Pharisees of the Day
Today's Pharisees are Representative Sam Johnson and the entire congregation of the Allen, Texas United Methodist Church. Rep. Johnson is a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was held as a POW for over seven years, but apparently learned no lessons from this experience other than "Nuke Brown People" (via carpetbagger):

Now we know where Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) thinks the weapons of mass destruction are buried: in Syria, which he said he’d like to nuke to smithereens.

Speaking at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas, on Feb. 19, Johnson told the crowd that he explained his theory to President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) on the porch of the White House one night.

Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ‘em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”

The crowd roared with applause.

The Fifth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill.

For all the fundies' talk about how much they love the Ten Commandments and want them to be displayed in public places around the country, they don't appear to have read them very carefully.
- posted by TJ @ 11:26 AM |

 
It's legal here, but so what?
Watertiger has the goods on how the U.S. is pushing the delegates at the follow-up meeting to a landmark 1995 United Nations conference on women's issues to "make clear that women are not guaranteed a right to abortion."

AP article here.

If you're not angry, you haven't been paying attention.
- posted by TJ @ 11:02 AM |

 
Does having an abortion now mean you give up your right to privacy?
The anti-choice assholes say yes. Tena at first draft has a link to a sobering article in The Nation (by Sharon Lerner) about the anti-choice crowd's utter callousness and lack of respect for the privacy of women who have chosen to have abortions. As many of you have heard, a Colorado funeral home has given ashes resulting from cremations of fetuses aborted at the clinic of Warren Hern (in clear violation of the contract between Hern and the mortuary) to a Boulder Catholic Church to be used for anti-choice propaganda. The ashes were buried in a secret ceremony at the Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Boulder, which "placed them near a 'memorial wall for the unborn,' while a church bell tolled to the rhythm of a beating heart."

It turns out that the personal stories of some of these women don't fit into the stereotypes that the fundies want to portray as the norm for abortions (you know the drill--irresponsible teenagers and uppity women who just want to have sex without consequences). Frankly, I don't give a shit about a woman's reason for choosing an abortion. It is a personal decision and the woman should be free to choose to have an abortion for whatever reason makes sense to her. But it is doubly galling that the Boulder fundies seem to think it is okay for them to make a political statement by trampling on the privacy rights of a woman like Cella Roberts, a Jewish wife and mother who had already experienced the tremendous pain of ending her pregnancy:

Roberts was 23 weeks pregnant when she discovered her fetus had a heart defect that would make it unable to survive outside the womb. Roberts herself was suffering from a blood sugar problem she had developed during the pregnancy and, as it wore on, she was getting sicker and sicker, facing the potentially fatal complication of toxemia. Though an abortion seemed the most logical choice--her doctor counseled it, and everyone from her neighbors to her in-laws urged her to follow his advice--Roberts wasn't sure what to do. So she brought her rabbi along to a doctor's appointment to help her make the wrenching decision.

"We asked all the questions we could," remembers Roberts. "Then I cried, and cried, and cried." Rather than risk her life to deliver a dead baby, Roberts decided to end the pregnancy. She was referred to Warren Hern in Boulder, Colorado, virtually the only physician in a six-state area who could perform an abortion at that stage. The four-day procedure was excruciating. But Roberts, who already had a four-year-old daughter at the time, eventually managed to put it behind her. "I had responsibilities to people who were already living. I was a mother and a wife and a sister and a friend and a neighbor," she says. Roberts had to move on--and she did, adopting a baby last year.

[snip--After learning what the mortuary had done], Robert's response was pure anger. "This time, I cried out of fury," says Roberts. "That was my fetus! I had worked out a situation to take care of that fetus in a way that was appropriate for me and my family and our religious views." Roberts knew she had to respond to the indignity. But what is the appropriate reaction to such a bizarre and personal affront? "I can't imagine going to a Catholic grave and digging it up and saying I don't think this should be here, I'm going to put it in my Jewish graveyard," she says.

As Tena rightly says, "This story reveals exactly how the anti-choice movement views women - as nonentities. How else could these people be so cruel as to dispose of their fetuses without their permission or even their knowledge? It just staggers the imagination that anyone would think that he or she has the right to completely disregard the feelings and wishes of a woman who's pregnancy did not result in a live birth to this extent."

Jesus would be so proud.

Note: Sharon Lerner also has an excellent article on the state of Roe v. Wade in Mississippi and what this means for the rest of the country.
- posted by TJ @ 10:35 AM |

 
Stock Up on The Pill
For those out there who hadn't yet yeard, contraception is under attack in this country. There is an organization of "pro-life" obstetricians and gynecologists who subscribe to the belief that the birth control pill and other forms of contraception are abortifacient. In September of 2004, the BBC reported (in tones of utter amazement that such a thing could happen in a civilized country) on the growing practice of pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills to women with legitimate prescriptions:

Julee Lacey, a mother of two, had used the Pill for nine years when a pharmacist at her local chemist in Texas refused her prescription. "She [the pharmacist] began to tell me she personally does not believe in birth control," says Ms Lacey.

"I was a little caught off-guard and shocked... I asked her again. She said: 'No, ma'am, I don't believe in birth control. I can't help you'...

"I really couldn't believe she had the right to withhold my medication from me," she adds.

At first these were just isolated cases, mostly in the Midwest. But recently they have increased dramatically. [snip]

At the moment, the Pill is hugely popular in the US. But calling it a type of abortion opens up a whole new front in the pro-life, pro-choice debate. This moral condemnation is a fresh challenge to one of the most used, most reliable methods of family planning.

As discussed in this Prevention magazine article, there are also many doctors unwilling to prescribe the Pill:

Melissa Kelley, 35, was just as stunned when her gynecologist told her she would not renew her prescription for birth control pills last fall.

"She told me she couldn't in good faith prescribe the Pill anymore," says Kelley, who lives with her husband and son in Allentown, PA. Then the gynecologist told Kelley she wouldn't be able to get a new prescription from her family doctor, either. "She said my primary care physician was the one who helped her make the decision." Lacey's pharmacist and Kelley's doctors are among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of physicians and pharmacists who now adhere to a controversial belief that birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraception--including the skin patch, the vaginal ring, and progesterone injections--cause tens of thousands of "silent" abortions every year. Consequently, they are refusing to prescribe or dispense them.

[snip]

Last winter, 24-year-old Katie Williams encountered a doctor who refused to give her a prescription for the Pill, even though she'd already been taking it for 5 years--originally to relieve extremely painful menstrual cramps. Williams, who had just moved to Milwaukee for a job with an insurance company, realized she was nearly out of Pills. Her roommate recommended the physician who had written a Pill prescription for her a year before: Cynthia Jones-Nosacek, MD, a board-certified family doctor with St. Mary's Medical Clinic, a Catholic medical center in Milwaukee. Williams made the appointment, explaining she needed a routine annual exam and a new prescription.

But when she arrived at the office, recalls Williams, "the doctor's assistant told me 'the doctor doesn't write prescriptions for the Pill.' I was totally floored. I just stared at her. "

Williams opted to take her chances and see the doctor anyway, thinking the assistant must have been confused. After the doctor finished her exam, Williams asked for her script, explaining she'd been taking the Pill for several years. "The doctor told me she doesn't believe in oral contraceptives and does believe in natural family planning," Williams claims. "I told her that's ridiculous." Angry, Williams stormed out of the doctor's office.

"Refusing women access to the Pill is a very disturbing trend," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The war on choice is not just about abortion anymore. It's about our right to birth control."

Stock up, people. Get as much as you can now. Your daughters will thank you.
- posted by TJ @ 2:00 PM |

 
Recent developments
So, it's been a while since I've posted anything. Busy at work, and the flu hit the TJ household. But of course, it's not as if anything's changed over the past few weeks. We've continued our slide into becoming a fundamentalist state. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the Attorney General of Kansas wants the personal medical histories of women and girls who have had late-term abortions in that state. He claims he's looking for evidence of child sexual abuse, but it is crystal clear that his real motive is to find out if any women had late-term abortions in violation of law. (As critics have pointed out, “If Kline's motive was to find young girls who were raped and became pregnant, he could have looked at state birth certificates instead of abortion records.”) Kansas law prohibits abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy unless the continuation of pregnancy could severely injure the woman. Shawnee Country District Court Judge Richard D. Anderson said, sure, you can have those records, you can spend your nights reading the sexual histories and birth control practices of these 90 women and girls (who won't even be informed that you are given this information). Two clinics involved have appealed this decision, but I'm not holding my breath that they will succeed.

Ladies, you need to wake up. Your freedom to live how you choose, to have sex with whomever you choose, to marry (or not) whomever you choose, to use whatever form of birth control you choose, are all at stake here. Shortly after Bush's reelection, Deirdre Fulton wrote an excellent article summarizing the dangers posed to women's rights by the conservative agenda. I urge you all to read it, because it is happening NOW. At the recent CPAC conference in DC, Salon reported the following statement by Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum:

"I'm talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people," he said. "The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives."

Now, let's analyze that comment for a moment, because frankly, it blew me away. Not that he said it, but that he was bold enough to say it in a publicly reported forum.

The less virtue we have in our society...
Virtue to whom? Whose virtue? Well, obviously, virtue as defined by Senator Rick Santorum, who is an anti-choice Catholic bigot.

...the more the need for government to control our lives...
What he is really saying here is more need for government to control the lives of people whose virtue is sub-par. In other words, women and girls who have sex and want abortions.

I posted this at Eschaton recently, but all you people who think that the so-called "pro-life" movement really cares about life should think again. Occasionally, in unguarded moments, they let their real colors show. Recently, on the Corner at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO's editor and a truly sexually repressed woman who needs to get laid, posted her musings regarding safe haven laws:

LIFE SIGNS [K. J. Lopez ]
Just thinking aloud a little: I’ve never liked “safe haven” laws--legal abandonment of babies.

Here’s my conundrum: I want us saving kids. But do safe-haven laws send a cultural message that there’s no responsibility that comes with being a mother if you don’t ask a mother to at least hang out, talk to authorities? I think you might save some babies lives but you send a larger cultural message—that infants can be dropped in emergency-room deposit boxes, etc. Nevermind the odd potential legal and other problems that could arise. In other words, does it do more damage than not?

Anyway, I am reminded of that in today’s story about the baby in Florida who was thrown from a car with a plastic bag over her head. The parents are criminals and better be prosecuted.

But doing the TV this morning the sheriff (I think it was, of Broward Co.) almost overemphasized that mothers can get rid of their children via safe-haven laws (which, admittedly, is a brilliant alternative to throwing a newborn out of a car). On The Today Show, though, Matt Lauer had to remind the guy to point out that what was done here was a crime.

Legal abortion, Peter Singer...legal abandonment...these things are very different mind you--the first two vs. the last--but there's an association...get my drift about the overall culture messages? I guess what I am saying is that I rather communities/states be expending energy on adoption-education campaigns. This is how you responsibly and easily give your child to another.
Posted at 02:50 PM [Friday, February 11, 2005]

What she is saying here is that the larger cultural message is more important than the potential that babies' lives might be saved by these laws. She doesn't care about life. What she is concerned with is "responsibility" (as reader dave noted, this is really about blame). In other words, making women pay for their “sinful” sexual practices. Because, ultimately, to the fundamentalists, sex outside of marriage is wrong and the woman should be punished for any violation of this credo. It is both sad and depressing that so many people still harbor the same beliefs that were prevalent when Hester Prynne wore the scarlet letter.

And let us not even get started on the “responsibility” crowd’s disdain for the welfare of children after they are born. This was amply demonstrated on the comments board at Eschaton this morning, by a troll calling him or herself “Jade,” who responded to a commenter’s postings about the expense of caring for a disabled child thusly:

"Where's universal health coverage? Easily available and affordable day care and preschool for a disabled child? Where's the assistance my brother may need if his son is not eventually capable of living on his own?"

It's in Utopia! Or, perhaps in the old Soviet Union. Or, I think China has universal health care.

What's sad is how much our citizens now look to the goverment for assistance.

Live free, and die.

Simple.

Setting aside Jade’s ignorance of the health care available in Western Europe, this response perfectly encapsulates the Puritanical view of most anti-choicers, who violently mocked Hillary Clinton’s infamous view that “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.” Of course, middle-class mothers, struggling to raise children and hold on to their jobs (because, really, who can afford to stay home in the Bush Boom years?) are beginning to recognize the wisdom of that philosophy. Judith Warner has written a book called Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which was excerpted in Newsweek recently:

Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.

It is time for us to take a stand and say, No More. We will not allow fundamentalists to take away the right to do what we wish with our own bodies. We will not allow access to birth control to be jeopardized by a few powerful groups with a warped interpretation of ancient religious texts. We will not continue to allow Bush and his cronies to ignore our pressing need for affordable, high-quality child care, universal health care, fully-funded public education for all, flexible working hours, and time to spend with our families in favor of a warmongering agenda that is bankrupting our nation and killing our youth (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives lost). Because, you see, it is all of one piece, one package. A nation that denies women the right to choose what they do with their own bodies will eventually deny other rights to those it successfully demonizes—homosexuals, the poor, the mentally ill, immigrants, people of color. And, likewise, a nation that denies the rights of gays to get married will deny the rights of women to choose. These issues cannot be separated. We are all part of a joint struggle and we must stand together and fight back against the people who want to turn our nation into Gilead.

(And yes, one of these days, I will post something about the name of this blog. It is of course taken from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.)
- posted by TJ @ 1:23 PM |

 
Pharisee of the Day
This is the first in an ongoing series. Today's Pharisee (look it up, heathens) is my own fair Senator, Mary Landrieu, eldest daughter of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu. During a November 2002 debate with Louisiana Republican Senate nominee Suzanne Haik Terrell, Mary responded to Terrell's assaults on her personal religious beliefs and loudly proclaimed that "I have a good relationship with my God and with my savior."

Here at WTG, we thought we'd compare the words of Jesus, as reported in the Bible (New International Version) with Mary's vote yesterday to confirm Alberto Gonzalez, torture proponent, as Attorney General of the United States, one of only six Democratic Senators to do so:***

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? Matthew 5:43-46

Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Luke 6:31-36

A vote for Alberto Gonzalez, the architect of Abu Ghraib, is a vote for torture and a vote against the clear instructions of Christ to do good to one's enemies. (Much more on this topic in later posts.) Mary's religious beliefs are her own, but for using her Savior as a debate talking point and then ignoring his words in yesterday's vote, Mary is today's Pharisee of the Day.

Ask yourself, Mary, Who Would Jesus Torture?

***For a list of the traitorous cowards including photos and contact, go here .
- posted by TJ @ 11:09 AM |

 
A thought
If Bush is indeed the Antichrist, does that mean Joementum is the Antijudas?
- posted by TJ @ 10:09 PM |

 
And the Antichrist Speaks
So, like I said, I didn't tune in to the SOTU last night. Plenty of other bloggers out there willing to take one for the team, so to speak. But I hear that the Dems are starting to grow some ovaries and actually, gasp! heckled Bush when he was spouting more lies about Social Security. (Naturally, the Rude One deals with the thin-skinned wankers who objected to such callous treatment of their Lord and Savior, in his--or her--own unparalleled style. Warning: you will no doubt be treated to many links to the Rude Pundit in the coming months--in my humble opinion, the Dems could learn a lot from the Rude One.)

Stay tuned...in the next few days we'll take a look at some statements regarding Social Security from Faux Christians of all variety.

btw--for the nonexistent readers who might be curious about the Antichrist reference, apparently Pope John Paul II now believes that George W. Bush is the Antichrist. No, really. According to freelance journalist Wayne Madsen, after allowing John Kerry to be smeared by the Catholic Church for his views on abortion, the Pope has had a change of heart and is beginning to suspect that "Bush's blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs, and his constant references to 'evil doers,' in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations - the anti-Christ." And the Catholic New Times has picked up on it here.

Oh well. You made your bed, Holy Father. Hope it's comfy.
- posted by TJ @ 11:18 AM |

 
Testing
Well, here goes.

Courtesy of Eschaton commenter "MisterX" we get this bit of snark:

Occident, n. The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce". These, also, are the principle industries of the Orient.

--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

How's that for starters? This blog will cover, from time to time as the demands of work and family permit, the lies, hypocrisy and other shenanigans of fundamentalist religious nuts across the world, from the Pope to Radical Cleric James Dobson to Our Anointed Leader Himself. That said, there will be no liveblogging of the SOTU this evening, as it will be all I can do to get through the speech without retching. After-the-fact analysis will commence as soon as the transcript's out and the hangover has subsided.



- posted by TJ @ 3:15 PM |