Butt Babies got no reason....
Almost a week later I'm still hung up on South Dakota's Napoli and his interesting...Um... discussion of what situation would be serious enough for a woman to be allowed an abortion. What are special circumstances according to the patriarchal Fundamentalist Christian crowd up there in beautiful South Dakota?
Lets see...In great detail, Napoli tells us that the girl would be a Christian Virgin who was saving herself for marriage. He then goes on to elaborate as to the brutality of the attack and the sodomy involved....Napoli is really into this attack and the emotional fallout of the resulting pregnancy.
On Air America's Majority Report, Jeaneane Garafalo wrestled with the obvious question of what sodomy would have to do with pregnancy, calling this baby a "Butt Baby," which I somehow find pretty funny, considering that the sodomy obviously is just the titillation that these guys crave and yet hate themselves for.
Again the Christian Conservatives have shown their strange psychological problems about sex and women and their feelings of lack of control. You can hear how terrified this guy is, and he covers it up with bravado and sureness of mission as if leading the savages to Jesus will save him along with them! These convictions are rooted in a selective reading of scripture, and the fear that someone else's sin somehow bleeds over into one's own purity. So, the scripture reader feels compelled to try to stop the sin in order to cleanse himself of the transferred sin, and maybe in saving a "baby" saves himself somehow. But really it just allows him to feel in control of something that scares him, women having sex out of wedlock.
I've always thought that this sort of religious conviction indicates more than a simple devotion, but a serious fear of death. I'm not saying that all religious people are like that, but whenever I hear one of these conservative Christian creeps go on about what level of sexual activity is acceptable in women, I get a crawly feeling like something bad is happening and I just want to take a shower.
Who spends time thinking about the exact details of this stuff?
And then there is the issue at hand:
Here is a group of people who are more interested in the fortunes of a bunch of cells that can't live outside of the mother's body, than they are in the suffering of the live children in this world. It never occurs to them that the best way to save these cells is to offer programs to the mothers that fully support these children once they are born. Forcing women to have babies that they cant afford or handle only creates a world where women and their children live in poverty.
Not that it should be important, but, in my opinion, a fetus is only a person when it can survive outside of the mother on its own or with medical care. Until then, it is a part of the mother's body and we must defer to the mother, even if we don't agree with her decisions.
It only makes scientific sense to consider it that way or we end up devaluing the life and rights of the mother, who is a born person so has to be accorded the rights of the constitution.
Life is full of tragedy and to try to deny that or to value one tragedy over another is crazy. The only rule of thumb that I go by is to deal with the tragedy at hand before you take on a new one.
If every life is precious then there are some very bold contradictions in how we are running this country. Perhaps the real message is that every white American life is precious; that deaths in the WTC are worth more than deaths in the the Oklahoma City bombing; that the "snowflake" cell blobs of rich white people who can afford invitro fertilization or even health insurance, are worth more than inner city kids who are not getting proper nutrition or education.
Last Tuesday Sam Seder was talking about a question posed to a right-wingnut that if you were in a fire and there were 4 petri dishes with embroyos in them and a 2 year old child in the room , who would you save?
that's the question exactly....And the guy couldn't even answer the question.
Why cant we work on the people that we have already? Why is it so important to make more people when we hardly take care of the ones we've got? How does it make sense to cut funds to programs that help people at the same time that they are forcing women to have more unwanted babies?
If the American government wants to offer stipends to women who might consider having babies instead of abortions, and then offer health care, places to live, and education, that's one thing. If the American government wants to strengthen the laws on deadbeat dads and make sure that all of the responsibility does not fall on the mother, that's one thing. If the American government wants to insure that all women have health care and easy access to birth control, the number of abortions will decrease. These are real , proven measures that might insure that more of these clumps of cells might develop into people or not be created at all.
No one wants to have an abortion. It is always a tragedy and it stays with the mother forever, no matter how she is perceived or how she acts. But, the alterative for many women might be the loss of her own life, and not in ways that Napoli might consider fun to think about, but in ways that might go unseen for years, ways that might be taken out on the child, ways that crush a spirit and condemn one to a lifetime of poverty and missed opportunity. But ultimately, this is the private decision of the mother. It is a medical procedure on something that is a part of her body unless and until it can survive by itself.
I don't believe that the Republicans really want abortion outlawed. Real Republicans don't want more social programs and they want people to be more independent. To screw with the privacy of the individual, or to mess with what the states do, is not the Republican way. The large majority of Americans, including Republicans, want abortion to be safe and legal.
We are hearing from a very loud fringe group that only gets this much press because the president is one of them. Our moral lives and decisions should be private.
I want to see these guys actually get down on the floor with some underprivileged kids and interact, instead of sitting up on a hill somewhere passing judgment on the private decisions of the mothers.
I cant get over the nerve of these holier than thou guys who would definitely cast the first stone with one hand while robbing you blind with the other.
I hope that there is a judgment day and a hell because, if there is, a place is surely reserved for Napoli and his ilk.
Here is the Dowd!!
March 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
W.'s Mixed Messages
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The good news is the Arabs aren't going to run our ports.
The bad news is the Americans are going to run our ports.
Homeland Security's protection of the ports is a joke. The goof-off Michael Chertoff is remarkably still in charge. The swaggering of the president and vice president on national security has been exposed as a sham, with millions spent shoring up our defenses wasted, with the Iraq war aggravating our danger, and with anti-Muslim feeling swelling among Americans and anti-American feeling swelling among Muslims.
A Washington Post-ABC News Poll this week found that a growing percentage of Americans have unfavorable opinions of Islam. A majority now think Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence.
The creepy John Grisham-style Washington firm called the Carlyle Group, suffused with Arab connections and money, and seeded with Saudi money (including bin Laden family money until after 9/11), even gave some thought to investing in the ports, before backing off.
The nakedness of the ports is so obvious it was a "Sopranos" plot point. A source called Deep Water, who helped check out new hires for the New Jersey port before and after 9/11, told the F.B.I. a couple of years ago about what he saw as gaps in security practices on the waterfront and a "suspicious" flow of recent Arab immigrants, some speaking little English, being hired as port watchmen. Deep Water said he'd recently been interviewed by New York detectives.
President Bush does not seem to understand that it was his bumbling  rather than our bigotry  that led Americans to gulp and yelp at the idea of an Arab government running our ports. When the president said yesterday that "my administration was satisfied that port security would not have been undermined by the agreement," he seemed oblivious to the fact that  after W.M.D., Katrina and Iraq  many Americans no longer trust this administration to protect them.
Still shaken by his first rebellion by Republicans fed up with White House hubris and hamhandedness, W. chastised lawmakers about xenophobia. "I'm concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," he said. He said that we had to cultivate moderate Arabs, but that moderate Muslims were shrinking back as violent Islamists pushed ahead.
American skepticism about the Dubai government running our ports is not prejudice. As Denny Hastert put it, "It's counterintuitive." There is nothing wrong with wanting Americans to be responsible for American security. That's not nativism or jingoism or bigotry. It's self-reliance and prudence. Of course, such an attitude can be exploited by bigots. And some bigotry is being fed by scenes on the news every day of Arab fighters blowing things up, leading to the same stereotype of Arabs that existed in the 70's, a caricature limned from terrorism, oil and the petrodollar.
The president also does not seem to understand that he spurred the dissonance that led to this vote of no-confidence. Since Sept. 11, he has been anti-terror but pro-Mideast, a position that has left Americans confused. His enemy is a tactic that's too vague to pinpoint, too vast to ever defeat. In some ways, the country seems more alive to the true origins of the fiends who attacked us than the president.
His nuclear deals have so jumbled up the carrots and sticks that American threats on nuclear proliferation have lost all meaning.
W. and General Rove present the war on terror as Armageddon and World War VIII, yet in every other aspect of foreign policy, it's business as usual. One minute they're scaring Americans into supporting their power grabs by essentially yelling, "They're coming to kill us!" The next minute, the Persian Gulf is still the great nexus for capitalist deals by the likes of Treasury Secretary John Snow, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.
The president preaches that we are seriously threatened by autocratic Arab societies that won't modernize and become free markets, but then his cozy relationship with autocratic Arab regimes, including the Saudis, continues basically unchanged.
As Michael Hirsh of Newsweek summed up in a recent column: "How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence."
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
posted by Melina at 5:04 PM
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