Abortion and LGBT Rights Are Next the Trump/Christofascist Hit List

Like many in the LGBT community, I felt physically ill when I heard the news that Justice Anthony Kennedy would be retiring from the U.S. Supreme Court at the end of the current term.  His retirement means that Der Trumpenführer, whose approval ratings remain in the toilet outside of Christofascist and white supremacist circles, will nominate another ideologue like Neil Gorsuch who will purse the Trump base's dream of outlawing all abortions, rescinding LGBT rights, and disenfranchising as many minority voters as possible.  Short of a miracle where moderate Republicans - if such a thing still exists - in the U.S. Senate buck Trump and their party and reject Trump's nominee, for at least a generation, the U.S. Supreme Court will be openly hostile to minority rights of all kinds. How bad will it be?  Likely, very bad and if "friends" who voted for Trump think I will forgive them, they are delusional.  They have stabbed so many of us in the back and deserve nothing but derision and ostracizing from the company of decent, moral people.  A piece in The Daily Beast, looks at the coming nightmare.  Here are highlights:

The judicial apocalypse is here, and there’s nothing Democrats can do to stop it.  Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing voter in most of the Supreme Court’s close cases of the last decade, is retiring at age 81. President Donald Trump will choose his successor.

With the Senate filibuster of Supreme Court nominees eliminated last year by Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, anyone Trump nominates will be rubber-stamped.  That has been the pattern so far, with 39 judges confirmed so far, often in an expedited process, with not a single Republican vote opposing any of them.

Moreover, Trump’s judicial nominees thus far have been chosen by the far-right Federalist Society, which has put forward extreme ideologues in the mode of Justice Clarence Thomas, whose ideas were once considered on the fringe but are now increasingly within the [GOP] mainstream. 

While Justice Neil Gorsuch replaced another conservative, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whoever replaces Justice Kennedy will likely be a conservative firebrand replacing a moderate.  The shift will transform the Court for decades to come.

Among the Court’s precedents that will be on the chopping block are Roe v. Wade, protecting women’s rights to choose to have an abortion, and Obergefell v. Hodges, protecting gay people’s rights to marry.

Roe has been significantly limited in recent years, and all four sitting conservative justices have either opposed it directly, or opposed the doctrines on which it is based.

Justice Kennedy wrote the Obergefell decision, over a vigorous dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the vote was 5-4.  Even the Court’s own doctrines of respecting precedent will not protect same-sex marriage; just this week, the Court directly overturned a precedent regarding public-section unions. 

It is quite likely that the both rights will come to an end within two to three years: there are cases pending that would further limit each, and more will soon follow.

In the case of abortion rights, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote striking down Texas’s junk-science regulations that would have shuttered most abortion clinics in the state; with him gone, other states will surely pass and litigate their own versions.  Iowa’s new law, known as the heartbeat bill, bans abortions once a heartbeat is detected, usually the sixth week of pregnancy – the lawsuit about that law will provide the next Supreme Court with an opportunity to further limit Roe, or overturn it entirely.

Likewise for marriage rights. There are already cases pending about whether same-sex spouses are entitled to spousal benefits, and numerous cases about when private actors may discriminate against gay people.  Each of these provide opportunities to limit or overturn Obergefell.

Assuming the Senate fast-tracks the nomination – as McConnell and Trump have already said will happen – the confirmation vote will take place before the November elections.

Democrats’ only hope is to somehow persuade moderate Republicans like Jeff Flake or Susan Collins to oppose Trump’s nominee, although they have been mostly unable to do in the first two years of the Trump presidency.  (Senator Flake recently said he would block Trump’s nominees if the Senate did not act to restrain Trump on tariffs.)

Understandably, the consequences for the Supreme Court, and civil rights as we know them today, are eclipsing, . . . Justice Kennedy turned out to be the unlikely hero of the LGBT equality movement, writing every major pro-LGBT opinion in the Supreme Court’s history, culminating in Obergefell in 2015.

n an ideal world, a responsible Republican president would nominate a thoughtful moderate-conservative who is respected by his colleagues and who lies within the judicial mainstream – basically, a conservative version of Merrick Garland.

But in the world we live in, Trump is likely to please his base by nominating an extreme conservative, like his recent picks who have compared abortion to slavery, called Justice Kennedy a “judicial prostitute,” and called transgender children “evidence of Satan’s plan at work.”  All of those nominees, by the way, were confirmed without a single Republican vote against.

I am not many years from retirement and, if my fears are realized, the husband and I may find ourselves looking to retire somewhere outside of the United States.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Why I Can’t Resign Now

In some respects one of the most important aspects of presidential elections in America is the power of the president to nominate appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court.  But that power of appointment is not unlimited.  Nominees still must pass approval by the U.S. Senate.  Something that is not as assured as it once was given the non-stop obstruction of today's Congressional Republicans.  A piece in Politico looks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's explanation of why she will not retire for as long as possible.  Here are article excerpts:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pushing back against suggestions that she should soon retire, saying President Barack Obama would be unable to get a justice like her through the Senate.

“Who do you think President Obama could appoint at this very day, given the boundaries that we have?” the 81-year-old justice told Elle Magazine in an interview excerpt released Tuesday. The wide-ranging interview portrays Ginsburg — seen as a member of the court’s liberal wing — as attuned to the dynamics in Congress and some of the greater political and social discussions in the U.S.

In the interview, she suggested that Senate Republicans would likely block any potential nominee like her.

“If I resign any time this year, he could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court,” the oldest member of the high court said. “[A]nybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided,” later adding that she can “do the job full steam.”

Tuesday’s excerpt focused largely on the court’s conservative shift in recent years and Ginsburg’s disappointment with its rulings on women’s issues.

When asked why the court has become “very conservative” on women’s rights, Ginsburg singled out a particular justice.

“To be frank, it’s one person who made the difference: Justice [Anthony] Kennedy,” she said, the justice often seen as the court’s swing vote given the court’s relatively entrenched liberal and conservative camps of four justices each. Ginsburg said that since upholding Roe v. Wade, Kennedy has been largely responsible for the upholding of several abortion restrictions.

When asked which decisions she thinks will be considered most significant 50 years from now, Ginsburg pointed to June’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court said corporations could use religious exemptions to avoid paying for contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

“Well, I think 50 years from now, people will not be able to understand Hobby Lobby,” said the justice, who wrote a blistering dissent in the case.

The GOP War on Women and Push to Restore Sodomy Laws

At times it is hard to tell who is more obsessed with the sex lives of others: the GOP or the Vatican.  Both seem happiest only when meddling in what transpires in the bedrooms of people they don't even know.  In the case of the GOP the result is that a campaign to restrict abortion rights - will contraception be next? - continues unabated here in Virginia and elsewhere.  Going hand in glove is an effort being spear headed by Virginia Christofascist and would be governor, Ken Cuccinelli.  An article in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the GOP's twin agenda when it's not seeking tax cuts for the wealthy or funding cuts for the neediest Americans.  Here are highlights:

In red states all over the country, similar laws are being passed, making clinic regulations impossible to meet, and limiting abortions to a term so early in the pregnancy many women don’t even know they are expecting. Where we go wrong as pro-choice liberals, is to think of these states as aberrations, and that the women unlucky enough to live there are the ones who are going to have to take on the fight. They most definitely are not unrelated events. They are a part of a coordinated Republican plan to get Roe v. Wade back before the Supreme Court.

It seems counter-intuitive, but Republicans don’t want the women of the states under assault to accept the new restrictions, they want them to sue. The participating states have purposely used similar language in most of their anti-choice bills, because it increases their chances of getting a different decision on the same law, from different federal judges. And when the lower courts disagree on how to “interpret” one of their decisions, that disagreement practically guarantees that the Supreme Court will take up the case.

Why now? The Republican establishment, the men with their hands on the levers of power, have made a determination that the current Supreme Court is as good as it is going to get – conservative-wise. The changing demographics and their party’s lackluster performance in the last two presidential elections have them worried that the court will become more and more moderate in the next few years. They are determined to get as many of their conservative issues before this court as possible, even if it means passing laws they know are unconstitutional.

Abortion is the prime target, but it is hardly the only law Republicans are hoping they can manage to have revisited before Scalia is six feet under and Thomas spends the rest of his years curled in the fetal position on his old pal’s grave. We have already seen the Voting Rights Act, and affirmative action targeted. Now you can officially add sodomy laws to the list of decisions Republicans are trying to have re-argued. 

Republicans have long hoped that if Roe is overturned, Lawrence V Texas, the decision that made it unconstitutional for states to ban sodomy, will follow. Both decisions are based on the unenumerated “right of privacy” that the Rehnquist Court found in the Constitution, a right Justice Scalia has often said he does not think the Constitution grants. So it is very possible if Roe falls on privacy grounds, so will Lawrence.

The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, is well-known as a true believer when it comes to ending the right to privacy.  .   .   .  .   Cuccinelli has been scheming for more than a decade to get Lawrence V Texas back in front of the Supreme Court. He wants this! He is running for governor at the moment, and political wisdom dictates that attorneys general step down so they can campaign full-time without the baggage of the state’s controversial litigation, but Cuccinelli has stayed on. He’s so close to reopening Lawrence he can taste it, and he doesn’t trust anyone else to take over as the battlefield commander in the Holy War for Missionary Position Only in America!

When the Supreme Court handed down their decision on Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, the Virginia legislature recognized their Crimes Against Nature statute was unconstitutional, and tried to bring it into compliance by adding a consenting adults exception. Newly elected State Senator Ken Cuccinelli led the resistance and killed the changes in committee, so all these years, if you have had so much as a blow job in Virginia, you have been guilty of a felony.

Now, as attorney general, Cuccinelli has decided it’s time. He purposefully used the unconstitutional Crimes Against Nature Law he protected as a young state senator, to charge a man who solicited oral sex from a 17-year-old female. He had many other choices, but he chose Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature Statute so he can finally put the Lawrence decision in the spotlight. 

As expected, the court rejected the Crimes Against Nature Charge, and as expected, Cuccinelli has filed an appeal. He is now on the legal trail that leads to the Supreme Court. With the Republican push to get the Court to revisit Roe and the “privacy” issue, his timing couldn’t be better.

Because of Ken Cuccinelli’s zealous pursuit of bland sex, women and gays have now become strange bedfellows in the struggle to defend the right of “privacy.” I would warn Mr. Cuccinelli not to expect either group to just roll over and take it. After all, he has made that illegal, at least in Virginia.

Cuccinelli is a menace who must be stopped.  And it is not just Virginians who need to be working for his defeat in November.   No one sane anywhere should want to see this man gain the governor's mansion.

NYT: Courts Should Not Wait to Protect Fundamental Rights

Can you imagine the out cry if the rights of Christians, Jews, immigrants from  specific countries, blacks and other minorities were suddenly put up for a public vote or a Supreme Court justice said that in protecting the rights of such groups the Court should take a "go slow" approach?  Yet this is precisely what is done to LGBT Americans over and over again and even one of the Supreme Courts :liberal justices" suggested that the Court might be wise to go slow on extending gay marriage rights.  It's, of course, easy for someone not subjected to legalized bigotry and discrimination to take such a view.   What's shocking, however, is that the liberal justice is Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is Jewish.  One would think that Ginsberg of all people would grasp the wrongheadedness of allowing the majority to decide what rights a minority will be allowed to have.  The New York Times blasts this "go slow" approach in a main editorial  Here are excerpts:

With two same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court, numerous commentators have latched on to remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg critical of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. It is not the judgment that was wrong, but “it moved too far, too fast,” she said at Columbia Law School last year, a view she has expressed in various speeches and law review articles. As one of the court’s moderate liberals and a champion of women’s rights, she is now being routinely cited to argue for a timid resolution on the issue of same-sex marriage that would strike down California’s ban on such marriages, but would leave prohibitions standing in about 40 other states.

How Justice Ginsburg will vote on same-sex marriage is unknown. But her comments misread the legal and political landscape at the time of the Roe decision and have been used to bolster the inaccurate notion that the court’s ruling on abortion rights somehow short-circuited a political process that was moving in the states to end criminalization of abortion.  

The real story, as explained by Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who now teaches at Yale Law School, and Reva Siegel, a professor there, is that political conflict over abortion was escalating before the Roe decision, and that state progress on decriminalization had reached a standstill in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.

Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to move, women in a large portion of the country would still be denied the fundamental right to make their own childbearing decisions. 

The claim that the court invited a backlash by getting too far ahead of public opinion does not hold. At the time of the ruling, a Gallup poll showed a substantial majority of Americans favored letting the abortion decision be made “solely by a woman and her physician,” with more Republicans than Democrats in favor.

There is bound to be conflict and opposition when minorities pursue their rights, whether legislatively, in the voting booth or in the courts. But fear of an angry reaction from some groups cannot be the reason to deny people basic rights. As for Roe v. Wade, Ms. Greenhouse and Ms. Siegel persuasively conclude that the political polarization around abortion owes more to political realignment and the vehemence and perseverance of abortion opponents than general public anger at the court’s ruling, which was grounded in a constitutional right to privacy that flowed naturally from a line of previous decisions.  .  .  .  . The so-called backlash was a political creation that was cultivated and nourished. 

This may seem like ancient history. But there is a danger now that overblown fears of a backlash based on a false reading of politics before and after Roe v. Wade could lead the Supreme Court to shy from doing as it should — enforcing equal protection by declaring same-sex marriage a constitutionally protected right in every state.

I for one am tired of having my rights subject to the approval of a bigoted  minority of Christofascists who through lies and untruths dupe a majority into enshrining Christofascist beliefs into the civil laws.  If my rights are to be subjected to such votes, lets apply the same rule to every minority and let the shrieks and screaming begin.  Otherwise, the Times is right, the Court needs to strike down all state bans on gay marriage.

The Economist Endorses Obama - Math Does Still Matter

I continue to be amazed at the Republicans who keep saying the nation's budget deficit has exploded under Obama - obviously they have "romnesia" about the real budget busters: Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Worse yet, the foam at the mouth about what will happen to the budget deficit if Obama is reelected.  Meanwhile, they have done nothing to check the impossible math of Mitt "I'm a Liar" Romney's proposals.  Between the promised tax cuts and huge increases in defense spending Romney has promised, the budget deficit would utterly explode.  One can only assume that they have imbibed far too much Kool-Aid laced with mind altering drugs or that they live in an alternate universe where simple math doesn't exist.  Well, the Economist HAS done the math and in large part because Romney would be a financial disaster deficit wise, the Economist has endorsed Barack Obama for reelection.  The entire endorsement is worth a read because it looks honestly - and critically - at Obama's record but nonetheless concludes that Romney/Ryan would be far worse.  Here are some excerpts:

[T]his choice turns on two questions: how good a president has Mr Obama been, especially on the main issues of the economy and foreign policy? And can America really trust the ever-changing Mitt Romney to do a better job? On that basis, the Democrat narrowly deserves to be re-elected.

Mr Obama’s first term has been patchy. On the economy, the most powerful argument in his favour is simply that he stopped it all being a lot worse. America was in a downward economic spiral when he took over, with its banks and carmakers in deep trouble and unemployment rising at the rate of 800,000 a month. His responses—an aggressive stimulus, bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, putting the banks through a sensible stress test and forcing them to raise capital (so that they are now in much better shape than their European peers)—helped avert a Depression. That is a hard message to sell on the doorstep when growth is sluggish and jobs scarce; but it will win Mr Obama some plaudits from history, and it does from us too.

Two other things count, on balance, in his favour. One is foreign policy, where he was also left with a daunting inheritance.  .  .  .  .  The other qualified achievement is health reform. Even to a newspaper with no love for big government, the fact that over 40m people had no health coverage in a country as rich as America was a scandal.

Mr Obama’s shortcomings have left ample room for a pragmatic Republican, especially one who could balance the books and overhaul government. Such a candidate briefly flickered across television screens in the first presidential debate. This newspaper would vote for that Mitt Romney, just as it would for the Romney who ran Democratic Massachusetts in a bipartisan way (even pioneering the blueprint for Obamacare). The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things.

Take foreign policy. In the debates Mr Romney stuck closely to the president on almost every issue. But elsewhere he has repeatedly taken a more bellicose line.   .  .  .  .  Mr Romney seems too ready to bomb Iran, too uncritically supportive of Israel and cruelly wrong in his belief in “the Palestinians not wanting to see peace”. The bellicosity could start on the first day of his presidency, when he has vowed to list China as a currency manipulator—a pointless provocation to its new leadership that could easily degenerate into a trade war.

[F]ar from being the voice of fiscal prudence, Mr Romney wants to start with huge tax cuts (which will disproportionately favour the wealthy), while dramatically increasing defence spending. Together those measures would add $7 trillion to the ten-year deficit. He would balance the books through eliminating loopholes (a good idea, but he will not specify which ones) and through savage cuts to programmes that help America’s poor (a bad idea, which will increase inequality still further). At least Mr Obama, although he distanced himself from Bowles-Simpson, has made it clear that any long-term solution has to involve both entitlement reform and tax rises. Mr Romney is still in the cloud-cuckoo-land of thinking you can do it entirely through spending cuts.

Mr Romney’s more sensible supporters explain his fiscal policies away as necessary rubbish, concocted to persuade the fanatics who vote in the Republican primaries . . . . However, even if you accept that Romneynomics may be more numerate in practice than it is in theory, it is far harder to imagine that he will reverse course entirely. . . . . Mr Romney, like Mr Hollande, will have his party at his back—and a long record of pandering to them.

Indeed, the extremism of his party is Mr Romney’s greatest handicap. The Democrats have their implacable fringe too: look at the teachers’ unions. But the Republicans have become a party of Torquemadas, forcing representatives to sign pledges never to raise taxes, to dump the chairman of the Federal Reserve and to embrace an ever more Southern-fried approach to social policy.

As a result, this election offers American voters an unedifying choice. Many of The Economist’s readers, especially those who run businesses in America, may well conclude that nothing could be worse than another four years of Mr Obama. We beg to differ. For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive. And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.

GOP Senate Candidate: Pregnancy from Rape Something "God Intended"

Republican candidates are for the most part trying very hard to hide their extremist agenda from voters and women in particular.  The GOP party platform calls for nothing less than the outlawing of abortion and the sharp curtailment of the availability of contraception..  The latter goal is beyond insane and, in fact, will only assure that the number of unwanted pregnancies increase.  Fortunately, GOP candidate for the U. S. Senate in Indiana, Richard Mourdock (pictured at right), has reminded everyone of what the GOP agenda - war on women if you will - is really all about: even if a woman is raped, she is expected to carry the unwanted child and "get over it."  Her situation is "God's Will."  Yes, it horrible batshitery, but that IS today's Republican Party all the way down from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan who support the overturning of Roe v. Wade and defunding of Planned Parenthood, to the lowest level GOP extremists here in the Republican Party of Virginia.  These folks are in many ways the face of the Christian Taliban in this country.  CBS News has coverage on Mourdock's pronouncement for women,  Here are highlights:

In a Tuesday night debate with his Democratic rival and a Libertarian candidate for one of Indiana's U.S. Senate seats, Republican candidate Richard Mourdock suggested that pregnancies resulting from rape are "something that God intended to happen," despite the "horrible situation" from which they derived.

Mourdock, a Tea Party-backed candidate who beat longtime moderate Senator Richard Lugar in the state's Republican nominating contest earlier this year, expressed his view that "life begins at conception" and that he would only allow abortions in circumstances in which the mother's life was in danger.  .  .  .  .  "And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

While to the right on Lugar with regard to issues relating both to reproductive rights and others, Mourdock's stance on abortion is hardly an anomaly in the Republican party. His comments echo similar remarks made by former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a staunch pro-life social conservative, while he was still in the midst of a bid for the White House. 

At the GOP convention in Tampa this year, the party approved a platform with language calling for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. The language, which is the same as in the party's 2004 and 2008 platform, did not provide exceptions for victims of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.

Romney, who has endorsed Mourdock, recently appeared in a campaign video on behalf of Mourdock, and campaigned with him in Evansville, Indiana, on Aug. 4. Paul Ryan, who, like Mourdock, opposes all abortions except to save the life of the mother, appeared at an open press funder with him on Sept. 17.

As I have tried to tell long time Republicans, today's GOP is NOT the party of past decades.  It has turned into something extreme and is the antithesis of what the party once stood for.  These Republicans need to hold their noses and vote Democrat and send a message that extremism is the route to the political wilderness or at minimum, minority party status.

Paul Ryan's Roe v. Wade Bombshell and Why Women Need to Wake Up

There's been talk among the pundit class and elsewhere that Mitt Romney has been narrowing the gender gap in some states because of his utter lies and disingenuous statements during last week's debate and the follow up.  Particularly because of Romney's dishonesty on what he would really do with respect to abortion and the availability of contraception.  Last night, Paul Ryan exposed Romney's dishonesty on this issue for all to see.  While I am not pro-abortion, I do believe that it should be safe and rare.  Outlawing abortion completely and shutting down agencies that provide contraception and abortion counseling is not the answer.  Yet that is precisely what Romney/Ryan will seek to do either legislatively or through the appointment of Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.  It ought to be a clear wake up call to women: if you want religious extremists and angry, chauvinistic men making your most private health care decisions, vote Republican.  If not, you had best get yourself to the polls and vote Democrat.  Michelle Goldberg looks at Ryan's bombshell for women in a piece in The Daily Beast.  Here are highlights:

Abortion was discussed only briefly during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate, but the exchange about it was, I think, an important moment, because it drove home the likelihood than a Republican victory in November will mean the end of Roe v. Wade.

 In the last week, as Mitt Romney has cultivated a new, more moderate image, it looked like he was having some success catching up to President Obama among female voters. Neither reproductive rights nor equal pay figured in the first presidential debate, which almost everyone agrees that Romney won. When it was over, Romney continued his lurch to the center. Contradicting everything he said in the primary, he told an Iowa newspaper that he knew of “no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” While his spokeswoman walked it back, conservatives, happy that Romney finally seemed to be winning, didn’t demand any loud mea culpas. A person paying only sporadic attention to the campaign probably wouldn’t realize that Romney has pledged to work toward a wide-ranging abortion ban.

In general, Americans are ambivalent about abortion, but they don’t want to make it illegal. By speaking in religious terms, Biden was able to combine his personal opposition to abortion with a strongly pro-choice stance. In his own life, he says, he accepts Catholic doctrine. “But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others. Unlike my friend here, the congressman, I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that—women they can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor.”

Ryan, by contrast, reminded the country that he opposes abortion in all circumstances, and that Romney intends to severely restrict it. “[I]f you believe that life begins at conception … That’s a principle,” he said. “The policy of a Romney administration is to oppose abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.” When Raddatz asked him if abortion-rights supporters should fear a Romney administration, he sort of harrumphed, and then responded, “We don’t think that unelected judges should make this decision; that people through their elected representatives in reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process should make this determination.” In other words, they want to overturn Roe.

Ryan was admirably clear about his ticket’s intentions. None of this, of course, will be news to those who have followed the campaign closely. In general, though, swing voters haven’t been. It will be interesting to see whether women start moving back away from Romney after hearing what he and Ryan have in store. 

The fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Christofascist dominated Republicans is that Republicans - including Romney and Ryan - believe they DO have the right to force their religious beliefs on everyone else.  And that mindset isn't focused solely on women.  Gays are particularly within the scope cross-hairs if one takes the time to look at the GOP party platform which was largely written by far right religious extremists.Voters need to not allow themselves to be lulled by Romney's lies and debate performances.  What he and Ryan would do in office is what really matters and to understand that plan, one need only look at the GOP platform which is the most extreme in over 50 years.

Oklahoma Supreme Court Strikes Down Proposed GOP Backed Embryo Amendment

While I suspect that the members of the Oklahoma Supreme Court are hardly what one would call flaming liberals, I also suspect that nonetheless there will be hyperventilating about "activist judges" who oppose "the will of the people."  Or at least the people who live in some bizarre alternate universe where protecting embryos is a highest priority while taking care of the living - particularly if they're gay - doesn't rate very highly. Politico looks at this defeat for the batshit crazy Christianists and their political whore Republican allies.  It speaks volumes that the GOP and Christianist forces in Virginia still seek passage of a similarly unconstitutional measure in this state.  Here are some highlights:

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday halted an effort to grant “personhood” rights to human embryos, saying the measure is unconstitutional.

The state’s highest court ruled unanimously that a proposed amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution that would define a fertilized human egg as a person violates a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Pennsylvania case and “is clearly unconstitutional.” Supporters of the personhood amendment are trying to gather enough signatures to put it before Oklahoma voters on the November ballot.

Opponents contend the measure would ban abortions without exception and interfere with a woman’s right to use certain forms of contraception and medical procedures, such as in vitro fertilization.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed a protest with the state Supreme Court on behalf of several Oklahoma doctors and residents. They asked the court to stop the group Personhood Oklahoma from gathering signatures.

The nine-member court determined the initiative petition “is void on its face” and struck it down.

“The only course available to this court is to follow what the United States Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the United States Constitution, has decreed,” the court said.

The ruling is the latest setback for abortion opponents who have been pursuing personhood measures in several states. In December, a judge in Nevada ruled that a personhood initiative petition was vague and could not be circulated for signatures to qualify for the 2012 ballot. Similar personhood proposals were defeated last year in Mississippi and Colorado.

The backers of the signature drive have said their goal is to set up a legal challenge to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 that gave women a legal right to abortion.

Opponents argued that the proposed amendment “would confer rights on a fertilized egg that trump the rights of each woman to determine whether and when to conceive and whether to carry a pregnancy to term.”

Court documents filed by opponents noted the state Supreme Court rejected an attempt to use the initiative petition process to ban abortion in 1992, ruling that the process could not be used to curtail rights secured to women by the U.S. Constitution.

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the Oklahoma Constitution specifically prohibits amendments that are “repugnant to the Constitution of the United States.”

Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the ACLU’s Oklahoma chapter and a former Democratic lawmaker, said the court’s decision Monday supports the notion that a woman and her family, “and not the government,” should be making decisions on reproductive health care.

Will Christianists Make In Vitro Fertilization Illegal in Mississippi

I have long maintained that imposing their views on sexual orientation on all of society is only the tip of the iceberg for the Christianist/dominionist movement. Other targets are outlawing pre-marital sex, totally outlawing abortion, and even making the use of contraception illegal. People scoff at the idea that such things yet if one reads the discourse on Christianist websites over a period of time it become all to clear that these people are extremists and zealots. Looking at what's happening in Mississippi suggests that these folks will go to any lengths to achieve their goals. In Mississippi the ostensible goal is to outlaw all abortion and set the stage to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet the collateral damage would extend much further and would in theory outlaw in vitro fertilization in an already exceedingly backward state. Michele Goldberg looks at what's afoot in a column in The Daily Beast. Here are some highlights:

In September, Mississippi’s Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution to define embryos as persons could go forward in November. Since then, Dr. Randall Hines, one of four physicians in the state who perform in vitro fertilization, has been fielding panicked calls from women with fertility problems.

The so-called Personhood Amendment won’t outlaw all IVF, but it could drastically change how it’s practiced, making it less effective and more dangerous. “It’s certainly possible that certain IVF practices would become illegal,” says Hines.

The personhood movement, which aims to put initiatives like Mississippi’s on the ballots of nine other states in the next year, represents a radical new anti-abortion legal strategy. It’s built around a few lines in Roe v. Wade that grapple with the question of whether a fetus is a person under the 14th Amendment. “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun, before concluding that a fetus is not in fact a person. The personhood movement believes that by legally changing the definition of what a person is, it can undermine Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion. But should any state actually pass a personhood amendment, it would impact IVF as well. That is not accidental.

The first personhood initiative to make it onto a state ballot was in Colorado in 2008, a campaign Mason managed. It lost overwhelmingly, getting just 27 percent of the vote. Anti-abortion activists tried again two years later, and lost again, though that time they got 30 percent of the vote.

For Mississippi women desperate to become pregnant, the prospect of seeing their chances drastically curtailed is terrifying. Thus, they’ve been some of the strongest voices against the personhood amendment. A little over a month ago, Atlee Breland, a mother of three children conceived through intrauterine insemination—a less invasive form of assisted reproduction that couples often try before progressing to IVF—founded Parents Against 26, and has been traveling the state speaking out. “The medical realities of the IVF process definitely mean that 26 is a serious, serious threat to the family-building options of thousands and thousands of Mississippi women just like me,” she says.

Hopefully people will wake up to the dangers of the Christianist agenda that seeks to strip away the rights of others who don't conform tot he Christianist world view. There are legislators right here in Virginia who support a similar effort to change the definition of what constitutes a "person." The threat is very real - especially if the GOP takes control of the Virginia Senate.

McCain Lies About Supreme Court Nominee Standards

John McCain lied frequently during last night's debate, but one lie in particular ought to have sent the alarm bells ringing among women, LGBT citizens and anyone else who believes in personal privacy. This lie dealt with who McCain would nominate to the U. S. Supreme Court if president. While he stated that he would have no litmus test for nominees, he has repeatedly promised to nominate individuals like Scalia and Thomas who do NOT believe that the Constitution grants the right to privacy to individual citizens. It is this right which was first enunciated in Griswold v. Connecticut which struck down a law that barred MARRIED COUPLES from using birth control that began the line of cases that includes Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas that have granted protections to women and struck down the laws that continued to make LGBT citizens potential felons in 13 states, one of which was Virginia.

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McCain can call such anti-privacy nominees whatever he wants - "strict constructionist" is a favored code term with Christianists - but the bottom line is that with two more such "strict constructionists" on the Court, contraception, abortion under any circumstances, and a permanent end to the sodomy laws all are put at risk. Read Scalia's opinions and dissents - it is all there. If you don't believe me, also read the websites of Christianist groups like Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, etc., and you will see that this organizations want the line of privacy decisions reversed and "strict constructionists" is the code term/litmus test that would be used to select justices that would over turn such prior Supreme Court decisions.

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In short, McCain lied big time last night. He's become as much a pathological liar as Bible Spice Palin who, if her lips are moving, is likely lying.

Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

Gloria Steinem had a op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times that looks at why women should NOT be duped into voting for the McSenile/Palin ticket. If I were an intelligent woman, I suspect that I'd feel insulted and outraged that the Republican Party/John McSenile believe that I'm so stupid that I will be influenced by Palin's gender rather than what her positions are on important issues. The basic message of the Christianist element of the GOP is that women are expected to be at home, barefoot, pregnant and subservient to men - unless they are out bashing gays and working to impose Christianist religious beliefs on all citizens (think Beverly LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, and in Virginia, The Family Foundation's Victoria Cobb, who do not practice what they preach to other women). As the father of two highly intelligent and talented daughters I am all for women having equality with men. I am NOT for the Christo-fascist idea of women's rights. Here are highlights from Steinem's column:

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Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president.

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But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere.

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Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

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This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. . . . McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

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So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; . . . Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs.

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So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband. . . . A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

End-Running Contraception

From my review of Christianist organizations' websites for a number of years, it has long been evident to me that gays are not the only targets in the Christianist agenda to implement a Taliban-like legal structure to bar all citizens from exercising rights and choices not supported by the Christianists' warped, intolerant religious views. Among the other matters they seek to force to conform to their views are divorce - they want to make divorce much harder, even though ironically they have the highest divorce rate of any religious group - and contraception. A reading of their sites and articles by their blowhard talking heads make it clear that they believe that there is NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY under the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, they seek not only a reversal of Roe. v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas, but also Griswold v. Connecticut which struck down laws banning the use of contraception by MARRIED couples. Now, Bob Felton over at Civil Commotion has a post that shows that the Chimperator is trying to assist this agenda backhandedly by regulations and interpretations. Here are relevant highlights:

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It’s been clear for a long time that the evangelical right means to eliminate not merely abortion, but even contraception; I’ve written about it previously here, here, here, and here. Now, President Bush’s Health and Human Services department proposes a rule that permits employees of facilities that receive federal dollars — which is practically all hospitals — to refuse to participate in any procedures that violate their religious beliefs, including the provision of contraception.

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I am not making this up, or indulging in hyperbole:

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Therefore, the Department proposes to interpret this term broadly, as encompassing individuals who are members of the workforce of the Department-funded entity performing the objectionable procedure. When applying the term “assist in the performance” to members of an entity’s workforce, the Department proposes to include participation in any activity with a logical connection to the objectionable procedure, including referrals, training, and other arrangements for offending procedures. For example, an operating room nurse would assist in the performance of surgical procedures, and an employee whose task it is to clean the instruments used in a particular procedure, would be considered to assist in the performance of the particular procedure.

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And don’t kid yourself: These yahoos won’t hesitate for an instant to put their hands on other people’s lives and destroy them for the glory of Jesus. It is beyond shocking that HHS would seriously propose to codify such a wide-ranging veto of private health decisions. Contact Congress … today.