#i wonder with states outlawing abortion

[fantabulisticity]

The hacktivist collective SiegedSec, previously responsible for leaking the info of a bunch of people who subscribed to a far-right media outlet, breaching the computer systems of various anti-trans state governments, and infiltrating a nuclear lab to demand catgirl research, has done it again. This time, as part of what the group calls #OpTransRights, they have targeted the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, obtaining and leaking the passwords, email addresses, and full names of the site’s users, according to cybersecurity outlet SC Media. The group posted to its Telegram channel on Tuesday to announce the hack, which they say was the culmination of seven days of hacks of various entities, “from NATO to Israel.” SiegedSec called the Heritage Foundation “among the most influential public policy organizations,” and cited the organization’s key role in creating Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for a conservative takeover of the U.S. government in the event that Republican nominee Donald Trump wins reelection this November. The Heritage Foundation has a long history of pushing for anti-LGBTQ+ policy, from opposing same-sex marriage to spreading anti-trans disinformation to backing voter suppression efforts. Among many other nightmare scenarios, the Project 2025 proposal includes calling for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse the approval of the abortion pill mifepristone and create a “pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.” Project 2025 also calls for the outlawing of “pornography,” which has become widespread conservative shorthand for anything “concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children,” as Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote for The New Republic.

Accordingly, in its Telegram message, SiegedSec wrote, “Project 2025 threatens the rights of abortion healthcare and LGBTQ+ communities in particular. so of course, we won’t stand for that!” punctuating with a “^-^” emote to boot. The group claimed to have gained access to the Heritage Foundation’s database, “with user data, logs, and other juicy info :D.” “mew mew i wonder what would happen if we leaked the passwords, email addresses, and full names of every user :3 every US government employee, even the Heritage president Kevin Roberts,” the message continued, ending with the classic adage, “be gay do crime~” In a comment provided to Them over Signal, SiegedSec representative vio said that the organization targeted Heritage Foundation for two main reasons. “it shines light on people who support an organization built on hatred, the freedom of the everyday person is threatened as long as Heritage continues leading Project 2025,” they said. They also added that SiegedSec’s attack has “encouraged more people to step up and fight.” “we have received countless messages from other hackers, activists, and even organizations who wish to support the fight against Heritage,” vio said. “with this overwhelming support to stop Project 2025, i believe its actually possible to stop them before more rights are threatened.” They added that it was particularly important for SiegedSec to target the Heritage Foundation “to show everyone what we stand for.” “we want to support LGBTQ+ people and other minority groups however we can, and we can demonstrate that by targeting the people who hate them most,” they said.

[rohirric-hunter]

Hello 👋

My name is Carlos "r4cs0" Albuquerque

I live in Idaho, but I am a bisexual/demisexual transgender aromantic identifying as a brony-furry winged raptor. My pronouns are Latinx / Lopex. As a member of both the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, a Mexican immigrant and a refugee fleeing from my Catholic family members who hated me for dating a bisexual woman, Iowa has been a very difficult state for me to live in.

As I'm sure you know, the right-wing bigots who control this state have implemented a lot of legislation recently which is intended to kill off people like us. They banned all transgender surgeries, outlawed all abortion and have been arresting people who try to leave the state to seek these services. But the worst part is that Mormon fundamentalists control virtually the entire southern half of the state. I attempted to move further north to get away from them, but some of them were so obsessed with me that they have followed me and continue to come after me!

One of them even found out about my blog here on Tumblr and followed me here! She is a former neighbor from before I moved and she was well known in the neighborhood as the quintessential Mormon girlboss "let me speak to your manager" Karen of the area. She constantly brags about how she graduated top of her class at BYU and that she is the best alto in her stake choir. She now has multiple sock puppet accounts here on Tumblr where she sends her Mormon followers to harass me, including "lemuel-apologist" and "werehamburglar" among many others.

Please consider donating a few dollars to my cause! It would really help and I'm hoping that one day I can save up enough money to leave Idaho and move to the abandoned Burger King in York, Nebraska.

Gofund (dot) me (slash) getoutofidahor4cs0

Thank you! 😁🐺

Don't you ever get tired? Like do you ever type up something like this and then stop and wonder how long it took you exactly?

[evidence-based-activism]

Hi I just wanted to say that you're so we'll spoken and informed and I love it!! I used some of the information you provided to debunk some misogynistic pigs on reddit and I've never felt better!!

Not sure if you talk about activism as well, but I just found out about Chile women marching against women-based violence (am I saying it right?) "This march represents a powerful rebuke to the forces plotting to rescind or abolish hard-won rights for Chilean women. But it alone is not enough. Three days later, the Chilean Ministry of Women and Gender Equality announced that 35 femicides had taken place this year and another 143 were thwarted throughout the country." I can't find the link in my recent but this is smth I copy pasted from the article.

Some dude tried to pass a picture from this article off as crazy feminazism and I just had to dunk on him.

Hi! That's great!! Proving misogynists wrong is always a wonderful feeling! And I'm glad my posts helped you do that! (Not to mention, spreading accurate information is important! I'm ecstatic that the data I'm collecting is reaching beyond my sphere of Tumblr!).

I occasionally talk about activism, and I'm always happy to hear about it! I think I found the article you are referencing. It's from 2021 and details part of a continuing feminist activism again the Pinochet regime and its aftereffects. (For those who don't know, Pinochet was a Chilean military dictator from 1973 to 1990. His regime was horrifying in all the ways you'd expect, and possibly in some ways you can't imagine, including extreme forms of sadism, sexual violence, and torture.) Chilean feminists are advocating against the ongoing state sexual violence, domestic violence, and widespread public sexual harassment.

Recent advances in Chile include (summaries obtained from Human Rights Watch Chile country report years 2020-2024):

A 2017 easement of their total abortion ban (still with significant limits on access)

A 2019 law outlawing "sexual street harassment"

A 2020 expansion of the definition of femicide to a killing committed for “gender motives,” without requiring a relationship between the perpetrator and the victim

Ongoing trials of people involved in Pinochet's abuses, ongoing reparations for the victims of his regime, and a new national search plan for victims of disappearance

[meljane7]

The CisHet Moderate

One of the most important things MLK ever said was that the greatest barrier to black liberation was the white moderate, and this sentiment rings true in that same sense today, but it is also very much true of the fight for queer (and especially trans) liberation .

Last night I read one of my poems that was published in my small town Texas library's poetry and art magazine. I live in a town halfway between Austin and San Antonio, and it is also a college town so it is fairly liberal, but it is by no means completely safe for queers (and neither are Austin or San Antonio, because no matter what the cities do the state always steps in to silence us). My poem was inherently and obviously queer, and many of the other poets were also obviously queer. A few poets took some time to get on their soap boxes about things like the Nashville shooting, the impending civil war hurtling towards us, etc. So I ended my poem with a classic "protect trans kids" which was obviously received with applause.

After, I went to hang out with a friend and her neighbor. My friend is very liberal but tends to pump the brakes when it comes to more "extreme" leftism, but she very much agrees that the state of politics in this country is becoming (if not already) extremely dangerous for queer folks.

Her neighbor (we'll call her M), however, was the epitome of the white cishet moderate. I made a joke about my mom's "mayonnaise chicken" recipe and how it was the reason everyone hates white people, and M immediately took offense. I explained to her that it was a joke and that I wasn't in anyway trying to target her (which should have been obvious because I'm also white), but she took it very personally and of course went on about how she loves everyone and doesn't care about color and that she just doesn't want to talk "politics." Okay, whatever. The conversation eventually turns towards the treatment of queer folks, and she is concerned that kids are being "pressured" to choose an identity. I explain to her that for hundreds of years kids have been forced to identify with whatever is in their pants, and now kids are free to try on as many identities as they want and how wonderful that is. She tells me I'm completely wrong about boys and girls being socialized differently and that SHE got to run around and play in the dirt and the woods, so her experience must reflect everyone else's. I tell her this is blatantly untrue and that I am living proof (this woman is also about 15 years older than me). The conversation keeps going on like this, where I present facts about how kids understand gender and gender identity from the age of 4 without even being taught those things, that trans identities have existed forever and that European colonialism erased many of those identities (especially indigenous ones), and that there is a very real and preset threat to trans people alive in this country as shown by the numerous laws being proposed and passed in conservative states (including Texas). M continued to tell me I was wrong and only cited her personal feelings and experiences, and at one point claimed she was both liberal and conservative, further proving that the reason she "doesn't talk politics" is because it hasn't affected her. I even tried to compare it to roe v Wade being overturned, and while she agreed that abortion shouldn't be outlawed, she again said that she doesn't care about politics and she just loves and welcomes everyone. I explained to her again and again that it is great that she thinks that way, but not everyone does and we (queer folks) need allies like her to help defend us from those that want us disenfranchised and dead. No matter how many times I reassured her that I was not making any personal judgements about her, she continued to take personal offense to everything I said and refused to believe that her identity in any way affected her perspective of the world.

Let me make this abundantly clear: it does not matter how much you "love" queer folks, people of color, disabled folks, or any other marginalized group. Love is not enough to save us from centuries of oppression and systems designed to make us either serve the ruling class or die. We need allies to defend us in our absence, we need allies to make it abundantly clear that an attack on one of us is an attack on all, to show that racists and transphobia and Nazis will not be tolerated under any circumstances. "Love" is not enough, we cannot protect ourselves with your love. The only thing more dangerous than a Nazi is the moderate that allows them to exist, because that same moderate will turn us in when the Nazis come for us

[thepro-lifemovement]

@rosaliewarda sent me this submission: "Some people here seem to think women find abortion an easy solution to have fun without consequences. This while also saying that abortion is painful and brutal. Well yes it is. No woman would say the opposite. But deciding for women whether or not they have the right to go through this painful procedure is also brutal. What about the victims of rape? Would you also tell them that they should have been careful?"

I usually don't bring up cases of rape because that is an incredibly small group, and most pro-abortionists still want abortion legal regardless of rape being the reason for pregnancy. The average rate of pregnancy that results from unprotected sex is 2-4%. A survey of U.S. women's reasons for choosing abortion found that only one percent reported "rape" as a reason and less than one half of one percent reported that rape was the main reason.

If a woman is raped, I suggest she seek medical care immediately. Do not hesitate. If the victim is not already pregnant from prior, freely-chosen sexual activity, has not yet ovulated (i.e. has not released an egg from her ovary into the fallopian tube where it could be fertilized by the attacker's sperm), the morning-after pill can reasonably be expected to prevent her from ovulating. Doctors can test the woman's LH levels, and if it's determined that her LH levels have spiked and she is ovulating, the morning-after pill will not be able to block the egg's release from her ovary, making it an abortifacient if used. So it should only be used to prevent ovulation. If she has already ovulated and conceived, then she should receive the utmost love and support in her pregnancy. I think the rapist shall be held liable for all of her hospital bills, child support payments, and every bill for that child. That's a law we need to push for. Like really push for.

I will never blame a woman for getting pregnant as a result of rape. She is the victim. But I don't believe she should abort her baby because it's not the baby's fault. "A hint is found in another study of 164 women who had rape pregnancies (conducted for the book Victims and Victors). In that study, the majority of those who had abortions said it only caused additional problems and the vast majority regretted having abortions. By contrast, among those who delivered the child, satisfaction was higher and none stated any regret for giving birth."

People need to stop scaring victims of rape into getting an abortion. It is not their rapist's baby; it's her baby. It is a social myth that abortion is her best option. It's not.

[aibidil]

At age 17, having grown up in a place where abortion was legal and accessible, my partner and I discussed the eventuality of abortion before we even decided to do any sex acts that could result in pregnancy. We planned contraception with multiple levels of contingencies, and it felt responsible and straightforward. At the time, it was the GWBush admin and I was furious about abortion rights, over the global gag rule, which seems positively small potatoes now.

About two decades later, with two children who were planned and wanted, I'm sitting here coming up with a plan for accessing abortion care if my state outlaws it. (The way this works, if any of my non-Americans are wondering how our multilevel governance works: now that Roe is overturned, it's up to States to make laws about it. There were a bunch of states that had passed laws saying that if Roe was overturned, abortion would be immediately illegal. In a couple, states had passed a state guarantee to abortion, so that it remains legally protected today. In a bunch of states, there are no laws on the books, and now we see what happens. I live in a see-what-happens state.) I'm lucky because 1) I have enough money to travel and 2) I have family in NY state, where abortion is protected at the state level.

Millions of people in the US who can get pregnant are currently looking at maps and trying to figure out how we would get to one of the places that's shaded a different color than our own.

And this affects so many of us in so many ways. It's not just people who think it's a possibility that we might face an accidental pregnancy (from sex in a relationship or otherwise). I have friends who are rightfully terrified to try for wanted children because they have a health condition that could endanger their life if they get pregnant. Can they trust an ER doctor to save their life if an abortion was needed? Probably not. And did you know that 60% of abortions are given to people who are already parents? Not to this stereotype of naive teens who are irresponsible (though to be clear, I absolutely insist on the right to abortion for people who are naive and irresponsible), but to people who have already given their body and life to a next generation and know EXACTLY what it would take to do it again.

I imagine, even though it will affect all of us differently and those of us with less privilege will take the brunt of it, we're all (rich, poor, parent, childless) sitting here looking at these maps and making plans we should never have to make.

One thing that strikes me as important is this: there's no need for us to reinvent any wheels. We already have many longstanding abortion funds that work to increase access, and that are ready and we'll positioned to help people who need help. We don't need to build brand new organizations. We need to support the ones that already exist (and note that many, many of them are run by WOC). This isn't a time to try to colonize that system by reinventing it according to monied whiteness. You can find abortion funds here (and at the National Network of Abortion Funds, but their site is down from all the traffic atm). This is probably a better use of dollars than one of the large orgs like Planned Parenthood. These funds already do amazing work, but now those travel expenses and childcare expenses are going to be WAY higher as people all over the US will need to cross state lines to get an abortion.

When you've made your plan, think about all the other people doing the same. It's a communal experience here, and the answers will also be communal. Give to abortion funds! Call abortion funds if you need help! ✊🏻

[grandhotelabyss]

I linked a few times last year to Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures from the 1990s, which have become a sensation on YouTube. Sugrue’s channel also now features lectures in the same series by the historian Darren Staloff. The most recent upload, above, is Staloff’s lecture on the “outlaw Marxist” and sociologist of intellectuals, Alvin Gouldner. 

Everyone with any interest at all in the recent debates about the “post-left” should listen to this lecture, which, despite being almost three decades old, speaks with appalling clarity to the present.

In Staloff’s summary, Gouldner turns the Marxist lens on the Marxists, accounting for the veiled interests of this ideology’s exponents. These exponents, despite their meretricious claim to represent the working class, tend to be educated professionals. 

After noting that class struggle usually takes place not between owners and workers but between declining and rising elites, Gouldner uncovers two apparent flaws in Marxism that, considered together, are not so much errors as productive historical misreadings that empower Marxism’s elite partisans.

First, Marxism lacks an account of non-ownership classes, that is, classes not defined by the holding of material wealth. This prevents them from grasping the intelligentsia (to include what in premodern contexts would be called the clerisy, the mandarinate, etc.) as an independent social class—a class that is perhaps, alongside the peasantry, the oldest class in human history. Second, Marxism’s conviction that the state serves the owning class rather than being an autonomous bloc with its own interests makes it unable to properly account for state power as in itself oppressive.

Combine these two Marxist errors, says Staloff glossing Gouldner, and it’s no wonder that actually-existing Marxism produced Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—and, I might add, our incipient new regime (supported by most left-wing parties in the west and by the left-wing intelligentsia) of global corporatist managerialism. The political unconscious of Marxism, a further development of Plato’s Republic, is a totalitarian state overseeing a social stasis managed by intellectuals. And if Platonism itself emerged to challenge Athenian democracy, a polity in which intellectuals were not in charge, then Marxism arose to battle modern capitalism and democracy, systems that likewise empower non-clerics in state, economy, and civil society.

How might we apply these ideas to the present? For one thing, to be post-left is to be a member of the intelligentsia who rebels against its power, either because it has in some way abused us or because we are not members of this class by birth and so do not owe it our primary loyalty—or both, as in my case. None of this cogent analysis, unfortunately, can solve that problem whose contemporary names are Donald Trump and Peter Thiel: the problem that the intelligentsia’s elite rival today is a somewhat decadent and attenuated alliance between the old capitalism (both owners and workers, as in Trump’s vaunted base) and the rising tech barons, themselves a new clerisy with authority premised on a different form of knowledge from the old intelligentsia’s. 

How badly has the left-wing clerisy misused its power that some of us could look with even a modicum of sympathy at this rival elite and its troubled alliances? So badly that I think back with nostalgia on last summer’s advocacy for permanent lockdownism. Two weeks ago their bright idea was self-immolation, while this week they’re celebrating “withdrawals of gestational labour-power,” which I take to include not only abortion but infanticide. Again I ask you: what are we without tenure supposed to do? I could think of all sorts of ideal phenomena to which I would prefer the present post-left, but this left—a death cult at either end of life, from “queer” infanticide to “green” suicide, with an intellectual career of “misinformation” policing and God knows what biological mandates in between for anyone who manages to live and to think—is the actual alternative.

Before Staloff’s lecture, I knew Gouldner dimly as a name in the bibliography of my doctoral advisor’s book, which I’ve cited here before. She wrote an incipiently post-left sociological critique of the high modernists for professionalizing literature in the interests of the expert managerial class and thereby confiscating culture from its prior superintendent: the much (and on this account unfairly) maligned Victorian matriarch, domestic woman, the so-called angel in the house. I found and still find this overstated as an objection to the likes of Woolf and Joyce, as opposed, say, to Marx and Freud. (My own dissertation ended up being a riposte to my advisor’s thesis, not the customary extension. And people wonder why I don’t have a career in academia! Actually, no one wonders.) 

Art’s polysemy and irony make it available to multiple classes or none—even to the individual in existential confrontation with life below and above all social contexts. Matthew Arnold and Northrop Frye were right: true art, true culture, does away with classes. Art is what Marxism only pretends to be. 

The proof? Look no further than Plato’s Republic itself. Primordial manifesto of the totalitarian intelligentsia or prose-poem, closet drama, and novel of ideas meant as ironic therapy for this intelligentsia’s will-to-power? In other words, philosophy or poetry? The latter, the latter, the latter.

[potteresque-ire]

Hi :) Are you following the zheng shuang scandal? Would you say that her career is pretty much over now? The rate the news has been unfolding is so crazy to me. It’s only been 3-4 days. Was wondering if the gov would handle her matters personally.

Hello Anon! Yes, I’ve followed the news about the actress, primarily because it offers insight on how the current administration deals with stars exhibiting what it deems as “immoral” behaviour. As of today (2021/01/26), it’s difficult to imagine her career will survive at all. While she isn’t the first to be categorised as a “bad-history entertainer” (劣迹藝人), she’s the first to be explicitly banned by the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA; 國家廣播電視總局), the department that controls—and censors—content of all radio, television, satellite, and Internet broadcasts in the country. Before, the NRTA didn’t publicise the names of the entertainers the government no longer wishes to see, which allows a possibility for reversal in a few year’s time if the “bad-history” wasn’t too damaging, and production companies are willing to take a risk and produce shows with the entertainers that may be difficult to pass the censorship board. But with such a high profile announcement, the government’s stance is unlikely to turn around in a foreseeable future.

Hmm. Let’s backpedal a little to get everyone on track. Before, I’ve shared some info re: the censoring of books, of audiovisual media. What if the government decides to “cancel” an entertainer instead? How does it do it? What are the standards?

The actress’s downfall is a (sad) example.

I shall skip names, the gossipy elements. Whether she made mistakes or not, no one deserves having their private matters exposed and sensationalised like this; no one should have to undergo such a humiliating, public trial. Essentially, the heart of the story goes as follows: the actress, a romantic-lead type who has been popular for several years, secretly got married. On 2021/01/18, her estranged husband claimed on Weibo that the couple had two children using US-based surrogate mothers, and the actress had abandoned the children in the US under his care. Meanwhile, his friend provided an audio from approximately the 7th month of the surrogate pregnancies, at which time the marriage was already falling apart. In the audio, the actress expressed dismay that abortion was no longer possible; her family talked about abandoning the newborns at the hospital or giving them up for adoption.

The next day (2021/01/19), the actress responded. She didn’t deny the existence of her surrogate children and claimed that she had been extorted. More importantly, she said the following: 

“身為藝人我深知我國疫情的防控與重視。** 在中國國土之上我沒有違背國家的指示，在境外我也更是尊重一切的法律法規。”

“Being an artist, I deeply understand the attention my country (China) has placed on controlling the epidemic. On China’s soil, I didn’t do anything that violates the directives by the government. Outside the country, I’ve been even more respectful of all laws and regulations.”

This apparently hit a nerve of the administration. On the same day (2021/01/19), the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC; 中央政法委) — one of the most powerful commissions that oversees the entire legal enforcement system of the government —  published an opinion piece , in which it said:

但[女星姓名]的回应，却通篇强调自己没有违法，丝毫没有任何悔过、道歉的意思。…

But the response of (name of the actress) insists that she didn’t violate any laws, doesn’t show a hint of remorse, regret…

要知道，在我国代孕行为是被明确禁止的。… 作为中国公民，因为代孕在中国被禁止，就钻法律空子就跑去美国，这绝不是遵纪守法。…

It should be known, that in our country, surrogacy is explicitly prohibited … as a PRC (People’s Republic of China) citizen, to use a legislative loophole and go to the US due to the ban of surrogacy in China is absolutely not obeying the law…

要知道，没有营养的炒作带不来长久流量。公众人物的魅力，来自其高尚的职业操守、良好的社会形象、文质兼美的优秀作品，而不是疯疯癫癫、任性胡闹、缺爱卖惨的“人设”。作为公众人物，几度疯狂游走在法律边缘，把这样错乱的世界观、价值观、人生观，置于众目睽睽之下，贻害世风，这绝不是无辜！

It should be known, that hype devoid of significance will not bring in traffic (click rates). The charisma of public figures comes from their noble professionalism, good social image, high quality works in character and content, and not from “personalities” rooting in craziness, petulance, mischief, the selling of one’s lack-of-love and misfortunes. As a public figure, to wildly roam at the edge of the law, to place such wrong and chaotic world views, values and life perspectives in the public eye, to cause harm to the morals of society — that is definitely not innocence!

Things to note here:

1) The CPLAC reacting within a day of the actress’s statement ~  unlikely enough time for teasing out / verifying the facts or truth of the matter.

2) The implication that Chinese citizens must follow Chinese laws, even when they’re overseas. (What about, for example, same-sex marriages?)

3) These words that, IMO, bordered on insult: “craziness, petulance, mischief, the selling of one’s lack-of-love and misfortunes”.

The actress’s career was hanging by a thread with this opinion piece. State-controlled agencies chimed in, many of which echoing CPLAC’s stance that surrogacy is explicitly prohibited in China. By night time of 2021/01/19, rumours abounded that multiple media companies had already listed the actress as a “bad-history entertainer” and would be shelving all her works and cancelling all her scheduled appearances. Prada terminated her endorsement.

The final drop of the hammer happened a day later, in the evening of 2021/01/20. The NRTA issued a statement that explicitly named the actress and contained the following lines:

代孕不是私事，与法不合，有违社会主义公德。…

Surrogacy isn’t a private matter. It doesn’t agree with the law, violates the civility of socialism…

从事广播电视和网络视听的演艺人员尤其是知名艺人，作为公众人物，有很大的社会影响力和示范作用，应当自觉践行行业自律准则，严格律己修身，严私德，讲大德，守公德。

Artists who work in TV and web audiovisual productions, especially famous entertainers, have significant social influence and demonstrative roles as public figures. They should be conscious about the self-discipline required for their industry, be strict in their behaviour and personal virtues, speak of great kindness and defend civility.

行业主管部门的相关政策要求是明确的，严格的。广大人民群众不愿意、不接受、也不允许丑闻劣迹者污染我们的社会公德和公序良俗。

Policies regarding the management of the industry is clear and strict. The public does not want, does not accept, does not allow those with scandals and poor history pollute the civility, the good order and customs of our society.

我们不会为丑闻劣迹者提供发声露脸的机会和平台，一如既往，坚决为广大人民群众提供健康向上荧屏声频。

We will not supply opportunities and platforms for those with scandals and poor history to sound their opinions, to show their faces. Just as before, we are determined to provide audiovisual content that is healthy above all.

And just like this, less than 72 hours after the estranged husband posted on his Weibo, the actress’s career is over. The NRTA, which has The Say on who and what get exposure time on screen, has spoken. The actress had no way of self-defence. Her 11 million followers on Weibo didn’t get to decide whether she’d stay or she’d go.

This is a brutal punishment but for what, exactly? Some netizens have whispered while the others shout their condemnations ~ but I thought…. surrogacy isn’t illegal?

And they’re correct: surrogacy isn’t explicitly outlawed in China, despite what CPLAC and other state agencies has claimed. In 2001, the Ministry of Health banned medical institutions and health care workers from "practicing any form of surrogate technology". However, no laws have ever passed that prohibit individuals from commissioning or providing surrogacy services—especially when the services are overseas.

The actress, therefore, wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t do anything that violates the directives by the government on China’s soil. Her “crime” of using surrogate mothers was, at worst, a legally grey area. For years, China has had a booming, semi-underground surrogacy market, their client base including older parents who wish to have another child after the country relaxed its birth limit (the so-called “one-child policy”) in 2015, infertile couples, and to a lesser extent, the LGBT+ community. Blued, China’s most popular gay social networking/dating app, has offered overseas surrogate services for several years that connect their clients with US-based surrogates. It pulled the services after the actress’s incident.

But all that doesn’t matter. People in China understands this: the law book is there, but those in power at the moment always have the final word ~ and that word doesn’t have to match the legal codes, or the previous final words of their predecessors. As for the moral outcry re: the actress having wished to abort / give up her unborn children, it’s worth mentioning abortion has long been used to to enforce the country’s decades-long birth limit policies, and forced, violent late-term abortions were not unheard of. Many people in China are also aware of that.

But again, it doesn’t matter.

I’ve described the government’s reactions in detail because they put in words the expectations it has of its entertainers. Entertainers in China are expected to not only obey the laws, but also have proper world views, (moral) values and life perspectives (collectively called 三觀, literally, “three views”) as defined by the government. The state has also made clear that such expectations grow with the fame of the entertainers.

Entertainers at the top of the c-ent industry, especially the idol types with many young fans, are therefore expected to get things right. These opinion pieces are reminders that the administration keeps a close eye on them, can “cancel” them with a few words if they fail.

The term for “canceling” an entertainer is 封殺 (literally, “seal and kill”).

The actress isn’t the first to be “cancelled” by the government. The first time the NRTA issued a directive regarding “poor-history entertainers” (劣迹藝人) was in 2014, which essentially called for shutting out any entertainer with a history of bad behaviours. It demanded all production companies, TV stations, online media companies and theatres to stop producing / broadcasting audiovisual content with these people, citing that TV and film media should be used for “spreading the progressive culture of socialism and promoting socialist core values” (”传播社会主义先进文化、弘扬社会主义核心价值观”). As these entertainers will no longer be exposed to an audience, these directives effectively kill the career of most who are affected.

What makes up the “poor-history” of “poor-history entertainers” then?

- The 2014 edition named drug use and prostitution (including hiring a prostitute) specifically.

- The 2018 edition, an announcement made by a top NRTA official, stated that audiovisual programmes should adhere to the “Four Never-Use” guidelines when inviting guests for their shows. Those guidelines were vague but for the last line: “In addition, the NRTA explicitly requests that programmes should not use entertainers with tattoos; (those associated with) hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), decadent cultures.” (”另外，总局明确要求节目中纹身艺人、嘻哈文化、亚文化（非主流文化）、丧文化（颓废文化）不用。”)

Some may be asking: wait … hip-hop?

Yes.

It was believed that hip-hop artists were targeted due to a scandal at the time, in which (another) well-known actress had an extra-marital affair with a rapper. Analysis of the rapper’s lyrics found sexism and suggestions of drug use (the rapper later apologised and claimed his “core values” had been distorted due to influence from “black music”.) 

As this guideline hasn’t been retracted under any formal capacity, it can still be used to axe any show, shut out any entertainer.

If you’re wondering about SDOC, for example, this again illustrates the need for some … mind-reading skills to navigate life in China. A good way to achieve that without superpowers is to have the right connections to higher-ups, who can offer hints on what can get away at the moment and what cannot (this is true not only for c-ent, but for most business practices in the country; building 關係 guanxi— literally, “relationship”— is a must for those who wants a  piece of the Chinese market).

- In 2020, NRTA expanded the “no exposure” rule to live-stream shows on the internet as well as on- and offline charity events, where previously “cancelled” artists had started to find jobs in to make a living. While that notice didn’t further elaborate on what makes “bad history”, the accompanying article in People’s Daily (The State-controlled Newspaper) went into more details. In addition to drug use and prostitution specified in 2014, the article named tax evasion; lying about education levels; *suspected* (涉嫌) extramarital affairs, domestic violence and inappropriate speech.

It’s worth emphasising that many of these activities are not illegal. “Suspected” also means these activities do not have to have happened ~ it’s the impression that they’ve happened that counts. Hence, back to the actress who had surrogate children, not only did it not matter whether surrogacy is actually illegal, it didn’t matter whether the leaked audio was real or taken out of context, or that the babies didn’t end up being aborted / adopted. The article once again stresses that private matters are no longer private for entertainers who are in the public eye as social influencers, and these directives on “poor-history entertainers” — colloquially called “封殺令”, with 封殺 meaning the “seal-and-kill” and 令 meaning command (as in Chen Qing Ling 陳情令) — are there to set the standards, the bottom-line for c-ent. It did call for more specifics in future directives: more guidance on what makes “bad history”, the ways these entertainers can redeem themselves. As of today, however, such specifics have not been provided. As a result, to avoid crossing the NRTA, the media has ended up “overachieving” in certain cases, wiping out the screen time of entertainers who only have a remote chance of being viewed as having “bad history” to play it safe. Last October, for example, a young singer was briefly edited out of all his recorded shows because his parents (not him) was revealed to be deadbeats owing millions in debt.

And so, without a known way out yet, “bad-history” entertainers such as the actress will likely remain “sealed and killed” for a long time. Entertainers recently caught with extramarital affairs ~ a relatively minor “offence” ~ have been missing on screen for 2-3 years, and the heavy-handed treatment by the government this time is likely to put a pause on any companies considering using these people again. Even if they’re finally allowed some degree of comeback, their career prime will be over and and their NRTA “sentence” will likely follow them everywhere they go, which makes their getting face time in any high-profile (high-investment) projects unlikely. Those who must work to make their ends meet will probably end up like so many entertainers who never made it big, or are at the very tail end of their career ~ drifting from city to city singing in local clubs, getting paid poorly and harassed by rude customers...

===

** A side note: In case anyone wonders why she brought up COVID, it’s a similar idea as Gg apologising for “佔用了一些社會公共資源” “occupying social resources” in his first team post after 227 (2020/03/01). For an authoritarian regime that has placed the most attention on maintaining social stability (ie. quelling dissent), disrupting the government’s narrative re: current events and potentially reversing the overall tone the administration is trying to reach in public discourse can be a greater offence than any actual “wrongdoing”. 227, as an incident, was guilty of that.

(And I’m bringing this up because I find this relevant to the safety asks I have in my inbox. Arguments among fans do not themselves render Gg and Dd unsafe, but can become a significant issue if they “occupy social resources”, disrupt the government’s narratives and/or its political machinery in some ways. IMO, 227 took a dangerous turn not because the fans were arguing over a piece of fanfic, but because a group of fans took over the reporting machinery intended to rat out dissidents. It was a mistake that I hope no fans ~ regardless of who they support ~ will repeat again.)

[coochiequeens]

In a suburban Fort Worth House runoff, Republicans debate killing women over abortion

FORT WORTH Should Texas punish abortions by putting teenage girls and women to death? Or not? That’s the current debate in the Republican Party of Texas, where outlawing abortion is no longer a question of “if” or “when” but a question of whether to kill women for getting one.

North Richland Hills Republican David Lowe swears his campaign in the May 24 runoff election has nothing to do with killing women. “I’m not even a fan of the death penalty,” he told a Republican women’s club luncheon last week in downtown Fort Worth.

But then he went on to praise a House bill last session that would have made ending a pregnancy a potential capital crime.. In other words, Texas could kill the woman, along with anyone who encouraged her or helped. Lowe’s final comment was chilling. “Do we all agree that abortion is murder?” he asked the crowd. “Absolutely. There should be consequences for it.”

Of all the opponents, Lowe — an Afghanistan war veteran and longtiime Dallas County party volunteer — chose to run against District 91 state Rep. Stephanie Klick, a five-term House member from the Haltom City-North Richland Hills-Watauga district.

Klick, a 35-year nurse, has been a low-key House leader in Texas’ one-step-at-a-time effort to end abortion. So far, Texas has reduced abortions by about 10%. “Abolishing abortion is important, but we can do that without giving women the death penalty,” Klick told the luncheon.

She talked about how pregnancy clinics counsel many teenage girls. At 18, they’d be eligible for the death penalty. “Do we want to give those young girls the death penalty?” Klick asked. “ ... I don’t think it’s necessary to sentence women to death that had an abortion.” If you’re wondering how killing women became a pivotal Republican issue, that just shows how extreme this Texas primary and runoff have become. Strong, steady, rock-solid conservatives are up against outlandish challengers accusing them of fixing elections, mutilating children or enabling abortions..

Some other runoffs statewide match faith-and-values candidates who both want Texas governed by the Bible. They just can’t agree on whether to use the Old or New Testament. Lowe has said he filed against Klick mainly not over abortion, but because Texas has failed to outlaw using hormones or rarely used medical procedures to affect children’s or teenagers’ gender. In an interview with a political website, Lowe’s message to LGBT Texans — an estimated population of 1.1 million — was: “Keep your hands off our children.” Lowe is also aligned with a Texas affiliate of Abolish Human Abortion, which calls for an immediate halt to abortion regardless of court decisions or law.

Arlington Republican state Rep. Tony Tinderholt filed Texas’ first such bill in 2017. The more recent 2021 version by Royse City Republican state Rep. Bryan Slaton would make ending a pregnancy anytime after fertilization a potential capital crime. That is not pro-life.

[joelmathis]

Are women 'persons' under the 14th Amendment?: At Washington Monthly, Garrett Epps discusses an argument laid out by conservative philosophers that fetuses are "persons" under an originalist understanding of the 14th Amendment:

Now, as an apparent anti-abortion victory looms, the two suggest that the movement hit the trail for fresh fields and pastures new. Its aim, they say, should be to make all abortion illegal: The prohibition of abortion, they told the Court in their brief, is “constitutionally obligatory because unborn children are persons within the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.” No state can permit it, they say.

Which reminds me of an argument made by Antonin Scalia, the patron saint of originalist jurisprudence:

Q: In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

A: Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don’t like the death penalty anymore, that’s fine. You want a right to abortion? There’s nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn’t mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

I don't know that John Finnis and Robert George, the scholars named by Epps, shared Scalia's outlook on the meaning of the 14th Amendment. Certainly, they all shared an anti-abortion stance. But taken together, it's fair to wonder if Epps might be right when he concludes of originalist conservatives: "Under the Constitution, a fetus is a person from the moment of conception. The woman who carries that fetus is, well, never a person at all."

[route22ny]

Sky

Perhaps this will be hard to read. Laments often are. It may bring you comfort, or it may make you angry. It may make you think more of me, or less. It may offend you. Rest assured, it offends me. So be it. 

Once upon a time, there was a man who spoke of torture as a good in and of itself, to be pursued whether it was effective or not. Who promised to use the power of the state to enact violence upon scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities. Who insisted upon framing our struggle against Mideast terror groups in the same religious terms the terrorists themselves insist upon. Who praised himself for nursing petty grudges, for treating revenge as justice. Who threatened the free press with retaliation for reporting certain truths about him. Who bragged about sexual assault. Who mocked people more brave than himself and called their bravery weakness. Who lied seemingly without strategy, as if lies were good to tell only for the telling, who showed a shocking indifference to the very concept of truth. Who praised brutal dictators for their brutal methods. Who seemed (and seems) to be receiving shadowy support from a brutal dictator. Who claimed dictatorial power for himself.

This is fine.

He appeared entirely confused about the basic facts of geopolitical reality, or of how our government works, or even of the function within our government of the role he proposed to take on. He had a clear and obvious history of fraud and hucksterism, of enriching himself at the benefit of others with less leverage, and was even engaged throughout his campaign in a lawsuit for defrauding college students, since settled for $25 million dollars. He speculated with frightening casualness about destabilizing actions: proliferation and even use of nuclear weapons, defaulting on our debts and our treaties, backing out of our most long-standing alliances. He publicly called upon the intelligence apparatuses of foreign governments to intercede in our election on his behalf, and it seems increasingly likely they may have obliged. He whipped his crowds into frenzies, then directed their ire toward journalists reporting the event, many of whom he threatened to prosecute once in power. He offered to imprison his political adversary, to the delight of his chanting crowds, who wore t-shirts decorated with the flag celebrating the war to preserve American slavery, decorated with vulgar slogans of violence and rage. He promised to steer us directly into the deadly heart of the oncoming climate catastrophe; having claimed the work of men more intelligent and knowledgeable than he was nothing but a Chinese hoax, he sneered at the very idea of new energy sources.

This is fine.

That’s a short list. It’s a hell of a short list. But wait, listen: The people went for it.

Tens of millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world. He will soon have the ability to blast the planet to an irradiated cinder, if he sees fit. He will continue to run his business, which appears to involve sitting in a golden throne and putting his names on things. He's given every indication, despite some laughably thin feints toward divestment, he will run that business from the Oval Office. Maybe he’ll even put his name on new things, like laws. Laws: a whole new product line for Trump International, and a potentially lucrative one. He owes the banks of foreign powers millions and millions of dollars. One wonders what laws they’ll want passed. Word is, his first foreign trip will be to visit Vladimir Putin. Heigh-ho. 

His party is in control, too. They don't seem bothered by any of this. They're a bit more focused on providing checks and balances upon ethics watchdogs who have pointed out their party leader's multifarious and historically unprecedented infractions. They'd rather ignore those, so they can immediately—immediately—get down to the serious business of divesting millions and millions of the most vulnerable people in our society from the only chance they have at affordable health coverage. They plan to replace this program with something...someday. Their speculation so far indicates they will be replacing it with the opportunity to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical bills if you need them someday, or, if you don't have hundreds of thousands of spare dollars, to maybe go screw yourself. So, a lot of people are going to die in coming years, that would otherwise have lived, and they're rushing to make it happen. My, look at them laugh. 

Republican lawmakers sign legislation to repeal ACA and defund women's health care access through Planned Parenthood, January 2016

Meanwhile, they're ignoring as peccadilloes the caricatured infractions of a man who intends to keep his own private security detail around him, who expounds upon provable lies, and then when exposed simply doubles down on the lie, who is considering throwing the press out of the White House, and other maneuvers straight out of the dictator handbook. It's really something to see. It's a new order, trumping the old. Isn't it great again?

Laura Ingraham, speaker at the Republican National Convention, 2016.

It’s hard to understand what people hoped for from him other than this. It’s hard not to assume they were responding to the shockingly frank bigotry, his promises to return to an earlier time, the knowing use of slogans used byracists and fascists of days past. These are certainly what seemed to generate all the most popular applause lines. But I don’t want to think that of my country or my fellow citizens. I really want it to be something else. Let us consider other possibilities. Many seem to think that a great thing about him was his frankness. They liked that he “tells it the way it is.” Then again, those same people seemed most likely to think that he didn’t really mean his more shocking proposals. It’s a bit confusing, then, parsing what is meant by ‘telling it like it is,' as it appears to rely on selective trust in insincerity. Many voters, excited by promises to “drain the swamp,” but now disappointed by the recent appointment of a Goldman Sachs foreclosure kingpin to Treasury, of a Putin-connected oil executive to State, and by other signals the new president has given about his eagerness to rob us all blind, have been admonished by a key advisor for taking his words so literally. The 'alt-right' Neo Nazis and the KKK are very excited, for what it’s worth, about the more shocking proposals, and they remain confident our new leader meant every word.

You're really going to want to go to video on this one.

Some people thought he would be less likely to make them pay more in taxes, I suppose. So perhaps at last now we know the answer to the old hypothetical about whether we’d be willing to travel through time and sacrifice our lives to prevent the rise of a self-professing tyrant. Answer: We wouldn’t even suffer a hypothetical increase in our income taxes. I'm told folks voted for Trump because they were tired of being called racist. I imagine that was hard for them—who wants to be considered racist? If this complaint is yours, I imagine reading this (if you're still reading) is also hard. I sympathize; it's not particularly easy to write. But then again, the response seems an odd retort to the complaint. If your persistent problem is people keep telling you there is spinach in your teeth, you might consider getting a mirror and taking a look, rather than voting for the Jolly Green Giant running on a platform of outlawing all floss. And, perhaps, if it is painful to be considered racist, consider this: it may be all the more painful to live under racist oppression.

KKK Newspaper, The Crusader, endorses Trump. 

Many seem to have mainly enjoyed that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and it’s certainly true to say many concerns and criticisms could be levied against her. But the man they voted for as an alternative already stood actualized as the cartoon parody of any potential danger she may have hypothetically posed. Bad judgment? Corruption? Fraud? A proclivity to violent retaliation? A worry about temperament? Untrustworthiness? Lack of transparency? It’s hard to believe this all had much to do with Hillary Clinton and her faults. Hard to believe this list of concerns would yours, but your acceptable alternative would be Donald Trump.

Or maybe they believed the more lurid stories, the debunked, the ridiculous. Hillary’s murdered 80 people close to her. She invented cancer and put it in your cell phone battery. She is secretly seven tiny demons all stacked up in a pantsuit and glued together with the blood of aborted fetuses. She controls the Yosemite supervolcano, along with a cabal comprised of George Soros and 17 other Jewish industrialists. I don’t know what all. I know there are people like this, who have seceded from objective reality into a dystopian alternate dimension, where they can perhaps supplement the powerlessness they feel in their lives with the comfort of false control, of being one of the few with the secret knowledge unavailable to the masses. I don’t know what to do with them, because they live in an alternate dimension. And, it must be said, I don’t think there are 63 million of them.

So here we are. In grave moral and physical danger. All of us. And for what? I’ve heard the same line again and again since the election: “America isn’t a different country today than it was before the election.” Jon Stewart trotted it out. I think I heard it from President Obama.

I fear I agree with the statement. I’m puzzled, though, because I think it is meant to be reassuring, to think we’ve always been the country capable of such a choice.

The statement doesn’t imply that we’re still great. It implies that we were never good.

It has to be admitted, people responded to Trump for what he is. Which means we are left with the statements and proposals by which he distinguished himself. And millions of us—tens of millions—preferred him specifically for his points of difference. Excited by his promises to return us to a time when our system existed only for certain people, and the preferences and needs of all others were beneath consideration, or at least willing to overlook that, in favor of some material or policy advantage somewhere. And ultimately, the reason is immaterial. A man ran for president promising to use the power of the state to bring violence to scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, to make America torture again, to make it easier for an already-militarized police force to employ violence, who praised dictators, who bragged about sexual assault, who praised vengeance as good, who promoted as fact debunked conspiracy, who stated his determination to ignore as conspiracy what the data overwhelmingly indicates is an oncoming extinction-level event. There was some other reason to vote for him, that allowed you to overlook these facts? Save it, please. It really doesn't matter. It was a bad reason. We have seen this movie before. Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding? What am I saying here? Am I saying we are Nazis? The answer, I suppose, has to be 'no.' Only Nazis are Nazis. We are Americans. But what that will mean in decades to come—'American'—has been thrown into hazard. We used to be the sort of place that doesn't allow Donald Trumps to happen. That's gone now, along with that specific sort of trust the world once had in us. In any case, what we seem to now be trying to redefine 'American' to mean seems like a rough beast, and omnivorous. Democracy reveals us by our choices and our actions, not our intentions. We are what we are. And Donald Trump will be president.

As a result, I’m bereft. Bereft of the country I thought I was living in. Bereft of the people I thought I lived among. Bereft of what I believed was a shared direction despite divergent opinions. Bereft of a belief in the possibility of a common dialogue or even a common reality. Bereft in confidence in basic decency and intelligence. Bereft of the spiritual heritage I was born into, because of course Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters were white Christians. Christians voting for a new Herod with the power of a Caesar is a pretty good joke for the universe to tell, I suppose. He’s even promised to go after the (anchor) babies.

My translation of the Bible is full of all this toff about loving your enemy, about how love of money is the root of evil, about showing hospitality to the widow and orphan and the immigrant, and admonishments against drawing the sword lest you die on it. My reading of the Bible doesn't ask "but who's going to pay for that?" My reading of the Bible suggests to me that if you wish to pretend to care about babies unborn, maybe you shouldn’t be so hostile to the idea of making sure they’re cared for once they are born and inconveniently and expensively needy, and perhaps you shouldn’t make so many of their mothers into the welfare-queen boogie-men of your whole realpolitik, and perhaps you shouldn't make weaponry a right more important than health and food. Maybe healing and wholeness and liberty is something that should be available to even the pagan. Maybe the door is open for the tax collector and the prostitute and the Samaritan. Maybe, unencumbered by the overweening need to be perceived as correct in every moral posture, they've even entered that door ahead of us as we do our best to hold it shut against unworthy access.

Maybe I got a trash translation. Maybe the other ones are all about the joys of using political power for your own aggrandizement instead of the call to self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, about the dangers of anchor babies and welfare mothers, about how paying tax money toward a shared life is tyranny, about how with terrorists you have to kill the families, folks, believe me, kill the women and children, you’ve got to go after the families, and we’re gonna torture again, folks, we’re gonna torture, believe me…

You know what? I believe him.

WWJD Check: White Evangelicals are the group most likely favor use of torture by a military superpower. 

* * * You wake up and the sky is gone. At times that’s how it seems. You wonder at it: how could there not be a sky? What will become of us now, in this world without a sky? Was it ever there, or did we just imagine it there, as an exercise of collective will?

And then you talk to other people who insist the sky is there. They say: It’s not gone, it’s just red now. Don’t be a sore loser, just because you didn’t want it red. Accept that we did want it red. It’ll be fine if it’s red. And anyway, the banks seem to like it red. Move on with your life. Suck it up. Hope that the red sky will be as good as the blue one. But the sky isn’t red. It’s not anything. It’s just … not. It is a not-ness. An un-sky. A nothing.

And then you start talking to people who laugh, not without compassion, that you ever fell for the idea there was a sky. They say: That big vast emptiness? Oh, yes. That’s always been there for us. Is it there for you now? How… interesting. We can tell you a thing or two about that emptiness, if you’d listen. We’ve been watching it an awful long time.

American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939 

Future Georgia Representative and Civil Rights pioneer John Lewis, beaten by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965.

Oh. Will he. Will he do that.

The sky is the future. Or it was the future. That’s how it seems, at times. How odd, to speak of the future in the past tense.

But the past tense presents us with further troubles. It seems the past is gone, too.

In 1965, everybody thought King was great, and nobody tried to dismiss him by tying him to violence.

Growing up, we were taught that we were a kind and good and just nation. The story we were given was of a nation born of a righteous cause, not quite made perfect by the godlike men who forged it, but honed to apotheosis over the decades that followed. The destruction of the native nations and their people, ah, tsk, a shame, we’d change it if we could, but unfortunately in the past and unrecoverable. Slavery, a dark stain, but by now expunged entirely. Jim Crow, its shameful cousin, absorbed by a saint named King, who led a boycott (a pleasant and polite and non-disruptive one, it seems, in our memories), then stood on some stairs to give a universally-admired speech about his dream of inclusion, and then, his work seemingly accomplished, having seemingly changed minds forever, ascended harmlessly into the clouds.

Somehow we are never culpable. It was always a long time ago. Mistakes were made, but we’d never make them ourselves. It was always somebody else holding the gun, the whip. We arrived here after that, you see, born blameless, without any afterbirth or shock, into the Greatest Country in the World. Our holocausts we absolved ourselves of, because they served to illustrate not the evil we’d done, but how far we’d come from it. We stood on the prow of the ship, looking forward as we cut new water, not aft looking back at whatever may have been churned up in the wake. Not big on the rear-view mirror, us, not fans of the over-the-shoulder glance. We’d tell ourselves stories of what lay behind. We’d imagine ourselves into those stories of darker times, making ourselves the protagonists. We would have been the ones to build false walls in our home to hide slaves. We would have marched with King. We would have spoken out against the Japanese camps. We would have stood at Stonewall.

Our moral arc bends ever toward justice; an inevitable thing. That was the story.

America was great, because it was good. All the old hits.

People still alive can remember this sort of thing very well. 

This kid is probably still alive. As are most of his classmates. As are the children with whom he refused to attend school. 

This also happened within living memory. 

It's amazing what people consider communism. I mean back then, of course.

Sometimes you’d hear stories about a random injustice or brutality. A policeman who had become a little too enthusiastic. A bad apple, and surely justice was served. If not, it’d have been in the papers You’d hear about it in the papers if it hadn’t been. A gay teen beaten to death in a cornfield. A car with the banner of the struggle to preserve human slavery on the bumper sticker. The KKK marching again, how quaint. Ah, you’d think, if you were like me. We still have some work to do. Cleanup on aisle seven.

Technology has changed that. We see with new eyes now, unless we choose not to. We see videos, dozens and dozens of them now, new ones each week it seems, of police shooting unarmed black people. Again and again and again and again. Can you remember all the names? I can't anymore. And I ask myself: why can't I?

We see the speed with which so many seem willing to seek and find the nearest handy reason the victim deserved his or her fate. We see the news organizations find a Sunday School photo for the shooter and a mugshot to represent the victim. We see acquittal and acquittal and acquittal. We see failure to prosecute.

And, perhaps, we begin to wonder.

We see the people protesting, unarmed, asking only that their lives be thought to matter as much as another’s, and we see the stormtroopers with their massive guns and their tanks, arrayed against a civilian population almost reflexively, like defenses in an organism’s bloodstream mustering against a disease. And we wondered, perhaps: why do they look so much—so exactly, if we’re honest—like an occupying force? 

We saw the white ranchers seize government land, pointing their guns directly at law enforcement officials, speaking openly of armed insurrection against the government, of revolution, of war. We saw them, later, seizing a government building. They weren’t protesting after centuries seeing their children and brothers and sisters killed without consequence by authority. Rather, they didn’t want to have to pay a grazing fee. Was it with surprise that we saw it: law enforcement seemed less frightened of these white men and their guns than they had an unarmed black woman in a sundress, or a 12 year old boy playing in a park? Were we surprised to see they seemed so level-headed in this situation, so much less likely to respond with immediate lethal force?

Why, those fellows with their arsenal didn’t even get convicted. They were less threatening to the system, apparently, than a man, arms up, lying on the ground next to his autistic ward begging not to be shot. (He was shot.) We might contrast to the treatment of the protesters at Standing Rock, and wonder…is the Holocaust against native people relegated only to the past? Would we change it, if we could?

We wonder: Are we seeing the system breaking down, unable to cope with new challenges? Or are we seeing a system working exactly as it’s always intended? Do we as a collective of 'white' people secretly want the police to control brown people by force? Are we secretly hoping that force will prove lethal, only occasionally enough to soothe our consciences, but frequently enough to promote an order less immediately costly, than the pain of culpability, than the justice of restitution?

If not, why are prosecutions so rare, and convictions even less so?

If not, why aren’t we protesting these killings? Why aren’t we in the streets?

Do all lives matter? If so, why wouldn’t we act like it?

White Christian America reveres Dr. King, it should be noted. You remember him—the peaceful guy who gave the speech that ended racism. If Facebook and newspaper op eds are any measure, we white Christians can’t stop bringing him up, almost as a cudgel, an admonishment to those today who would dare ask for their own human dignity, for not doing it as antiseptically as we remember it being done by him. And perhaps people begin to wonder: Why was King enshrined as 'the peaceful one' only once he was peacefully dead? Is King’s being safely dead our favorite thing about him? These days, we white Christians can claim to have brought his dream to reality (the white guy is usually the hero of the story in the movie), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will not protest—and we white Christians don’t like protest. Heavens, no—it’s so divisive. Dr. King, he wouldn’t approve of this protest, nor that one, and certainly not that one. His protests were so polite! Why, nobody had any problem with them at all! Dr. King agrees with all of us in white Christian America so much, these days. Oh my, he never stops agreeing with us. Just ask us; we’ll tell you. Yes, and what ever happened to Dr. King, anyway, after he gave that speech that ended all inequality forever?

But no matter, I told myself. That’s a dying strain, it's not who we are these days. That’s just a few bad apples. We’ve made so much progress. They’ll exhaust themselves in a final futile sputter. We’re just about to turn the corner. Sure there are racists, bigots, white supremacists, lost-causers, and they're loud, but they're dying out, and they know it. They'll eventually run somebody on an overtly racist platform, and they'll lose huge—I disagree with Republicans, but most of them won't stand for stark white supremacy, surely, and obviously Christians won't be able to align themselves with it — and we’ll show them it’s no use, and they’ll retreat, retrench to even positions even more compromised, less fortified, further back, smaller, diminished. We’re a better country than that.

But then Donald Trump, a half-rate and transparently obvious bullshit artist, a greasy reality TV star most skilled at demonstrating his manifest ignorance, promising mostly the goodness of violence and the strength of vengeance, offering to return America to an earlier time, railing against the inconvenience of practicing sensitivity toward the perspectives of others (he called it 'political correctness'), received 63 million geographically-convenient votes to become the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you took a moment then to ponder that statement about bad apples and what they do to the whole barrel. The meaning of it. And, perhaps, another saying, about recognizing a tree by its fruit. And, it must be said, though we refuse to face it: In America, our trees have long borne a strange fruit.

  Here’s what we’ve lost, or at least what I’ve lost: The assumption of goodness’s inevitability. The assumption of goodness of those around me. The assumption of good intent in their hearts. The assumption that the future is still there. The assumption that most of us will die of old age. Here's what I've lost, the one favor Donald Trump may ever do for me: The wool from my eyes. An illusion, particularly a pretty and a convincing one, can be a painful thing to lose.

I’ve gained a vision of tens of millions of people desperate to bend history’s arc back toward an injustice that favored them, and willing to fight for that regression, willing even to risk species-wide extinction rather than suffer the pain of facing the consequences of their own mountainous indifference.

The moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but the gears of history grind the weak. There are people now who are giddy, almost with the air of a teenager behind the wheel of a sweet-sixteen hot rod, to test out their perceived new warrant to deliver retributive and violent indifference to the people they deem unlovely. A headscarf yanked off here. A slur shouted in public there. A swastika scrawled on a wall here. A Neo Nazi propagandist advising the President of the United States in the corridors of power there. A crowd of seig heils in a government building, in praise of our new leader here. A few million children stripped of health insurance with no serious attempt at a replacement there.

They think this is allowed now. Sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly aligned with white supremacy, gave them the idea it is. It’s going to be our job to show them otherwise. We must show them otherwise. And. Even if you voted for Trump—especially if you voted for Trump—the door is wide open for you to join in that struggle. You show them otherwise, too. All you have to do to join...is join. Your intentions were good? Excellent. I believe you. I've badly misunderstood you? Excellent. I believe you. Now, show it. Show your good intention by your good actions. You, like all of us, possess tremendous moral authority. Don't lend it any longer to those who have promised to squander it on atrocity. They seem intent on doing as they say. If you wait too long, they will leave you with none left to withdraw. Use it to protect those different than you. Use it against your own advantage, for the advantage of those who have none. And. If you, like me, did not vote for Trump, there is the great danger of complicity. You will be offered, if you, like me are white and straight and employed and well-off and cis-gendered and able-bodied and healthy and property-owning, the opportunity to be indifferent. Resist that current.

If the universe bends toward justice, the engine it has chosen for this good work is the hard and sacrificial struggle of good people willing to acknowledge the basic humanity of all other people. People who don’t think profitability is the foundational metric of goodness. People who don't think life holds a value that begins at conception but ends the moment it enters poverty. People bold and willing to become peaceful pebbles in the gears. To give time and money. To link arms with a married gay couple. To take sides in a cafeteria skirmish with a transgendered teen. To take a truncheon in the head for a Muslim. To paraphrase Jesus (another favorite who those of us in white Christian America appear by our words and deeds to consider as safely dead as Dr. King): to live, first you must die.

Or, as another poet says, love’s the only engine of survival.

So, what’s next?

First, we lament. We acknowledge the un-sky, the void. We listen to those who’ve been staring at it far longer than us. We name the challenge with clear eyes. That, I suppose, is what this has been.

And then we get to work. Let us hope our leaders will prove other than than they say they will. Let us not be so naive to think it likely. Let us oppose in a fierce and broken love. Let us meet with friends, we eat good meals with them. Let us consider people before money, and notice where our society fails to do so. Let us make art, and we try to make it well. Let us refuse to allow a comfortable silence to enfold a hateful or ignorant statement. Let us stand up against hate, bodily if necessary. Let us learn our system, and work within it. Let us call our leaders, and advocate for those who suffer. Let us practice generosity without care for the merit of the beneficiary, but only for their need. Let us investigate before we publish. Let us loudly proclaim the humanity others try to diminish. Let loudly proclaim the humanity of those who do not share our values, even as we oppose. Let us never celebrate the suffering of those who oppose us, for they suffer, too. Let us seek to divest ourselves of unearned cultural advantage. Let us enter spaces where our voices are not primary, and listen without thinking to speak. Let us create space to speak, in places where our voices are primary, for those who have had no voice. Let us reject optimism and blind belief. Let us embrace hope. Let us work. Let us work. Let us work. We are a people who have dreamed of the sky. I’d like to see if we can make it real.

source: http://www.armoxon.com/2017/01/sky.html (January 16, 2017)

VOTE

[soul-music-is-life]

I've seen some of your post on the bullshit heartbeat bill in your state and I'm just wondering how you're dealing.

I have stared at this ask for a while, wondering whether or not I wanted to get in depth into this conversation. But I do have a lot to say on the matter. A while back I drafted a blog post that I toyed with sharing, but ultimately held off. Until now.

There’s…a lot to be covered.

First, thank you for sparking me to put this out there. I feel as though it’s important enough to say what I have to say on this. And though this platform is usually used for fandom stuff (I use other platforms for my political stuff), I’m not afraid to get real now and again.

Second, let me state that I have a background in medicine and a family heavily involved and working in politics…so I know how this goes.

I’m going to pre-empt this by saying that I am not going to argue with anyone who is pro-life who reads and disagrees. If you agree, great. If you disagree, there is no point in trying to fight me…because we will never see eye to eye.

This is strictly an argument based on why I’m against politics and religion in medicine. I am not looking for a debate here. There is no debate to be had. If you can’t look at things without religion, or if you can’t understand scientific/medical facts it’s a moot point.

It’s a long one. Saddle up.

Religion vs. Medicine:

Christianity should have no place in medicine (the bible condemns polyester blends, playing with pigskin, gambling, and divorce, but Christians still shop til they drop, support football, play the lottery, and divorce their spouses). Yet we get lawmakers constantly using the bible as a talking point (”Thank God” and “As God intended”) for this argument and ignoring testimony from physicians with degrees in science.

Men (with the exception of those whose sperm fertilized an egg in a consensual act) should have no say in what happens inside of a uterus that does not belong to them (and even then, it should be a discussion between those two people and their doctor, not a government made up of religious zealot white women and white-boys without uteri).

The government should not infringe upon individual rights of medical privacy via HIPAA.

Basically:

If you can not argue without the basis of religion (or you keep using “God” or The Bible as your baseline) or if you are not someone who has a uterus or in the medical profession or a woke dude/lady, you have no fucking say.

If you are a Christian forcing your beliefs upon the population based upon a magical book that has absolutely no proof, you have no fucking say. (see Separation of Church and State).

If you are a politician forcing your agenda upon every person with a uterus based upon something you can absolutely never experience, you have no fucking say.

If you do not have a background in science and you’re basing your opinions upon a movie (”Unplanned”) that is nothing more than political propaganda (and a pro-life “advocate” who saw dollar signs and a means to fame) then you have no fucking say (and yes, I’ve seen the film, which was nothing more than a religious backed, over-dramatized flick poorly representing abortions and relied heavily upon cheap emotional manipulation and inaccurate CGI). As someone who has seen medical procedures…it was exaggerated in the film. It is absolutely not a representation of safe and legal abortions. It also does not address the confidentiality between patient/doctor (See HIPAA and the testimony of physicians in this matter).

The fact of the matter is that people who are informed, intelligent, and know about the subject in depth are against these abortion bans, because they know it’s extreme and infringes upon basic rights. This includes women, our allies, and in some cases…people who are religiouswho stand with the pro-choice movement (I see you all, too, don’t doubt that…this is not a reflection upon men and Christians in general. This is about the extremists).

If you fall into the extreme religious or non-medical community category or you are a politician with no medical training and you’re writing bills and arguing against basic human rights…you can shut the fuck up.

***

For the sake of facts, let’s break it down:

-Sexual education can be informative, and the preventatives used to prevent pregnancy can fail. Condoms break. The pill can fail (and let’s not even get into the horrible side effects that contraceptives have on women. Let’s talk about the fact that there was actually a birth control for men that companies tried to put on the market, but the side effects were too ‘dangerous’. Sure, like high blood pressure and hormonal imbalances are something women look forward to). But yeah, let’s put all the responsibility on the woman.

-Women are raped, and given the trauma that occurs…they should not have to PROVE they were raped in order to receive medical treatment…including abortion. It’s horrific enough as it is, and there is NO wrong way to deal with the trauma. They shouldn’t have an additional stigma to be treated medically.

-Women who tend to make the choice to have an abortion have looked at their options and have made an informed CHOICE (that’s what this is about). And it’s not always at the 6-8 week mark, because hey…there are things such as irregular periods. Cis-men hating on women, let’s talk about women’s reproduction for a minute. Have you ever spent 7 days bleeding out of an orifice of your body? Have you ever shed the lining of an internal organ? Have you ever had blood clots inside of your body that feel like fucking death? Have you ever had your panties soaked in blood? Have you ever gotten stressed and missed a period or had medical issues that caused you to have irregular cycles? No? Okay, so how about the stressors of pregnancy? How about the changes a woman’s body goes through? How about the emotional and physical toll it takes? Truth is, hetero-normal men who are so deep-set in their beliefs will NEVER view women as equal. Reality is…we women areintelligent enough to make our own decisions.

-An embryo at 6-8 weeks is not viable. The so called “heartbeat” is an electrical activity in a group of cells that is at maximum a few inches long. There is no heartbeat, because there IS no heart. It hasn’t formed. There is not a cardiovascular system. It’s a vibration in a cell. It is ONLY active because of the woman. At this point it is NOT a child. I see pro-life/pro-birth people going, “but…but SCIENCE…Life at conception!” without understanding the depth of their actual words. The medical community knows their shit. And people can challenge them all they want with their opinions upon when life is sentient, but the truth is that there is no brain activity this early because IT IS NOT A HUMAN. It is an embryo, which can not exist without the mother’s body. Yet politicians use the term “heartbeat” because they know there are uneducated people out there who will eat it up and back them.

-Abortion is situational, and trying to force a law upon women based upon the preconceived notion that ALL women are using it as a form of birth control is ignorant, ill-informed, and extremely sanctimonious. There are numerous reasons for abortion, and none of them are the government’s fucking business.

Why religion and politics is a slippery slope in medicine:

Using a religious bias in a political war is against everything in the judiciary and legislative branch, and it is a slippery slope that is dangerous to patient care. When we start listening to “Gods” and evangelical people over actual physicians there is a huge problem. Ask yourself this question: if you were dying and a surgery could save your life…would you call a priest to perform the procedure? Or a licensed physician? If you choose a priest, enjoy seeing your version of the afterlife, because you’re going to die.

Abby Johnson (”Unplanned) is not a doctor. She is someone who “found God” and is using that to exploit the situation with her own views as a claim to fame. She ran a Planned Parenthood (in her own words). ONE chapter, which means it’s a FRACTION of the actual unit. She does not have a PHD. Her accusations against physicians are bullshit and is frankly an insult to actual doctors who perform safe medical procedures every day.

Politicians have no knowledge of medical protocols and treatments (and in a lot of cases know an embarrassingly low amount about women’s reproductive organs). And in many cases it is old white men (and religious white women) dictating what a woman can do with her body. If you think that’s okay, you’re part of the problem.

Religious zealots hold fast to beliefs written in a fairytale rather than learn the scientific facts associated with the base of their argument. They can’t grasp the concept that an organism can be created in a petrie dish with a “beating heart”, because of muscle contractions, not because it’s “alive” or “sentient”. They would rather blindly follow a God that may or may not exist rather than listen to educated physicians who know the topic.

Rapid fire question: if an unconscious woman and a frozen embryo were in a burning building and you could only save one of them, which one would you choose? Something that is not aware and is only a potential for life? Or the actual living breathing human?

This shit is not about “saving babies”. Politicians couldn’t give a shit about babies after they are born. It’s about controlling women/trans-folk and telling people what they can do with their body (it’s funny how Republican politicans haven’t outlawed smoking or drinking, because hey…that kills you! “AnD wE aRE PRo-LiFE!”).

Anyone who can’t see that all these abortion laws are just plays for politicians to pursue their own political pursuits is an idiot.

A Note about Georgia’s Abortion Law/Kemp

In my state, there was talks that Kemp was overheard saying that even if he wanted to veto the bill he couldn’t due to “his campaign promises”. Which is absolute bullshit, because given the polls…he knew that a majority of the people in his state are against it. This bill was co-sponsored by three men and three women who are basing it heavily upon religious purposes (if you don’t believe me, look up Ed Setzler, he’s been quoted several times leaning on religious propaganda for this bill). It was then voted through by a bunch of old white men.

Convenient how they threw the one token woman up front (but honestly, fuck her…because she should know better). The fact of the matter is that those who voted on this are a bunch of “good ole boys” with religious principles trying to bypass the fact that there is a separation of church and state. This bill has had numerous polls conducted to the constituents, and while they were divided…the PRO-CHOICE voice won every single poll. Put this up for a vote and I guarantee this would not become a law.

Kemp waited weeks to sign this (unlike the governor of Alabama).

Why?

Because he knew that most of his constituents were against this (given the polls that were conducted), but due to political pressure he couldn’t veto for fear that he’d lose the religious/deeply rooted republican votes. Even Kemp seemed to realize that this is against the moral rights of his citizens. But he doesn’t give a shit. Because as long as his pockets are lined with money and he can ignore his constituents, it’s all gravy for him.

To take this a step further, this asshole is the man who pointed a gun at a kid jokingly in an age where school shootings are rampant, as a joke…for political purposes. Cuz, ya know…violence is funny.

He’s “pro-life” but he shoots things.

This man is sponsored by the National Hunting and Fishing association, who supports killing living breathing things with a heartbeat for sport or “because it tastes good”.

I challenge anyone who is so “pro-heartbeat” to never shoot their guns again to kill something. Because hey, life is so precious to you, right? You value heartbeats so effing much, stop killing living breathing things. Nut up or shut up.

Actually, no, don’t nut up. That’s the reason for unplanned pregnancies in the first place. Just shut up.

…that will never happen. And you want to know why?

Because this is not about life. They don’t give a shit about “life”. This is about power. This is about control.

If you can’t see that an entire gender is being used for political gain then you need to wake the fuck up.

I’ll end this by saying that, yes, there might be some common ground that can be found here. In the people out there fighting every day for their rights. In the allies we have coming out of the woodworks. In the physicians who fought like hell for us in court.

I’m not an unreasonable person. I do believe in sensible laws. These bans are not sensible. They’re a power play. And that’s fucked up. And as much as I’d love to pack up and leave, I don’t have that option. A lot of people don’t (and in fact, I think the “Boycott GA” movement is so fucking stupid, because that doesn’t hurt the people in power. It hurts the PEOPLE).

So if you’re pissed off, remember this at the polls. Know who your reps are. And if they are for this bullshit, vote their asses out.

Flip their fucking seats.

I’m tired, you guys. Let’s get our rights back. Let’s take our state back.

[sunjadye]

The fact that there are states in this country outlawing abortion makes me wonder what planet am I on? But more importantly it pains my heart that my fellow women are having a right taken away and are having their body’s be controlled by an outside force.

[feministeblog-blog]

Blessed Be the Fruit: Six-week abortion bills are sweeping the nation

Under his eye. (Photo credit Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Back in March, I brought up a (then) brand-new law in Kentucky that essentially outlaws abortion. Technically, it only bans abortion after a heartbeat can be detected, but since that can happen as early as six weeks — before many women even know they’re pregnant — it’s basically a not-even-that-sneaky attempt to ban all abortions. Except it’s not even that. It’s an attempt to get their law in front of the Supreme Court to create an opportunity for our newly conservatized court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Kentucky was the first to get their bill over the line, but they’re far from the only contenders. Three more have been signed — among them Georgia’s truly repugnant bill, which was signed just this week — and six more are currently sitting in various stages in their respective legislatures, most of them openly declaring an intent to make it to the Supreme Court, consequences and expenses to the taxpayers be damned.

(A note on terminology: These bills are made all the most absurd by the fact that a fetus doesn’t even actually have a heart at six weeks’ gestation, as pointed out by Dr. Jen Gunter. But I guess “fetal pole tissue activity bill” doesn’t have the same ring to it. I’ll be using the term “six-week ban,” because I don’t like reinforcing inaccurate, intentionally inflammatory terminology.)

It’s important to note that even after these laws “officially” take effect, they won’t be able to actually take effect because they are, to a one, unconstitutional AF. (But again, that’s the whole point.) It’s less important to note that 56 percent of the U.S. public opposes the bans once they know what the bans really mean, and 65 percent of the public don’t want the court to overturn Roe. Why is that less important? Because the public doesn’t get an opinion on this one — it’s not in Brett Kavanaugh’s hands yet, but it will be before long.

Signed

Georgia

Just on Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB 481 — the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, see, it spells a word! It’s so clever! — which prevents women from getting an abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The law does include exceptions for a documented medical emergency or for rape or incest — in which case you have to file a police report before they’ll let you get an abortion.

But wait, there’s more. The Georgia law also declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition” — meaning that, no shit, fetuses have to be included in “population based determinations.”

Unlike many abortion laws that apply to abortion providers but not pregnant women, this law does criminalize women who get abortions. If they get an abortion from a provider, they’re a party to murder, punishable by life in prison. (If you travel out of state, or help someone else leave the state, for an abortion, that’s conspiracy to commit murder, 10 years.) If she miscarries because of her own conduct (like using drugs while pregnant), that’s second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison. (So pregnant women in Georgia, look forward to an interrogation about that sushi you ate that one time if you should ever experience the tragedy of a miscarriage.) And if she terminates her own pregnancy, that’s murder, subject to life imprisonment or death.

The law will go into effect January 1, 2020, although Roe v. Wade will prevent the state from actually prosecute women — for as long as Roe remains precedent, at least.

Ohio

At long last, Ohio has finally managed to get a six-week ban passed! (Fifth time’s the charm.) In April, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed SB 23, the Human Rights Protection Act (which doesn’t spell anything clever. Come on, Ohio, you’ve had eight years to work on this). The new law, of course, bans abortions as soon as a heartbeat can be detected, making it a fifth-degree felony with up to a year in prison for any doctor who performs one. The legislation also lets the State Medical Board take disciplinary action against doctors, with penalties of up to $20,000. It was known as the country’s most punitive such bill until Georgia said, “Hold my beer.”

Is this another bill designed for the sole purpose of causing a Supreme Court challenge, though? No way!

Just kidding. “Will there be a lawsuit? Yeah, we are counting on it. We’re counting on it. We’re excited about it.” Well, I’m glad you’re getting such a thrill from violating a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, state Rep. Ron Hood.

The new law is scheduled to take effect 90 days after signing — which will be July 10 — unless, of course, it’s blocked by a federal judge.

Mississippi

In March, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed their own six-week ban, SB 2116, also prohibiting abortion as early as six weeks in lest a doctor lose their Mississippi medical license. (It does include an exception for the life or health of the mother, although the legislature rejected efforts to allow an exception for rape or incest.) In a statement at the signing ceremony, Bryant said, "I can remember the exciting moments both with my children and grandchildren when the first sonograms were taken and that heartbeat could be heard,” because some dude’s happy sonogram memory should definitely dictate what women are allowed to do with their own bodies.

Mississippi’s last attempt at an abortion bill passed last year — a ban after 15 weeks, which was, at the time, one of the most restrictive laws in the country. (Ah, simpler times.) It was blocked by a federal judge who found it to “unequivocally” violate women’s constitutional rights. I’m sure they have great hopes for this one, though. (Although it’s facing legal challenges, it remains as yet unblocked.)

(Fun fact: Did you know that Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country? I wonder if any of those babies would have appreciated the funding the state is prepared to dump into defending this openly unconstitutional law.)

Kentucky

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin got to signing SB 9 with a quickness — not only did he sign the bill into law around midnight the day after it passed the Senate in March, he also signed an “emergency” declaration to make it take effect immediately. The ACLU of Kentucky filed almost immediately to stop it from going into effect, and then U.S. District Judge David Hale awarded them a temporary stay almost immediately on the grounds that come on, y’all, please don’t pretend to be as stupid as you’re pretending to be. Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the only remaining clinic in Kentucky that performs abortions, had to turn patients away the day the bill was signed. They were able to reopen again when the stay was ordered — for as long as it lasts, anyway.

In Progress

Louisiana

Louisiana’s SB 184 passed through the state Senate just this week and is headed over to the House for consideration. The bill prohibits a person from performing an abortion after a heartbeat is detected under penalty of a fine up to $1,000, up to two years in jail, and revocation of their medical license. It includes an exception for the woman’s life or health but not for rape or incest — the Senate committee original approved such an exception, but then a representative from Louisiana Right to Life convinced them to leave it out, because it would show respect for a life after it’s born, which we don’t do in Louisiana, merci beaucoup.

This law actually has a trigger clause that it will only go into effect if Mississippi’s law passes its own legal challenges. That way, Louisiana doesn’t have to pay for a legal battle it know it won’t be able to win. There’s using your noodle, Louisiana.

Alabama

Alabama HB 314 would make abortion — all abortion — a Class A felony, carrying a maximum sentence of 99 years in prison, and attempted abortion a Class C felony, with up to 10 years. It passed in the House 74-3, with all of the Republicans voting in favor (save for two who didn’t vote at all), and nearly all the Democrats walking out of the House chamber rather than vote.

As in other states, bill sponsor Rep. Terri Collins was very open about the fact that her goal with this bill is a Supreme Court challenge — that’s why it doesn’t include an exception for rape or incest (despite a proposed amendment to include such an exemption). She says the bill will provide “a vehicle to revisit the constitutionally flawed Roe v. Wade decision.”

The bill will move to the state Senate sometime next week, and while it’s not completely certain that it’ll pass, a companion bill (SB 211) was introduced last month, so chances aren’t bad. I mean, “not bad” in the sense that it’s not unlikely to pass, not “not bad” in the sense that it wouldn’t be very, very bad for anyone who might get pregnant.

South Carolina

South Carolina’s H 3020 would make it illegal to receive an abortion in South Carolina after a heartbeat is detected. Unlike most other six-week bans currently under discussion, South Carolina’s bill includes an exception for rape or incest as well as for the life of the mother, although it was only added after a bit of a fight.

The bill isn’t likely to become law this year, since the legislative session is over, but: The South Carolina legislative session is actually two years, meaning this bill could come back up when the General Assembly reconvenes in 2020. So while the bill hasn’t totally passed, we can’t really put it down as a fail either. (More’s the pity.) And it’s not promising that this is the first time this proposal has ever made it this far — attempts in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018 never made it to the floor, but this one appears to be a winner.

Missouri

In February, the House of Representatives in Missouri — which has exactly one abortion provider left — passed HB 126, which bans… like, everything. It started out just banning abortion after the detection of a heartbeat, making it a felony, but then it got loaded up like a party bus on prom night. As passed, the bill also bans abortion on the basis of race, sex, or indication of Down syndrome; requires both custodial parents to be informed if a minor tries to get an abortion; and requires Missouri residents who are getting an abortion out of state to receive the same informed consent booklet they would if they were getting their abortion in Missouri. It also includes a trigger clause that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion is banned entirely in Missouri. And it bans abortion at eight, 14, 18, or 20 weeks, whichever ends up being deemed constitutional. (The bill includes an exception for the life or health of the mother but not for rape or incest.)

So just to be clear: This bill bans abortion after the detection of a heartbeat or on the basis of a whole bunch of things that can’t be detected at six weeks. And it requires out-of-state abortion providers to have Missouri informed consent materials, and it bans abortion after… basically whatever they can get away with. Missouri, you definitely win the award for most dadaist abortion bill.

The bill — called the “Missouri Stands for the Unborn” Act — is currently sitting in the state Senate, so we’ll see where it goes from there.

West Virginia

West By-God Virginia’s HB 2915 was introduced in February to ban abortion after a heartbeat is detected, except in the case of danger to the mother’s life or health, rape or incest, incomplete miscarriage, or fetal incompatibility with life — making it probably the most permissive of the current crop of six-week bills, which, of course, isn’t saying much. It also includes regulations as to what can be done with fetal tissue. The bill, which happens to have been co-sponsored by Speaker of the House Roger Hanshaw, was still sitting in committee when the legislative session closed in March.

Incidentally, last November, West Virginia voters approved an amendment to remove the right to abortion from the West Virginia constitution. During that debate, abortion-rights proponents argued that the amendment would open the door to other abortion restrictions. What a bunch of sillys, right?

Minnesota

In January, HF 271 (and its companion bill SF 869) were introduced to the Minnesota State Legislature. It was referred to the Health and Human Services Policy committee, and there it appears to be hanging out, for the time being. These bills are identical to HF 4524 and SF 4109, which failed to pass in 2018, so here’s hoping for a repeat of that.

FAIL

Florida

Companion bills HB 235 and SB 792 would have made it a third-degree felony for a doctor to perform an abortion after a heartbeat is detected, with an exception for the life or health of the mother. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had pledged to sign such legislation if it passed, which it didn’t.

Maryland

In February, HB 933 and HB 978 (the “Keep Our Hearts Beating” Act, like, seriously) were filed with the Maryland House of Delegates, but neither made it out of committee. Also in February, a bill that would enshrine a woman’s right to abortion in the state constitution was withdrawn because the Senate president didn’t want to move it forward this year. Maybe next year, Maryland.

Texas

The Texas House of Representatives held a public hearing in April to discuss HB 896, a law that would criminalize all abortion with no exception, and make it possible for women who get abortions to be convicted of homicide. Since Texas is easily the death-penaltiest state in the country, that means a woman could be executed for getting an abortion — even if her own life was in danger. Rep. Tony Tinderholt said the bill is necessary to make women “more personally responsible.”

The law, thankfully, was blocked in committee when Rep. Jeff Leach refused to advance it to the floor. The local sheriff’s department is currently looking into multiple threats to his life. Because, life! We care about it!

Tennessee

Tennessee’s HB 77 (companion bill to SB 1236) passed out of the state House in February by a vote of 66-21, but it failed in the state Senate Judiciary Committee because it is, as Lt. Gov. Randy McNally says, “constitutionally suspect.” (Not that “constitutionally suspect” is basically a defining feature of all these bills.) But the state House and Senate appear divided over whether they want to focus on a six-week bill or a trigger bill, and now they’re engaged in a zany comedy of errors. Don’t hold your breath, though — the six-week bill has been sent to “summer study,” so we’ll probably be seeing it again next session. Then again, Sen. Mark Pody has submitted a letter requesting that the bill be brought to the floor now, so who knows what might happen? It’s definitely not in any way a clusterfuck.

Iowa

Iowa’s six-week ban was signed into law in May of 2018 but never took effect because, of course, it violates the state constitution. The Polk County District Court deemed it “violative of both the due process and equal protection provisions of the Iowa Constitution as not being narrowly tailored to serve the compelling state interest of promoting potential life.” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said she thinks the court got it wrong but that she sees “no path to successfully appeal the district court’s decisions or to get this lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Oh, come on, Kim, don’t get all discouraged like that! That kind of thing isn’t stopping any of the other states.

[pastor-dj]

Modern Science and Modern Evangelical Christianity: Strange Bedfellows

Many bloggers and media pundits seem to suggest that “science” and “religion” (and by “religion” they usually mean Christianity) are opposite forces that are at complete odds with each other. Well-known celebrity science advocate Bill Nye’s new TV show is all about promoting science and “defending” it from the “anti-scientific claims of religious leader.”  As a Christian myself, not only do I believe that there is no contradiction between scientific fact and Biblical truth (as opposed to scientific theory vs. speculations about Scripture), I also believe that the quest for truth – whether through scientific exploration or theological study and reflection – is always something God delights in. All truth is God’s truth, and both 2+2=4 AND John 3:16 are equally valid, even if the methods for discovering the truth are different.  But I find it fascinating that there are two big issues in which both scientists and evangelical Christians seem to be stuck together in the same boat.

The first is this: (1) who speaks for either group? The Roman Catholic Church has a big advantage over the rest of the Christian family, as they have the Pope who is the only one authorized to speak on matters of theology, doctrine or practice. But for evangelical Protestants, who speaks for them? Pat Robertson? Franklin Graham? Joel Osteen? Rick Warren? Paula White?  All of them are people the media will go to for a quote. But while there is a broad consensus among Christians on the main issues of the faith (salvation, Lordship of Christ, etc.), when it comes to secondary issues (baptism, interpretation of Revelation, speaking in tongues, etc.) or hot-button political/social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, there are many different answers you might get to these questions.  No one person speaks for all Protestant evangelical Christians. And when the media reports that Christians disagree on some things, it leads a lot of people to believe that Christians don’t agree on ANYTHING.  Now, if you can get past the profanity, crude sex jokes and unrelated tangents, watch John Oliver’s show from last season on “Scientific Studies” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw) and you see the same dynamic at play. Every week, there is a report in the media on a new “scientific study” about a food or some product that will either (a) give you cancer, (b) prevent cancer (c) help you lose weight, (d) make you fat, or (e) any combination thereof.  It’s no wonder, as Oliver notes, that so many people distrust “science” when it all seems so contradictory. At one point, he angrily berates Al Roker for suggesting that people “just pick the scientific study that works for you” (in all fairness, Roker probably said it in jest) by shouting: “No! In science, you don’t get to cherry pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway!” That’s what religion does!” And he’s right! – or at least, he’s right about how many humans approach religion (i.e., cherry picking the parts of the Bible that they already agree with while ignoring the others). So, if science is not this big monolith, with all scientist moving in lockstep, who “speaks for science”?  Well, just like evangelical Christianity, people like Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others are jockeying for position, trying to get the most media face time, and hoping to be the official spokesman. But, both sides are facing an uphill battle.

           The second issue that both groups are facing is this: (2) when either science or Christianity gets in bed with politics, the search for truth becomes secondary.  Politics is all about, as Charlie Sheen used to say, WINNING. It’s all about your side winning the debate, shouting down your opponent, and making your side look good and the other side look bad. And that unfortunately is what both evangelical Christians and scientists have been doing for the last several decades. Early on in the history of the Church, Christianity was outlawed by the Roman Empire but despite its suppression, it grew exponentially even though the followers of Jesus risked their lives by doing so. But then, the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the state, and overnight, Christians went from persecuted to favored status. Suddenly, Christian leaders and teachers were members of the emperor's court, and got caught up in palace intrigue and king-making instead of sharing their faith --  something we've struggled with in many Western countries ever since. So many evangelical Christians give their blind allegiance to either the Democrat or Republican parties hoping that the trade-off will be more power and prestige (regardless of whether or not the party fully espouses Christian virtues). And in the same way, many scientists have aligned themselves with political movements and given them their full allegiance without taking into consideration other studies and other potential conflicting data. Many scientists, having been goaded into support global warming as a political issue rather than as a scientific inquiry, are now so fully immersed in their political position that they won't stop to consider any conflicting data (as we saw from the “Climategate” scandal several years ago). Rather than searching for scientific truth and trying to educate the public about the dangers of damaging the earth’s ozone layer, instead it's all about proving that “Al Gore was right and his Republican opponents were wrong!” and shouting “DENIER!” at anyone who questions them. But when you try to ask these scientists “what can we do help stop global warming?” it's like they don't care about what we can do to fix it. All they seem to care about is being right and winning the debate.

           Personally, I don’t know if the scientific data available has convinced me that every time there is a record high temperature somewhere in the world it is the result of man-made global warming as opposed to circular weather patterns. But, I also don't need for the former to ultimately be true for me to be convinced that pumping lots of fluorocarbons into the atmosphere is bad and it's going to wreak havoc on the environment. I also don't know if I believe that either the Democrat or Republican Party is “more Christian” than the other and deserves our full allegiance. But, I believe that even if we don't choose sides, we could still work together to make a huge difference in this world. It would be great if both scientists and evangelicals could put down their guns and knives and poison pixels on the internet and start listening to one another and working together the solve some of the bigger problems in this world. Because when it comes down to it, we are both pursuers of Truth.

[frankterranella]

What is this obsession with the monarchy?

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has unleashed a tsunami of interest in the monarchy by Americans. This has been fed by the U.S. media, which has had a field day providing wall-to-wall coverage of every step of the queen’s travels from deathbed to tomb. Any idiot who can show the slightest expertise in things monarchical has been summoned to be a talking head on the 24-hour news channels. And Americans eat it up and clamor for more.

The American appetite for monarchy is curious, considering the reason for founding this nation was to break away from an English monarch (Elizabeth’s 3rd great grandfather George III). It seems like we can’t get enough of news about the royals from Princess Margaret to Princess Diana to Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. What is this fascination with an ancient system based solely on an accident of birth?

If we look at history, it’s clear that some Americans have always favored monarchy here. To start with, we have the 20% of Americans who were Loyalists during the American Revolution and supported the king. Most of these people stayed after the war and maintained their pro-monarchy views.

And even some of the people who supported the revolution had favorable views of monarchy as a system of government. Alexander Hamilton proposed an elective monarchy for the United States at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He proposed that the President be elected for life like a king. Hamilton believed in a very strong executive who would have strong, king-like powers checked only by impeachment.

And in poll after poll in the last 50 years, an ever-increasing number of Americans have expressed approval for the idea that the United States would be better run if we had a king. This has translated into support for increased presidential powers. Just this month, a poll by Axios/Ipsos showed that about one in three Americans prefers a strong unelected leader to a weak elected leader.

In recent years, Republican leaders from Dick Cheney to Donald Trump have supported greater and greater executive powers. Their supporters point to Article 2 of the Constitution, which states: “The executive Power [of the United States] shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." And "The President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed ..."). They interpret this as saying ALL of the executive power of the federal government (including the Justice Department and the FBI) is under the absolute unfettered control of the President.These provisions, they say, mean that the President is effectively king of the Executive Branch. The President’s powers are exercised by the increasingly popular Executive Order, which tends to make the perennially-divided Congress irrelevant. Hamilton would approve.

So with a public so ready to embrace an all-powerful, solitary leader, is it any wonder Americans have their faces glued to their televisions as the grand majesty of a royal funeral unfolds? Many Americans have monarch envy. They may not want an English-style ancestral monarchy, but they want an autocratic leader. And they wouldn’t mind all the trappings that come with monarchy like palaces, robes and jewels. In fact, the more money the candidate has, the better the chance of election.

Of course the English monarchy today is not autocratic. It’s mostly symbolic at this point. But I think there is a substantial minority of Americans who would go for an old-fashioned king like Henry VIII, as long as he wanted to outlaw abortion, gay marriage and immigration.

Personally, I find this tendency toward autocracy dangerous to the future of the country. And this is why it is so important to shore up our democratic institutions. We need to have a free press that is perceived as impartial, that is trusted by a large majority of Americans to tell us the true facts, rather than the alternative facts. We need to be able to have elections that have the full faith and support of the American people. Without these things, we will inevitably fall into autocracy.

So this week as we watch all the pomp and circumstance of the English monarchy, let’s think about why our ancestors were willing to give up their lives to found a nation without a monarch. The Founders envisioned Government 2.0, a government where the people choose their leaders and tell those representatives of the people what to do. And when they misbehave, they can be removed from office via impeachment. We have done well with this system for nearly a quarter of a millennium. And now it is our obligation to make sure all politicians get the message:

"No Monarchs Wanted Here. In our country, leaders are bound by the will of the people and the rule of law."