(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

So, South Dakota just signed into law the bill banning abortion. If you watch this charming video, you will see (at around 3.30, thanks pdanielson!) Human Turd Napoli pontificating on the requirements for an exception to the new and exciting abortion ban:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

The first thing that struck me about this? The fact that it really reads like a masturbatory fantasy, like he has given it a LOT of thought in that kind of context. I mean, insert [with a big thick black cock] in there, and you've got the standard niche fare from, like, alt.sex.stories or whatever. He is totally getting off on this description. Like, the thought of a Christian virgin raped and sodomized to the max is, like, the fantasy he jerks off to. "As bad as you can possibly make it." You know, as opposed to rape lite, maybe with mild-to-medium vaginal perfirations and the cuddly user-friendly sodomy.

pdanielson the law student explains who wouldn't be eligible for abortion.

I have, like, a pie of rage, most of is for these human turds, but some of it is for the MaChesmo boy activists of the "ain't no difference between two parties" varieties and wankers like nihilistic_kid who, if memory serves right, around election time, was lambasting concerned women in America, like, "how dare you prioritize the interests of your privileged white vaginas" (and that's pretty much verbatum; he is a writer, that one) [over, like, some pomomacho-meets-Nietzsche's-amor-fati rejection of the voting system performed and executed with self-righteousness that exists only among the "I consume Che therefore I am" contingent].

Some people need to be, like, retoractively aborted.

Comments

[theophile.livejournal.com]

The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was wearing flimsy white cotton things, slightly stained with her own tears. I tore her brassiere off with one heavy, scarred hand, and I laughed, softly, as I pushed her down onto the dry, rough grass.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

hey man that's just inappropriate

[teragram22.livejournal.com]

You gotta love how even in this context, the emphasis is on rewarding Christianity and abstinence. And the reward is a moral exception, an indulgence if you will, a permission slip to commit what for us blasphemers would be a mortal sin. That's some of the most twisted fucking logic in the world. To qualify for an abortion, you have to abhor abortions and abortionists. Because if you're not religious and/or not a virgin, then you deserve whatever you get.

And why does the embryo of a waitress and her drunken boyfriend have a right to life, while the embryo of a church-going virgin is totally murder-able? Are some embryos more equal than others?

[nearly-there.livejournal.com]

Right. I mean, since when is it a good idea to create laws that have impossibly vague interpretations? If you're going to say that doctors can only perform "life-saving abortions," then fine. It's a reprehensible thing to advocate for, given that pregnancy - depending on the details of a particular conception - can potentially have traumatic and health-endangering consequences that may not perhaps fall under "life-saving," but fine.

But then to define someone from a particular group as deserving of a "life-saving" procedure because she's religious? And to assume that lawyers or worse, Congressmen, can reasonably gauge what qualifies as the psychological equivalent of "life-saving?"

Have these people learned NOTHING from poor Terri Schiavo?

[To be honest, the worst part of it right now is that the NY Times article never even hit the "most forwarded articles" list. Are we that complacent about stupid-ass things that conservatives try to ram through the courts? Do that many people really just not care?]

[remsaverem.livejournal.com]

I'd like to second the retroactive abortion sentiment.

While Japan is struggling with the declining population problem (which it blames on women), at least abortions are still legal (probably because they are quite profitable). Perhaps the abortion issue just needs to be rephrased with market rhetoric.

[nom-de-grr.livejournal.com]

I like it! Abortion, a growing industry, good for the economy! Why do Christians hate capitalism?

...complete non sequitur: an old man just walked by my desk wearing the most amazing pink slacks pulled up over his old-man belly. I just needed to share this with someone.

[circekills.livejournal.com]

haha privileged white vaginas, my yellow ass. because yeah, all feminists and supporters of feminist ideology are white women. what a fucking crock of crap.

i think i'll anally sodomize napoli. i bet his tight, virgin, religious asshole would love it.

[cascadianista.livejournal.com]

I see, so if she wasn't wearing a chastity ring, NO ABORTION FOR YOU.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

I tend to think actually the dark, poor and working class vaginas will be more affected. That's the demographic where there has been an increasing number of abortions, while it's been declining among privileged whites.

The similarties between the Republican and Democratic parties is another matter. Not that any third party has a chance under single member districts. As it is, considering the few number of folks who vote for third parties compared to the vast numbers who don't vote at all. If folks are going to bet on horses, at least pick one that can get out of the gate.

What's very sad here is that the issues that are distinguishing the two parties, are the ones that are helping the Republicans win elections. Perhaps if there was more advocacy on the issues and less on just pulling the lever for anybody with a "D" behind their name; there would be a different result. Considering the sheer number of women who have gotten abortions and the wide-demographic they hail from, it's suprising that they would loose on the issue on the national stage.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

right, one of the most eye-opening parts of Freakonomics, for me (and the part most hideously mis-summarized by William Bennett) was the realization that criminalization of abortion really does have no appreciable effect on anyone at or above the middle class; it's only in lower economic strata where illegalization of abortion actually results in either lower rates of abortion or higher mortality rates due to botched abortions.

saying "we shouldn't care about abortion because it's an issue that affects white privileged people most" would be a morally abhorrent statement if it were true. since it's actually demonstrably false, for reasons that one could arrive at through simple deductive reasoning, though, the statement is more... what's the term I'm looking for... "fucking retarded"?

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

One thing about the criminalization of aborition is that it won't even stop the majority of abortions from happening.



Although women in developing countries are much more likely than women in developed countries to live under restrictive abortion laws, levels of abortion are about the same for both groups (Chart C). In any given year, 34 abortions occur per 1, 000 women in the developing world, and 39 are performed per 1, 000 women in developed countries. However, abortion rates vary considerably among countries, ranging from fewer than 10 to more than 80 abortions per 1, 000 women.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Somehow I figured you and nihilistic_kid would be on the same side of the barricades. My bad.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I think he is over in the Comrades That Ooze Privilege and Self-Rightenousness corner of the barricades. It's pretty much a no-girls zone.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

I think you're off on the privilege; his father's a dockworker and he's a writer. Self-righteousness, though, definitely.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

not to be all second wave about it, but male privilege.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

also cultural capital as per Bourdieu with that particular flavor-cache that a blue-collar parent provides.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

I agree that being a writer automatically negates any chance of privilege, I mean the very suggestion is absurd

[commandercranky.livejournal.com]

An embryo is an innocent defenseless fully developed human deserving of legal protection unless it was came into being because of an act of rape? Then it deserves to die, a fate reserved only for this particular class of unborn humans, the product of extra-special-bad sin?


I can't help but think there's some twisted reinterpretation of concepts of original sin here.

I also can't believe that anybody thinks these jokers have a moral/logical leg to stand on. I mean, either it's a beautiful unborn human from the moment of conception right up to birth, or it isn't. Right?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

not just ANY kind of rape. An "as bad as it gets" rape. If the rape was in missionary position, it's probably fine.

[inhumandecency.livejournal.com]

I don't see this. It sounds to me like Mr. Turd was claiming that the "physical and psychological health of the mother" exception is too often invoked in situations where it's just an excuse for trivial cosmetic abortions. He was trying to describe his image of a situation where a woman was so badly traumatized that yeah, it really would threaten her life and sanity. So it's not that virginal Christian barely-legal teens are more entitled to abortions; it's that they're the ones who would be most traumatized by being raped and pregnant, and therefore the likely members of a very limited class where an abortion really would be necessary to save the mother's life.

I do hope that's the tack he's taking, because it makes it much easier to argue; we can find actual evidence relating to the health and psychological effects of pregnancy by rape, or unwanted pregnancy, in general.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

we can find actual evidence relating to the health and psychological effects of pregnancy by rape, or unwanted pregnancy

Since when is scientific evidence a compelling argument for Christian fundamentalists?

Also by that logic as you interpret it...does that mean that a lesbian would be more traumatized than a self-identifying heterosexual, because she would be raped by someone falling outside her preferred orientation? Would one of those Prussian Blue girls be particularly traumatized by being raped by a non-Aryan person? Oh my head is going to explode.

[inhumandecency.livejournal.com]

Since when is scientific evidence a compelling argument for Christian fundamentalists?

You don't have to convince them. All you have to do is convince the wider population of voters who fall for their lousy arguments.

As for the other question, I agree that it's offensive and ineffective to determine an individual's trauma by their group identification. When you're dealing with real people, you don't have to make predictions about who's more likely to be harmed by what hypothetical situation. You can talk to this particular person and assess how traumatized they actually are.

I don't think that demonstrated trauma should be a requirement for getting an abortion in the first place. But it's useful to be able to talk about trauma in the fight against across-the-board anti-abortion laws -- demonstrating that rape and unwanted pregnancies are widely and seriously traumatic, not just for virginal blonde Christian teens.

[bookwormpride.livejournal.com]

hmm, but do you agree the example gets a little pornographic-sounding?
maybe you are reading at one level, and anthrochica at another? someone can articulate an argument that can be reconstructed to sound reasonable, but the actual words they use are telling in another way.

[commandercranky.livejournal.com]

I guess my reply to this line of logic is that, though it's marginally more cohesive than what I'm lampooning, it still doesn't hold an ounce of water.

If an embryo is an "unborn human," deserving of legal protection from "murder," then it is. Period. And it doesn't matter how its conception occurred. If you take the initial premise to be true (that life begins at the instant of conception), and further believe that all life must be protected, then you simply cannot rationalize abortion in some situations. Anti-choice concessions to allow abortion in cases of rape of the woman are just that: concessions to a mostly confused, sane, moderate public so that the anti-choicers don't look like they're heartless bastards who don't care about women. It's a political calculation, contradicted by moral or logical coherence.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

Maybe all life shouldn't be protected.

Is every zygote sacred? Maybe there is more to being a human being than simply being a small group of living DNA cells. Maybe we have to have a more complex definition of what makes someone a person with the same rights and responsiblities as everyone else.

We can argue "life" from a biological stand point fairly easy on how we define our terms.

[redheadedmuse.livejournal.com]

So let's say this good, Xtian girl does save herself for marriage. She marries an attractive, wealthy man and spends a decade living as his faithful wife. They have three sons.

Then one day, out of the blue, he informs her that he's divorcing her and marrying the local king, er, governor's daughter. He plans to leave her totally without support,and the community will ostracize her, leaving her and her sons with no means of survival.

Would our heroine then be justified in murdering her children and her husband's new wife and then flying off on a dragon?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I thought she had two children! Or are we thinking of different stories?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

also the one I am thinking of is of a radically pre-Xtian variety...so maybe you are thinking about something totally else. I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet...

[redheadedmuse.livejournal.com]

yeah. I guess nice Xtian girls don't ride off on dragons.

I started thinking out the logic of Napoli's argument: if a woman is mistreated badly enough by a man, she is entitled to kill the offspring created by that mistreatment. And I thought that sounded awfully familiar, though as you say, radically pre-Xtian.

[redheadedmuse.livejournal.com]

you're totally right. two children.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that the anger I thought I'd gotten over about idiots on my end of the spectrum who see not voting as some kind of revolutionary act or who voted for vanity candidates has reared its ugly head again in recent weeks.

And yeah, there are certain LJers I've taken to just ignoring all together because I don't want to pollute other people's journals with my vitriolic replies to their oh-so-revolutionary wankings.

a better link

[cos]

Crooks & Liars is a very active blog, sometimes posting more than once an hour, so just linking to their front page could confuse people - especially when the video you're referring to scrolls off the front page. Use the direct link:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/06.html#a7412

Re: a better link

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh, thanks!

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

hahaha: sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it

"you," Mr. Napoli?

[spoonfeeding.livejournal.com]

i LOVE that she has to be sodomized

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

i've heard brief mentions on the radio of the legislatures in mississippi and south carolina (possibly the two most retrograde states in the country) working on passing similar laws. so much for the alito "gradualist" approach. and here i thought all of these states were too busy passing "sanctity of marriage" ammendments to their state constitutions to have time for this.

on a related note, isn't it time that the "red" states started being referred to by their true color, gray? the blue northern states have retained their color, but the gray southern states have switched to red. did they think that we wouldn't notice?

[astronomick.livejournal.com]

Yes, you are right on. And it seems to me that these people who want to ban abortion (or a certain set of these people) are altogether obsessed with controlling people’s sex lives, to the point of needing to take away and own those lives for themselves, as if they wanted to experience those lives vicariously. Hence the masturbatory fantasy (if Mr. Turd can’t prevent the rape of his Christian damsel, he wants to witness every single bit of it). And the “as bad as you can possibly make it” on top of everything else is just incredible.

[hissilliness.livejournal.com]

A part of me is kinda glad that the anti-choice crowd is crawling out from under their rocks into the sunlight, ignoring all the carefully-crafted rhetoric of the professional activists they've been funding.

If we're gonna have to re-fight this shit, I'd much rather they show their true colors like this rather than managing to hide behind their usual weasel-words.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

I think you are missing something with the masturbatory fantasy line of thought - that it's not necessarily there because he's masturbating to it. The reason why it IS masturbatory is because it's seen as dirty, bad, and wrong, and he's saying that it is, in fact, dirty, bad, and wrong, so you'd have to be really sick to masturbate to it (hence making people want to masturbate to it).

The problem with his line of thought is more that this weird story he creates is somehow speaking to a norm (a norm of rape). If people start to accept this kind of definition as reasonable, then women who get raped under less extraordinary circumstances are, by definition, not really raped. "Well, she was an atheist who had been giving it out since she was 22, so she wasn't really raped. I mean, she had had sex with TWO other guys before, so what's the big deal?"

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

no, dude, he is totally phrasing it in a way that reads as this-is-his-jerk-off-scenario. on top of everything else.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

I do admit that the way he says "the girl was a virgin" is a little telling - he could have said "a girl who's a virgin".

Regardless, it's definitely fucked up.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

http://mollysavestheday.blogspot.com/2006/02/for-women-of-south-dakota-abortion.html

[rockemstockem.livejournal.com]

I promise that if you are a woman living in South Dakota and want but cannot get an abortion. For a predetermined sum, I will threaten to kill you if you don't kill your damn gonna be screaming baby.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

sweet! I think you should do that as pro bono work. Also, how the hell are you?!

[rockemstockem.livejournal.com]

eh! Hopefully things are about to pick up.