More On Herman Cain's Religious Tolerance

GOP hopeful Herman Cain had some interesting things to say about Church State matters this weekend.

Take a look:


The part I like best is that he opens with:

Our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state.

And then uses that to assert that a community has the right to ban a mosque's construction in that community.

It's a stunning piece of logic, to be sure.

As far as I can tell, it's based on the idea as Cain ably states, that Islam is both a set of laws and a religion. Since it's both and since the Constitution (and it's oh-so refreshing to hear a conservative - even a nutty one like Cain - say this) guarantees separation of Church and State, any "religion" that's looking to impose itself onto the law can be banned.

He's just wrong when he says that non-Islamic religions don't have a set of rules or are otherwise not looking to impose their rules onto the law.

So when Archbishop Dolan says that New York's Gay Marriage Bill is an "Ominous Threat" he's not looking to impose Catholic Church doctrine onto the people of the Empire State.

So when the Southern Baptist Convention, in 1984, called for its members to push for legislation that agreed with their position of abortion, it wasn't looking to impose its faith upon the law.

Freedom of Religion for me but not for thee. That's the GOP.

Hey, I rhymed. Thrice - or was that twice? Anyway, how nice.

Just a Reminder

This is just a reminder that when Lil Ricky Santorum said at the GOP presidential candidate debate on Monday:

"Not only have I been consistently pro-life, I have not just taken the pledge, but I've taken the bullets to go out there and fight for this and lead on those issues."

That there are actual people who have taken real bullets over providing women with legal abortions:

Dr. Gunn was murdered in 1993.
In 1993, Dr. Tiller was shot but not killed.
In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and his escort, James H. Barrett, were assassinated.
In 1994, Dr. Garson Romalis was shot but not killed.
In 1995, Dr. Hugh Short was shot and killed.
In 1997, Dr. Jack Fainman was shot but not killed, the shooter was a suspect in an unnamed NY physician's murder
In 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian is shot and killed. His murderer, James Koop, was the suspect in 1997's shooting of Dr. Fainman and the other unnamed doctor.
In 2009, Dr. Tiller was shot, again, and killed.

In 1994, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols were shot and killed at clinics in MA.
In 1998, Officer Robert Sanderson was killed during a clinic bombing and nurse Emily Lyon was severely injured.

What a douchebag.
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Action Item: Pennsylvania HB 574

Most of you will remember the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell who operated a House of Horrors under the guise of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. Comparing his office to actual abortion clinics in PA is like comparing a crack house to a Rite Aid. The response of our state legislature to this has been to craft a bill -- HB 574 -- that would shut down most legitimate clinics. Among other things it would do include:

- Abortion providers would be required to increase the size of their procedure rooms by 3 or 4 times their current size.

- Many providers would be required to employ a full-time registered nurse (RN) even when abortion procedures are not being performed.

The bill will likely be voted on today.

You need to contact your state representative and tell them to vote NO on HB 574.

You can sign a petition here and call the State House to contact your Rep. via Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates:

Here's where you come in. Call 717-496-9866 and you'll be connected with our system which will direct you to your State Representative's office in Harrisburg. When you call in, we'll tell you exactly what to say whenever you reach your State Rep's Office. Call 717-496-9866 now -- there is no easier or faster way to do your part today! The House will probably vote before early afternoon, so please call as soon as you can!

Remember: call 717-496-9866, and you'll be connected to your State Rep. Be sure to say that House Bill 574 is NOT the solution. Stay tuned for updates from the Capitol. Thank you for your support!

More On Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand's getting a lot of press these days. What I find intriguing is the many many ways in which Rand's a hero (heroin?) to the right. And yet there were so many many ways in which she's not of the right. For instance in the past few days there was this by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post:

The appeal of Ayn Rand to conservatives is both considerable and inexplicable. Modern conservatism was largely defined by Ronald Reagan’s faith in the people instead of elites. Rand regarded the people as “looters” and “parasites.” She was a strenuous advocate for class warfare, except that she took the side of a mythical class of capitalist supermen. Rand, in fact, pronounced herself “profoundly opposed” to Reagan’s presidential candidacy, since he did not meet her exacting ideological standards.

Rand cherished a particular disdain for Christianity. The cross, she said, is “the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.” Yet some conservatives marked Holy Week by attending and embracing “Atlas Shrugged.”

But that's just some writer writing about Rand. They may be some liberal whack job taking her ideas out of context. Maybe the writer's a jealous Lyndon Larouche follower. Who knows?

What do we find if we dive head-first into the crystal clear waters of Objectivism?

Among other things, we find this:

Roe v. Wade is right in its result, but dangerously wrong in its reasoning. Roe v. Wade is correct in its conclusion that a fetus has no rights and that a woman has the right to determine whether or not to abort her pregnancy. But Roe v. Wade is wrong insofar as it holds that "state interests" justify interference with the woman's right and that, when the state so desires, it may commandeer her body either for her supposed benefit or the benefit of a fetus.

The problem, the writer goes on to say, is found in "balancing" rights against "state interests" as in:

Abortion is a right, and all rights are absolute and cannot be "balanced" away. Ayn Rand has explained: "A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." The moral standard to be applied, Ayn Rand has shown, is that of man's life and what is "required by man's nature for his proper survival." The fundamental condition for man's survival--the freedom to use his rational faculty to maintain and enjoy his life. Thus, a pregnant woman, like every other individual, has the right to determine her own destiny and the destiny of her body, to choose what constitutes her own best interest and private happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as she respects the same rights in others.

And what of the rights of the fetus? Pro-life Objectivists must be surprised to read:

The concept of rights is based on man's nature and presupposes the existence of an actual, fully formed and separate human being. Fetuses and embryos are not actual human beings; they are potential human beings. They have no rights until they exist apart from the mother, i.e., at birth.

To Ayn Rand abortion is an absolute right that can not be balanced away to any state interest. A woman has absolute right to determine the destiny of her own body and any fetus she may be carrying has no rights at all until it is born.

Imagine if the Secretary of State or the First Lady said exactly the same thing. Fox "News" would never tire of pointing out the radical anti-family philosophy of either.

So tell me again why Rand's such a darling of the right? No really, I am serious.

Fact Checking Rick Santorum

Lil Ricky's at it again:

A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.

And both major fact-checking sites call this one false. Both.

First factcheck.org:

Rick Santorum incorrectly stated that “one in three pregnancies end in abortion” in the United States. It’s actually fewer than one in four.

Santorum appeared on a New Hampshire radio talk show, blaming abortions for “causing Social Security and Medicare to be underfunded.” But he not only misstated the abortion statistic, he also got it wrong when he said that "our birthrate is now below replacement rate for the first time in our history." The total fertility rate, not the birthrate, is used to determine the stability of a nation’s population, and the U.S. total fertility rate was below its replacement rate from 1972 to 2006. Finally, Santorum also misrepresented France as lagging far behind its replacement rate.

If Rick's ever going to be take seriously (yea, I know - that's a giggle!) he's going to have to get the numbers right. And now I'd like to introduce Rick to something he may never have met. The facts:

In a March 2011 report, the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute reported that there were 22.4 abortions for every 100 pregnancies in 2008, excluding miscarriages. (The chart can be found in Table 1 on page 3.) The 2008 data is the most recent available, according to Guttmacher spokeswoman Rebecca Wind. The institute’s chart goes back to 1973, and the abortion ratio never reached 33 per 100 pregnancies. Its peak was 30.4 in 1983.

So the highest rate was during Ronald Reagan's first administration?

I wonder how they're gonna blame that on Bill Clinton's penis.

But I digress.

Politifact, on the other hand, went straight to the CDC's numbers:

We chose 2003 as our representative year, since it was the most recent year for which we were able to obtain all of the relevant data.

We set out to determine the number of known pregnancies in 2003. We say "known" because some pregnancies end due to natural causes at a very early stage, often before the woman even realizes she is pregnant. CDC only offers statistics for fetal deaths beginning at a fetal age of 20 weeks, so that’s the parameter we’ll use in our calculations.

To calculate the number of known pregnancies, we added together three figures: the number of live births, the number of fetal deaths (these include natural miscarriages and stillbirths), and the number of abortions. Here’s the data for 2003:

Live births: 4,090,007
Fetal deaths: 25,653
Abortions: 1,250,000

Total known pregnancies: 5,365,660

So abortions account for 23.2 percent of all known pregnancies. That’s less than a quarter of all pregnancies, rather than the one-third Santorum said.

And Rick has another flaw in his "logic" (see what I mean about those irony quotes?). Politifact:

A 2005 Guttmacher study of more than 1,200 women who had undergone an abortion found that a little under half cited the desire not to have additional children as a reason for having their abortion. This means that a substantial minority -- and possibly as many as 53 percent -- expected to have children after the abortion. This pattern was particularly strong among younger women in the study (less than a quarter of those 19 or younger said they were done with childbearing) and among those who had no children at the time of the abortion (only 3 percent said they were done with childbearing).

From an email quoted by factcheck.org, Guttmacher spokesperson Rebecca Wind:

The group of women most likely to have an abortion are in their early 20s. They may already have one child and don’t want another at that time, or they may be childless but desire to have children in the future. Either way, the abortion postpones the birth of their child, it does not eliminate it — and there is no impact on the overall population. Some abortions actually terminate pregnancies that would have ended in miscarriage, so again you can’t assume that every abortion would have otherwise resulted in a live birth.

But let's remember that Rick's a big fan of Intelligent Design - so science and logic are probably not among his intellectual strengths.

Live blogging 4802

RE: Wisconsin: Rachel Maddow had an excellent piece on this last night which you can view here.

USDA & Genetically Engineered Food: Right on! We should know what we're eating.

Philly Abortion Clinic: Acting like that place in Philly was an actual "clinic" is like comparing a crack house to a Rite Aid.

The teenager and the parental bypass: Nope! Sorry! That's not what I said. Her lawyers were aware that the judge had support from the anti choice groups. I believe we may have been the first to publish that the judge was endorsed by anti choice groups. I don't and never have claimed to be the first/only person to discover this -- only that when I did find it with a simple Google search, that I put it out there.

Also: Hmm, four guys sitting around discussing two abortion stories and a story on a female reporter who was sexually assaulted -- I would have liked to have heard at least one woman's opinions on these issues...

Tell them you can't kill us or our doctors: Rally on Thursday!

(Click to embiggen)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2011, 4:30pm-5:30pm
The Old Allegheny County Morgue
542 4th Avenue, Downtown
(Corner of 4th Avenue and Ross Street)
We may be mere "physical locations" and less than full citizens -- or even persons -- in their eyes, but it's time to tell them that you can't kill us or our doctors. You can't continue to attack our health care and our Reproductive Justice. You can't turn back the clock because we won't back down.

It's time to go Egyptian on their asses because they're trying to go medieval on ours.

We won't go back.



We won't go back.


More info and RSVP here
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Allegheny County PA judge rules minor too immature to choose an abortion, but not too immature to have a baby

Via The Morning Call:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will consider the role judges play in deciding when a minor can have an abortion.

In the case, In re Jane Doe, a minor girl asked an Allegheny County judge for permission to have an abortion after she was unable to obtain consent from one of her parents, as required by the state Abortion Control Act. The judge denied her request and the girl appealed, but lost again.

Now the girl's lawyers have asked the state Supreme Court if a lower court should have done more. They argue the appeals court should have reached its own conclusions on the girl's maturity and ability to consent to such a procedure, rather than simply review the county judge's legal process.

[snip]

Jennifer Boulanger, executive director of the Allentown Women's Center, which counsels women seeking abortions, said she has never seen a judge deny a minor's permission to seek an abortion.

Please explain to me how someone -- anyone -- can be too immature to want to seek an abortion but mature enough to have a child? How can someone be mature enough to face the medical, emotional and financial consequences (even if they decide to give the baby up) of carrying a pregnancy to term and delivery, but can't be allowed to decide to chose to end the pregnancy? In fact, for all the judge knows, if forced to deliver, the minor may decide to keep the baby in which case the judge believes that someone can be mature enough to actually raise a child but immature enough to not be pregnant. HUH?

I have heard that Phil Ignelzi is the judge in question in this case.

Interesting that while Ignelzi was fairly vague to the League of Women Voters and the Steel City Stonewall Democrats while running for election (because, you know, it would be "inappropriate and unfair" to get too specific), the group People Concerned for the Unborn Child determined that he was anti choice and endorsed him -- in fact, he was the only candidate who they endorsed for that seat (out of a total of five who they could have endorsed):


A guess a little birdie told them. Funny how that always seems to happen when it comes to anti choice candidates . . .
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