Civil & Human Rights

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Tina Dupuy writes at crooksandliars.com They've Socialized Our Wombs: 'In Arizona I'm Pregnant':

I will be in Arizona tomorrow, driving through on my way to New York City. And I am "expecting" (get it?) to be legally pregnant for a couple of hours. When the law sees us as public incubators – adding a prequel to conception is the least of our worries. It means your body is not your own. If your body is not yours they can probe you, criminalize what you do with your own body and arbitrarily change the legal duration of your pregnancy. And it's already happening in Arizona: Make way for state-decided immaculate conceptions!

"This lovely [satirical] video and song comes to us from Taylor Ferrara." (below thw fold).

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: In an interview on Meet The Press Gregory in March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) slammed the GOP assault on working women, and even urged his fellow Republicans to finally end their lengthy war on women’s reproductive health. Think Progress reported After Backing Anti-Birth Control Blunt Amendment, McCain Now Says GOP Needs To … Read more

Posted by AzblueMeanie:

There was a great comedy album called "The Wategate Comedy Hour," with skits written by Jack Burns & Avery Schreiber, plus Ann Elder (1973). My favorite skit was Fannie Flagg playing Martha Mitchell, the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (who was sentenced to prison in 1977, serving 19 months), drunk dialing a UPI reporter to dish dirt on Richard and Pat Nixon.

In one of these skits, Martha Mitchell is talking about Tricky Dick to the UPI reporter and says, "If he was doing to her (Pat) what he's doing to the rest of the country, she'd be a whole lot happier!"

Perhaps this is the problem with the anti-sex culture warrior Mullah Cathi Herrod of the Christian Taliban aka the Center for Arizona Polcy. Someone seriously needs a booty call. "When I get that feeling, I need Sexual Healing" (by Marvin Gaye). Maybe "she'd be a whole lot happier!" *

I have to give Mullah Cathi Herrod credit. She managed to bully and intimidate the Tea-Publican Arizona legislature into passing perhaps the most restrictive abortion bill in the nation, HB 2036. Thanks to the way a woman's menstrual cycle is calculated under her bill, a woman can be pregnant two weeks before having sex. As Stephen Colbert pointed out in a recent segment of the Colbert Report, this means that all women are pregnant. It's richly ironic that Mullah Cathi Herrod devised a "prophylactic" rule to cover all women. Brewer signs bill banning abortions after 20 weeks | Arizona Capitol Times.

She also succeeded in kicking low-income women to the curb who rely on Planned Parenthood for their healthcare needs on the specious theory that funding Planned Parenthood's healthcare programs indirectly subsidizes the safe, legal abortion services of Planned Parenthood. 

The federal Hyde Amendment banning federal funds for abortions has been in place since 1976. Arizona law already bars the state from using any public funds for abortions except when a woman's life is in danger. Public money may also not be used to pay for a health insurance that provides for abortion services. Not one effin' dime of government money goes to elective abortion services.

Planned Parenthood does a painstaking job of bookkeeping to keep funds received for women's healthcare services segregated from the funds it receives from donors to provide safe and legal abortions, which accounts for less than 3 percent of its services. Planned Parenthood does this painstaking bookkeeping in the event of an audit of its books from the likes of Arizona legislators.

Under Mullah Cathi Herrod's bill, HB 2800, Planned Parenthood will no longer receive funds to pay its doctors to provide low-cost cancer screenings, pap smears, STD treatment, contraceptive options and other health-care services to low-income women who are on the state’s AHCCCS program. Bill that would deny money to Planned Parenthood ready for governor | Arizona Capitol Times. Hmmm, that doesn't sound very "Christian" to me. What would Jesus do? Matthew 25:31-46.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

There was a My Turn column in the Arizona Republic on Sunday by Linda Binder (Lake Havasu): Susan Gerard (Phoenix); and Roberta Voss (Glendale), each a former Republican state legislator.

Each legislator was considered a "solid conservative" Republican in their day, but in today's radicalized Tea-Publican Party would be vilified as a "Republican in Name Only " (RINO), or worse: (choose one) a socialist, communist, Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, secular humanist, "librul" Democrat — disparaging terms used interchangeably without regard to meaning by Tea-Publicans to refer to anyone who disagrees with their radical extremist agenda.

Binder, Gerard and Voss sounded the alarm on the radicalized Tea-Publican War on Women. Stripping health choices from women isn't priority:

Among Republicans there is a history of support for access to health care, including Planned Parenthood, and rejection of the intrusive laws being passed by the more extreme-right members of the party now.

In fact, we Republicans just a short decade ago passed Arizona's state law requiring insurance companies to provide fair coverage of contraception — the very bill these extreme right Republicans now are working to repeal.

The sad thing is, if this new crop of Republicans get their way, more women would be uninsured, medical discrimination against women would be legal again, and women would once again be forced to pay more for health care and get less for their money.

Even the nation's family-planning program — to provide low-income women with birth control and other preventive care — was signed into law by President Richard Nixon and expanded by President George H.W. Bush. Solid conservatives, like Barry Goldwater, supported Planned Parenthood. His wife, Peggy Goldwater, sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.