For any reason

Lyin' Bill.  He earns his title every day. What's he lyin' about now you might ask?  Why, he's telling us that a Texas women can get an abortion at any time -- simply because of a sprained hand for instance.

“You can just kill the baby, or the fetus, however you want to describe it, any time you want for any reason, you know, women’s health, that’s any reason at all.”

Sure, we all know that women are hypochondriacs, prone to hysteria and likely to be faking things like they fake orgasms and I'm sure Bill has experience there. God makes sure women don't die in childbirth anyway, just like he makes sure they don't get pregnant when they get raped. So if a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, we can be sure it's because she doesn't want to cancel a hair dresser appointment or something equally as important. Why we ever let them vote, I don't know.

In one of those bilious exchanges that Fox is famous for, O'Reilly and Kirsten Powers went back and forth ratcheting up the lies:

Lyin' Bill:  “In New York here, there’s a proposal, ‘I don’t want any limitations on anything!' It’s crazy.”

Powers: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

Lyin' Bill:  “Yeah! For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!"

Powers: “Yeah.  For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

Of course no one of integrity, no one who gives a rancid shit about the truth or human rights or anything but his stinking faith believes this garbage. Very, very few late term abortions are ever performed and even fewer of that "partial birth" procedure they'd love to tell you happens all the time.  Such things are done with dead fetuses,  fetuses with no brain and the like, but Fox has never stumbled over a fact so far.  Nor, for all their ranting, whooping and hollering, all their pusillanimous persiflage about how Liberals are trashing the constitution have they ever really seen the law as anything but a nuisance and impediment to "freedom" and something that can be and should be ignored by any state with or without public support. 

No, there should be no regulation of anything but women and if God didn't bother to ban abortion, well then the Great State a' Texas is gonna take care of it for him, now all y'all have a nice day, y'hear?

Defending the Faith

I hesitate to write about this, since everyone and his horse will undoubtedly pick up on the latest Republican hilarity.  It's an easy target, but it says so much about what the Republican party has been party to: the degradation of truth, logic, decency and freedom.  Yes, we have another Republican telling us that women probably can't get pregnant from being raped.

Denial, as I've been saying ad nauseam, is the flip side of belief and every belief requires a denial.  Denial of what you know to be true, is hypocrisy and to avoid hypocrisy, too many Republicans will defend what they know to be false and tell themselves it's heroic; tell themselves that lies are not lies if they're useful in defending the faith. Some of what one needs to defend in order to gain party support is immoral, indecent, mean-spirited and nasty too. Much of it is just a series of damned lies, but that's another story.

There's just no truth to the idea that God or biology protect a rape victim from pregnancy but the creed demands that one oppose terminating a pregnancy, whether unwanted or repellant or dangerous, so you -- forgive my technical jargon -- have to make shit up in order to defend the belief and deny the truth, be it incontrovertible truth about evolution, cosmology, geology, economics, law, mathematics or history. In many cases, being a Republican requires that you park not only your brains, but your honesty, your decency in the alley behind the GOP bar next to the dumpster, lest any of the clergy see it.

I won't deny that I take a certain satisfaction in presenting this one small, relatively unimportant demonstration of the mental processes that produce and direct the American Opera Buffo.  I delight in airing their dirty laundry, not because I like the rancid smell of batshit, but because it's time to burn it and bury the ashes.  It has been time forever.  

Both Sides, Now

No, this isn't about Joni Mitchell and I'm not going to talk about Bows and flows of angel hair,  just about stunning hypocrisy.  How many ice cream castles have been built upon the idea that a fertilized human egg cell is a human being possessed of  human rights?  It would be hypocritical enow that those rights are allowed by Church doctrine to foetuses when they have been so often denied to adults by religious authorities, but that's not what this is about. It's about, as I said, hypocrisy; about arguing both sides when needed to avoid guilt, or at least to avoid prosecution and penalty.

Catholic Health Initiatives, with assets estimated at around 15 billion dollars, operates a chain of hospitals and as a response to a wrongful death suit involving twin foetuses who died before birth, their attorneys argued that in cases of wrongful death, the term “person” only applies to individuals born alive, and not to those who die in utero, says Raw Story today.

Perhaps that will be a precedent that plagues them in future when they try to argue otherwise according to Roman Catholic doctrine regarding abortion and birth control, but looking at this cloudy argument from both sides now is pretty entertaining, don't you think?  And of course we remember all the adages telling us that when they argue principle, what they mean is money.

Feather canyons everywhere, indeed.

Virginia, the Rape Me State

Sic Semper Tyrannus is the motto of the State of Virginia, but as with any matters involving Republicans, a government is not a tyranny if it subjugates individual liberty to the prejudices and perverted morals of the Religious Right. I read over at The Impolitic that Virginia passed a law last week forcing any woman seeking a legal abortion to have an ultrasound examination. For those who don't know, this means that for a pregnancy in the first trimester, she must, by law, have a probe inserted into her vagina and maneuvered around by a technician until an ultrasound image satisfactory to the state is produced. As Libby points out, without that state mandate, this meets a general description of rape.

It doesn't take much to imagine the feelings, for example, of a 14 year old rape victim being violated a second time by the accursed state that murdered Lincoln and had no reservations about taking children from their mothers and selling them -- or raping those mothers for that matter. It's a state that talks a lot about Jesus and distrusts those who don't. It's a state wherein people tend to like Rick Santorum and others who have a lot to say about what consenting adults can do with what and with which and to whom -- and talk about Jesus and small government a lot.

Keep in mind, this is not an examination done for a medical reason. It's not done to protect the public from a disease or to protect the woman to whom it's being done. It's not something that one can opt out of. It's an act of intimidation and a deliberate act of humiliation. It was passed because of the religious objections of men who were elected to represent everyone, but instead represent preachers and priests -- and in a state that has just decided that a single cell has civil rights but a breathing female of child bearing age has not, can't we be excused for wondering whether these "conservatives" will either ban contraception soon or require some other humiliating procedure before allowing it?

Can't I be excused for seeing this insane drive to bring back the horrors of medieval Europe in high-tech form to a nation that was formed by repugnance for it as anything at all but Conservative?

Where is the outrage from actual conservatives? You know, those people who insist on a government too weak to do anything but leave us alone. I guess when those sentiments put them in a light that makes them seem too much like Liberals who designed a government that must leave us alone and respects the sanctity of our persons, our bodies, our homes and our rights, they scurry like roaches when the lights are switched on. They scurry because they're the same roaches who supported the horror of slavery, the obscenity of racism and are still at war with the rights of women and a government that protects them.

Conservatives, and this liberal, often decry the trend, falsely identified as Liberal, toward seeking safety by making the public helpless and dependent on authority, but it's in conservative strongholds like the secessionist states that we see just how much that obscene ecclesiastical tyranny has made the weakest and most vulnerable totally dependent upon the state in the most personal way. Small government my ass, it's the old Confederacy out of it's coffin like a putrefying zombie, its pockets filled with church money, corporate money, the money of tyrants staggering toward Washington to eat your freedom.

To be or not to be human.

58% of those responding to a CNN poll today answered "no" to the question of whether human life begins at conception. Of course such polls are hardly scientific and they do to some extent select for people who have strong enough feelings to bother and of course for those who can and do read.

Evidently the voters of Mississippi who bothered to vote would have answered the same way and in fact they did so by voting down a proposed constitutional amendment yesterday that would grant 'personhood' to a single celled organism and thereby outlaw not only all abortions but many forms of birth control. Do we see in this some evidence of intelligent multi-cellular life in Mississippi?

I think we do see that more women than usual went to the polls this time, but what I don't see is anyone parsing the loaded questions of what constitutes life and what constitutes the humanity thereof. Certainly both zygotes are alive and the unfertilized egg as well as a sperm cell contains all the DNA needed to produce a human being. It's that DNA that makes us human, of course, and not a monkey or a mouse or an amoeba for that matter and we lack only a bit of technology to produce an adult, or at least an embryo from that helical string of chemicals. It's already been done with simpler creatures. Will we push the "conception" notion so far that we consider a shelf with bottles of cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine a "baby?" Will extremists insist that we put excess chemicals up for "adoption" as they are suggesting be done with unwanted fertilized eggs?

Every question can harbor other questions. This one harbors a legion. Conception of course is the beginning of a natural process that usually results in a breathing infant: screaming, defecating and urinating as well, as some of us know. But we've done things in a laboratory that make me question the idea that this is the Only way to do it. So should we ask whether personhood inheres to the DNA string, to the zygotes carrying it, which are certainly alive? Is any living thing with human DNA a person and if it is, am I aborting "babies" by shaving in the morning (when I bother to?)

Or is a fertilized egg something that can under the right circumstances develop into something we call human -- develop towards it that is? Simple minds, religious minds, want there to be an instant and yet there are few significant instants in the development of life. Most take time; most evolve. Sure, there's a heartbeat within a few weeks but that applies to earthworms and guinea hens as well and it's not a heartbeat that makes us human. It's something ineffable or at least complex and subjective.

The question of just what does do that is one that's hard for religion alone to answer rationally since, after all the Bible tells us that not only life, but personhood, that word for breath: nephesh ( נָ֫פֶשׁ ) which we usually translate from the Hebrew as "soul" actually means breath, as with God's breath into Adam's lungs. Strictly, or at least Biblically speaking, what does not breathe has no breath, no soul, no personhood - that being something conveyed by God in an instant and with the filling of the lungs. Scientifically speaking, human life began quite some time ago and not in an instant. Speaking for myself, personhood is a characteristic acquired over time, just as apes at some time arrived at the point at which thy could ask such questions as we do.

Laws can't cope with such things however and since there is no point that defines a yes-no, on-off, either-or condition, we must consider the unborn as we might consider Schrödinger's cat: both human and not human until we must make a decision. And it isn't an easy decision. There is somewhere between unconscious flesh and sentience where we need to make the choice dependent on other things as well, such as the survival of the mother, the survival or survivability of the embryo that enter into the choice. It's at the most obvious ends of that evolution from egg to embryo to breathing of air that we make ourselves stupid, not at points near to that hazy zone in which many things must be considered.

I don't think a cell or a cluster of cells is a "baby" nor does the beating of a proto-heart make a citizen. I think an 8 month foetus deserves some -- much consideration if not a passport. It's in that gray zone that we need to decide and that zone is an awfully dim place for the light of reason as well as the fog of faith to penetrate. We need to have mercy on people making such decisions as well as on something that might be human to some and not quite human to others. Thanks to yesterday's vote, there may at least remain some mercy in Mississippi.

Christian terrorists have more rights.

Scott Roeder is a terrorist by any definition and was one before he decided to murder George Tiller. He's been caught making bombs. According to Time.com, he's been involved in an armed standoff by the anti-government "freemen." He was apparently a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated "justifiable homicide" as a way of protesting abortion.

There were always strange cars coming and going at all hours of the night and Roeder has been warning from his prison cell of “many other similar events planned around the country,” according to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Why then, if it could save lives, are we silent on the question of turture when it comes to this dangerous man. Why is it acceptible to have him in the US when he would likely do it again if he escaped? Why are we even giving him legal counsel and allowing him a fair trial if such people are deemed too dangerous with flimsier evidence.

Of course Olbermann and MSNBC are all liberal liberal oh so liberal and far too radical to be paid attention to by the good citizens of GOPistan or the Fox Reich or the kingdom of Jesus on Earth, but it's hard for the rest of us marginal, heretical, skeptics to understand why if it's so necessary to torture anyone who has been accused by anyone of harboring vague thoughts of terrorism, or who has a beard and sounds foreign. If we need to torture them for years and lock them up for years without trial -- why then, Mr Limbaugh, Ms Colter et al, do we not torture someone who apparently knows of terrorist plots to be carried out on US soil against US citizens? Let's hear your justification for torture one more time.

We won't get an answer from any of them, of course, but we really don't need one, do we?

Hypocritical oath

I like the idea. Pennsylvania State Senator John Eichelberger, A Republican of course, has introduced a bill strategically titled the Conscientious Objection Act. Of course the idea of exempting someone from the draft because of conscientious objections to war isn't often associated with the Conservative "ethic" but Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1255 isn't about war, it's about birth control and abortion. It provides immunity for those hospitals and doctors who won't administer drugs designed to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching itself to the uterine wall and who won't perform abortions or inform a patient as to the availability thereof.

"A health care institution that declines to provide or participate in a health care service that violates its conscience shall not be civilly, criminally or administratively liable."

I'm amused by the suggestion that a corporation can be possessed of a conscience, but as I said, I like the idea. Forcing health care professionals to provide health care is after all, unnecessary government regulation and this sort of protection should be extended to other public service providers.

I would like to see firefighters and their departments allowed to pick and choose which buildings they protect and which people they will rescue according to their prejudices consciences and I would prefer that policemen not chase after those who commit crimes against atheists or pagans or followers of false religions. Souls are, after all, at stake.

Doctors should be given the freedom to treat or not treat certain afflictions according to conscience. Syphilis, after all was sent by Gawd to torment sinners along with a host of plagues he's provided to punish populations for their tolerance of sins and intolerance of religious rule. We shouldn't be interfering with his will in a country so dedicated to him that congress had to take time out last year to pass legislation to make sure GOD was more prominently displayed on new coins. In Gawd we trust and under Gawd we are.

The next time some terminally pregnant woman is at death's door because of a hydrocephalic fetus she can just die in the street for want of a "partial birth abortion" and the next time that 12 year old retarded girl knocked up by a hospital orderly wants the morning after pill she can forget about offending the consciences of the health care corporations. Gawd will be pleased.