VAGINAS AND THE AMERICAN TALIBAN

   
    Feeling that it would be grossly unfair to praise the inherent beauty of women one day and to ignore the ways in which those women are being attacked and subjugated the next, today's edition of PhilroPost addresses itself to the very real War on Women, as it pertains to the even larger war on humanity waged by the frustrated old turdlickers out there who want to enslave everyone but themselves. 
    Vagina.
    There. With that said, we can get down to specifics.
    First, here how things are playing out in our friendly ally known as Pakistan. A young woman singer named Ghazala Javed and her father were shot to death in the northwestern city of Peshawar. Many insist she might have been murdered by Taliban members who objected to her singing and dancing. "Two men on a motorbike sprayed bullets and fled leaving them in a pool of blood," senior police officer Dilawar Bangash told Agence France Presse.
    "We have registered a case and launched an investigation. The murder seems to be result of some dispute.”
   Ghazala Javed, who was only 24 years old, fled her native Swat valley three years ago when Pakistan’s military waged a violent campaign against Taliban militants in the remote region near the Afghanistan border. Taliban warriors had targeted singers, dancers and other entertainers during their brutal occupation of Swat.
    Ghazala, who released more than two dozen albums during her short career, was hugely popular across the Pashto-speaking communities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Fearing the Taliban’s edicts against music, she recorded many of her albums in Dubai.

    Here in the United Taliban States, we don't shoot you in public. We simply have our corrupt idiot lawmakers bind and gag you. Here's how they do it in Michigan. In a speech last week on a controversial bill that would further regulate abortions, Representative Lisa Brown used the V-word and got in all sorts of trouble. A day later, House Republicans refused to allow Brown, a Democrat, to weigh in on a school employee retirement bill. A spokesman for cowardly Michigan Speaker James Bolger released a statement explaining that Brown and fellow Democratic Rep. Barb Byrum “will not be recognized to speak on the House floor today after being gaveled down for their comments and actions yesterday that failed to maintain the decorum of the House of Representatives.” Byrum had tried to introduce an amendment to ban vasectomies except when one’s required to save a man’s life. 

    Here is the text of Lisa Brown's speech.     "Yesterday we heard the representative from Holland speak about religious freedom. I’m Jewish. I keep kosher in my home. I have two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for dairy, and another two sets of dishes on top of that for Passover. Judaism believes that therapeutic abortion, namely abortions performed in order to preserve the life of the mother, are not only permissible but mandatory. The stage of pregnancy does not matter. Wherever there is a question of the life of the mother or that of the unborn child, Jewish law rules in favor of preserving the life of the mother. The status of the fetus as human life does not equal that of the mother. I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. why are you asking me to adopt yours. And finally Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina but no means no."

    For this they silence you?

    Is there more? Oh, yes. Much more, including legislation that

• expands the pre-abortion waiting period requirement in South Dakota to make it more onerous than that in any other state, by extending the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requiring women to obtain counseling from a crisis pregnancy center in the interim;
• expands the abortion counseling requirement in South Dakota to mandate that counseling be provided in-person by the physician who will perform the abortion and that counseling include information published after 1972 on all the risk factors related to abortion complications, even if the data are scientifically flawed;
• requires the health departments in Utah and Virginia to develop new regulations governing abortion clinics;
• revises the Utah abortion refusal clause to allow any hospital employee to refuse to “participate in any way” in an abortion;
• limits abortion coverage in all private health plans in Utah, including plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
• revises the Mississippi sex education law to require all school districts to provide abstinence-only sex education while permitting discussion of contraception only with prior approval from the state.

    These items are huge. They also reveal for all to see the amazingly baldfaced hypocrisy of the overwhelmingly male legislatures that want to ogle the shapely female form, impregnate the women against their will by way of spreading their seeds, deny women the right to control their own bodies, and once the child is born, starve the family to death by denying these same women healthcare coverage, food assistance, and education. 

    We in the United States like to believe that if some foreign power were "dragging our bays or dropping the bomb on our streets," as a once popular song had it, that we would never stand for it. Yet that is exactly what is happening to fifty-one percent of our population and our collective outrage manifests itself in a popular action of chanting the words "vagina" and vasectomy"? Certainly, pointing up the absurdity of state government's behaviors is crucial and there must always be room for satire and ridicule in dissent and protest. But how are you going to silence someone who will not be silenced? Or are we simply going to wait for the state-directed American Taliban to do to the women of this country what was done to Ghazala Javed in Pakistan?

    Please do not look to the reactionary Supreme Court for solutions. Back in 1992, the Justices, in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, did uphold a woman's constitutional right to abortion services. However, as with the Court's decisions since the days of Nixon, there has always been a repressive catch. In the case of PP v Casey, the Supremes allowed leeway in placing restrictions on access to reproductive healthcare. Since then, right-wing politicians have increasingly pushed through dangerous state laws intended to erode the right to choose and undermine the protections of Roe v. Wade. These state-level evils cripple women's access to reproductive health services. Burdensome waiting periods and parental notification requirements have been passed throughout the country, and now anti-choice activists are increasingly turning to new ways to undercut women’s healthcare and constitutionally protected liberties.

    These state laws operate on several levels. Typically they mandate one or more of the following: Unnecessary and intrusive ultrasounds; pro-Christian biased counseling; race and gender discrimination; Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws; fetal pain laws; heartbeat laws; personhood laws; and legalized murder of abortion providers.

    Let's look at two of the more astounding items from this list. First, the discriminatory laws. In February 2011, the Republican majority in the Arizona House of Representatives voted 41-18 to pass a bill that criminalized abortions sought because of the race or sex of the fetus. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative. Steve Montenegro, claimed that “there are targeted communities that the abortion industry targets.” If his bill becomes law, women seeking abortions in Arizona will have to sign a statement declaring that race or sex was not the reason they sought the procedure. The biological father or the woman’s parents, in the case of minors, could sue the doctor and health professionals involved in terminating the pregnancy on behalf of the fetus “if they were aware of race- or gender-based procedures and failed to report them.”
    According to the Cronkite News Service, ninety-two percent of abortions  take place “before 13 weeks of pregnancy,” while doctors cannot determine the sex of the fetus “until at least the 17th week.” Anti-choice activists consistently portray legal abortion as a stealth genocide committed against minority communities, painting groups such as Planned Parenthood as “racists” and “Nazis.” However, studies show that the statistically higher abortion rate among women of color is due to a higher rate of unwanted pregnancies, with no evidence pointing to a racially-motivated campaign.
    Michelle Steinberg of Planned Parenthood points out that the bill “could be a slippery slope in terms of requiring women to disclose why they’re choosing abortion.”

    As to legalizing the murder of abortion providers, let's look at recent events. Last year in South Dakota, the House of Representatives tabled a bill that would have legalized the murder of doctors who perform abortions by classifying it as “justifiable homicide.” Now the Nebraska Senate is weighing a bill that would amend the state’s self-defense code “to authorize protection of an unborn child.” Under the amendment proposed by the fiercely anti-choice state Senator Mark Christensen, a “third person or person to be protected includes an unborn child” which “means an individual member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development in utero.” State Senator Brad Ashford, the chairman of Nebraska Senate’s Judiciary Committee, said “we could see firefights at clinics” if Christensen’s amendment is passed in the unicameral state legislature. David Baker of the Omaha Police department warned that the bill “could incite violence at abortion clinics.” Even though proponents deny that it is the intention of their bill, the legal ambiguity would create a perilous and potentially deadly environment for abortion providers in the state.
    Along with the personhood bill under consideration in Iowa, the state House plans to consider HF 7, a bill that expands the right to use deadly force to protect a third party. Essentially, by declaring that a zygote and a fetus have all of the same legal rights as a “person” while also broadening the legal protections regarding the reasonable use of deadly force, the bill opens the door for attacks on abortion providers. Criminal defense attorney Todd Miler told The Iowa Independent that since HF 7 “explicitly provides that people have a right to defend themselves or others at any place they are legally allowed to be,” if someone attempted “to kill a physician or a clinic worker, and if they did so while believing they were protecting another person, which would be defined under House File 153 as a fetus, then, under this law, they would have the right to do that.”

    The message, I think, is quite clear. If you're going to have randy thoughts about a woman, thoughts that may include how much fun it would be to engage that woman in sexual congress, then you BY GOD better being willing to share in the responsibility for the natural and potential outcome of that fantasy. You better support free access to contraception. You better support abortion rights. And you better not cringe at the sound of words that begin with the letter V.