Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 8, 2012 at 5:29pm

Or, how about a tax levy based on the number of unwanted pregnancies carried to term in each county?  You know, to pay for the costs of raising those fetuses....I say, make them pay the much larger cost of raising children to adulthood.

The children would suffer.

I knew a man whose mother often told him he was a "mistake," and ruined her career as a dancer...starting when he was a toddler.  He used to beat up his wife (one of my oldest friends), divorced her, and made her pay him cash for her share of the community property, blew all the money in less than a year, and then killed himself.

We don't need any more people like that on this planet.

We don't need Ricky-Tacky InSanitorum on this planet.  Give him a trip to Jupiter.  One-Way.

Permalink Reply by Dorris Journeay on March 8, 2012 at 6:34pm

Based on the move to prevent insurers from being mandated to cover birth control, I think women legislators should introduce serious legislation to prevent insurers from covering Viagra.  After all, Viagra really is just about men having sex, whereas hormonal birth control pills have many legitimate medicinal purposes besides contraception.  And how about vasectomies?  Why should we force insurers to cover a procedure that interferes with the passage of sacred sperm?  My point is that every move made to legislate morality applied to women should be seriously countered with one applied to men - because it takes two to have sex and make babies; a concept Repubs seem to have difficulty grasping these days.

I really see this as the only way to counter the anti-progressive, anti-woman shit floating around out there.  Of course none of it would pass, but it would make our point quit painfully obvious to the retards and the process would up the pressure on the imploding Republican party.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 8, 2012 at 8:33pm

You're absolutely right....maybe we should dress up as monks or nuns and sing "Every Sperm is Sacred" outside every state capitol...

Satire works.  Sometimes.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 8, 2012 at 8:35pm

http://ffrf.org/news/blog/anthony-comstock-lives/

Anthony Comstock lives

March 8, 2012

By Annie Laurie Gaylor
Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President

Share on emailShare on printShare on twitterShare on facebook| More Sharing ServicesShare

It is outlandish that in the 21st century, women are being forced to re-defend the long-won right of contraception. The right to contraception, first secured as a constitutional right of privacy by the Supreme Court in a 1965 decree, Griswold v. Connecticut, was a done deal.

Not anymore. In January, Rick Santorum told ABC News he opposed Griswold, averring that contraception should be left up to states to ban. Anthony Comstock lives!

The bizarre temper of the times is revealed by Rush Limbaugh’s scurrilous attack on the appealing young Georgetown law student who was muzzled when she tried to defend Obama’s contraceptive policy to a roomful of Congressmen and male clerics. Limbaugh essentially labeled as “sluts” all young women who use birth control. His belated “apology,” grudgingly offered to placate advertisers, is not accepted. Much of what is wrong with the United States is due to the influence of this demagogue. Why is he even on the air? Let’s hope the advertising backlash rings in the death knell for his radio career.

Limbaugh’s remarks (initially defended by Newt Gingrich, et. al) follow the grotesque remarks in February of millionaire Santorum backer Foster Friess. Back in the late sixties and early seventies as a young teenager tabling for Zero Population Growth, I used to commonly hear (and wince at) that remark every time I staffed a booth. Older men would approach the table to leer about the “tarts” who went out “and got themselves pregnant,” and how they ought to have put “an aspirin between their knees.” I never expected to hear this vulgar and demeaning line repeated in the 21st century as part of a presidential campaign.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation exists because religion’s war against women and reproductive rights was the wake-up call to the dangers of religion in government for FFRF’s principal founder, Anne Gaylor. Anne's phone never stopped ringing after she, as editor of a weekly newspaper, wrote the first editorial in support of legalizing abortion in Wisconsin. My mother went on to woman a hotline on contraception, and abortion services when it was still illegal, and founded the Wisconsin Committee to Legalize Abortion. She began raising funds to assist women without means to pay for abortion care by the early 1970s and at 85 is still administering the all-volunteer Women’s Medical Fund, which has helped well over 20,000 women without means exercise their rights under Roe v. Wade in Wisconsin. She is such an old-timer in the abortion rights movement that she served on the governing board of NARAL when it stood for "National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws"! (It later was changed to the National Abortion Rights Action League and today is NARAL Pro-Choice America).

It was always religion, usually Catholic dogma, that was thrown out as justification to deny reproductive freedom in those early days of the movement as it is today. During heated hearings in the Wisconsin State Capitol on contraception in the early seventies, nuns, priests and bused-in parochial school students filled the state Rotunda, and the “anti” testimony all began, “God’s law says . .”

In Wisconsin, we had special insight to the harm of the Catholic Church’s political fight against reproductive rights because we were fighting that church on contraception long after the Griswold decision. Wisconsin was the last state in the union to legalize contraceptives for unmarried people. Up until a federal court decision in 1974, a state statute referred to contraceptives as “indecent articles,” a vestige of the notorious 19th century Comstock laws, and forbade their sale to the unmarried. Were it up to our conservative Catholic-dominated Wisconsin State legislature, “indecent articles” would still be off limits.

The bible and the Christian Church are still, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton realized more than 100 years ago, the major stumbling blocks to women’s emanicipation.

With the defeat by a narrow 51-48 margin a week ago of the Blunt Amendment to override President Obama’s contraception mandate in the Senate, it's currently Women 1, Orthodoxy 0. But the Catholic Church, joined by Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals who are increasingly siding with that church against birth control, has promised not to give up. The House version has more than 200 sponsors. It’s going to take vigilance to defeat the latter-day Comstockians playing political football with women’s rights and lives. Once more the assault against women’s rights has taken center stage as the most significant state/church battle of our time. 

Tax-deductible donations to the Women's Medical Fund, administered by Anne Gaylor, may be sent to Women's Medical Fund, PO Box 248, Madison WI 53701. Annie Laurie Gaylor serves as secretary of this charity. 

Permalink Reply by Dorris Journeay on March 8, 2012 at 9:18pm

Thank you for posting this.  It looks like something I'll be supporting...especially since I'm an RN. I see ethicolegal healthcare issues as a major concern for providers in the US.  I have determined to make fighting against anti-woman healthcare legislation one of my major goals as a politically active atheist nurse.

Permalink Reply by Steven D Campagna on March 22, 2012 at 2:17pm

The same sort of thing - a war on women - is happeni gn right now in Arizoan. A bill - written by out-of-state people - is sponsored by a Republican female state senator:

This bill provides employers to deny birth control to female employees 'based on the religious freedom of the employer who objects'....if the woman requires the medication found in birth control pills...she must state her problem to the employer (invading her privacy).

The religious wrong has wars going on many fronts. In an election year this is unheard of. They are not afraid of this - they welcome the war.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 22, 2012 at 4:00pm

Idaho just passed a bill requiring any woman who wants a (legal) abortion to have two ultrasound exams, one of them the "mecanical rape" type where the probe is inserted into the vagina. Even if the patient in question is a victim of rape.

But any man can get a prescription for drugs like Viagra or Cialis with no questions asked.

What is wrong with this picture?

Permalink Reply by Richard ∑wald on March 22, 2012 at 4:04pm

"What is wrong with this picture?"

…Christians.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 22, 2012 at 5:00pm

 

Phphphbtbtbttt!  ;>P

Yeah, but they say that contraception, especially The Pill, is "unnatural," so why isn't any other medication unnatural? 

Well, there are the extreme crazies who pray over their sick kids instead of taking them to a hospital or a doctor, and then pray some more when the kids die...and say it's god's will.  I say it's god swill.

Permalink Reply by Steven D Campagna on March 23, 2012 at 11:43pm

Allowing any 'employer' to opt out of any mediation (in this case birth control) based on his/her 'religious objections' sets everyone up for a really slippery slope.

Heart medication, cholesterol drugs - all are 'unnatural' to someone's God. That just might be next.

Birth control pills contain certain medication used not for birth control but for many other illnesses. A woman employee who requires such a drug - will now need to let her employer know such - and that employer is going to ask why? If it's not for birth control of which this interfereing employer asks - what is it for? Now you've entered another area...a woman's privacy - of which Christians hate. They interfere becasue they have this overwhelming need to know every aspect of your life - expecially women.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on March 24, 2012 at 2:07am

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have always been anti-woman...thousands of years for the first two.  The Israelites invaded a land that worshipped the Great Goddess (Ba'al was her lesser consort.), and the first thing they did was devote all their energy to destroying the older religion.

I've mentioned the book When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone in here before; it's fascinating.  She uses archeological evidence of widespread goddess-worship that goes back to the Neolithic Age....and Paleolithic Age (I forget which one was earlier, but you know what I mean.)  If even half of what it says is factual, it explains SO much about the Abrahamic religions, and the Eve myth. 

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page