The Twinkle Amendment
But when has honesty ever had anything to do with the abortion debate? Despite claiming to be moral and religious people, opponents of abortion rights stopped being honest a long time ago.
They resort to every legal trick imaginable to try to force their personal religious beliefs upon everyone else. When they can't twist the law to get their way, some of them have no qualms about breaking laws up to and including the law against murdering doctors.
The latest legal assault on abortion rights in Wisconsin is a so-called “personhood” amendment to the state constitution. The amendment, introduced by state Rep. Andre Jacque (R-Bellevue), takes aim at this fundamental guarantee in our state constitution: All people are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, among which is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Unbelievably, Jacque would rewrite that constitutional guarantee of freedom, equality and inherent rights to deny—you guessed it—freedom, equality and inherent rights.
The first thing Jacque would do is cross out that word “born.” He believes our founders erred in limiting human rights to people who actually exist.
In addition to eliminating the bothersome little requirement that people actually be born before having constitutional rights, Jacque would create a brand-new definition of a person.
He would define “people” or “person” in our constitution as “every human being at any stage of development.”
Republicans like to come up with cheery titles for their laws destroying rights. A perfect name for this one would be the Twinkle Amendment, declaring personhood from the time someone is a twinkle in dad's eye.
The real purpose behind all this flimflam, of course, is to create through subterfuge a constitutional prohibition against abortion and even contraception in Wisconsin.
It says volumes about how drastically Wisconsin's reputation as a progressive state has fallen under Republican Gov. Scott Walker that such a Neanderthal amendment would even be attempted here.
The last place this personhood ruse was attempted was just two months ago in Mississippi, the Deep South state that a 2011 Gallup poll ranked as the most conservative state in the union.
Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs described Mississippi as the nation's most backward capital of hatred during the civil rights era, concluding with the classic line: “Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.”
Well, guess what? In November, even the voters of Mississippi voted down a personhood ballot initiative 58% to 42%.
An End to Birth Control?
Their schools may not be very good down there, but Mississippians were still smart enough to understand medical experts and others who explained that declaring a fertilized egg to be a person could have far-reaching, unwanted consequences.
Those didn't just include denying a woman's right to have an abortion, even in cases of rape, incest or when her own life was at stake. It also raised legal questions about a woman's right to use birth control or to receive treatment in the event of pregnancy complications.
The media's biggest mistake in covering the political battle over abortion is their uncritical acceptance of the claim by opponents of abortion rights that their objections are moral.
That automatically makes anyone on the other side—all those who support a woman's right for the past 40 years to choose whether to give birth to a child—immoral people.
It's particularly odd to hear extreme right-wing tea party Republicans arguing for laws imposing one narrow religious view upon all Americans.
In the little world of the tea parties, one would expect them to be railing against the immorality of Big Government forcing a woman by law to bear a child she doesn't want for perfectly understandable, moral reasons, including rape, incest, personal health, desperate poverty or being 11 years old.
There's a very good reason why freedom of religion is in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We were always a diverse nation and are becoming even more so.
The fact that people hold different religious beliefs or even no religious beliefs does not mean some people are moral and others aren't. Immoral atrocities have been committed in the name of religion throughout history.
Morality aside, writing one particular religion into law raises practical questions. Should we write into the law the teachings of the church or the real practices of that church's followers?
Once there was real-world evidence that Catholic teachings on abortion and contraception were being strictly obeyed. The rarity in America today of Catholic families of 16 living in rags now suggests otherwise.
If a church can't enforce its teachings among its own members, we surely shouldn't try to impose them by law on everybody else in Wisconsin.
On the "person-hood" amendments; beyond Joel's major point that we do not yet have equal rights for "the born", making hard to have equal rights for "the unborn"; what about equal rights for the merely "chartered"?... meaning person-hood for corporations!
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I was recently watching a documentary about Nanking China just prior to the Second World War, It talked about "war-rape" perpetrated by the Japanese against the pre-Red Chinese, something that still happens today, look at Bosnia (Muslim)-Serbia (orthodox)-Croatia (Catholic), look at Rwanda with the Tutsi and Hutu people (even Khadafi's Libyan military was accused of buying Viagra for use in rape-toture). You take a people who strongly values the fathers lineage, and you send in the invading impregnators to forcibly plant the enemy's seed (or infect with HIV) among the people to be conquered. All the bastard offspring will be unwanted, and will ruin the respect and credibility of the mothers forced to bear them and raise them, will bring down that community that may already be heavily oppressed, no way can they muster up campaign donations or have the will to rise up against new dictators coming into power.
Is that the plan to forbid abortion, especially in the case of forcible rape or economic hard-ship? To get a targeted class of people to be so caught up in personal survival that they cannot successfully battle the ruling class on an equal playing field?
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Check out the "Freakonomics" movie-documentary in 2010, they had an interesting segment exploring the question of what led to a decline in the urban crime rate in the US during the mid- to late 1990s. The authors of Freakonomics suggest that a substantial factor was the 1973 US Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade, in the US which permitted people to have legal abortions, leading to more wanted children with better upbringings. As a counterpoint, they mentioned the fall of an east European leader 26 years after a government mandate that outlawed abortion and contraception, the purpose was "we need more babies to fix our failing economy". The comparison was that the crime drop (and economic success?) of the 90's was because the babies born after 1973 were wanted, and therefore raised properly.
So, while you moral-majority busy-bodies are trying to get people to stop screwing around, look at what happens when those children you forcibly bring into the world grow up. While you may force big negative consequences on those who do screw around, you won't stop the screwing around that happens among people who do not think with their brain anyway.
Abortion is a preventable crime.
We allow corporations more personhood privilege than an unborn potential citizen and tax payer. Corporations that come and go at will. They can change their fingerprint at any time for almost any reason or for no reason. They can change their stripes. The products of conception cannot. It will always be what it is. All of the DNA that will ever follow that person for the rest of his or life is there at that second. Many argue that the product of conception is not “life as we know it”. We all knew life that way or we wouldn’t be here now.
To me we are a culture of death, we euthanize our elderly, we abort our unborn, we cause to go extinct plant and animal life because we decide it’s a nuisance, we execute our criminals and we talk about the right to die as if we have a choice. We need to focus more on life.