SCOTUS again tears down a section of the wall of separation of church and state

First Amendment religious liberty was intended to be a shield from government control over religion in response to the state religions of Europe, and the centuries of sectarian conflict from which many colonists had fled Europe. The government was prohibited from establishing a state religion, and all religions were free to exercise their beliefs. But … Read more

The anti-choice movement is not about “life”. Never has been.

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Monica Potter quote
“Pro-life” leader in a moment of honesty of what this is all about.

Since last Friday when a deranged man murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic and injured several more, even some veteran pro-choice people have been stunned at the response by anti-choice people to it, which has been equal parts callous and defensive.

“After all these years and millions of babies that have gone to their death, violence is to be anticipated,” said Judie Brown, president of American Life League, in a phone interview with MSNBC. “Because it’s acceptable to violently kill a baby, so why isn’t it acceptable to violently kill other people?”

“We never approve of violence against anybody, whether it’s the unborn babies or the clients of Planned Parenthood or anybody else,” Ann Scheidler, vice president of the Pro-Life Action League, told MSNBC. But, she added, “it’s not the fault of the pro-life movement that someone found out that Planned Parenthood is doing these things. It’s the fault of Planned Parenthood for selling the baby parts.”

Planned Parenthood is a villain,” she said. “They undermine the integrity of families and the morality of young teen girls and kill babies on a regular basis, day after day. We’re not going to say, ‘Oh, poor Planned Parenthood, we should never say anything negative about what they call ‘services.’ Because they are a blight on our culture.”

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No, anti-choicers, there aren’t thousands of clinics that could easily replace Planned Parenthood

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

PlannedParenthoodIsCritical-HealthAffairs

As anti-choice activists continue to push the now-thoroughly discredited “Planned Parenthood sells baby parts!” story as a ruse to defund the organization and deprive millions of women of contraception and health screenings (since federal funds can’t be used on abortion), you will often hear them speak of “thousands of community health clinics” that are readily available to low income patients who currently use Planned Parenthood. This, it turns out, is a bunch of garbage (as is approximately 99.9% everything claimed by anti-choicers but mainstream news people continue to treat them as a credible movement for dog knows what reason). The Congressional Budget Office commissioned an analysis of health provider availability for women who need contraception and found that Planned Parenthood is a crucial provider of birth control to a large number of regions and the women who live in them, as the graph above illustrates.

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Empty gestures

empty gesture

While it true that most politicians of any stripe engage in empty gestures – mainly symbolic votes and proposals – modern conservatives have raised the empty gesture to an art form. Examples of this include anti-choice Republicans in the 2014 midterms pretending to support the sale of over-the-counter birth control, despite having long records of support for “personhood” measures that would lead to many forms of contraception being banned. That was an empty gesture that went a long way toward helping Republicans like newly sworn-in CO Senator Cory Gardner(R) to persuade credulous pundits and voters who would normally be alarmed by their actual positions and voting records that they were not as threatening as they really are.

Sometimes the empty gesture is not even a strategic vote or policy stance. It can be pure political theater, such as the GOP having a Latino Congressman deliver Sen. Joni Ernst’s exact response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech in Spanish.

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Mr. Anti-Choice goes to Washington

HuckabeeHello, ladies…

Anti-choicers – who ought never be thought of as less-than-assiduous in their quest to rid America of the scourge of ladies refusing pregnancy – are really going to town these days!

Per the inimitable Sally Kohn:

“Serious adults are in charge here,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) added for good measure, “and we intend to make progress.”

And then they introduced no fewer than five restrictions on abortion on the first day of the new Republican-controlled Congress. Because, you know, priorities.

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