Mississippi legislators are actively making it impossible to seek out a safe and legal abortion in their state. But what did State Rep. Bubba Carpenter have to say about it? What did he think about the women he would inevitably force into unsafe situations?

The video has since been removed by the GOP but the soundbyte lives on:

(Wait, the video is back up!)

“It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to… Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.

“But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do.”

Moral values?! Perhaps he should try taking his own advice.

Kiessling’s mother was brutally raped at knifepoint by a stranger and became pregnant as a result. This was before Roe v. Wade and her mother opted against visiting illegal abortion clinics. Still, she admits she would have gotten an abortion if it had been legal. Having been conceived by rape, Kiessling frames the issue by saying that if you support the right of rape victims to have abortions — or even to have access to Plan B, then you’re saying she deserved the death penalty:

Have you ever considered how really insulting it is to say to someone, “I think your mother should have been able to abort you.”? It’s like saying, “If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.”

No, no it is not. It’s like saying, “Your mother should have been able to abort you, just like my mother should have been able to abort me.” And if my mother had made that choice, I would not have suffered in the slightest. I just wouldn’t have ever existed.

I have some sympathy for Kiessling — she went through a great deal of personal anguish after finding out how she was conceived. But I really wish she had received proper counseling during that time instead of turning to religion. Now, she’s putting her church’s ideological views above the needs of traumatized rape victims and trivializes what they experience if they become pregnant, suggesting that looking at a sonogram of their rapists’ fetus wouldn’t be such a big deal for them.

The pro-life/pro-choice debate always boils down to one core difference: pro-lifers believe zygotes are people because they have souls. Even if we play along with this fairy tale of a supernatural-self that comes along with our bodies, this assumption still doesn’t hold water.

If every zygote has a soul, then:

• What happens to it if it divides into two or more babies? Do they divide the soul or does another pop into being? What if the zygote doesn’t separate completely, do two souls still result?

 

• What if two zygotes merge to form a chimeric embryo? Does the resulting baby have two souls or does their fusion destroy a soul?

 

• Why do the gods allow so many soul-having zygotes and blastocysts to get flushed out of women’s bodies before they even know the fertilization happened?

Rhetorical questions aside, this is ultimately an issue of the separation of church and state.  Religious/theistic people are the only ones who believe in souls and they want those souls to be recognized by the government, just like they want their gods recognized by the government. But we won’t let that slide.

It begins with some assumptions and a conclusion. Yes, the assumptions are generalized (obviously, there are exceptions), but I hope you find it worth discussing. Feel free to poke holes in the argument.

Assumption 1) Christians are opposed to abortions.

Assumption 2) According to Christians, if a baby (or fetus) is aborted, then surely Jesus would allow it to go to heaven.

Assumption 3) If an atheist couple raises a child, there’s a good chance the child could grow up to be an atheist… and then go to hell when s/he dies.

Conclusion) Christians should be happy if atheists get abortions because they’re actually giving the child the best chance to go to heaven.

Where’s the problem in that logic?

I asked a couple of Christian friends and they said some things about Assumption 3, that we have free will and we can choose to accept Jesus and that’s somehow “better” than going there simply because you weren’t given an opportunity to know Jesus… but if you’re going to heaven either way, I don’t see why that matters.

There’s something beautiful about the way Mike stops the Christian protestors by quoting their own book right back to them.

However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.

Sen. Constance Johnson, D-Oklahoma City, said that while it takes two people to create life, Crain’s measure focuses only on half of that equation.

My amendment seeks to draw attention to the absurdity, duplicity and lack of balance inherent in the policies of this state in regard to women. Oklahoma already incarcerates more women than any other place in the world. Under the latest provisions, a woman in Oklahoma may now face additional criminal charges and potential incarceration for biological functions that produce or, in some cases, destroy eggs or embryos, such as a miscarriage. In vitro fertilization, involving the fertilization outside the womb for implantation into the womb, would also potentially represent a violation of the proposed Personhood statute.

Finally, this amendment seeks to draw humorous attention to the hypocrisy and inconsistency of this proposal – from the Republican perspective of down-sized government and less government intrusion into people’s private affairs.

This new video is a perfect response

I loved the line, “Don’t look a rape-horse in the mouth.”

(via Christian Nightmares)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Morgan: Do you really believe, in every case, [abortion] should be totally wrong, [including] cases of rape and incest? You’ve got two daughters… If you had a daughter that came to you who had been raped, and was pregnant, and was begging you to let her have an abortion, would you really be able to look her in the eye and say “No,” as her father?

Santorum: I would do what every father would do, which is to try and counsel you daughter to do the right thing.

[Crosstalk]

Morgan: It’s almost an impossibly hypothetical thing to ask you, but there will be people in that position. And they will share your religious values…

Santorum: It’s not a matter of religious values…

Morgan: …and they’re looking at their daughter saying, “How can I deal with this? Because, if I make her have this baby, it’s going to ruin her life.”

Santorum: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

I really don’t like the way Morgan conducted the interview. By asking Santorum to imagine himself as the father of a pregnant rape victim, he may have thought he was putting the candidate in a difficult position. But evangelical men thrive on this line of thinking. I get the sense that Santorum wouldn’t mind being regarded of as a clear-headed Daddy to a nation of hysterical women who might not “do the right thing.” If you want to challenge patriarchal ideas, you don’t do it by framing women’s health issues as father-daughter conversations.

More revealing than Morgan’s inane question were Santorum’s explanations of what kind of God he believes in. For him, God (Sky Daddy, if you will) is responsible for each and every human life, all of which begin at conception. Each of these lives is a gift. When a man rapes a woman, sometimes God decides to give the woman a “broken gift” in the form of a pregnancy, in the hope that this will woman will “make the best of a bad situation” and give birth to the child of her rapist. But what if this imperfect woman starts to think that she might just be better off terminating the pregnancy she didn’t ask for? In that case, it is the job of her father, who is head of his household as Christ is the head of the church (Ephesians 5:23), to “counsel” her so she doesn’t “ruin her life.”

And why is it that the father and head of household gets to makes these determinations even though he never has been and never will be pregnant? That’s easy enough to explain. You see, the first defective woman that God made tricked the first defective man into eating a piece of fruit that would allow him to know things (Genesis 3:4-7) and be less reliant on his heavenly father. And so God punished her, and all the women who came after her, with the pain of childbirth (Genesis 3:16).

I’m fairly certain that Rick Santorum will not be the Republican nominee, let alone the next president. But let’s not forget that more than 150,000 American adults in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have voted for him so far.

(Via ThinkProgress)

Yesterday, a federal judge put a stop to this nonsense with a preliminary injunction. Katherine Lewis Parker, Legal Director of the ACLU North Carolina Legal Foundation (which argued against the North Carolina DMV) previously said in a press release:

“This is a basic issue of freedom of speech and fairness. It is a fundamental tenet of the First Amendment that the State cannot use its authority to promote one side of a debate while denying the same opportunity to the other side. Anyone who supports freedom of speech should agree with this stance, regardless of one’s position on abortion. Our position would be the same if the State had authorized a pro-choice license plate but not an anti-choice alternative. In that situation, the ACLU-NCLF would be suing on behalf of anti-choice drivers under the exact same theory of viewpoint discrimination.”

…

“If anti-choice drivers are permitted to express their views on their license plates, people like me should be able to express our view that women deserve full reproductive freedom,” said Sue Holliday, plaintiff and certified nurse midwife.

(I like how they both use “anti-choice.” Nice touch. See the footnote below.) Now, the ACLU appears to have limited their legal arguments to the idea that if you give a government-sponsored voice to one side of the debate, you have to give it to the other. (They requested a license plate which read “Respect Choice”). My issues with this go further, though. There’s a big problem with where the money is going from these license plates. The Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship gets $15 of every $25 that a driver pays for these plates. Now, there’s a debate to be had about whether this is private speech and thus protected by the First Amendment. My particular problem with this is found in the organization’s mission statement:

Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship (CPCF) is a statewide, 501(c)3 nonprofit, pro-life organization committed to offering help and encouragement to those God calls into pregnancy care ministry, especially those located in North Carolina.

Their site indicates they run crisis pregnancy centers. By approving this license plate and the revenue that would come from it, the state legislature (at the very least) is implicitly approving this position and the underlying religious rationale. They all, as individuals, can believe whatever they want. It’s way out of line to make this sort of religiously-justified rhetoric into the Official State Position.

The good news is that in order to win a motion for a preliminary injunction you have to show a “likelihood of success on the merits.” That means the judge has already shown a sympathy towards the ACLU’s position by granting the motion. The only logical outcome of this suit is to require the DMV to provide either an alternative or withdraw the “pro-life” plate option.

(I know, I know, lots of non-profits with religious bases get public funds. Doesn’t mean I have to think it’s constitutional.)

*There’s a whole discussion here to be had about the rhetorical uses of “life” and “choice” labels in this debate. I mean, who’s against life?

Via Joe. My. God. who adds:

This is a HUGE loss for the Family Research Council, which lobbied fiercely to essentially outlaw abortion in Mississippi. The bill, as written, would have also outlawed some methods of birth control.

Kate Smurthwaite, a member of the National Secular Society, appeared on the British show “The Big Questions” and gave arguably the best possible response to a religious man’s claim that “every aborted child is in heaven”:

And then she finishes the video with complete bluntness

Normally, I’d think that tactic is counterproductive, but if you watch an extended clip and see how the theists respond to her (Do you believe in money? Then you have faith!), it’s hard to argue that she’s wrong. In the heat of the debate, in that room, I’ll admit I would’ve had a hard time containing my thoughts, too…

On her blog, Kate points out:

At the time unsurprisingly the assembled religious leaders who were on the show reacted as if I’d defecated on the studio floor. But I wasn’t really expecting the general public to have that much of a reaction to the clip. I mean “idiots” is hardly the harshest insult. At very least it’s the sort of insult that goes out on BBC One on a Sunday morning.

By the way, if you read the rest of her posting, you can see for yourself the kind of awful things people said about her online — calling her a lesbian bitch, an idiot because she’s a woman, someone who needed to be gang-raped, etc — all on account of that clip. (It also doesn’t help that the video is titled “Atheist Bitchslap.”)

Even if you think people get way too hyper-sensitive when it comes to sexism (especially lately), I hope you’ll agree that those comments (some of which came from atheists) are completely uncalled for. If you see them, call the commenters out on it. If you’re making them… what the hell is wrong with you?

(Thanks to Gil for the link)