Update: Kathryn Joyce emailed me this and confirmed my suspicions. Now onto a favorite right wing strategy of arguing—don’t admit you were wrong in the first place, but just move the goal posts. I’m sure they’ll start saying she was a bad person to do this, instead of realizing that she totally pwned their paranoid asses.

A ton of people have been emailing me this story about a woman who supposedly self-aborted a number of embryos and kept them as an art project. Conservatives like Drudge have been going nuts, but if they gave it one moment’s thought, they’d realize that this story is so not true. I’ll give you a hint why:

If self-aborting were safe, easy, and relatively painless, that object above would not be an emblem of the pro-choice movement. We pretty much wouldn’t need the right to medical abortion if it were that easy. But simple self-abortions is what this art project would need to exist.

Lindsay has a more in-depth analysis.

There is an infamous video of clueless anti-choice demonstrators who are asked what punishment a woman should be subjected to if abortion is made illegal. Most make lame excuses — it’s a “crime” but the “perpetrator” should go unpunished. Actually, it’s worse than that — most of them say they never thought about the issue. Planned Parenthood and the National Institute for Reproductive Health have launched a campaign to ask pols the question “How much time should she serve?”

The protestors are clearly underinformed. But what about the anti-choice establishment? Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has an even more ridiculous answer — only the doctor should be punished, because the woman who seeks out the abortion is too “impaired” to be responsible for her actions.  Read the insanity the jump.
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On the new blog Open Left, a diarist uses the word “framing” while not understanding the first rule of framing. His argument is that in order to “reframe” the abortion debate, we should agree that abortion is very bad but talk about how to reduce it. That is not reframing. That is the opposite of reframing. When you concede that abortion is bad, you are arguing within your opponent’s frame.

If you want to reframe an argument, you phrase your arguments in a way that brings your opponent onto your turf. So someone wrings their hands about how bad abortion is, to actually reframe the argument, you say, “Actually, I think that it’s great that women have this choice. I think it’s important that we as a society value women’s equality, health, and human rights, and that we make all medical care they need available to them as we do men. What do you think it’s a bad thing if women have full access to all the health care they need?” That’s reframing.

I’m all for pushing birth control and welfare as wedge issues—also, it’s great to talk about how women need the full range of choices, including the choice to give birth if they want—but wedge issues are a different rhetorical tactic.

My fellow Pandagonians, in honor of Independence Day, I’d like to be a bad American and acknowledge the British. All of the actors below the fold are British.

Pics below the fold. Enjoy!

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On Saturday Kate and I saw Michael Moore’s documentary on the health care industry, SiCKO. As predicted, I left enraged at the situation in this country. Not that I didn’t know about the issues at hand — overpriced drugs, systematic efforts to ensure coverage is rejected and services withheld that end up killing sick people, patients who cannot pay dumped on Skid Row, the insane profits being generated by the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and what is spent by them on lobbying your representatives on the Hill.

The bureaucracy, chaos, corruption and lack of any sense of conscience toward the health of our nation’s residents is appalling. While the universal health care depicted in the U.K., France, Canada and Cuba isn’t perfect, the critical difference that those cultures believe every person is entitled to free health care — and the fear of obtaining it or losing it or having it tied to one’s employment releases a burden that we live with here every day. No one has to worry about being bankrupted or made homeless, or in one instance in SiCKO, having to choose which finger out of two lost in an accident can be reattached because of the medical price tag.

The Americans living abroad in countries with universal care are the most powerful voices in the film because they have seen both systems, and know what folks living in the U.S. are missing, and the misperceptions (and misinformation spread by the industries with the most to lose) about what health care for all is really like.

That said, could this country ever successfully switch to a universal health care system? I have my doubts. We are very much a “me” culture, with an acceptance (as well as envy and disdain) of the ability of those with money to be able to buy services they want and need. We also have a history of watching our government fail miserably in terms of administering programs that citizens are dependent on (look at FEMA). For whatever reason we accept that government can do some things (the military, build roads, the mail), but not others, such as health care — privatization is always seen as the better option.

More below the fold.
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Picture via Painstick.

Black Looks: Public Sector Strikes in Africa: Any Subversive Elements?

Women’s Experiences of Abuse as a Risk Factor for Incarceration.

Professor Black Woman has to deal with the racist stupid. (Hat tip: Shannon.)

I thought this was satire. Apparently, it isn’t. Maybe we can get MB to give her a new, “Most Unintentionally Funny Blog Post” award or something?

Shark-fu posts on the recent dustup between Brownback and Romney, and the uncomfortable reality for many conservatives that no, actually, not everyone’s Christian faith similar or palatable to others.

Psuedo Adrienne blogs about the stakes for Moroccan women in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Public sector workers in Israel may have to strike to get decent pay.

Finally, I know I’m an anti-consumerist pinko, but wow. These folks put me to shame. Then again, I don’t think I’d get such a sweet haul in the dumpsters in my neighborhood, which is definitely not affluent. You’ll find no working iPods tossed away.

It was hard to decide what to write about tonight. Iraq, the confusion over the definitions of “marriage” in this thread, my ongoing battles with my very evil and very stupid tabby cat, you name it. But in the end, there’s some low-hanging fruit available and in honor of Twisty posting an FAQ on the scourge that are MRAs, I thought I’d shine a little light on some more pro-domestic violence (of women) writing.

From Twisty’s blog:

The goals of the men’s rights ‘movement’ include, but are not limited to:

• supporting legislation that would give men an edge in child custody battles.
• the right to hijack another human being’s personal uterus if the MRA suspects his sacred genetic material is involved in an embryo contained therein.
• promulgating baseless claims that men are in constant danger of physical assault by legions of villainous females, and that there exists some kind of vast matriarchal conspiracy to cover this up.
• the practice of beating up women, kidnaping her kids, going on the lam, convincing family court judges that the woman is crazy, and summarily escaping jail time.

The organized support for wife-beating is our topic today, as David Usher has written yet another article about the tragedy that is the increasing difficulty of beating your wife and getting away with it. You see, in the old days, keeping a woman trapped in an abusive marriage was so easy. Socially mandated financial dependence helped, but your average abuser has a whole array of tactics, the most important being the practice of sequestering your bride from the rest of the world so that she doesn’t get assistance in leaving you or even the message that she’s not crazy if she thinks that regular beatings are bad. Nowadays, while your average abuser can still successfully get his mark to quit talking to her mother, drop her friends from her life, and wear sweaters and make-up to avoid questions about her injuries from concerned parties, the abuser must still contend with all the technological access that a woman has to the outside world.

Today’s villian: Cable TV programming that teaches the dangerous lesson to women that your husband is in the wrong when he beats you.

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So I was reading this post on women of color and the porn industry at Brownfemipower’s, and ended up being smacked upside the head with the cluestick.

(Anyone who thinks that I’m going to suddenly burst into song praising the flaccid excuse for sexuality that is Hugh Heffner and his corporate Playboy logo, the Suicide Girls, Girls Gone Wild, or the system of female sexual service and male consumption as the liberating and one true way of the sex should stop reading right now. Seriously. You’ll be disappointed.)

No, the cluestick smack happened as BFP said this:

** As with other “choiceâ€? debates (abortion is the biggie), “choiceâ€? rests its foundation on the beliefs that 1. the person making the choice is valued by society and 2. the choice the made is valued by society. In the abortion debates, people like Dorthy Roberts (and lots of other RWOC theorists) argue that “choiceâ€? is harmful to women of color (and other marginalized women) because it continues the agenda against women of color such that women of color are systematically violated for making the “wrongâ€? choice. For example, the choice to have a baby is certainly available to all women in the U.S., but it is generally only poor white women, disabled women and women of color that must contend with back to work programs, sterilization without consent, losing children through child protective services, imprisonment, etc. Also, many times, under the guise of “feminist choice” white feminists employ violent and harmful policies of reproductive control over women of color–for example, the unquestioned support of Planned Parenthood (a corporation with a proven track record of systematic “population controlâ€? policies.)

I found myself nodding along in agreement with the idea that choice is bunk when your options are limited. And then found myself getting really defensive over this paragraph. So I did what I usually do when I get defensive in response to what someone from a very different background from me says–and I walked away and thought on it.
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Cohen fitting the peg in the hole (L); he has said “You’ve got to feel it to heal it.”

Yipes. Is there a catfight? After “conversion therapist” Richard Cohen’s embarrassing, clownish appearance on The Daily Show demonstrating his techniques on how he frees men from homosexuality (the clip was yanked by YouTube, photos below from my post on it), Exodus International’s Randy Thomas couldn’t take it any more. He had to unload on Cohen for making the movement look bad.

Richard is not the foremost of anything except making a spectacle of himself and completely misrepresenting the larger “ex-gay” movement.  He is not a part of Exodus and apparently not willing to take our private feedback and accountability to heart.

So, if he is willing to allow “ex-gays” to continue to be circus show fodder for those who mock our sincere beliefs, he deserves the public denouncement this post brings.

A sample of his “therapy” from a report on CNN, via Truth Wins Out. You can see the hilarious CNN segment here.

Richard Cohen does not represent me or thousands like me, who have moved beyond a life defined by being “gay.”

…Richard, stop doing these type of interviews and listen to us when we say that your therapeutic, coaching… whatever … approach is not above reproach as so obviously displayed every time you show up on television.

Hat tip Jim Burroway, at Ex-Gay Watch, who asks a few logical questions about a movement that is unclear what a “cure” is:

Is it therapy or is it ministry? Is it faith that brings “change” or is it psychology? And if there is a psychological component, how is anybody to know that Cohen is a charlatan and someone else isn’t? After all, there are no standards to guide anyone on this. There’s just Exodus’ word to go on, unless you would rather believe NARTH or Cohen. Or the guy’s voice on the subliminal therapy tape from The Daily Show.

As long as ex-gay groups continue to be unclear about what they do and how they do it, as long as they continue to talk around gays and lesbians instead of speaking plainly using ordinary language that everyone can understand, this confusion is likely to continue.

Jill writes about how anti-choice groups are trying to improve their reputation in black communities, and how this is unlikely to work due to the fact that most anti-choice groups are dominated by racist crackers. As Jill details, these efforts tend to be crippled at the outset by the anti-choice assumption that black women are stupid. Also, anti-choicer are the brains behind the efforts to imprison women for “child abuse” for using drugs during their pregnancies, the enforcement of which almost exclusively targets black women, especially in the South, and are functionally white supremacist and send the signal to black women that their attempts to give birth in peace will be met with resistance from a white-dominated state.

But anti-choicers think they have their weapon—they can selectively misquote Margaret Sanger to make it seem that she was trying to wipe out black people! Never mind that the quotes they claim are anti-black are actually the opposite and they only appear racist through the use of ellipses. The lie has legs because Sanger did associate with eugenicists, though she was never part of the race-baiting eugenics movement.

Anyway, I bring this up, because the anti-choicers who scream that abortion is racist genocide, and who “prove” it by referring to Margaret Sanger leave out one important detail, a detail that I didn’t realize until I read When Abortion Was A Crime. (The book club discussion of the book is at that link—good stuff there!) During the period of Planned Parenthood’s history where Sanger was associating with eugenicists, the organization was adamantly anti-abortion. Women would come to Planned Parenthood seeking abortion and be sent off with information to prevent the next pregnancy and some words of pity that this time it was too late.

In other words, when anti-choicers point to Sanger’s association with eugenics, and trying to imply that people “like her” were eugenicists, they are saying that people who oppose abortion rights are eugenicists.

Planned Parenthood’s historical opposition to abortion rights (which was only overturned after feminist activists made it clear how important abortion rights are) does seem to have been some kind of marketing strategy. They deemed what they did “birth control”, because that tends to be a more user-friendly term than “contraception”, but the latter is really what they meant. However, they soon found out that when most people heard “birth control”, they tended to think about the kind of birth control they were most familiar with, which was early term abortions, which were regarded mostly as restoring menstruation. A good deal of Leslie Reagan’s research about how people regarded abortion came from letters to Planned Parenthood requesting abortions, requests that were always turned down. Planned Parenthood realized they wouldn’t get very far promoting contraception if their entire customer base just wanted abortion, so they had to adamantly come out against abortion so people would then ask, “So what is it then that you do?”

But that’s just conjecture. The fact of the matter is that when anti-choicers condemn Planned Parenthood under Margaret Sanger, they are condemning an organization that opposed abortion rights, period.

All this just goes to show that anti-choicers aren’t against just abortion and this has litte to nothing to do with “killing babies”, and everything to do with strong opposition to women exacting any control whatsoever over their reproductive lives. The anti-choice hatred of Planned Parenthood doesn’t really make sense until you realize they oppose any kind of birth control, and especially any kind that focuses on female control of it. Most Planned Parenthoods don’t perform abortions, but that doesn’t stop anti-choicers from hating it, because it isn’t really about abortion. Planned Parenthood is a symbol of female control over our own bodies, and a symbol of the pro-choice belief that all women deserve that control, even if they aren’t wealth enough to obtain it privately.

We must ban the pill or this woman could blow up a major American city in the next 10 minutes!

Zuzu has a post up about Michael’s weekend post here about genetic testing and abortion. We’re all roughly on the same page with regard to the ethical problems that arise from this issue, which is that said problems are best attacked not by limiting reproductive rights but instead educating people about disabilities. Zuzu summarizes:

Let me state for the record that I support abortion at any time up to viability for any reason whatsoever, from birth defects so serious that the child will be dead moments after birth to wanting a child of a different sex to not wanting to raise a child with Down syndrome to wanting to fit into a prom dress.

Why? Because I trust women. I trust them to know what’s right for their own lives.

However, that’s not to say that I can’t also believe that we, as a society, need to change the conditions that lead to abortions in the first place. And that means comprehensive sex ed, it means contraception, it means emergency contraception. But it also means strengthening the social safety net so that women of limited means can afford to have a child, and it means changing the way that we as a society think about the disabled and the different (and, in the case of widespread sex-selective abortions, about the value of women and girls). When people are confronted with the news that the child they’re expecting will be born with a disability, it can make all the difference in the world if they know that they will have resources available to help them, not just when the child is young and in school, but long after the parents have left this earth.

Because I am at one with the deep-seated need in many people to pass judgement on others at the drop of a hat, a trait that is apparently common to people on the internets, I did quarrel with the idea this trust thing. It’s not really a disagreement with Zuzu at all, but more that nit-picking that is the second favorite habit of internet denizens, after passing harsh judgements on strangers with shallow knowledge of their situations. Quoth myself:

I don’t trust all women to make the “right� decision—let’s face it, someone who is wealthy and aborting a pregnancy because of Down’s and is worried about what the neighbors will think is being an asshole—but to me the overruling principle is freedom. Most people will do the right thing if given the freedom (and implied respect) and the tools to do so. That a handful of people will fuck it up does not change the fact that the overall social good is generally better served by liberty than by not-liberty.

I appreciate the rhetorical effect of saying that you trust women. It’s a direct assault on the underlying sexism of anti-choice legislation, which generally presumes that women as a whole are too stupid to make their own decisions about something as basic as when and how their reproductive organs should be used. I do have my concerns about the limits of the statement that women are to be trusted to do the right thing, though, because it almost encourages anti-choicers to seek out that one woman out there who’s really pushing it with the eugenics.

So while agreeing about the usefulness of the trust rhetoric, let me go a step further and say that it’s sad that it’s even necessary to use language like that. Freedom is not contigent on universal good use of it, or it’s not really freedom. The most popular example of this principle is with freedom of speech. If people were to have their right to free speech pulled because they said repugnant things—think the KKK on some hate march—then we don’t have free speech. Same with reproductive rights. You don’t really have your rights if they can be snatched because other people dislike your reasons.

Anti-choicers who resort to hypothetically selfish women who have to have their rights stripped in order to prevent them from making unpopular decisions are making a bad faith argument anyway. They’re not interested in commandeering women’s basic bodily autonomy in order to bolster disability rights. In fact, the opposite—the most vocal proponents of eugenic movements are against abortion rights. Check out this latest exhortion to white women to have more babies in order to maintain American hegemony from anti-choicer Rebecca Hagelin,for a typical example. Granted, pro-eugenics people try to skirt the charge by only advocating “positive” eugenics, but the sentiment is still there. Exhorting white women to have more babies and seeking out legal methods to force that to happen aren’t linked by mere coincidence.

Rhetorically speaking, invoking the hypothetically horrible woman who has an abortion to fit better into a prom dress or whatever reminds me of nothing so much as the pro-torture arguments being trotted out by conservatives and illustrated weekly on the show “24″. You know the argument—”What if there was a bomb about to go off and you had to torture someone to get the information in the next 10 minutes?” If you concede that it might be okay to torture then, apparently then you have to tolerate secret prisons across the world and routine torture of prisoners and the suspension of habeas corpus.

All which is to say I can’t wait for a very special anti-choice “24″, where Jack only has 12 hours to get some critical anti-abortion bill passed through the legislature and signed by a governor before the solitary 18-year-old who’s 8 months pregnant and wants to abort to keep her somehow still-slender figure actually gets her abortion.

It looks like Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might toss his hat in the GOP ring. The decorated combat veteran would be the only anti-Iraquagmire/anti-Bush candidate in the GOP prez wannabe roster. That would really twist the Right into knots. (The Politico):

A bid by the Nebraska Republican would further jolt an unsettled Republican presidential field and a GOP already under siege in the wake of President Bush’s unpopular troop surge plan and a steady drumbeat of other bad news for the administration.

Some analysts say Hagel, who will announce his intentions in Omaha, faces an impossible task in courting the party’s conservative base considering his own vociferous opposition to the war in Iraq. Given that, they say, his best course may be to run as an independent.

It’s unlikely that he’d get the party’s nod, but in reality, a top-of-the-ticket Hagel could siphon off those centrist votes that Hillary Clinton prizes. However, he’s not a moderate Republican:

  *  Voted YES on recommending Constitutional ban on flag desecration. (Jun 2006)
  * Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. (Jun 2002)
  * Voted YES on loosening restrictions on cell phone wiretapping. (Oct 2001)
  * Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Jun 2000)
  * Voted NO on setting aside 10% of highway funds for minorities & women. (Mar 1998)
  * Voted YES on ending special funding for minority & women-owned business. (Oct 1997)
  * Supports anti-flag desecration amendment. (Mar 2001)
  * Rated 60% by the ACLU, indicating a mixed civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)

He also directly answered the marriage equality question in GQ:

No. Personally, I think marriage is between a man and a woman, but that’s because I see it as a religious union. As a legal contract, marriage should be up to the states. If a state wants to change the rules, that’s up to them.

Fun fact: Hagel wants manure off list of hazardous substances.

***

“I think people are somewhat disillusioned. I think a lot of people are cynical out there. I think they’re looking for something different. … and I think that they’re going to be open to different things.”

Seeing the weak and pretty compromised GOP field out there (flip-flop Romney, too-liberal and too-divorced Giuliani, a tanking McCain, and a second tier of politically impotent fundies and anti-immigrant prospects), Law & Order actor and the former Senator from Tennessee Fred Thompson could have a shot.

More after the flip.
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title="Photo Sharing">

Uploaded by superlocal.

Have you heard the latest scandalous thing that young fathers are doing these days? Word has it that the fathers of young children from one end of the country to the other are introducing their little ones to the adult activities of watching sports like football, baseball and even internationally suspect sports like soccer. Not only are these men encouraging their little ones to watch adults play these adult sports, but they are encouraging small children to learn and play these same sports themselves, although they don’t make them miss school to do it.

What kind of lessons are we teaching kids by exposing them to these adult activities? Sports fandom is linked to rowdy behavior and gawking at cheerleaders, activities that are not appropriate for children. Some sports fans are even known to consume alcohol and junk food while watching these games. We do know that alcohol is served in some of the same sports stadiums, and yet these irresponsible fathers foolishly bring their children to these games.

Fathers need to learn that their days of having fun and hobbies ended the day they decided to be a father. Time to step up to the plate and teach your children to engage in the world joylessly, because fun is simply not appropriate for children and especially not their parents. Parenthood is a big responsibility, which is why we here at Pandagon firmly support the Republican plan to make it mandatory through steady application of abortion bans and restrictions on contraception.

And these fathers who are teaching their children to indulge their darker natures by watching and enjoying sporting events need to grow up already. My god, the kids are almost safer with their mothers at Baby Loves Disco.

66% of all hospital revenue comes from hospital births (and the C-section rate is 33%), according to a new documentary that examines pregnancy practices in America. When we’re fighting for reproductive rights, I think we need to remember that we have more enemies than just the Christian Right.

Via Lauren.

Jill picked up my post on abortion being a moral good and a roughly similiar conversation ensued, which only drove home my sense that this argument needs to be made in the public, because what seems self-evident to me—that it’s good if people with serious problems have solutions for them—blew a lot of minds. In my thread and Jill’s thread, I saw variations of support for the notion that it’s somehow valuable to the conversation to agree with anti-choicers that there’s something morally unsavory about abortion, on the theory that maybe they’ll listen to our side more if they think we understand the gravity of abortion. This argument bothers me for two reasons: 1) It’s not true. Outside of invoking religious reasons that shouldn’t fly in a conversation about secular law, there’s no reason to give an embryo any moral weight that should make abortion, at least early term abortion, troubling. 2) There’s no evidence that conceding ground on abortion does anything but embolden the anti-choicers.

Example of the incorrect argument, offered by a man who doesn’t identify his stance, so he could very well be an anti-choicer concern trolling the feminists. But it’s a pretty standard version:

Marcotte asks why should one hand-wring about the morality of abortion when fighting to preserve the right to it, and the answer is very simple: Because it acknowledges to people who disagree with you that you that even though you disagree with them you regard an abortion as more than just the utilitarian removal of a clump of cells. Trumpeting the “moral good� of abortion basically reinforces stereotypes of strongly pro-choice women being selfish, callous regarding life and immoral, whether those stereotypes are true or not. That certainly harms the cause more than acknowledging that abortion is more of a dilemma than having heart surgery.

The history of the abortion rights movement demonstrates that this quote couldn’t be more incorrect. The Rad Geek posted some lengthy quotes from people who were actually on the ground as activists and reporters when the pro-choice movement gained the momentum that led to Roe v. Wade, and these histories show that it wasn’t compromising and middle ground with anti-choicers that worked, but in fact activism under the banner “Abortion on demand without apology”. He quoted Lucinda Cisler:

The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

… Until just a couple of years ago the abortion movement was a tiny handful of good people who were still having to concentrate just on getting the taboo lifted from public discussions of the topic. They dared not even think about any proposals for legal change beyond reform (in which abortion is grudgingly parceled out by hospital committee fiat to the few women who can prove they’ve been raped, or who are crazy, or are in danger of bearing a defective baby). They spent a lot of time debating with priests about When Life Begins, and Which Abortions Are Justified. They were mostly doctors, lawyers, social workers, clergymen, professors, writers, and a few were just plain women—usually not particularly feminist.

Part of the reason the reform movement was very small was that it appealed mostly to altruism and very little to people’s self-interest: the circumstances covered by reform are tragic but they affect very few women’s lives, whereas repeal is compelling because most women know the fear of unwanted pregnancy and in fact get abortions for that reason.

… These people do deserve a lot of credit for their lonely and dogged insistence on raising the issue when everybody else wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. But because they invested so much energy earlier in working for reform (and got it in ten states), they have an important stake in believing that their position is the realistic one—that one must accept the small, so-called steps in the right direction that can be wrested from reluctant politicians, that it isn’t quite dignified to demonstrate or shout what you want, that raising the women’s rights issue will alienate politicians, and so on.

Because of course, it is the women’s movement whose demand for repeal—rather than reform—of the abortion laws has spurred the general acceleration in the abortion movement and its influence.

Pro-choice speakouts where women talked about their abortions and drew attention to the fact that abortion was good for them, the right and moral choice, and a common choice made by good, moral women for good, moral reasons were a big factor in getting abortion legalized. From Susan Brownmiller, on Gloria Steinem’s revelation on the effectiveness of this tactic:

Steinem received a shock of recognition when a Redstocking quipped, I bet every woman here has had an abortion. Hers had been done by a Harley Street practitioner in London during the late fifties after she’d graduated from Smith. Later she would say that the speak-out was her feminist revelation, the moment that redirected her public path. That night, however, she was working on a tight deadline. She threw together a hasty paragraph for the political diary she wrote for New York magazine. Nobody wants to reform the abortion laws, she explained in print. They want to repeal them. Completely.

The Redstockings abortion speak-out was an emblematic event for Women’s Liberation. Speak-outs based on the New York women’s model were organized in other cities within the year, and subsequent campaigns to change public opinion in the following decade would utilize first-person testimony in a full range of issues from rape and battery to child abuse and sexual harassment. The importance of personal testimony in a public setting, which overthrew the received wisdom of the experts, cannot be overestimated. It was an original technique and a powerful ideological tool. Ultimately, of course, first-person discourse on a dizzying variety of intimate subjects would become a gimmicky staple of the afternoon television talk shows, where the confessional style was utilized for its voyeuristic shock value. Back then, personal testimony was a political act of great courage.

I’d point out that I disagree with Brownmiller about why testimony on television tends not to be a powerful tool anymore, and it’s not because we’ve hardened to the importance of people’s stories. The standard testimony on television has the woman speaking about her “deviant” experiences or behavior to Oprah or Barbara or whoever and then tearfully groveling for forgiveness, which tends to reinforce the idea that she’s the bad guy, not the oppressive society. Abortion speak-outs had a different message, that women who get abortions are in the right, not the people who try to stop them.

Conceding the moral authority to people who oppose abortion is simply not a way to win this fight. Pro-choicers are in the right, and unless we believe it and say it ourselves, how can we convince anyone else?

What are - hic! - the odds that Auguste’s going to use another geeky illustration?

Robert and d at Lawyers, Guns and Money both have good posts up about luck. Roberts’ reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to point out for awhile:

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I should have resisted, but I got sucked into the tedious argument about whether or not abortion is moral in the thread at TPMCafe. The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong” thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one. Suggesting that abortion is immoral just reinforces the anti-choice claims that abortion should be banned and it strongly reinforces the anti-choice notion that women who get abortions are moral children who are too stupid to know what they’re doing. The belief that women are too stupid to really understand what they’re doing is evident in anti-choice measures like requiring sonograms and requiring that women spend a day to think it over before they get an abortion.

Having the notion that women are moral midgets and that abortion is an evil, even if you think it’s one that should be tolerated, being reinforced by pro-choicers does the pro-choice argument no good. So I’d like to argue against it. I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.

To see that abortion is moral, you just need to look at women as human beings with lives that have value. When a woman chooses abortion, she’s not indulging some guilty pleasure, like sneaking in a round of adultery at lunch, to bring up a genuinely immoral action that should not be criminal. She is probably thinking about her family’s well-being and yes, her own well-being. Taking your own well-being into consideration is called “selfish” by anti-choicers, but I think valuing yourself is a moral good, even if you are female. In fact, especially if you are female, since you live in a world where having self-esteem can be an act of moral courage that requires some defiance. If I got pregnant, I wouldn’t even have to suffer much mental strain to realize that abortion would be the best choice for myself, my family, and my relationship. Abortion, not just the right to abortion but the actual procedure, is a moral good that helps women and families and should be honored as such. Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.

Updated to add: Also, saying that abortion is morally questionable, even if you’re pro-choice, is a huge insult to the brave men and women who risk life and limb to perform them. Being an abortion doctor is a pretty thankless task, because a bunch of “Christian” men who have emasculation issues are gunning to kill you in hopes that brings their huevos back. Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is horseshit and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women.

Some people have used up a great deal of energy and bandwidth bloviating about what I believe when it comes to religion and faith. Even if they did actually know me as a human being, the truth would be too inconvenient for them.

This is just a free-form essay, written as matters come to mind.

My mother was Episcopalian and I was baptized and confirmed as one as well. We weren’t regular church goers after I was confirmed, and there weren’t a lot of discussions about God and faith, at least I don’t recall any of significance. From K-6 I attended Catholic school. What I noticed, even as a kid, was that there’s not a heck of a lot of difference between Episcopalian and Catholic rituals. I was always fascinated by the rituals even if I didn’t understand them. I always wondered why I didn’t get to go to confession.

When I was in first grade, it was the early days of post-Vatican II, and the nuns at my school didn’t wear habits. Some even wore skirts just above the knee! One of my teachers, Sister Judith, actually left the order to get married. I recall not completely understanding what they were talking about when they said she was leaving. I was upset, wondering why she had to stop being a nun to get married, and worse, stop teaching us. Corporal punishment was also still alive and well in the late 1960s, and though I didn’t get on the bad side of the more strident nuns, I witnessed a lot of grabbing and even pulling of a student out of the classroom by the ear on more than one occasion.  One teacher had a paddle for those extra special occasions.

I spent 7th grade in public school. I don’t remember attending church during that time.

In 8th grade I had moved to NYC and went to a Lutheran school for one forgettable year. I can’t say it left much of an impression on me. When I went to Stuyvesant High School (a public school in NYC), I was exposed to people of many different faiths and cultures. Many people talk about high school as a horrible experience, but it was the best time of my life, learning from my Jewish friends about their faith, which was clearly a different experience from my own. In fact, talking about how observant or non-observant some of my friends were — cultural Jews versus religious ones, was a topic of discussion. I was sensitized enough to mini-freak out in my mind last year when one of my best friends from NYC came to visit and her husband, who was Jewish (and clearly non-observant), piled on the pork barbecue when we went out to dinner.

But getting back to my personal beliefs, I fall into the category of spiritual but not religious. When my mother passed away suddenly several years ago (it will be 10 years ago this May), her desire on record was not to have a religious service, she simply wanted to have her ashes cast in New York. While she held a strong belief in a power greater than all of us, she was disillusioned by the pettiness of organized religion, and held particular contempt for the “death merchant industry,’ so her send-off was her statement of the simplicity of her brand of faith.

Returning home, driving around in the daze of grief in the immediate aftermath, I often looked up at the clouds, thinking in childlike fashion, I wonder where she is…is she in heaven…is she simply gone? Does this death, while meaningful to me on so many levels, mean no more in the grand scheme of things than stepping on an ant on the sidewalk — just another life snuffed out, life goes on? The thoughts were fleeting at times; sometimes I obsessed about it, sometimes I simply cried and thought about nothing more than the immediacy of losing a parent. You feel orphaned, no matter the age you are when you experience the loss of a parent you are close to, and it’s a time for your brain to race through those memories, those feelings of childhood and dependency on that loved one, and the overwhelming sadness of never being able to talk to or see them again. For those who have grown up in a faith of some kind, no matter how observant you are, it is a time of reconciling religious teachings with reality as well…

— how can God take this person from me?
— if these things happen for a reason, what is the reason?
— how can God allow natural disasters to take thousands of innocent, even believing lives?
— how can God allow earthly misery and suffering for some, and wealth and pleasure for others?

I’m not saying anything here that many others haven’t written or thought about, certainly more eloquently than I have. These are feelings common to many of us who experience a loss of this magnitude. I can still feel the pull of organized religion, its ceremony and sense of community when I attend services (for occasions of others — weddings, funerals, etc.) and can appreciate what faith can do for others in times of need and as a means to share joy and give thanks.

In the end, I am on the agnostic side of the fence, though I’m not precisely sure of which variant, it depends on the day, the events at hand.

Like many of you, I have seen the dark side of a fixed religious belief, exhibited by some people who follow their spiritual leaders without question, take the Bible or sacred text of choice literally and fail to engage in any critical thinking about tomes translated and shaped by humans of their time. Along with poetry, parable, and spiritual inspiration, there are also social mores and political realities of the day threaded in there, for better or worse. Does there mean there is nothing of value in the Good Book? No — there is much that people can find inspiration from in those texts that helps them draw strength and purpose in their lives.

More after the jump.
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Shorter Pantload: Amanda and Melissa died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.

[via]

UPDATE: WHY I’M VOTING FOR JOHN EDWARDS.

I don’t get it. Given that his position on Choice isn’t discernably different from that of Mario Cuomo or John Kerry, I don’t see Rudy making it across the Hudson.

And Choice isn’t his only problem with Conservatives. Check out this comment from ProLifeBlogs.com:

I challenge those who think conservatives should vote for Giuliani to name *a single issue* that is a) controversial and b) relevant to contemporary politics on which Giuliani takes a clearly conservative position. Abortion? No. (He even supports legal PBA.) Gay marriage? No. Immigration? No.

So, let me get this straight. We’re supposed to think we have lots of “common ground” with him because he supported NYC police in stopping people from urinating on the public streets and breaking windows in New York City and because he made impressive frowny faces after 9/11? Spare me. Conservatives have no common ground with this guy at all.

Crazy or just unwilling to put up with crap?

From the number of people who emailed me this article from the NY Times titled “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?”, it’s clear that there’s high demand for a blog post about it. Jill covered it really well, but basically the sum total is that there is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome, and the very idea that there is a post-abortion syndrome only has come to fruition because the ever-creative anti-choicers are seeking a way to reframe abortion as bad for women. To my mind, they don’t do a very good job of this because they are generally quite aware that abortion is a good thing if you need one, but that anyone who needs an abortion is undeserving of good things. So to try to turn that on its head and pretend they want women who get abortions to do anything but suffer is asinine.

Still, “post-abortion syndrome” obviously has enough hooks to make an examination of it worthy of the NY Times’ attention. And I think that the reason it does has everything to do with our culture’s long tradition of using diagnoses of mental illness as a way to punish and control women for rebellious behavior. From the article:

For Arias, however, abortion is an act she can atone for. And this makes it different from the many other sources of anguish in her past. As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepbrother, she told me. An older boy forced her to have sex when she was 14; seven months later, she says, she woke in the middle of the night to wrenching cramps and gave birth to a baby girl who was placed for adoption. A year later, Arias’s father, a bricklayer to whom she was close, plummeted from several stories of scaffolding to his death. She left home and fell out of touch with her mother and two brothers.

But she blames the abortion and only the abortion for her suffering, to which Jill says:

I feel truly sorry for the women who say they are experiencing post-abortion syndrome. And so perhaps this will sound cold, but I can’t but think that maybe they aren’t using their abortion as a catch-all for long histories of depression, anxiety, and often abuse and other problems. It makes sense, psychologically — abortion is something you can control, and if the rest of your life has been fully out of control, you can channel that pain inwards and deal with the one thing that you did. Further, many women who are going in to get abortions are in troubled situations anyway — at the very least, they’re pregnant when they don’t want to be pregnant. If that pregnancy was caused by abuse, or happened to a girl or woman from a strict anti-choice family, or happened to a woman who already suffered from depression, it logically follows that there will be some ongoing issues, and the abortion will be grouped in with that.

And these two passages demonstrate why “post-abortion syndrome” just makes sense to people who are deeply invested in traditional gender roles—and the notion that the only thing a woman can control is the only thing that could be the source of her mental illness is the issue at hand. And women controlling things is what alarms them and needs to be snuffed out.

Defining what makes something a mental illness has always been difficult and hazy to do, so there’s a long history of mental illness being defined strictly as deviance from expected norms, many of which are oppressive. With women in particular, there’s a long history of defining women as mentally ill because they reject male dominance and the “treatments” have been extremely punitive. The most famous example is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “treatment” of being confined and her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” that was a fictionalized account of it. A good book to read on this is For Her Own Good, which chronicles a number of ways that perfectly healthy women have been labeled mentally ill in order to control and punish behaviors that undermine male dominance. Some examples off the top of my head—doctors used to excise the clitoris in order to “cure” masturbation, white girls in the 50s who got pregnant out of wedlock were pretty much monolithically described as neurotic (which helped make it easier to coerce them into giving up the baby), the popular assumption that “career women” are emotionally stunted, and now we have anti-choicers desperate to define getting an abortion as the cause of mental illness (and it appears their belief that abortion causes breast cancer feeds the notion that they view illness as god’s punishment for women who disobey).

This view that illness is caused by and a punishment for deviating from one’s assigned role as a subservient female is the very reason that out of the long, long list of problems, events and traumas in Rhonda Arias’ life, only one was considered a legitimate reason for her to be depressed, and that’s the abortion. That’s because her other problems—the rape, the abuse, the unwanted pregnancy, the being forced to give her baby up for adoption(which is linked, unlike abortion, to depression)—all cast her in her properly passive feminine role. Only by trying to take control of her situation is Arias violating gender norms, and so only in that will her conservative Christian buddies allow that she is mentally ill.

We know for a historical fact that this attitude that women’s mental illness is only real if she’s violating a gender norm has traditionally been a part of the dehumanization and degradation of women. Not only do you have the Victorian rest cure where mental health was seen as only existing in women who had been immobilized until their will was broken, you also have the notorious mother’s little helper era, where again you see sedation as the only legitimate “cure” for a woman’s health problems, because they are only considered problems if they disrupt an oppressive system. Taken to its logical conclusion, things like rape are not problems unless they upset the men in control of the rape victim—an attitude much in evidence with the way Arias is being treated by her Christian buddies, who have convinced her that a long history of sexual assault is nothing compared to being a bad woman who has abortions in terms of trauma.

Kyso’s highly entertaining post about anti-choice groups marching on January 22nd (the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade) reminds me—don’t forget to Blog for Choice on that day! You can sign up as an official Blogger for Choice here and get a sidebar graphic announcing your participation here. Last year’s Blog for Choice was a resounding success, but I think we can probably make it even bigger and more interesting this year. (Jessica will probably not overly appreciate all this heavy cheerleading, since she’s the one tasked with collecting links.)

To make Blog for Choice Day even more interesting this year, a number of us will be going to Atlanta next weekend for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women Summit. If you’re in the area around that time, I highly recommend checking it out. There’s a lot of feminist bloggers, writers, and even a couple of filmmakers that will be there, but we’re not presenting, just recording the event for posterity. And I know I’m psyched about it, because the roster of presenters and speakers is just awesome. (PDF of the program here.) NAPW is an organization that takes the concept of reproductive choice to the next level, by fighting the way that pregnancy is used as an excuse to meddle with women’s lives and invade our rights on all sorts of levels. Choice is about more than the choice whether to become pregnant or not or the choice whether to terminate a pregnancy or not. It’s also about the medical care you receive, what you eat, etc. If you’ve ever been pregnant or close to someone who is, you’re probably well aware of how society encourages the practice of everyone nosing into women’s business. As I always put it, “Everyone wants a piece of the pregnant lady.” So in the days leading up to Blog for Choice Day, I’ll be blogging about choice beyond the narrow scope of contraception and abortion, but about the bigger picture of how women’s reproductive capabilities are used as an excuse to invade our privacy and control us on every level. Should hopefully be interesting.

With that, I leave you this interestingly telling picture from an anti-choice site that Kyso found:

Notice that women don’t exist in the idealized world portrayed here. Also check out Kyso’s post for the comments—people are writing anti-choice poetry.

What Texas legislators imagine the world outside their front doors is like.

The Texas Lege is back in session and naturally, the legislators are back on the most important business they could possibly ever think of—trying to compete with each other in the race to be the most misogynist prick in the Lege. Sen. Dan Patrick and Rep. Warren Chisum are out of the gate to show how much they hate women, since it’s very important you don’t forget it for a second.

Freshman Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican talk-radio host from Houston, made the abortion ban the subject of his first bill, SB186, which he filed Wednesday.

Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, filed an identical bill, HB175, in the Texas House on Nov. 13, the first day to pre-file.

The bills would ban abortion except to “prevent the death” of the mother — if Roe is overturned. They contain no exemptions for rape, incest or to protect the health of the mother.

Chisum has also tried to get rid of no-fault divorce. He’s rather obsessed with the idea that women might escape the clutches of the patriarchy, apparently. Every vagina should be under lock-up with Warren Chisum as the prison guard. In fact, as Norbizness has noted earlier to me this week, legislating the use and disposal of vaginas and the bodies they are in is a much, much higher priority to our legislature than small potatoes stuff like health care or education funding. Cunts in general are being used in ways that keep our legislators tossing and turning at night. Why right this minute, there might be a woman using her cunt as if it belonged to her for all sorts of solitary pleasures! We can’t have that. And let’s not forget one of the highlights of a prior stupid season, when a Democrat was so deeply concerned about the way that the fleshy things around teenage cunts we call “girls” were dancing that he suggested diverting state money to appoint a man in every community to be a morality cop and carefully watch the gyrations of the high school cheerleaders to make sure he didn’t find them overly arousing. (Only a 7 on the Peter Meter, not a 10, I guess.)

Seriously, the entire thing is humiliating. Sometimes, I find myself wondering how it is that we can have a legislature that seems at times so single-mindedly obsessed with the injustice that is vaginas being under the control of the women who just happen to share a body with said vaginas. Someone screwed up somewhere with this plan of letting women control their bodies like this and the Texas Lege is out to correct the screw-up. If the school system falls to hell while they do it, it’s just a regrettable casualty that could have been prevented if the evil liberals hadn’t gotten the bright idea long ago that women should be free as if they were men or something.

Outside of Texas, it appears that James Kopp, another anti-choice terrorist who is in jail now for killing Dr. Barnett Slepian, is still delusional about whether or not he’s a moral person. (Answer: no.) This little bit of self-aggrandizing behavior from him in the latest trial is just more evidence that even the worst, least defensible characters out there shouldn’t be allowed to represent themselves in trial.

An anti-abortion extremist defending himself against charges of killing a doctor apologized to the man’s widow and declined to cross-examine her Tuesday after she described how her husband fell against her after he was shot in their kitchen.

The apology came on the first day of James Kopp’s trial on federal charges that he violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances act by killing Dr. Barnett Slepian, who provided abortions.

He is already serving 25 years to life on a state conviction of second-degree murder, but a federal conviction would carry a maximum sentence of life without parole.

“Mrs. Slepian, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I respect you and your family,� Kopp, 52, said quietly.

Lynne Slepian, who had just recounted the Oct. 23, 1998, shooting for the jury, looked at Kopp but did not react.

Yeah, that he said that to her face is prime evidence he’s not sorry in the slightest. That he would hurt her again shows how little he gives a flying fuck about anything but his own ego. People like him make me sorely reconsider my opposition to the death penalty.

“The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

It looks like Mr. 700 Club was hearing voices while on a recent prayer retreat.

There’s nothing like starting out the morning with a cup ‘o batsh*t crazy.

Apparently millions of people will be affected by this attack, which Crazy Pat says will take place sometime after September. He also said “God” (or a reasonable facsimile) told him that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward “national suicide.”

CNN sums up the insanity in a nice little box:

Remember, this is the man whose show Howard Dean went trolling for votes on last year.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.
– James Rutz, chairman of Megashift Ministries, in his unhinged column from last week, “A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals“

After declaring that Tofu is a tool of the Homosexual Agenda, Jim Rutz says he received over 500 emails about his little essay, and has decided to write a few more articles (fortified with links to sources that allegedly verify his crackpot claims), the first of which is titled The trouble with soy - part 2.

The most common question of the past week has been, “If soy is so harmful as to potentially alter sexual physiology and behavior, why haven’t the Chinese and Japanese all died off or become homosexual centuries ago?”

Three interlocking reasons: Click here for the first two.  The third is that Orientals simply do not eat as much soy as Westerners think.  The average daily consumption in Japan (one of the highest soy-consuming countries in Asia) is at most about eight grams of soy protein. China and other countries eat far less.

Soy has never been a leading staple there like rice, fish or pork.  Even going back to the 1930s, calorie intake from soy in China was rarely more than 1.5 percent of their diet, whereas pork provided 65 percent!  No comparison.  Traditionally, soy plants were plowed under in fields as fertilizer…The highest intake of soy in Japan is among monks, who eat it to turn off sexual desire.  (Think about that the next time you’re in the grocery store.)

Rutz, the founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries, is convinced that soy is responsible for, among other things, cancer, leukemia, infertility and obesity. He breathlessly urges us to look for his future missives on the matter.

But the worst victims of soy are babies. Per kilogram of body weight, the average Japanese in 2000 ate 0.47 milligrams of soy isoflavones daily, while the average U.S. baby drinking soy formula got 6.25 milligrams. Isoflavones are testosterone-suppressing female hormones.

Laura at Right Wing Watch was blown away be the bleatings of Rutz.

You have to wonder if seeing soy as the root of all sexual ills (for men anyway) also makes one seem, well, just a little odd.  However, there may be another reason for finding this claim unbelievable: Rutz acknowledges his initial column fell just a teeny bit short in the substantiating-his-claims category and promises to now remedy that by addressing all of what he sees as the “problems with soy” in “a scientific, footnoted format” by tucking “footnotes and excess text” into future columns. Rutz writes titillatingly that he will address what soy is doing to male “sex organs” and will describe its impact on “sexual orientation” if we but only “tune in next week” because the story “gets worse.”

Could the story really get any worse?  Not a big chance we’ll be reading his future columns closely to find out.

Take a look at what WingNutDaily readers think — they aren’t buying Rutz’s story either…
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“Those who attempt to save the lives of unborn children and who wish to promote a culture that respects life are now treated as fanatics, threats to American freedom.”

“As I go to a prison cell for a lifetime, I know that ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,’ “
– wisdom from the lips of Eric Robert Rudolph during his sentencing.

He had plenty of swagger back in 2005, when he pleaded guilty to bombing an Atlanta gay bar (the Otherside Lounge), two abortion clinics in Birmingham, AL. The lowlife most famously set off a blast at the 1996 Olympics that he said was to “confound, anger and embarrass” the government because women have the right to reproductive freedom.

His acts killed two people and injured 120 with his bombs created with dynamite and covered in nails which acted as shrapnel.

Now Eric Robert Rudolph, who was captured in the North Carolina Mountains in 2003 after five years on the run, is  complaining about his accommodations at a Supermax prison in Colorado, where he is sentenced to serve life without parole. (Charlotte Observer):

Unrepentant, Olympics and abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph sits in his cell at Supermax complaining about being treated like a “terrorist” and composing “satires” mocking his victims.

…In correspondence with The Gazette during the past 15 months, Rudolph refers to himself as a political prisoner and accuses the federal Bureau of Prisons of inhumane treatment for keeping him and other terrorists in their cells for 23 hours a day.

“It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis,” Rudolph wrote last month to The Gazette.

There are viable reasons to question some of the practices going on in our penal system regarding the treatment of inmates, but the whining of Rudolph, who used his free will to decide to kill and maim, won’t find a receptive audience.

At his sentencing hearings in Birmingham and Atlanta last summer, Rudolph read a statement saying he bombed two abortion clinics because “abortion is murder, and because it is murder I believe deadly force is needed to stop it.”

In his 16 page “satire” about his sentencing that he sent to the Colorado Springs Gazette, he shows what a sociopath he is.  He mocks the legal team and judge who put him away as well as Diane Derzis, manager of the Birmingham family planning clinic this man bombed in 1998. He describer Derzis in his manuscript as  “brassy, worldly, the kind of woman who had not only been around the block a few times but was probably dragged behind a truck the entire way.”

You can read the full text of Eric Rudolph’s written statement, which includes this diatribe against homosexuality. When you read this, think of how familiar it sounds — this could be coming out of the mouth of just about every fundie whack job I post about here (Wildmon, Dobson, Sheldon, LaBarbera, etc.). Unbelievably, Rudolph’s words seem more restrained than some of those moralizing folks who have the White House on speed dial. What does that say about those “Christians?”

Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality. Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition. Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society. Those, consenting adults practicing this behavior in privacy should not be hassled by a society which respects the sanctity of private sexual life. But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square in an “in your face” attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.

This effort is commonly known as the homosexual agenda. Whether it is gay marriage, homosexual adoption, hate crimes laws including gays, or the attempt to introduce a homosexual normalizing curriculum into our schools, all of these efforts should be ruthlessly opposed. The existence of our culture depends upon it. It is the duty of the state to promote the public welfare and this includes holding up values and model behaviors which tend to create a healthy society capable of reproducing itself by the natural means of the family unit. This model behavior which lies at the heart of a healthy society is the marriage between a man and a woman. To place the homosexual relationship along side of the model and pronounce it to be just as legitimate a lifestyle choice is a direct assault upon the long term health and integrity of civilization and a vital threat to the very foundation of society - and this foundation is the family hearth.

Any conscientious individual afflicted with homosexuality should acknowledge that a healthy society requires a model of sexual behavior to be held up and maintained without assault. Like other humans suffering from various disabilities homosexuals should not attempt to infect the rest of society with their particular illness.

Mixing up Amandas=Teh Funny. Mixing up pro-choice and anti-choice is just losing your grip.

So, this story will amuse everyone. I get an email from Jane Hamsher and she wants to elevate a comment at Firedoglake left by me to a post in and of itself. Thinking she meant a comment on the sexist slurs dust-up, I said, “Oh sure,” and included a picture to use for an avatar. Well, I hope the Amanda who the comment really belongs to likes the picture, because there was a wee mix-up and miscommunication about which Amanda and which comment. That said, I think this Amanda’s comment is extremely good and I wish I had thought of it. So, what Amanda said.

So, here’s the issue if you’re behind on it. Jane caught Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL, making the most outrageous statement on this attempt by Republicans to pass a law requiring doctors to lie to women and offer them pain medication for the fetus if they get an abortion at 20 weeks, which is about 8 weeks, or two months for the “pro-lifers” in the audience who might have trouble with the math, before there’s enough neurological structure to a fetus for it to even feel pain. This should be a no-brainer (no pun intended) for pro-choicers—laws mandating that doctors deliver misinformation to women in an attempt to intimidate them are anti-woman, end of story. It’s a clear-cut example of how sexist anti-choice laws really are, since the law doesn’t try to override reality and force doctors to lie to men.

So what was Keenan’s statement?

While the measure has provoked strong opposition from Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, perhaps the nation’s leading abortion rights group, has stayed neutral.

“Pro-choice Americans have always believed that women deserve access to all the information relevant to their reproductive health decisions. For some women, that includes information related to fetal anesthesia options,” Nancy Keenan, NARAL’s president, has said in a statement on the bill.

Okay, I thought while reading this, Keenan is a little hazy on what the whole cloth pro-choicers are talking about.