Monk

This is part of the fallout from the Todd Akin comments.

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed — the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

Ms. Dowd is responding to the Todd Akin controversy, bringing out the argument that it is not the substance of the man that troubles Republicans, including presidential contender Mitt Romeny, but the man's presentation, which was crass enough to offend even semi-educated, anti-poor, racist independents. Americans are not quite that dumb, at least not yet, despite the best efforts of Fox News - maybe the next generation at the rate we are going.

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

-- News-LJ

See what happens when you start turning away pieces of knowledge like evolution and you believe ideas like early-earth creationism, and you start thinking that knowledge is not something that you have to learn and work on but something you can just pull out of your ass at a moment's need: the dumbness grows and grows. It's running at epidemic rates in Republican circles. The Center for Disease Control should step in. Knowledge and reality are not faith-based.

"Abortion is a healthcare service like slavery is an employee compensation package."

-- LJer

That's a new line for me. I googled it, and I think it's actually original. See, LiveJournal still has some life in it.

We have a smashing account that the Christian site, Patheos, on what a recent innovation it is for the fundamentalist community to believe that life begins at conception. Is it too good to be true? I hope we hear more on the issue.

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In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.

Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.

Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.

That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.

That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:

God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.

Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.

At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting.

Even more interesting is how thoroughly the record has been rewritten. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

-- Fred Clark at Patheos and LJ

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"I'll tell you what I like about Obama, which is connected with the book. He really doesn't like to surround himself only with like-minded others. He really is someone who has never lived and wouldn't live in an echo chamber. His great skepticism about the red state, blue state divide is just the thought that no particular party has a monopoly on wisdom. He has an amazing line in the "Audacity of Hope" where he says, roughly, there are feminists in the United States who mourn their own abortions, and there are conservative women who have paid for their friends' daughters' abortions. And the reason I think this is so great is that it breaks down a sense that Americans come in two types."

-- Cass Sunstein

But is he too naive to play power-politics on the world stage? Or even on the national stage? It is not just about being the best debater and the best mannered and most open, or having the most inspiring message.

Such is the virtue of Hillary. She is one worldly tough bitch, already seasoned by two terms in the White House. Of course, some would say that such Washington experience is the problem, but is this really the time for experimentation? It is enough to change from Bush and the Republicans.

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Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women -- abortion.

-- Joyce Arthur, "When the Anti-Choice Choose"

Here are a couple of anectdotes Ms. Arthur has compiled:

"I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago. During her whole stay at the clinic, we felt that she was not quite right, but there were no real warning bells. She insisted that the abortion was her idea and assured us that all was OK. She went through the procedure very smoothly and was discharged with no problems. A quite routine operation. Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers." (Physician, Australia)

"I've had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, 'You're not going to tell them, are you!?' When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn't want this to interfere with it." (Physician, Texas)

Such hypocrisy and cruel absurdity is more likely to occur when you cannot separate church from state. Trying to maintain higher ideals of morality is fine and can be a noble thing, but it is not wise trying to legislate higher morality on others. Just see if you can maintain it yourself. That should be challenging enough.

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The Supreme Court came down with a big decision that represents a turning back from the protection of a woman's right to have an abortion. As friends have pointed out, this right was affirmed but this decision works from the proposition that rights are not absolute. In particular, the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions has been upheld.

Dr. Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, makes the interesting argument that Justice Ginsburg's dissent in the case may prove to have more lasting legal life than the majority decision, re-casting the right to have an abortion in terms of women's equality rather than the more nebulous right of privacy:

IN THE LONG RUN, the most important part of the Supreme Court's ruling on "partial-birth" abortions may not be Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion for the majority. It might well be Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent, which attempts, for the first time in the court's history, to justify the right to abortion squarely in terms of women's equality rather than privacy.

... In this week's case, Ginsburg, now the only woman on the court, attempted to re-conceive the foundations of the abortion right, basing it on well-established constitutional principles of equality. Borrowing from her 1985 argument, she said that legal challenges to restrictions on abortion procedures "do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature."

In particular, Justice Ginsburg argues that, at a minimum, restrictions on abortions must protect a woman's health. The ban on partial-birth abortions that the Court upheld is noted for not even allowing an exception for the health of the mother, which marks this ban as being rather hard.

On a personal note, I suppose this argument based on women's equality could work, but I hate the idea of weakening the right of privacy, which protects the idea that government needs to keep its big nose out of our bedroom. But you take what you can get, and individual rights are an endangered legal species these days.


(Source: Cass R. Sunstein for The Los Angeles Times)

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As all Americans cannot help knowing, the political ad campaigns have been especially nasty during these last weeks of what looks to be shaping up as something of a quasi-historic election. One of the nastier ones is that concerning Michael J. Fox and the little feud that Rush Limbaugh has started with him, over whether Fox is exaggerating his Parkinson's symptoms when doing an ad supporting a Democratic candidate who favors embryonic stem-cell research. Jon Swift has done the best with that material as far as I have seen so far:

Rush Limbaugh has always had the courage to fight enemies no one else would dare to take on, but this week he launched his bravest attack yet against a group of people whose power has long gone unchecked: The Disabled. You would think handicapped people would be satisfied when we gave them all of the good parking spaces. You would think they would be a little appreciative for all the wheelchair ramps and the Braille elevator numbers (which I have yet to see anyone use) which have cost businesses a lot of money. You would think that after passing the Americans for Disabilities Act they would just say thank you and shut up. But they just keep wanting more.

It is compassionate conservatism, not fuck-us-blue conservatism. We need to stand up more to special interests and cute celebrities. And we must keep science in its place!

Sometimes it's best just to let go and have some fun with these things, like Mardi Gras.

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And regarding Iraq you are quite the man, aren't you, "making the tough decisions." A regular Harry Truman, consigning thousands to death in order to bring democracy and freedom and peace to millions. But Truman actually produced democracy and freedom and peace, whereas you want credit for your hopes. That's not how it works. If you want to be the hard-ass, you get judged by results. And you can't be Gandhi and Truman at the same time.

-- Michael Kinsley for The Washington Post

That Gandhi part comes in becomes the column is taking issue with President Bush's pristine position on the Life issue when it comes to research on embryos while he is so cavalier about death and collateral damage in the Iraq War, especially when he is failing so bad at the war.

Kinsley is on a roll. It's a good quote. I had not seen Kinsley in some time. I guess he was on an extended vacation, taking advantage of his passport. I wondered if his own case of Parkinson's disease had gotten worse. Embryonic research is not just a theoretical issue for him.

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