Arizona Women lose the GOP War on Women

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.

But Mullah Cathi Herrod's biggest miracle was twice ressurecting from the dead the "Baby Blunt" contraception coverage bill, HB 2625. She skillfully used the "strike everything" amendment and motions to reconsider to outmaneuver committee chairs opposed to her bill and even recovered from a defeat in the Senate. In the end the cowardly Tea-Publicans voted in lockstep out of fear of Mullah Cathi Herrod and her Chrisitian Taliban in the GOP primaries. Contraception bill now ready for governor | Arizona Capitol Times:

The amended version allows an employer whose incorporation papers “clearly state that it is a religiously motivated organization and whose religious beliefs are central to the organization’s operating principles” to opt out of providing contraceptives. Churches are already exempted from providing contraception coverage.

You read that right: the legal fiction of a corporation, which is not a "person" despite what the U.S. Supreme Court said in Citizens United v. FEC, has "religious liberty" rights superior to those of individuals under the First Amendment, and corporations may discriminate by imposing a religious belief on individuals of other religious faiths, or no faith, in violation of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The corporatocracy and theocracy have joined together in an unholy union to deprive you of your religious liberty under the First Amendment.

Tucson Citizen editor Mark Evans correctly noted earlier this week, Contraception bill clearly would violate 1st, 14th amendments:

The great strength of the First Amendment is that it allows any person to believe whatever they want while preventing the government from interfering with that belief and preventing those believers from imposing their beliefs on others.

House Bill 2625 allows religious groups who have decided to leave the church and enter the public marketplace as employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees.

In fact, the bill's own language contradicts itself because it says in several places the religious employers must follow all state and federal rules prohibiting discrimination, which includes religious discrimination.

Yet any employee or prospective employee is forced to either agree with the religious employer's view of reproductive health care or find employment elsewhere. That's discriminatory and a clear violation of the First and 14th amendments.

This law wanders into dangerous and divisive waters and if it isn't vetoed, the courts should immediately overturn it.

Both the defunding Planned Parenthood bill, HB 2800, and the "Baby Blunt" bill on contraception coverage, HB 2625, are being held by legislative leaders, in violation of Arizona law, in light of Governor Brewer's threat to veto any bills sent to her until she gets her budget. Word is that GOP, Brewer on verge of budget deal (UPDATED) | Arizona Capitol Times.

Gov. Brewer has never met a bill from Mullah Cathi Herrod and her Chrisitian Taliban aka the Center for Arizona Policy that she has not supported, to my knowledge. She has signed every anti-abortion and anti-women's healthcare bill sent to her as Governor. Call her office and tell her to veto these two bills anyway.

Call Gov. Jan Brewer's Tucson office at 628-6580, or call Phoenix toll-free at 1-800-253-0883. Or email her using the form on her website: azgovernor.gov/contact.asp

I'm curious what Mullah Cathi Herrod and the Christian Taliban plan to do for an encore. Are we going to have state "sex police" proctor every office visit between a woman and her doctor? Will the state "sex police" have the power to enter your home and to do random searches to make sure no hanky-panky is going on? Are the state "sex police" going to have the power to arrest women or their OB-GYNs, and to seize the woman's and her healthcare clinic's property and assets? Will they finally succeed in enacting a "personhood amendment" declaring that life begins at conception — or two weeks before conception in Arizona — and give constitutional rights to divided cells, zygotes and fetuses superior to their host mother, reducing women to permanent second-class citizen status and child-bearing property of the state? Where will it end for these Forced Birthers?

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Back cover liner notes for THE WATERGATE COMEDY ALBUM are repro'ed on a typewritten 3×5 card topped by a red ink AN AMERICAN CREED plus a US flag rectangle at card's bottom. It reads:

There will be those, perhaps in government, who will say that this comedy album is offensive, outrageous and irresponsible. To those charges may we quote that great iconoclast from Baltimore who chronicled earlier Washington scandals. "It is the duty of the satirist to be outrageous and to offend. It is the duty of the government to be responsible." When a nation ceases to laugh at its' foibles and mistakes, it ceases to be great. But because this *is* a great nation it will survive Watergate, and indeed, this album.