They’re baaack! The Christian Taliban: Reducing women to second class citizens who are property of the state one law at a time

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Christian Taliban is back again, seeking to impose its religious dogma on all Americans of all religious faiths or no religious faith, by force of law. It is a clear violation of constitutional separation of church and state, which I am sure those sponsoring this bill will argue does not exist under their Christian Reconstructionist and Dominionionist theology. These are people I like to call "wrong."

Sen. Steve Smith (R-Maricopa) freely admits that he is seeking to impose his own religious dogma on everyone else by force of law. Abortion bill would alter Arizona law to define life as beginning at conception – East Valley Tribune:

The first-term lawmaker said if it were up to him, all abortions would be illegal.

"I guess I'm a purist," he said. "It's easy for me as a man to say that because I'll never be in that situation."

Smith said his reasons go back more to his religious beliefs.

"God doesn't make mistakes," he said. "I believe that God is still on the throne and that's happening for a reason, whether we get it or not."

Smith acknowledged his goal in imposing new requirements is to impose his religious dogma on everyone else:

[T]he most significant part of SB 1494 is that it would alter Arizona law to define human life as beginning at conception. And that could pave the way for abortion foes to use the Arizona statute to mount a head-on challenge to the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that women have a constitutional right to an abortion.

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"It clearly tells the woman that what they're aborting is a human being," he said.

His legislation hammers that point home with a requirement that a woman be told, at least 24 hours in advance, that the abortion "will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." And a pregnant woman also would have to be informed she "has an existing relationship with that unborn human being" which is protected by the U.S. Constitution and state laws.

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Smith's legislation would apply in both cases of surgical and medical abortions, the latter involving the use of RU-486 which induces a woman to miscarry.

Less clear is how a law defining life as beginning at conception might affect the legal use of the "morning-after pill."

And then there's the legal challenge. Our Tea-Publican legislature once again is abusing the legislative process to make work for its cadre of right-wing think tank lawyers to piss away your tax dollars on their secessionist nullification theory legal challenges to federal law and challenges to Supreme Court precedents with which they disagree.

Smith said the legality of a similar law is being considered by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If that is upheld and his measure becomes law, he expects a challenge to the 9th Circuit which has purview over Arizona statutes.

Ultimately, he expects the question to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"If the Supreme Court now decides that language is correct and what you're killing is a human being, well, we have a little law that you can't kill human beings," Smith said. At that point, he said it forces the high court to reexamine the rationale behind Roe v. Wade.

I suspect that "Personhood USA," the group that has sponsored "personhood amendments" in Colorado (twice) and most recently in Mississippi — all failed badly at the polls — is lurking in the shadows behind this bill. And it is a certainty that Cathi Herrod and her Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) is a strong supporter of this bill.

I have been over this territory before with Cathi Herrod and CAP's abortion restrictions bills passed last year. The Christian Taliban: Reducing women to second class citizens who are property of the state, one law at a time:

Cathi Herrod and the anti-abortion jihadists of the Christian Taliban are all about stripping women of their constitutional liberties and right of privacy to receive confidential medical advice and care from a physician of their choice, and to reduce women to second class citizens who are in effect property of the state. The state will decide what medical advice and care a woman may receive, if any, abrogating a woman's constitutional right to privacy and substituting the dictates of the state for the sound medical advice and care of a qualified physician of their choice.

No man is equally deprived of his constitutional liberties and right of privacy to receive medical advice and care from a qualified physician of his choice. This is a clear violation of equal protection of the law.

So-called "small government" conservatives are actually all-intrusive "big brother" police state authoritarians when it comes to the most private and personal aspects of our lives: sex, sexuality, and child birth.

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I have said before that the 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale was supposed to be a work of futuristic science fiction, but it is turning out to be a "how to" handbook for the theocratic Christian Taliban. The Handmaid's Tale Plot Summary and Details:

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid — a surrogate mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander and his frosty wife, Serena Joy… Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many of the nation's powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication — death by hanging — in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d'être.

If people remain silent as women are systematically deprived of their constitutional liberties and rights and reduced to second class citizens who are property of the state, this dystopian fable can all too readily become a reality.