Monthly Archives: February 2008

Obama can’t be fooled anti-choice activists?

As far as Hillary and Barack are concerned I’ve been of the mind that there is nothing radically different between them to justify being a near zealot for one or the other. However, a post about Barack’s position on abortion recently landed in my gmail that seems to show that while Barack may be for unity, he’s not for compromising on things he considers to be right.

The subject in question is abortion/reproductive rights and Barack seems to have went above and beyond the call of duty by voting against various bills that seek to undermine abortion rights. One such bill was SB1093 which would have resulted in pre-viable fetuses being called children which would entitle them with constitutional rights (the right to life and due process would essentially bar women from obtaining abortions). Barack had this to say (PDF):

Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term.

That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute.

Barack has also come out against parental notification laws and the funding of abstinence only sex “education”. He considers reproductive health care to be basic health care and supports OTC emergency contraception for both adult women and minors. He also supports having insurance companies cover birth control.

If that wasn’t enough to kiss him over, he also opposes the Hyde Amendment, doesn’t think public money should be spent on Crisis Pregnancy Centers and would get rid of the global gag rule reinstated by George Bush when he took office.

I find this quite unusual for a politician who speaks about uniting us as such unity is normally achieved by undermining the rights of women, people of colour and gay people. Granted, Barack does not support marriage equality and this is a negative to be sure and one I’m personally disappointed with him over, but he doesn’t seem like the type who’s going to compromise by backing down as has been quite common with democratic politicians lately.

I think that’s what we really need.  Someone who isn’t going to compromise on what’s right, just on things that are little more than superficial differences (ie, “you say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to”).  We’ve been compromising on the former for nearly eight years now and look where it’s gotten us.

Huckabee endorses personhood for eggs

Republican candidate Mike Huckabee has endorsed a bill in Colorado that if passed into law will amend the constitution of Colorado to state that personhood begins at fertilization.

Doing so will effectively make abortion a crime as one of the rights of personhood is the right to life.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Monday endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

The former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister also supports a human-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Huckabee spoke favorably about the Colorado ballot initiative, sponsored by 20-year-old Kristi Burton and her Colorado for Equal Rights group, during his Friday visit to Colorado Springs.

On Monday, Huckabee lent official support to the measure.

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value,” Huckabee said. “Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Burton’s initiative, if approved by voters in November, would extend state constitutional protections to every fertilized egg, guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law.

Some are saying that this bill is a new tactic in the drive to return to the days when abortion was illegal, but I disagree.

It used to be that they argued that women had a duty to carry pregnancies to term. Now they argue that the the state has a duty to see that pregnancies are carried to term. The rights and privileges of women have always been considered to be, at best, secondary in terms of importance.

If anything, this bill and the others like it are just more honest. They don’t even give lip service to the rights of women. In fact, I think an argument can be made that they’re worse than the bills that have come before. Women largely do not exist in these bills. We are implicitly demoted to little more than publicly owned life support systems with no rights or privileges except those our owners grant us.

If your brain could vote, who would it choose?

Hillary & Barack

You may be dazzled by Barack and think McCain is the last surviving member of the GOP Clown Car, but what about your lizard brain? Does it agree? Take the test and find out.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that while my lizard brain agrees that McCain and Huckabee suck, it hadn’t been suckered into thinking Barack was worse than Hillary due to the misdeeds of some of his followers. Hillary and Barack came out dead even at the top of the list.

Bah humbug!

So it isn’t Christmas, but that’s the kind of mood I’ve been in these last couple of days. Between the poor little persecuted Christians to the Obamabots who hate Hillary more than they support Barack, I’m in a very bad mood. So, here’s one of my favourite songs, Bodies by Drowning Pool.

Saving My Hymen for Jesus

Here’s a funny video of two young women who plan to save there hymen for the Lord.

The Happy Heretic is back!

Fireworks Background

I got a nice surprise this morning. Judith Hayes has reopened her site after being absent these last couple of years and will once again be writing her excellent columns. You can check out some of her older columns here .

An excerpt from her new column “What’s Your Favorite Bible Verse“:

… we are definitely heading toward a theocracy—a Protestant, Christian one naturally. If I’m wrong about that, how can the above quotes exist?

Making it all the more ominous is the fact that Mike Huckabee won in the Iowa Caucus.

The numbers are frightening because of what Huckabee stands for. To say he’s a Christian fundamentalist is not news. Evangelical? Same. Insane? Possibly. When you read the following keep in mind that as a citizen Huckabee certainly has the right to believe anything he wants to believe. But to think that so many American citizens believe that a man with his brand of faith should be the Leader of the Free World is astonishing and scary.

Read the rest over at Judith’s place.

Saudi to behead woman for witchcraft

Photo of George Bush & King Abdullah in Saudi Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali has been sentenced to death by having her head cut off because a man accused her of making him impotent. Arrested in May, 2004 Fawza was held for 35 days in which she beaten to the point of having to receive medical care after one of the beatings.

Denied access to her lawyer, a confession was extracted which Fawza had to sign by thumbprint because she’s illiterate.

Her conviction was overturned by an appeals court, but another court has since decided to sentence her to death anyway for the “good of society”.

If you recall, Saudi has been in the news two other times recently for it’s crimes against women. The first time was when a rape victim was sentenced to a beating. The second happened quite recently when the Saudi religious police made a woman strip for meeting a man in the family section (women are segregated by law in Saudi society) of a Starbucks.

Can we just have change instead?

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times. Vote for Change. Vote for Obama. There’s only one problem. Obama doesn’t appear to be about actually changing anything if this photo of him in front of one of his signs is to be taken at face value:

Barack Obama, Change We Can Believe In

“Believe” in change? No, thanks. I’d rather have real change right now. I want to actually see things change. I don’t care who’s nose gets bloodied in the process. Fighting ain’t bad by default. It’s what you’re fighting for or against that makes the fighting good or bad.

I want to see an end to the attacks on the rights of women. I want to see an end to the attacks on the gay community and want to see them get the same rights and privileges that my partner and I enjoy without question.

I want the religious reich kicked so hard in the nuts they’ll still be on the floor a hundred years from now. Hell, I want to to see the GOP go from God’s Official Party back to the Grand Old Party.

I do not want to believe these changes as well as others are going to happen someday. I want to know that these changes are going to happen.

Women cannot be in positions of authority over boys

A religious academy in Kansas recently expelled a female referee from a boys basketball game after claiming it was inappropriate for her to tell boys what to do. Kudos, however, go to the two male referees who walked out also, one with the expelled woman and the other after he found out what was going on.

Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was to work the game with her.

“I said, ‘If Michelle has to leave, then I’m leaving with her,”‘ Putthoff said Wednesday. “I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.

“When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games,” said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. “I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that.”

I remain convinced that more men need to start doing such things when the women they work with are discriminated against on the basis of their gender. It’s the only way women are ever going to be seen as equal to men and the religions will never change their beloved books as long as the majority is complacent in the hate and bigotry that so many teach.

As it stands, the academy may find itself banned from playing groups within the association if it turns out this is a policy of the school. How long do you think it’ll take the religious right to start saying that it’s the academy that’s being victimized if that happens? I give it a week or less.

Can we drown the atheist “movement”, please?

I’ve been an “out” atheist since I was a teenager when I was put on the spot about the truthfulness of the Bible. Having grown up in the backwater areas of the United States the only other atheists I knew were my brothers and my dad. I was in my early twenties and half way around the world before I met another atheist.

I’ve met other atheists (real life, not online) since then, but the pendulum remained squarely on the theistic side for the most part. Then September 11, 2001 rolled around and Muslim extremists finally succeeded in their attempts to bring the World Trade Center down. Since then atheists have been coming out of the wood work, especially here in America.

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, published in August of 2005, became a rallying point and a best seller. Before long he was joined by others and in what seems like a blink of an eye, the atheist movement had arrived and has been growing ever since.

I, for one, am sick of the movement. It seems to me that it is populated by assholes. No, I am not talking about Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins or the other horsemen. I’m talking about the people who’ve decided that there are two kinds of atheists. The “good” kind of atheist they just happen to be and everybody else.

The ‘everybody else’ group is populated by atheists the “good” atheists have deemed unacceptable for a variety of reasons. They’re described as hostile, irrational, unreasonable, dogmatic, ignorant, “just like the [favorite disliked group of theists]” and so on and so forth.

In the real world, such shit is, at the very least, extremely rude, but in the “movement” this good vs. bad atheist mentality is the golden rule. Why? Because I’ve gotten several comments/emails about how “atheist whoever” and/or “atheistic whatever” is an affront to the “movement”.

I expect this from theists as it’s the old ‘divide & conquer’ tactic and dismiss it on the spot. With other atheists though, I’ve decided to see where this comes from and it’s my firm opinion that the problem is the “movement”.

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