheists, even if they all have penis-vagina marriages! But you’ll never see this breed of wingnut argue to take marriage rights away from straight couples who don’t believe in the medieval crap they espouse. Something in them knows that’s just a bridge too far. But, you know, gays are bad.
The rest of his letter, as you can see, is about how she’s wearing white and he’s wearing a red shirt, representing blood, or something. Sounds like the wedding party looked like hell.
Anyway. So there is a portrait of one kind of biblical marriage. To most sentient beings, it’s pretty disgusting. But that is what at least some of the bigots are defending from the marauding hordes of evil gays.
Just curious, since she said this about Phyllis Schlafly:
If I could just say a couple of words about Phyllis Schlafly, she is my heroine and my example as a forerunner. As a young bride and a young mother, I read faithfully “The Phyllis Schlafly Report;” she was my lifeline to what was happening in the world.
She truly is the mother of the modern conservative movement …
I think she is the most important woman in the United States in the last one hundred years.
Whatever Phyllis Schlafly says, it’s important that we listen because she’s there on every issue, on every front. She is our hero, our heroine, our stalwart and I absolutely adore her. So God bless you, my dear mentor and the person that I hope to be some day. So thank you very much, Phyllis.
Aside from the fact that it’s horrifying that any human alive would consider Phyllis Schlafly the “most important woman in the United States” during any time period…
If you are like normal Americans, you were under the impression that yesterday, Labor Day, is a holiday where we celebrate the accomplishments of the organized labor movement in this country. More information about that here! Of course, wingnuts really hate organized labor in this country, so they have to find weird, contrived things to write about it whenever it comes around. So it is that we have this dude, writing at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Choler, about what Labor Day means to him, personally:
Robert Morrison served in the Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan. He is now a Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at Family Research Council in Washington.
Great, a dingus I’ve never heard of from a hate group that annoys me. This should be entertaining:
As we mark Labor Day, I’d like to salute those women who keep our economy productive by their labors in the home.
Scripture refers to the first time that God said that something was not good. “And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’” (Gen. 2:18). By “an help meet,” the Elizabethan writers of the King James Bible meant someone who is able to help a man work. Even in paradise, there is much work to be done. Naming and exercising authority over the plants and animals, making the garden fruitful — these are labors of the first order. Thus, we see marriage between man and woman as part of the natural order. In thus creating and honoring marriage, God also dignified labor.
God said something wasn’t good that wasn’t about gayness? Imagine. So we’re paying tribute to the ladies who stay at home, that’s fine. How is he going to make this about gays?
Labor unions claim credit for being “the folks who brought you the American weekend.”
That’s largely true. But today, organized labor also brings us America the weakened. That’s because liberal labor union leaders have too often ignored their members’ values as they’ve pressed for abortion-on-demand and the ending of marriage.
Bravo, weird wingnut, bravo. America is weaker because “labor unions today” (evil) spend all their time loving abortion and gayness. He of course offers no corroborating evidence for these assertions, but “proof” is anathema among the fundamentalist wingnut crowd. You’re simply supposed to take what the hate group hack says on faith!
Anyway, he goes on for several more paragraphs doing his “women should stay at home and push out babies” thing because that is the true meaning of “labor,’ and then he is finished, therefore so are we. Ugh.
Fundamentalist Christian Misogyny 101. Ladies need to get their heads out of “emo-porn,” you see. What is “emo-porn?” Welllllll:
Loneliness strikes at the heart of both husbands and wives, but tends to plunge deeper into the emotional expanse of women. This is one reason why wives are seduced by “emo-porn,” virtual infidelity that is more emotionally satisfying before it physically pleases. But like salt water, it creates a worsening thirst. With emo-porn, fantasy men perform stunningly between the sheets of conversation, emotional understanding, and emotional dexterity. Most mortal men cannot deliver such behavior, the way men do in soap operas and romance novels. Just as wives rightly complain when compared to the artificially created women of Internet porn, men should complain when compared to the artificial men of daytime television. Interesting, isn’t it, how they have such exciting jobs—no Joe The Plumbers. In the real world where real men burn through a lot of emotional battery life to make a real living, being expected to behave like men who don’t exist is more than wrong. It’s cruel.
Emo-porn creates caricatures in the minds and hearts of wives. Most men just aren’t and cannot be that attentive, especially in marriage where responsibilities to provide weigh heavy upon them. Husbands are quietly deemed unresponsive and uncaring when compared to emotionally dexterous hunks of daytime lore, chat rooms, celebrity rags, and romance novels. Thus a secretive and snowballing form of marital discontent is born and nurtured.
First of all, this was written by a dude. Stupid ladies, listen to the man trying to teach you the stuff about things!
Um, so yes, what Paul Coughlin seems to be saying here is that silly womenfolk get all caught up by the “nice, romantic men” they read about in the Harlequin romances and watch on the Days of our Lives, when what they really should be doing is staying home and being grateful for the chauvinist shitass Godly Christian Man the Lord Hath Blessed Them With.
Boys aren’t supposed to feel emotions or be thoughtful! Crazy ladies, what are you thinking, wanting men who treat you like human beings? That is not the fundamentalist Christian way, and you know it.
This is from the other day, but I missed it. Here’s Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association hate group, letting us all know that women are only qualified to be president if there are no suitable men available.
What if God can’t find any men?! Did he look behind the couch? What about in the garage?
What a pig. I like how he felt the need to let us all know that he’s not even speaking “for” the American Family Association in this instance, even though, as Jeremy points out, he’s speaking as “a paid employee of the American Family Association, on the AFA’s airwaves, to the AFA’s audience, in audio hosted on AFA’s website.” Uh huh.
[Strap in, y'all, as I am about to defend Michele Bachmann...to a point. And Wayne and I seem to be of two minds on the subject, so here's his take.]
Last week, Truth Wins Out released the results of an undercover operation which showed that the clinic owned by Marcus and Michele Bachmann offers “ex-gay” reparative therapy, which goes against all standards of medicine and mental health practice, and which is harmful to those who are subjected to it. Michele Bachmann has a long, long record of saying completely awful, baseless things about gay and lesbian people. Her husband is on tape referring to gays as “barbarians” who have to be educated. She has called on the media to investigate Congress to determine whether or not members are anti-American. I could go on forever, but if you really need a primer in the insane things Michele Bachmann has done and/or said over the course of her career, go play at the Dump Bachmann blog. Bachmann is not fit to be president of this or any other country.
As we on the liberal side of the aisle have made the case against her, we have used facts, figures, quotes, investigative reporting and analysis to illuminate why Michele Bachmann is unfit for public office. But now the establishment Right has decided that she has to be eliminated from the running, as she is unpredictable and unlikely to kowtow to the desires of Beltway Republicans. And so it was that Tucker Carlson’s Daily Choler website released their own “investigation” last night which showed that…well…
Erm…
According to the piece, Michele Bachmann gets bad headaches sometimes. The piece relies almost solely on unnamed former aides, who claim that sometimes Bachmann suffers from debilitating migraines:
“She has terrible migraine headaches. And they put her out of commission for a day or more at a time. They come out of nowhere, and they’re unpredictable,” says an adviser to Bachmann who was involved in her 2010 congressional campaign. “They level her. They put her down. It’s actually sad. It’s very painful.”
Bachmann’s medical condition wouldn’t merit public attention, but for the fact she is running for president. Some close to Bachmann fear she won’t be equal to the stress of the campaign, much less the presidency itself.
“When she gets ‘em, frankly, she can’t function at all. It’s not like a little thing with a couple Advils. It’s bad,” the adviser says. “The migraines are so bad and so intense, she carries and takes all sorts of pills. Prevention pills. Pills during the migraine. Pills after the migraine, to keep them under control. She has to take these pills wherever she goes.”
The headline to this piece? “Stress-related condition ‘incapacitates’ Bachmann; heavy pill use alleged.”
This has to be one of the shoddiest, most irresponsible, cruel pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen in my life. The people who are named in the piece tend to be refuting the spin of the article, for what that’s worth. I can only presume that the power brokers in the Republican party have gotten together and decided that she has to be dealt with, and they’ve chosen a pretty damn sexist way to do it. Dick Cheney functioned as Vice President for years with a heart that barely works. While the fact that the man does not technically have a heartbeat has provided fodder to go along with the fact that the man’s actions while in office do tend to align with the idea of not having a functioning heart or soul, rare was the suggestion that he simply couldn’t be Vice President because of his condition. I’m almost expecting a follow-up from the Daily Choler alleging that every twenty-eight days, Bachmann has an “episode” which causes her to be quite unfit to deal with, or that menopause is making her too much of a bitch to be president. That’s the level of discourse here, and it’s not surprising to see it from the Right attempting to destroy one of their own.
If Bachmann suffers from debilitating migraines, that’s sad and I feel for her, as a fellow migraine sufferer. If she has to take headache medicine to control or subdue them, that strikes me as pretty par for the course. But there is a greater principle at play here. I would rather have a brilliant, thoughtful, effective President who deals with debilitating migraines sometimes, than a President who, seemingly free from most medical issues, is nonetheless an idiot all day long, every day.
To be clear, Michele Bachmann’s record establishes that she is unfit to be President. Her past history suggests that there is no chance she would be brilliant, thoughtful or effective. Truth Wins Out and other fine media organizations and journalists will continue to expose that record for what it is, just as we will with any other person running for the GOP nomination with a similarly horrific record.
We’ll do it with integrity, as the Left usually does. I similarly expect that this is just the beginning of the Right’s campaign to destroy any of the Tea Party Monsters that they’ve created and now need to vanquish in order that their Beltway priorities are attended to.
Bachmann’s alleged headaches are irrelevant. Her record? That speaks for itself.
