Reproductive Rights are Civil Rights

While we fight, may Dr. Kenneth Edelin Rest in Peace.  On 30 Dec, Dr. Kenneth Edelin, defender of a lady's right to choose what happens with her body, died in Sarasota, FL, at age 70 as a result of cancer.

Although numbering among his achievments becoming the first black chief resident of obstetrics and gynecolgy at Boston City Hospital, history may best remember him as Doctor convicted of manslaughter for performing an abortion after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roe vs. Wade that women have a right to control their own bodies and thus terminate their pregnancies.

When the MA Supreme Court overturned his conviction, the decision helped define the parameters of legal abortions.  After his legal fight, Dr. Edelin became a lifetime defender of women's reproductive rights.

[In the book "Broken Justice: A True Story of Race, Sex and Revenge in a Boston Courtroom," Edelin recounted the experiences of his criminal case.

["At the center of this book are the rights of women to control their own bodies, and the rights of doctors to perform legitimate and legal medical procedures," Edelin wrote. "For me, the struggles for reproductive rights for women and Civil Rights for African-Americans are intertwined and at the same time parallel. The denial of these two rights is an attempt by some to control the bodies of others. Both are forms of slavery. We must never let slavery in any form return to America."] emphasis and emphasis squared added by me.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/31/kenneth-edelin-dead-dies_n_4523143.html

Although one can always find examples of larger sterotypes, let's demolish the framework used by Republicans in state after state to restrict reproductive rights from females: they see any woman seeking an abortion as a slut, perhaps through ignorance or deliberately ignoring consequences of having sex,

Nevertheless the last time I checked, men and women enjoy carnal encounters.  Yet only women get "caught" with consequences.

Let me just guess the vast majority of women seeking abortions would rather not but have come to the conclusion that for them it amounts to the right choice.

Also, no form of birth control proves 100% effective, and the horrible act of rape can produce pregnancy. Ought we as a society force females to carry to term the child of thier rapist?  No, we as a people ought to make sure the conditions of aboption occur in a safe and humane manner.

[“Nobody likes to do abortions,” Dr. Edelin told The New York Times in 1975, “but the least we can do is make it safe and humane.”]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/us/kenneth-c-edelin-physician-at-center-of-landmark-abortion-case-dies-at-74.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&

Safe and humane for God forbid some rightwing zealot come home and find their daughter dead from trying to self induce an abortion.

Rapists' Parental Rights

You read that right.  In 31 states, rapists whose sperm swim well can claim parental visitation rights.

Holy Purple Jesus punch in a dirty bathtub, patriarch Man!  Visitation rights for criminal vermin who ought to have all trace of their existence wiped from the earth.  What freakin' patriarchal Mormon prick came up with that idea?

[It would not be long before I would learn firsthand that in the vast majority of states -- 31 -- men who father through rape are able to assert the same custody and visitation rights to their children that other fathers enjoy. When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child.

Opinion: Wake up, it's not just Akin

When faced with the choice between a lifetime tethered to her rapist or meaningful legal redress, the answer may be easy, but it is not painless. For the sake of her child, the woman will sacrifice her need to see her once immensely powerful perpetrator humbled by the court.

I know it because I lived it. I went to law school to learn how to stop it.]
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/22/opinion/prewitt-rapist-visitation-rights/index.html

People without a uterus should shut up and stop making laws about women's bodies!

I'm looking at you, Paul Ryan, defender of every fertilized egg who would ban most forms of birth control.

Dipwad.

Federal Stimulus Created Jobs: Scott and Webster lie

Voters, just use your common freakin' sense when you look at tv campaign ads.

Every reputable media web site and the Congressional Budget Office--an organization that uses actual numbers rather than ideological lies--reports the stimulus created jobs and helped keep world economy from cratering into another Great Depression.

So lyin' Rick Scott, professional fraud, has campaign ads with scurrilous bald faced lies, as do his Tea party compatriots: Marco Rubio and Daniel "No Abortions Under Any Circumstances Not Even to Save the Life of the Mother" FL US District 08 candidate Webster.

Please support Alan Grayson for Congress, US-08, and Kendrick Meek for US Senator, FL. $5 can go a long way when combined at Act Blue.

And for those of you who do not vote:

Knife fight to save US Constitution

Tie the top three Democratic candidates for president together wrist to wrist to wrist, give each a knife, and let 'em fight 'til last person standing, not necessarily to death like in a spaghetti western




Though an an immodest proposal,

this provides an analogy to the general election where every wingnut, Repuklikkkan, mouthbreathing misanthrope and swiftboating bastard crawls from cesspools of ignorance spewing vile lies, calumnies, and slanders towards the Democratic nominee.

If Democrats and progressives and office seekers all get in a tizzy by media decontruction of candidate's every phrase--"it took a President" and "Reagan's party of ideas"--we distract ourselves from the war to come.

We should agree now on common principles.

I'd suggest 4.

!. Rollback the police state of GWB and consider the Constitution as supreme law of the land by recognizing it includes the Geneva Conventions as duly ratified under Article Six.

2. Reproductive rights.

3. Health care for all.

4. Sunset the Cheney's administation tax cuts for the rich.

We the people must prepare for all out war to preserve our very Constitution.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."