Since Ian Awesome is busily running around declaring war on the rich, he is proud to introduce his latest guest writer, Kate West, formerly of the Seattle Lesbian and all-around good gal. Huzzah!
Apparently Ron Paul thinks the gays aren’t the problem in the military . . . it’s those darn heterosexuals causing “trouble”. The same guy who is avidly anti-choice and a self-avowed Republican now (remember when he was a Libertarian?) told Iowa State Daily today that he thinks the straight soldiers are “causing more trouble than the gays”. He didn’t address the real ongoing problem of sexual assault in the military, presumably the “trouble” he referenced. According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.”
Thank goodness those queers didn’t start hitting on all the straight soldiers after DADT repeal . . . we can all sleep better at night knowing THAT didn’t happen.
On the same day that surely saw countless celebrations of our equal freedoms finally progressing forward, in Columbus, Ohio, there was another sort of mass gathering. Yesterday, several hundred pro-lifers gathered at the Ohio Statehouse to demonstrate in support of HB 125. Nicknamed the "heartbeat bill," this piece of legislation would give Ohio one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country; approved by the Ohio House in June, it's awaiting Senate approval.
Apparently this is as crazy as those anti-abortion activists get.
The bill would outlaw any abortions after a heartbeat could be detected. This usually happens by 6-7 weeks, and as early as 22 days after conception. At this point, many women are indeed fortunate enough to know that they are pregnant, to have surveyed their options, and to be ready to choose abortion. However, for many, many women this is not the case. This law would effectively ban abortions in the state of Ohio, and it is so extreme that even the Ohio Right to Life group (which exists mainly to support pro-life legislation) opposes the bill.
Other pro-lifers are not so wise, querying (this is my favorite), "How many wonderful Americans are not on this earth because of abortion?" Yeah. Because our biggest problem these days is underpopulation.
That this bill could pass in the state of Ohio alarms and offends me; I am comforted only by the knowledge that it is unconstitutional, going against Roe v. Wade, and would ultimately not stand up in court. Nonetheless, I wrote my state Senator Troy Balderson (who was appointed a few months ago - the senator he replaced turned his back on the working-class families in his district, advocating and voting for a major anti-union bill before magically remarkably getting a job as a lobbyist for a coal-related company. Just another day in the life in Ohio....):
"HB 125 is an assault of the most egregious sort on women's health in the state of Ohio. This bill allows women no control over their own bodies; this assumption of women's decision-making capabilities is downright offensive in this day and age. What would you do if it were your daughter or sister who found themselves with a pregnancy at a time where they would have been absolutely unable to care for the child?
This bill could ban abortions as early as three weeks into a pregnancy
- a time where even the healthiest, wealthiest women rarely know they
are pregnant. It essentially outlaws abortion, giving Ohio one of the
strictest anti-choice laws in the nation. Do you want that on your
record?
As you try to balance the state budget, think about how much more
difficult it will become as you have to educate, feed, and clothe these
offspring of what will surely be Ohio's newest baby boom.
You were appointed to serve in the Ohio senate to represent the wishes
of your constituency. Please abide by that promise, and show us that
the 20th District can yet again be proud of its senator who, regardless
of party lines, respects the demographic from which he hails."
Are you from Ohio? Email or call your senator and ask him or her to respect women's rights, and the constitution! Ah, there's nothing sexier than a man or lady who respects my anatomy, autonomy, and America!
Televangelist John Hagee below, warning his flock about the dangers of secular humanism. Is he really comparing rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women to single's bars and penitentiaries? Plus: I've tried the magic spells in Harry Potter (oooooh, some days I want to Expelliarmus the hell out of Adam) and sorry, they don't work. No danger of teaching your children witchcraft there.
Michele Bachmann has very noticeably distinguished her candidacy for President by refusing (on big news outlets anyway) to talk about LGBT issues, justifying her silence on her anti-gay record by insisting that she's running for President and the President should only focus on job creation right now. In related news, she is a big liar and wouldn't know what the President did if he slapped her in the face with his job description.
Anyway, Crazy Eyes is all about jobs and nothing else, right? You wouldn't know it from yesterday's GOP candidate's forum in South Carolina. During the forum, anti-gay activist and Princeton professor Robert George asked Marcus' beard if she would overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Roe Vs. Wade and make abortion completely illegal. From ThinkProgress:
GEORGE: Would you as president propose to Congress appropriate legislation pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to protect human life in all stages and conditions? [...] Given the clear mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment empowering Congress to enforce the guarantee of Equal Protection shouldn’t Congress act on that now?
BACHMANN: Yes, I believe that they should. [...]
GEORGE: And if it meant a confrontation with the Supreme Court are you prepared for that?
BACHMANN: Most assuredly.
What about taking away a woman's reproductive rights creates jobs, Michele?
The family of a Missouri seventh-grader continue their legal battle against the girl's school district this week, the latest development in an ongoing traumatic saga for the young teen, a rape victim and special education student. Yes. You read that right. Not only does this youth face an inherent uphill battle in school and life, but she also was raped, and it is around this incident that the lawsuit is centered. Where was she raped? At school.
The girl was first raped at Republic Middle School in the spring of 2009, according to the lawsuit. After the mother notified the school, the girl described the rape and "multiple sexual assaults" she'd experienced at school that year to Duncan, Mithelavage and Ragain [school officials who are named in the lawsuit]. They then told the mother that they thought that her daughter made it all up.
Even after the girl provided details about her attack and named the attacker, the school officials, who ought to have been her protectors, dismissed her allegations as false; not only that, but they forced her to apologize to her accuser, and then punished her for filing a false allegation.
Following instructions from the school, the girl wrote an apology to the boy she accused of raping her and had to personally give it to him, according to the lawsuit. She was then expelled for the remainder of the 2008-09 school year. The school also told "juvenile authorities" that she filed a false report.
After she came back the following school year? Guess what happened next. The same boy raped her again. Now her family is suing the southwestern Missouri school district, Republic School District.
Pretty much everything about this story is appalling. The thought of any sexual assault happening at school is chilling. Public school is the only safe haven that some children have. And to see behavior like that in a middle school is all the more unsettling. Speaking from experience, a thirteen-year old girl may be one of the most vulnerable beings on the planet, and to see her violated physically breaks my heart. To have that violation compounded by trusted educators is offensive beyond all imagining. I only hope that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri agrees.
For the record, a physical confirmed that she was indeed raped, but the school district refuses to budge. How can there be any sense of justice when things like this can happen in our country?
Of course, right-wing nutjob Bill O'Reilly has chimed in, playing his usual alarmist bullshit cards by claiming that mandating providing birth control is going worsen the unemployment rate. Just last week he said that women are normally too intoxicated to use birth control, of course, and now he thinks that this new regulation will make it impossible for employers to hire women:
O’REILLY: Now the federal government is ordering the health insurance companies to pay for all breast feeding stuff, all female birth control stuff, all preventative measures for doctors for ladies that go in. What do you think that’s gonna do? That’s going to inhibit hiring even more!
KUCINICH: Frankly, we ought to be very concerned about women’s health care.
O’REILLY: I am concerned, but they’re not going to expand and hire if they have to pay higher health care premiums for workers! Businesses aren’t going to do it…You can’t have both. You can’t have a welfare state and a robust capitalist system.
He effortlessly ignores, of course, that preventative care among women will actually drive overall health care costs down, but then, that wouldn't get him any viewers, now would it?
Amid all of the hustle and bustle in Washington D.C. this week in regards to the national debt, another change occurred that is in some ways equally exciting and monumental - this time in regards to womens' health, one of our favorite topics!
On Monday,, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that insurers will be required to cover contraception and other fundamental services, without any additional cost-sharing (aka co-pays, which can add up to hundreds of dollars even for the best-insured patient). This will enable women around the country to receive services such as "well-woman visits; screening for gestational diabetes; human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing for women 30 years and older; sexually-transmitted infection counseling; human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening and counseling; FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling; breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; and domestic violence screening and counseling."
Needless to say, this is fantastic news, folks! This is a huge step forward; I can hardly believe it that the government is (finally) endorsing family planning and recognizing the link between providing safe, available contraception, counseling, and testing and having healthy, happy human beings. Shocking, I know! Over here in Ohio, I'm doing a little dance in a pile of birth control pills!
Naturally, our friends at FOX News were shocked by this giant step forward, and they wasted little time before reminding us as to the depths of their hatred and intolerance. Family PAC Federal Vice President Sandy Rios was on the air yesterday, spewing all sorts of ridiculous assertions, made all the more offensive by the fact that they came from a woman.
Rios is outraged that, at a time of great national debt, "we're now going to cover birth control, breast pumps, counseling for abuse? Are we going to do manicures and pedicures as well?"
Yes, Sandy, because counseling for abuse - you know, when one person in a relationship physically or emotionally harms another and sometimes people die - is totally the same as sitting in a salon as my feet get scrubbed with pumice stone before I select the season's trendiest color with which to paint my toenails with. It's absolutely outrageous that the government should think to protect and counsel survivors of abuse. Outrageous.
Ms. Rios also claims that "uncontrolled sexual behavior is what is harming our girls, not our lack of birth control - which by the way they don't seem interested in taking anyway."
Funny, because I am pretty sure that over 15 million women in this country take birth control. Not to mention that that was an unnecessary snide afterthought of a comment.
I'm not sure of her logic through the rest of her diatribe, honestly, where she links the availability of contraception to promiscuity, that somehow if birth control is available those slutty, slutty young women will have multiple sexual partners (but no unwanted pregnancies!) rather than unprotected sex with one partner. She says that "having a baby is not the worst thing" - apparently the moral weight of having slept around is far, far worse than the lifelong commitment to a child that you can't afford to raise. Uh-huh.
This woman's crazy train proceeds to go down the rails, as she mentions a country I wasn't aware still existed called Red China, where womens' health is strictly regulated (wait - more regulated? I thought we were worried about spending on womens' health when we're $14 trillion in debt):
“In Red China, they have this down to a science. The local health care centers make women come in every month to be examined to see if they’ve had their cycle to make sure they are taking their medication and if they have a baby they are roundly punished, if they have an extra baby that baby is aborted. That is the control we’re moving toward.”
I'm sorry, but I don't even have words for this. It's especially confusing that a leader of the Family PAC is, for whatever reason, so vehemently against government support of safe, educational womens' services that somehow she advocates abortion. Do you see this right there?? I saw it. Let's look again: ". . . if they have an extra baby, that baby is aborted. That is the control we're moving toward."
You can watch the whole shenanigans - rewatching the craziest parts - right here:
Luckily, her comments have not created much buzz, and even if they have - the HHS's recommendation still stands. I, for one, am breathing out a sigh of relief that finally something good happened in this neverending battle, and that our opponents are having a harder time finding footing for their fruitless, offensive accusations.
Yesterday, Bobby Jindal signed into a law requiring medical offices that provide abortion to post notices informing women of alternatives to abortion, presumably including adoption. While I feel this law is unnecessary (who doesn't freaking know the alternatives to abortion?), it's a far cry from the draconian and restrictive policies recently signed into law in Ohio state, as covered by OneAngryAlly, Sarah N.
What's truly offensive about this whole situation is the speech given by Jindal during the signing ceremony. In his remarks, he compared women seeking abortion to criminals being read their Miranda rights.
"'When officers arrest criminals today, they are read their rights,' he said. 'Now if we're giving criminals their basic rights and they have to be informed of those rights, it seems to me only common sense we would have to do the same thing for women before they make the choice about whether to get an abortion.'"
"Jindal stressed the importance of creating a 'consistent culture of life' and how laws like this one can promote that idea.
"'Creating a culture of life is more than just words. It means we've got to fight to defend the lives of the most innocent and most vulnerable among us, especially unborn children,' he said. 'A civilized society is judged and will be judged by how it treats the weakest members of that society.'"
The Raw Story adds that in the past twenty years, the number of women who die from complications during pregnancy have doubled, with those number disproportionately impacting communities of color.
Hey, asshat, sometimes the only alternative to abortion is death. Are you going to include that on the placards?
Bachmann is once again giving a bad name to female GOPers everywhere, as the Tea Party candidate has famously asserted in the past that she is not a feminist and that she believes that a woman must submit to her husband. Now, as reported by the AP, it comes out that she pursued her law degree because her husband told her to. Ouch.
"'He is her godly husband,' said Peter Bachmann, Dr. Bachmann’s oldest brother, who lives on the family dairy farm across the eastern border in Wisconsin. 'The husband is to be the head of the wife, according to God.' It is a philosophy that Michele Bachmann echoed to congregants of the the Living Word Christian Center in 2006, when she stated that she pursued her degree in tax law only because her husband had told her to. 'The Lord says: Be submissive, wives. You are to be submissive to your husbands,' she said."
Uh. No. You cannot be elected President in order to have someone else tell you what to do. That's kind of the point. As HRM George Bush II famously said, "I am the decider!" Is this really what constitutes an empowered American?
This week, the Ohio House of Representatives passed not one, not two, but THREE laws that restrict a woman's right to choose. Additionally, impatient to join the cool-kids club composed of our glorious allies to the north and west (that is, Wisconsin and Indiana), the word is out that state Senator Kris Jordan is poised to introduce a similar bill that would defund Planned Parenthood entirely.
The trifecta of these three bills would leave Ohio with the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The most well-known of these (in the shocking case you didn't follow my extremely nerdy links to the text of the bill), HB-125, is also known as the heartbeat bill. Right off the bat you know that is not a good sign. Through a convoluted reasoning sequence, the bill concludes that "fetal heartbeat has become a key, medical predictor that an unborn human individual will reach vitality and live birth;" and that "cardiac activity begins at a biologically identifiable moment in time," and therefore no abortion shall be performed after a fetal heartbeat is detected.
For those of you playing along at home, a fetal heartbeat can be detected as early as three and a half to five and a half weeks after conception. Honestly, at that point, very few ladies know they're pregnant, and I'd wager even fewer would have arrived at the heart-wrenching conclusion that they need to have an abortion.
The worst part? It's not just our imbecile of a governor who supports this bill. Most of the Representatives quoted in the article are women. Says Republican Kristina Roegner,"There are over 28,000 abortions in Ohio each year. This bill, if passed, would save the vast majority of them. These are all little babies with a beating heart, each one deserving the chance of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Give me a break. I'm pretty sure a three-week-old embryo doesn't know the first thing about any of these three, but a struggling young woman? Most certainly. To Ms. Roegner, and other members of the Ohio House, I ask: what would you do if it were you, or your daughter, or your sister or your cousin?
The constitutionality of this amendment is questionable, as it likely undermines Roe v. Wade, so there is a little hope that it won't stand up in court. It also allows practically no room for medical emergencies, which is downright terrifying. Ladies: Grab your uteri and run for the border!
Today, everyone's favorite appallingly conservative Midwest governor Scott Walker is set to approve Wisconsin's new budget, which contains $1 million in cuts to Planned Parenthood. With this action, Wisconsin will join Indiana (also led by a favorite appallingly conservative Midwest governor), Kansas, and North Carolina in entirely ending state funding of the organization.
Despite the fact that anywhere from less than one percent to three percent of said funding is used for abortions, pro-life supporters rejoiced at the news, just one more blow to working-class Wisconsin. Less than one percent. Yup, all those baby-killin' liberals over at Planned Parenthood do is provide abortions. 100% of the time.
As a resident of a rural Midwestern state, one of the most heartbreaking parts about this story involves the clinics which stand to lose the most. The more metropolitan clinics (in Madison, the capital, for instance) will still be able to provide many services, as they receive funding from federal sources and elsewhere. No, the clinics receiving the primary impact of the state cuts are in small communities like Shawano and Wisconsin Rapids. If these outposts are anything like the Planned Parenthood clinic in my small community, they already have little to offer the low-income residents of the area. Now, these women will have nowhere to go for basic health care.
I recently needed to visit my local Planned Parenthood, in rural Ohio, another state where such funding is in limbo. When I called, early on a Monday morning, to make an appointment, I was told that the next available slot was the following Monday afternoon. And why? Was this because the clinic was absolutely jam-packed over the upcoming week? Oh, no. They only have the ability to have the doctor in one day a week, and in fact were closing five hours early on the day I spoke to the receptionist. There is no other option in my community, and I was forced to wait a week. Fortunately, my life was not in danger, but it was still not the most pleasant week of my life. Hey, Scott Walker, and pro-life douchebags! These clinics are already barely hanging on by a thread, and womens' health is at stake! What I do with my ladyparts is none of your business!
Now, I know that many of you faithful readers do not have to worry about parenthood or planning for it, but this is an issue that affects everyone. I can spend all day telling you guys about the services Planned Parenthood does provide - annual exams, contraception, education, a safe place, just for starters - and I'm sure that we all at some point have benefited from these.
Instead, I will leave you with another example that outrages me beyond all belief; I guess we can be grateful that this practice does not still exist. North Carolina legislators are currently debating paying a settlement to women who endured forced sterilization at the hands of the state as recently as the 1970s. The justification given? The woman interviewed, a 14-year-old rape victim, was "promiscuous." Fortunately, the state is considering a payment (a paltry $20,000); however, North Carolina's heavily conservative, hateful legislature will probably vote it down.
This sort of garbage absolutely turns my stomach. How advanced are we as a society when we still have to debate womens' basic rights? Womens' health affects everybody, everybody.
