Mark Warner Undoes Cuccinelli/McDonnell Effort to Shutter Clinics

One of the agendas of now felon, Bob McDonnell and Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli was to burden abortion and family planning clinics with hospital like requirements that would have forced many to close.  The effort was to supposedly "protect women" but other outpatient clinics performing even more dangerous and invasive procedures were exempt from the requirements.  As always, the Christofascsts' alleged justifications did not hide their anti-abortion and anti-family planning clinic goals.  Now, as the Washington Post reports, Attorney General Mark Herring has ruled that such clinics do not have to meet the excessive requirements.  Needless to say, the always evil Victoria Cobb of The Family Foundation - Virginia's leading anti-gay hate group - has her panties in a wad. Here are highlights:

Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) ­sided Monday with abortion rights advocates seeking to free clinics from strict, hospital-style building standards, issuing a legal opinion that whipped up those on both sides of the polarizing issue.

Herring’s action reverses an opinion from his Republican predecessor, Ken Cuccinelli II, and put an issue that has long divided lawmakers back on the front burner.

The advisory opinion has no immediate effect on clinics currently operating, but it could influence the state Board of Health when members consider an overhaul of rules. On June 4, the board will review rules that require the commonwealth’s 18 existing abortion clinics to widen hallways, add parking spaces and make other costly building renovations.

Abortion rights groups say those changes are a blatant attempt to close clinics and reduce access to abortion in Virginia, while abortion opponents say the rules are needed to ensure safety for women and access for emergency personnel.

Monday’s opinion “supersedes and reverses incorrect advice” given to the Board of Health in 2012 by Cuccinelli, Herring spokesman Michael Kelly said. Democrats accused Cuccinelli of bullying the board into forcing existing clinics to conform to the rules.

“That advice — that design-and-construction standards had to apply to preexisting facilities — is not supported by the law and represented an anomaly in how the Board of Health has treated the facilities it regulates and the way that laws are interpreted in Virginia,” Kelly said.

The new opinion restores the Board of Health’s usual practice of making such standards apply only to new construction and major renovations, Kelly said.

“[I]t’s not surprising that the Attorney General is inserting his political agenda by ignoring the will of the legislature,” Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, said in a statement. “He has proven time and again that he believes he is not bound by the law.”

Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) said he agreed that the move was an end run around the legislature, adding: “Now he’s saying, ‘Screw you,’ again.”

But Herring accused Cuccinelli of bending the law to his political agenda when he advised board members against grandfathering existing clinics.

The Board of Health is expected to vote June 4 on the proposed rules in a showdown likely to draw out passionate advocates on both sides of the issue. The vote will trigger a review by McAuliffe and Herring as well as a 60-day public comment period culminating in a final vote sometime this fall.

The issue has a contentious history in Virginia. In early 2011, the General Assembly voted for, and McDonnell approved, a law that categorized facilities that perform five or more abortions a month as hospitals.

Pope Francis, Breeding Bunnies and Ideological Colonization

In numerous posts I have slammed Pope Francis for his anti-gay batshitery while praising his pronouncements on wealth disparity and climate change.  The man, in short, confounds me, and it seems many others.  A piece in Religion Dispatches voices the same frustrations that I have and continue to experience.  Here are highlights:

Pope Francis confounds me. How can a man who is so eloquent and obviously heartfelt when he talks about global poverty and injustice and income inequality start spouting such a collection of reheated papal clichés and utter nonsense when he starts talking about women and sex?

His just-concluded trip to the Philippines was a virtual festival of such comments, some planned and some obviously off-the-cuff–and some even directly contradictory–but most just downright confounding.

In one of the impromptu inflight press conferences for which he has become famous, Francis told reporters in one breath that “[s]ome think that … in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits” but that Catholics should practice “responsible parenthood.”

Some saw this as a breath of fresh air or a major breakthrough for the Vatican. But who in the twenty-first century thinks Catholics “breed like rabbits”? That’s an offensive stereotype of Catholics that went out of date in the 1950s, when most Catholic women got on board with contraception—which the Catholic Church bans.

And he made his comments after saying Catholics shouldn’t use birth control and while criticizing a woman who was pregnant for the eighth time and facing a cesarean section: “Does she want to leave the seven orphans?,” he said, adding, “That is an irresponsibility."

So she’s irresponsible for getting pregnant eight times because she not using the contraception that you say she can’t use? . . . . Francis doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion that the reason most people don’t use natural family planning is that it’s not reliable. It’s how you end up pregnant eight times.

In case this sounds familiar, it was a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II, who blasted efforts to expand access to family planning for women in the developing world as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, which John Paul bitterly objected to for its emphasis on reproductive health care, all the Catholic cardinals met at the Vatican to denounce the conference as “cultural imperialism.”

The irony here is that the Philippines recently liberalized access to contraception that had been blocked by the Catholic bishops of the country in concert with the Aquino administration for more than a decade. The Reproductive Health law that restored government-financed family planning services was popularly supported by Filipinos but stymied for years by the politically powerful Catholic bishops. Who exactly was doing the colonizing here?

Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them.