Saturday, June 15, 2024
The Christofascist/GOP War On Women
For the religious right, erasing the constitutional right to abortion was just the beginning. They are coming after all our reproductive rights and freedoms, every single one of them, and the only way to stop them is with our votes.
On Wednesday, the Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in the country, with 13 million members — adopted a resolution denouncing in vitro fertilization (IVF). The measure calls on Southern Baptists to pressure government officials to “restrain” IVF, which often can be a couple’s last hope of conceiving a child.
For women who battle infertility at some point in their childbearing years — and who can afford the expensive procedure — IVF is nothing short of a miracle. According to a report issued in March by the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 2 percent of U.S. infants born in 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, were conceived through IVF. That equals 86,149 toddlers who otherwise would not be here to scamper around the house and test their loving parents’ patience.
How can the religious right, a movement that calls itself pro-life, take a stance against a procedure that creates life? The answer lies in the concept of fetal personhood — in this case, embryonic personhood. That is clearly where the zealots who seek “The Handmaid’s Tale” control over women’s bodies are headed, now that the obstacle of Roe v. Wade no longer stands in their way.
In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the frozen embryos created during the IVF process are “children,” and that the embryos are therefore protected under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. . . . . Alabama’s Republican-controlled state legislature and Republican governor quickly enacted legislation to shield IVF doctors from legal liability. But the court’s ruling stands — and was hailed Monday at the Southern Baptist Convention’s meeting as the “catalyst” for the new anti-IVF policy.
The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the denomination’s flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, urged passage of the anti-IVF resolution by telling Baptists in a speech that a human life begins “when the sperm and the egg meet and God says, ‘Let there be life.’” He went on to criticize Alabama’s elected leadership for its “lack of political will to stand behind what was the correct ruling and judgment by the Alabama Supreme Court.” . . . . And he claimed, without evidence, that “much of the market for this is actually not even found among heterosexual married couples, but the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of gender, the redefinition of all things in light of the LGBTQ movement.”
In his majority opinion overturning Roe, Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the court was leaving the question of abortion to state legislatures and perhaps, ultimately, to Congress. Since then, voters across the country — even in bright-red states such as Kansas, Ohio and Kentucky — have amended their state constitutions to give back to women what the Supreme Court took away: the fundamental right to control their bodies.
Most Americans, by a decisive margin, believe a woman should have the intrinsic right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy. Similarly, polls tell us that Americans, by an overwhelming margin, believe IVF is morally acceptable and a godsend. Most of us believe these are private decisions to be made by individuals, not legislators or judges.
Mohler speaks for a minority that believes all abortion, from the moment of conception, is murder. And the Republican Party fights — sometimes nervously — as this uncompromising minority’s champion.
So, with public opinion against them, antiabortion activists are already waging the next battle: to give embryos full personhood rights and protections. They are coming hard after IVF. They failed Thursday to get the high court to restrict safe and legal abortion drugs, but they surely will try again. They might even attempt an assault on contraception.
This is, simply, a forever war. Remain vigilant because there is no end in sight.
Friday, June 14, 2024
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Trump's Insane Gibberish and Rambling
Republicans - and many feckless journalist - continue to push a narrative about Joe Biden's age even as they ignore the reality that Trump is not much younger. Worse yet, they ignore the very visible signs that Trump is losing it mentally and his speeches go off into crazy land more and more frequently. Yes, after over 8 years of Trump's lies and abnormal behavior it is easy to become desensitized to what is anything but normal behavior, much less all the reasons one would not want such an individual back in the White House. Meanwhile, Joe Biden displayed in Normandy that he can speak in coherent and thought through sentences and paragraphs. I keep wondering when people will open their eyes and see Trump for the unfit, dangerous threat he is. A piece in The Atlantic looks at this double standard phenomenon and why it is occurring as well as the danger it poses to the nation. Here are excerpts:
Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.
For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug
Yes, sharks. In Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump went off-script—I have to assume that no competent speechwriter would have drafted this—and riffed on the important question of how to electrocute a shark while one attacks. He had been talking, he claims, to someone about electric boats . . . . As usual, Trump noted how much he impressed his interlocutor with his very smart hypothetical: “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.” (MIT? Trump’s uncle taught there and retired over a half century ago, when Trump was in his 20s, and died in 1985 . . . This ramble went on for a bit longer, until Trump made it clear that given his choice, he’d rather be zapped instead of eaten . . .
Sure, it seems funny—Haha! Uncle Don is telling that crazy shark story again!—until we remember that this man wants to return to a position where he would hold America’s secrets, be responsible for the execution of our laws, and preside as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. A moment that seems like oddball humor should, in fact, terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency. (Actually, a delusional, rambling felon known to have owned weapons would likely fail a security check for even a visit to the Oval Office.)
Nor was the Vegas monologue the first time: Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with an nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.
Why hasn’t there been more sustained and serious attention paid to Trump’s emotional state?
First, Trump’s target audience is used to him. Watch the silence that descends over the crowds at such moments; when Trump wanders off into the recesses of his own mind, they chit-chat or check their phones or look around, waiting for him to come back and offer them an applause line. For them, it’s all just part of the show.
Second, Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. . . . . Thus, they will later claim that questions about sharks or long-dead uncles are just bad-faith distractions from substance. (These are the same Republicans who claim that every verbal stumble from Joe Biden indicates full-blown dementia.)
Third, and perhaps most concerning in terms of public discussion, many people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist . . .
Such objections are mendacious nonsense and represent a massive double standard. As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote today: “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.” Biden’s mush-mouthed moments fall well within the range of normal gaffes. Had he or any other American politician said anything even remotely like one of Trump’s bizarre digressions, we’d be flooded with front-page stories about it. Pundits would be solemnly calling for a Much Needed National Conversation about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
It is long past time for anyone who isn’t in the Trump base to admit, and to keep talking about, something that has been obvious for years: Donald Trump is unstable. Some of these problems were evident when he first ran, and we now know from revelations by many of his former staff that his problems processing information and staying tethered to reality are not part of some hammy act.
Worse, the people who once managed Trump’s cognitive and emotional issues are gone, never to return. A second Trump White House will be staffed with the bottom of the barrel—the opportunists and hangers-on willing to work for a reprehensible man. His Oval Office will be empty of responsible and experienced public servants . . . . The 45th president is deeply unwell. It is long past time for Americans, including those in public life, to recognize his inability to serve as the 47th.
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Republicans Are Coming For Contraception Too
For decades, the forced-birth crowd pooh-poohed pro-choice activists’ warnings that partisan right-wing judges were out to gut Roe v. Wade. “Hysterical!” “Fearmongering!” Then the six-person radical majority shredded nearly 50 years of precedent to deprive women of bodily autonomy. The right responded, “Leave it to the states, they’ll be reasonable!” What followed were a series of inhumane, unworkable and dangerous abortion bans that have threatened women’s lives, created a shortage of doctors and sparked legal chaos and endless litigation.
Next, Democrats warned that Republicans were after IVF. “Absurd!” Well, Republicans in Congress voted against protection for IVF. Alabama effectively banned it before a backlash forced a reversal.
By now, you would think Democrats’ warnings that Republicans are coming after reproductive rights, including contraception, would be heeded. But, predictably, Republicans cry foul and deny any thought of snatching away contraception access. Ah, but along came felon and former president Donald Trump who let slip he was “looking at” contraception restrictions; then he backpedaled once he realized too much candor was politically disastrous.
And — no surprise — Republicans again showed their stripes last week. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer taunted Republicans before calling for a vote on bill offering national protection for contraception. “This week and in future weeks, Senate Republicans will have to answer for their antiabortion, anti-women agenda,” he said. “And my Republican colleagues should know that the American people are closely watching.”
The bill was straightforward. “The Democratic bill — intended to put Republicans on the spot in an election year on their unpopular positions on reproductive rights — would have prevented states from passing laws that limit access to contraception, including hormonal birth control and intrauterine devices,” . . . . Nine Republicans ducked the vote; all other male Republicans voted against it. Two female Republicans and all Democrats present voted for it.
Ahead of the vote, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) underscored the significance of the moment. “What message do we want to send our constituents? That we support their right to birth control? That we support access to IUDs, to Plan B? Or that we are okay taking that right away, and letting politicians make medical decisions for women in this country,” she said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of only two Republians to vote for the bill, in a video replied that if it is a “messaging” bill, that “I want my message to be very clear — a woman has a right to contraception.” Her fellow Republicans’ voting no obviously did not.
Republicans’ rationale for opposing the measure was confused and contradictory. They said it was “unnecessary,” although they had loudly cheered Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ripped away the underpinning for any substantive due process right regarding reproductive rights.
And it wasn’t a stunt. “Democrats pointed to Republican opposition to contraception legislation — including GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia vetoing a similar bill last month — as evidence that the effort was necessary” . . . .
In truth, Republicans are coming after all of it. That’s what the so-called fetal personhood bill is all about. The upshot of state measures to protect “fetal personhood” is that not only IVF but many forms of contraception would be at risk because they protect a fertilized egg at any stage.
Senate and House Republicans, like clockwork, routinely introduce “life begins at conception” bills. The House bill has drawn 130 co-sponsors. The Republican Study Committee is on record this year as supporting both a fetal personhood bill and a ban on mifepristone (used to treat miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies).
In other words, protection for access to contraception is necessary when the MAGA-celebrated Dobbs decision effectively removes federal protection and Republicans at both the state and federal level aim at “fetal personhood” bills that would outlaw abortion, IVF and some forms of contraception.
Voters have every reason to fear a GOP-held Congress would pass nationwide abortion ban and “fetal personhood” measures. They know that is true because Republicans continue to press these measures and simultaneously vote to block measures to protect IVF and contraception. And no one seriously believes that if elected on the strength of white Christian evangelicals’ support that Trump would veto such bills.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Europeans See the Treats to Democracy More Than Americans
Sometimes, things come into focus more clearly at a distance.
Friends of the United States in Europe seem far more aware of the stakes in our election than we Americans are. They understand the threat posed to long-standing alliances among democratic nations and to a political consensus that transcended ideological lines in resisting extremism and authoritarian impulses.
President Biden is making the preservation of democracy a central issue in the 2024 election, as he underscored during his trip to Europe last week honoring the anniversary of D-Day. Meanwhile, Donald Trump regularly praises the effectiveness of repressive regimes from Russia, China, Hungary and even North Korea. Their leaders are “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not,” the former president said late last month.
[I]t should not be viewed as partisan to describe what is at issue in an election, and in my conversations with Europeans over the past few weeks, I was struck that so many — of various political inclinations — were acutely aware of how different the world would look and how much trouble democracy would face if Trump were victorious. Outside the ranks of supporters of far-right parties, there are few Trumpists in Europe.
In one sense, this transatlantic disconnect is not shocking. In most democratic nations, voters typically cast ballots in response to workaday domestic concerns — prices, housing, employment, health care, crime and immigration. For a fair share of the U.S. electorate, “defending democracy” is a rather abstract issue.
If you live in Europe, on the other hand, American food prices or the future of Obamacare make little difference to your life, but how a U.S. election outcome might affect global alliances matters. So does whether American influence and power will be deployed against the threats posed by Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There’s another reason for Europe’s relative sensitivity to the democracy question: Dictatorship is a relatively recent reality there in a way it has never been in the United States. Consider not only the experience of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relatively recent transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s or in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Soviet occupation. . . . In Europe, the cost of losing democracy is a vivid memory.
My fear is that it’s not vivid enough. Europeans and American alike are losing their appreciation for democracy — because it’s old hat, or because democratic governments are seen as failing to solve problems, or because politicians are viewed as serving the interests of one elite or another.
In the United States, Gallup found that confidence in the way democracy is working fell from a high of 61 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in late 2023. An Ipsos poll taken around the same time found majorities or pluralities declaring their dissatisfaction with the way democracy was working in Poland, France, Britain, Italy and Croatia, as well as the United States. Among the countries polled, only in Sweden did a majority express satisfaction with democracy.
Champions of democracy might thus look outside the wealthy nations of the North and West for reminders of democracy’s capacity to give voters opportunities to express their desire for change, to speak up against social and economic exclusion, to hold governments accountable — and to defend democracy itself.
In India, voters denied Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party a majority after Modi — and most polls — predicted he would win a landslide victory. The rebuke came from poorer Indian voters who felt left out of the country’s prosperity and from those who feared that Modi’s Hindu nationalism would lead to constitutional changes disadvantaging Muslims as well as lower-caste Hindus.
On their own, neither these elections nor European worries about a Trump presidency are enough to transform democracy into a voting issue this year. But Americans would do well to pay attention to how friends of democracy around the globe will interpret the choice we make. They’re warning us that flirting with authoritarianism never turns out well.
Sunday, June 09, 2024
White Nationalist and Anti-LGBTQ Groups On the Rise
Emboldened by the mainstreaming of hard-right politics ahead of a presidential election cycle, white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ groups increased to record levels in the United States last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest annual report on hate and extremism.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has published the annual report since 1990, documented 835 active anti-government groups, up 133 from 2022’s count, and 595 hate groups, an increase of 72 over the previous year’s figure.
Accounting for a large portion of the increase was a 50% surge in white supremacy hate groups in 2023, the highest jump ever recorded by the SPLC, growing to 165 over 109 in 2022.
SPLC saw a 33% rise in anti-LGBTQ+ organizations over last year, bringing the total to 86. The group said the growth was largely attributable to the anti-trans movement on the far-right.
“What we’re seeing now should be a wake-up call for all of us,” Margaret Huang, SPLC’s president and CEO, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. “Our 2023 report documented more hate and anti-government extremist groups than ever before. With a historic election just months away, these groups are multiplying, mobilizing, and making, and in some cases already implementing, plans to undo democracy.”
The groups launched campaigns to gain influence in mainstream politics, according to the report, namely through the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, which outlines aspirations for anti-abortion, anti-free press, and anti-LGBTQ+ priorities should presumed GOP presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump win in November.
Nine of the anti-government and hate groups tracked by the SPLC are part of the coalition that supports Project 2025, the organization reports.
Among the states leading in numbers of anti-government and hate groups are California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington, and Ohio.
California topped the list with 51 hate and 66 anti-government groups.
The SPLC recorded the second-most groups in Florida, which has become a leader in book-banning incidents and restrictive policies on teachers. The Sunshine State is home to 43 hate and 71 anti-government organizations, according to the report, and is the birthplace of recently influential “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty.
The annual survey of hate groups tracked 116 hate-leafleting incidents in Florida, in which antisemitic groups rallied and flyered on multiple occasions, including over Labor Day, when groups named the Goyim Defense League, The Order of the Black Sun, and the Maine-based Blood Tribe marched in Orlando wielding flags with swastikas, making Nazi salutes.
The SPLC report cites the expanding influence of extreme Christian nationalism as a driver for the growing number of anti-government organizations.
The report expresses concern over the rise in the Republican ranks of Johnson, a former senior lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group behind the U.S. Supreme Court case that precipitated the overturning of the federal right to abortion.
Johnson’s far-right politics, including his anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ positions and his advocacy to blur Christianity and the state, are well documented.
The SPLC report specifically warns about the rise of the National Apostolic Reformation, a Christian movement made up of “dominionist leaders” that aim to “seize control” of seven areas of society, including government, education, and business.
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