Anti-Women Crowd Up Ante
From the Orlando Sentinel: Anti-abortion group wants to make birth-control illegal in Florida
TALLAHASSEE — A nationwide anti-abortion group launched an effort in Florida Friday to outlaw all abortions and certain types of birth control, including oral contraceptives and the morning-after pill.
The religion-infused movement, called “Personhood Florida,” would define conception in Florida’s constitution at the “biological beginnings,” supporters said — when the sperm meets the egg. The group filed its amendment today but the exact ballot language is still being worked out, said Secretary of State Spokeswoman Jennifer Krell-Davis.
The amendment seeks to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. Also criminalized: the morning-after pill and oral contraceptives taken by women, known as the pill. “There are some (birth control) methods that kill a child,” said Pat McEwan, who is leading the Personhood Florida group.
…At a press conference in Tallahassee, speakers blamed abortion for the financial insolvency of Social Security and the bankruptcy of American auto manufacturers, citing the millions of terminated pregnancies since Roe. v. Wade as costing the nation citizens and customers. They also said that a fetus is a person and should be given protections of law.
They talk about Roe v. Wade, but they are really gunning for Griswold v. Connecticut and the right to privacy. They want to tell people how to live, and to outlaw sex outside of their version of marriage.
These are the same people who have been screaming that they don’t want the government to insert itself between doctors and patients, but they forgot to add, unless the patient is a woman. These people are authoritarian in purpose and outlook and intend to impose their narrow views on the rest of the world.
The claim about the Social Security being insolvent is totally false, and the US auto industry sold the wrong cars at the wrong time. We don’t have enough jobs for the those who are alive, so all of those extra people would be on unemployment, welfare, or on the street. Corporations didn’t ship jobs to other countries because there were no workers in the US, they did it to increase profits.
12 comments
These moronic throwback hypocrites make a strong case *FOR* abortion and contraceptives. In fact, they should all be sterilized to limit the propagation of their obviously defective genetic material.
And of course, their version of morals, ethics and even the ‘sanctity of marriage’ is: the woman will do what she’s bloody well told, and the man can do what he pleases to any woman any time he pleases.
They even have their own version of the burqa with skirts to the floor and long-sleeved shirts button to the top which is really practical for 105° heat indexes.
They hate. They “live” to hate.
They don’t produce anything useful, and too many of them end up with some form of public assistance because of that. You certainly can’t hold down a job or farm when you are off picketing and protesting.
If I wanted to live under Sharia law I’d move to Saudi Arabia.
this is just depressing.
i looked them up and found that it’s not just florida that they’re targeting, which is both less depressing now i that know florida didn’t start this on their own, and more depressing now that i know how widespread it is.
The Rethuglicans have been after Griswold for a long time and have tried many “back door” ways to get woman back into the kitchen and subservient. When they don’t want funding for “abortion clinics” what they really mean is they don’t want funding for clinics catering to women’s health clinics providing various sorts of birth control.
Santa Barbara fortunately is quite progressive and basically almost all of the community actively and publicly supports our local Planned Parenthood clinic. Although we do have the usual nutjobs that come to picket and send death threats to the doctors.
One of the local events that our community looks forward to each year is the Planned Parenthood booksale held at Earl Warren Showgrounds (thousands of books, cd’s, etc. require BIG space.) I shop there early…and often. I know I am supporting women’s health and a clinic that my OBY practiced at.
.-= last blog ..If Stanford Hospital can do it…. =-.
Hipparchia, the article mentions that they will be spreading their hate to other states, but I was concerned with having to be rude to their signature gatherers. I tired of people claiming to be “moral” because they read edited versions of sacred texts.
I don’t want anyone interfering between patients and doctors, any more than between pastors and parishioners, [well, unless they are serving and arrest warrant]. It is no one else’s business. Those communications are privileged, even in criminal courts and grand juries, so people should not be injecting themselves.
Should we be outlawing blood transfusions because some believe they are sinful? Should we mandate circumcision because others think it’s required? Where does the religious interference end?
This is an amendment targeted specifically at women, and it is discriminatory.
Jill, I ran into this mildew when they were picketing a clinic for women and children in northern San Diego County. In as much as the clinic was an outreach program of the Catholic Church, I don’t think birth control, much less abortion was an issue, They hate women, and the fact that the women were migrants made them easier to hate in Tom Metzger’s neighborhood.
I personally recent people trying to turn this country into the some form of dictatorship.
…it is hard to imagine it, but there appear to be people out there who would be sympathetic to the idea that abortion has led to our current dire economic circumstances because of the loss of consumers. The fact that our current hard economic times include millions of already-born people out of work even in the absence of all those lost future persons (as you noted), would seem to suggest that the anti-contraception folks will have a really difficult row to hoe in their efforts to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen anywhere but in those few twisted regions where such nonsense doesn’t come as a surprise…
I have to confess that we must finally acknowledge that we are living in a truly strange world when the roots of the Southern Baptist denomination are even more extremely strange when it comes to issues of birth control than the views of the Roman Catholic church…especially given their long-standing “relationship”….
It doesn’t have to be logical, Jack, it just has to sound reasonable. Too many of these people have lost the ability to question authority, as long as that “authority” appeals to their prejudice.
There is no logical basis to call Obama a socialist, and plenty of hard evidence that he is a conservative, but “everybody knows that black people are socialists”, Obama’s black, so he is a socialist. It’s absurd, but there are a lot of people who believe it.
The evangelicals have a large problem: their numbers have been flat for a decade, and are starting to decline. They need people, and recruiting isn’t going well. If they don’t score some victories soon, they will fade into the archives, like all of the other “awakenings” that have occurred in American history.
They waited too long to do this. This should have been when they were riding high in the Bush years, which will probably be recorded as the high point of their influence. This amendment will require a 60% vote to pass, and they only have until February to get the almost 700,000 required signatures.
The real joy in Florida is that you only have 75 words for an amendment and they usually want to hide the meaning of what they are doing.
The crazies will always be with us, and there is a hard-core strand of Calvinism down here that can get really annoying.
Yes, it is sort of weird the way the Catholics and Calvinists are converging on some issues, given their history.
This phenomenon is far from new. When I started my tiny business in 1988 with a contract to do a political mailing list database for the local Planned Parenthood, my employers explained that many of these hostile protesters opposed even contraception. At the time, I could scarcely believe it. Over the months I worked for Planned Parenthood, I watched numerous women running the gauntlet from the parking lot to the door, facing bloody-fetus posters on sticks waved so close you could easily imagine that the intent was assault of patients… women who were there in the first place mostly for gynecological exams, pregnancy status checks for women who most definitely wanted to bear a child, and yes, of course, contraception. A submicroscopic percentage of women were there to terminate their pregnancies… but the other 99.9 percent of women were confronted by the zealots just the same. I came to realize what you stated here: these people despise women, possibly for biblical “reasons” or possibly just because the nut-cases are just plain sicko.
It takes a very bent reading of the Bible or the Koran to arrive at any justification for what these people believe, but their are always a few who are looking for some excuse for their failures, and blaming other people is easier that accepting that you didn’t work hard enough.
Shifting a the blame to a group with less power than you have is always safer than going after the more powerful, who may, in fact, have played a part in your problems.
Part of the reaction is fear of any group that has the courage to actually oppose those in power. This plays a role in the reaction to labor unions, civil rights groups, environmental groups, and other activists who are willing to speak truth to power.
The Nine-Twelvers don’t really think that there is a threat from the Obama administration, or they wouldn’t be in street. Look at the apology to Obama and compare it to the apologies by Republicans to Rush Limbaugh. It isn’t hard to see who really scares them.
Once more, in unison, “YOU CANNOT LEGISLATE MORALITY!”. Pardon the all caps.
.-= last blog ..Pausing One Fast Minute =-.
I would add, that you shouldn’t even try unless you have some morals.
I live among these losers and too many of them are serial bigamists. If they can’t even stay married, they are not the people I would choose to instruct me on family life. The same goes for a bunch of old men who are not supposed to be involved. There can’t be much worse than having the rules of “the game” drawn up by failures and spectators.