misc

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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from Talk to Action

Women all across the country continue to walk into pharmacies, present prescriptions for emergency contraception, common birth control pills, or even medications such as antibiotics, and find themselves at the mercy of a growing number of graduates of the Faith-Based School of Pharmacology.

In most states besides Illinois – where Governor Rod Blagojevich outraged the Operation Save America-affiliated Angela Michael and other self-appointed guardians of public morality by requiring pharmacists to do their jobs -- women continue to be denied prescribed medication with seeming impunity. This, despite the fact that only Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota have passed laws protecting pharmacists who refuse to dispense emergency contraception.

In 2005 such a piece of legislation was introduced in Texas, where it might have been expected to barrel through our rabidly anti-choice legislature like the Wabash Cannonball. But strangely enough, the bill was swiftly killed off in committee -– and by avowedly "pro-life" Republicans. In an unexpected twist of irony instructive to everyone fighting for a woman's right to contraception in the face of the religious right's campaign against birth control, an abortion statute already in existence dealt the death blow to a "conscience clause."

from Talk to Action

From last Saturday's New York Times:

Kiss-and-Tell No More

A federal judge in Kansas has dealt another blow to the crusade by the state's attorney general, Phill Kline, to restrict abortions under the phony banner of combating child abuse.

In February, the Kansas Supreme Court blocked Mr. Kline from invading the medical privacy of 90 women and girls who were treated at two abortion clinics. This week, a federal trial judge in Wichita killed Mr. Kline's daft idea to require doctors, school counselors and psychotherapists, among others, to report all sexual activity by people under 16, from kissing to sexual intercourse.
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It seems too much to hope that this will end the matter, since Mr. Kline is likely to appeal, and anti-abortion groups are eager to expand the use of child-abuse reporting laws. But for the moment, the thoughtful new ruling gives supporters of medical privacy and reproductive freedom a victory.

Just about no one in Kansas would expect Phill Kline to give up now – not the man who says God asked him to run for Attorney General.

Issue number 13 of The Carnival of Feminists is out now!

Terry of I See Invisible People is the host and editor of lucky number 13, and she's done a great job of rounding up some of the best of the feminist blogosphere.

Do stop by and leave a comment if you think she's produced a good issue - comments are like applause for Carnival Hosts. ;)

from Talk to Action

Talk to Action's dogemperor has documented extensively, and Ethics Daily concurs, that the Religious Right has an increasingly dangerous tendency to confuse medical mortality and morbidity with divine punishment for what they believe to be sexual impurity -- a moral blindness evident in their response to the cervical cancer vaccine that, when administered to girls under age 16, promises to confer near total immunity in later life. But the cancer in question is cervical cancer, its precursor is Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and HPV is contracted through having ... uh ... sex.

from Talk to Action

We all have heard South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli's description of a woman who might qualify for an abortion under the rigid strictures of South Dakota's draconian abortion law – an exemption now immortalized as the Sodomized Virgin Exception.

Bob Nelson, a contributor to the Rapid City Journal's Mount Blogmore, considers the plight of those young women less fortunate.

It was an easy rape, she said
(Though not the way she hoped to wed)
The stones were sharp against her head,
(Not her dream of a bridal bed)
And the dress he tore as he thrust her down
was not her idea of a wedding gown.

But really, it was not complex.
Just some simple brutal sex.
And though her young life had other plans
She would bear the child of the gentleman.
And try to love each smile and dimple,
And be thankful that the rape was simple.
And thank the men who made her free.
Simple men like Napoli.

No thanks are necessary, little lady. It was their simple pleasure. As Napoli himself says, "If I, as a legislator, can make life better, really help somebody, that's a wonderful feeling."