from Talk to Action

As GOP voters repudiate Republican legislators who failed to support South Dakota's precedent-setting ban on abortion, and as Louisiana awaits Governor Kathleen Blanco's promised signature on a ban just as harsh, Ohio's legislature is raising the ante by granting a hearing to a ban on abortion introduced by State Rep. Tom Brinkman – one that shows no mercy even when a woman's very life is at stake.

Brinkman's House Bill 228 is in line with the radical position of Ohio's Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial hopeful Ken Blackwell, and it already has picked up endorsements from 17 of Brinkman's colleagues in the Ohio House.

The Constitution Party of Ohio has crossed party lines to support this Republican bill, with an enthusiastic endorsement written by a member of both its state executive and national committees -- Patrick Johnson, D.O. -- which bestows upon Brinkman's bill the blessing of the Army of God.

from Talk to Action

Down through the ages, women and men have used just about anything they could think of in their attempts to prevent pregnancy, from vaginal plugs of crocodile dung to the lowly lemon. And the crusaders of the religious right waging today's war on sex tell us that every one of them was wrong. According to them, the only method that's God-approved is Natural Family Planning, or NFP.

NFP is a more sophisticated version of what used to be called the "rhythm method" - which was based only on the date of a woman's last menstrual period, although the term is still used as colloquial shorthand for NFP - but the goal is the same: "abstinence from genital contact and sexual intercourse during the fertile phase of the cycle as the means to avoid pregnancy."  Even when couples use NFP conscientiously, the failure rate of is estimated to be about 10%. But now, it looks as though something even more troubling about NFP could be what happens when it works.

New research indicates that the success of NFP depends on rigging the reproductive odds in favor of producing embryos that are unable to implant - you know, the same mechanism that the religious right condemns as "abortifacient" in its campaign against birth control pills, even though that postulated mode of action has never been demonstrated.

But if and when a blastocyst does fail to implant, well ... as Judie Brown is so fond of saying, "the woman's body rejects the tiny baby and he or she will die." And it now seems quite plausible that Brown and other "pro-life" luminaries are encouraging their faithful followers to let untold millions of their "tiny babies" die in obedience to God's law.

The Money Changers

from Talk to Action

Last week, Mainstream Baptist wondered, What's the Matter with Texas?, and referenced the Texas Freedom Network's incisive new report: "The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006."

No one should be surprised to hear that there's a whole lot the matter with Texas, or that -- as is the case even in religion-driven politics – the root of our state's particular evil can be traced to the love of money. Here in Texas, rich men who hand money out by the bucketload are using their wealth to buy a state government that looks like their vision of the promised land.

from Talk to Action

Last fall, before the shock of South Dakota's no-quarter "Degüello" of an abortion ban distracted our eyes from ongoing threats to reproductive freedom in other states, PBS Frontline focused our attention upon Mississippi with The Last Abortion Clinic (viewable online) a riveting account of how the Religious Right has come to exert such control over the legislative process there that only one clinic – the Jackson Women's Health Organization – remains open in the entire state.

But for Christian nationalist organizations like Operation Rescue, Operation Save America and Oh Saratoga!, that one clinic is one too many, and this summer they intend to converge in a perfect storm of intolerance to "storm the gates of hell" and close its doors for good.

from Talk to Action

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto sounded a long-delayed alarm in Contra-Contraception, a comprehensive overview of the religious right's war on birth control. It was past time for a publication of influence to "discover" what many of us have known for years.

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

Well, yes and no. While Judie Brown and her allies in the Protestant ranks are waging a full frontal assault against contraception, they declared war on birth control some time ago. The only thing new is that these days -- flushed with victory over the Roberts and Alito confirmations, and in giddy anticipation of the arrival of the South Dakota abortion ban's arrival before a more conservative Supreme Court – they've gotten a little braver about admitting it.
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