What happened to Republicans standing tall for defending our "land of the free"? We have a national election in 2008, Obama is freely elected, and now right-wingers are fond of calling him a tyrant.
Huh? A tyrant is someone who takes control by his own means, not under constitutional power.
Which precisely describes attempts in the not-so-great state of Oklahoma to take away the constitutional freedoms of pregnant women.
Reading our local newspaper this morning, my wife called out to me, "This is disgusting. You're not going to believe what's going on in Oklahoma." Well, I ended up believing it. But like Laurel, I find the state's new draconian abortion laws to be appalling.
Fortunately, the governor has vetoed them. But as the AP story says, there might be enough freedom haters in the state legislature to overrule his veto.
Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry vetoed two abortion bills Friday that he said are an unconstitutional attempt by the Legislature to insert government into the private lives and decisions of citizens.
One measure would have required women to undergo an intrusive ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting abortions. Henry said that legislation is flawed because it does not allow rape and incest victims to be exempted.
"Intrusive untrasound" means a probe up the woman's vagina. Forcibly. Without her consent. Since that is the medical equivalent of rape, this helps explain why rape and incest victims are exempted from the legislation.
However Rachel, a women's health blogger, wonders why there should be any distinction between women who have gotten pregnant because of a rape, and those who had consensual sex.
Let’s think about the implication of that statement: it leaves room for the notion that women who consent to sex, should they get pregnant and seek abortions, somehow deserve to be forced to have an object inserted into their vaginas (regardless of medical need or consent) in order to obtain that legal procedure.
Or, if they don’t “deserve” it, it doesn’t really matter, it’s no big deal. It would be “unconscionable” to subject immediate-past rape victims to such an act, but women who haven’t already suffered through rape, whose own experiences of sexual assault may be in the more distant past, who consented to sex, well, it’s the dildo cam for them!
I’ve said before that I don’t think abortion exceptions for rape and incest make any sense from a purely pro-life, “every life is sacred” position. If every life is sacred, it doesn’t matter how it arrived. Those exceptions do, however, make perfect sense from a position that pregnancy and childbirth is the proper punishment for sex.
Last night we watched Bill Maher interview Dr. Jack Kervorkian on his Real Time show. Kervorkian blasted the medical profession, saying "they follow religious ethics rather than medical ethics."
He was mainly referring to end-of-life decisions, where a person's freedom to decide how he or she wants death to come gets tangled up with religious fundamentalism -- such as an irrational belief that God forbids dying under one's own control.
The same religionist attempt to take away individual freedom is evident in the Oklahoma abortion laws. If legislators want to believe in the sacredness of a embryo, that's fine.
But they have no right to impose their religious beliefs on other people. Including pregnant women who have a constitutional right to an abortion.
I'd like to propose that from now on Oklahoma legislators be forced to watch the South Park "anal probe" episode before they vote on any abortion-related bill. And ideally, to undergo that procedure themselves whenever they go to the doctor.
Right on! The party of freedom and patriotism is a farce. They believe in neither. With our current Supreme Court, it's scary to see how easily what they want to do in Oklahoma might stand :(
Posted by: Rain | April 24, 2010 at 04:19 PM