moiv's blog

from Talk to Action

Like both James Dobson and Tony Perkins’ pro-war Family Research Council prayer team, Conservative Woman is hell on both Islamist plots and abortion – but what happens when their twin “Christian” crusades collide?

What is happening is exactly what anyone should have expected. Pregnant Iraqi women and their babies are dying in unprecedented numbers – and women who fear adding to that horrendous death toll with their own lives and those of their children are taking what they see as a lesser gamble by seeking out illegal and unsafe abortions.

The War on Terror is making us all safer, one tiny terrorist at a time.

from Talk to Action

In Life's Dominion, Ronald Dworkin posited that although most people believe that abortion is sometimes justifiable, they also believe it "a kind of cosmic shame when human life at any stage is deliberately extinguished."

Dworkin concluded that "because opinions about abortion rest on differing interpretations of a shared belief in the sanctity of human life, they are themselves essentially religious beliefs" -- which made the banning of abortion an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

But as self-styled political "moderates" decide that some forms of human life count more than others -- and that Christian conservative votes count most of all -- there's plenty of cosmic shame to go around.

from Talk to Action

Last week, Flip Benham's Operation Save America converged in Birmingham to "push what is left of the abortion industry into a deep grave." Writing of an OSA action against Birmingham clinics in 1994, Benham likened his mission to that of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Saints [were] held in the Birmingham jail where Rev. Martin Luther King wrote his letter. The battle we fight is the same, just a different colored glove. One colored glove: the humanity and equality of our black brothers and sisters. Second colored glove: the humanity and equality of our little brothers and sisters in their mother's wombs. Both gloves cover the hand of one who has come to rob, kill, and destroy -- the devil! The battle is the same.

Legitimate members of the clergy on the scene in Alabama this year included the Rev. Dr. Katherine Ragsdale of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, who witnessed a different kind of battle altogether.

from Talk to Action

As Flip Benham's Operation Save America prepares to besiege the same Birmingham, Alabama clinic bombed by Eric Rudolph, veteran associates of the underground terrorist network calling itself the Army of God prepare to memorialize assassin Paul Hill (left) — complete with a reenactment of the shotgun murder that took the lives of Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett.

Events like these are intended to remind abortion providers that there is a violent underground. But they should also remind the rest of society that there is an armed wing of theocratic activism, to which most turn a blind eye. — Frederick Clarkson

Many also turn a blind eye to the fact that people such as these — "the underbelly of the Christian right ... as scary as anything that ever dwelled in a Tora Bora cave" — have influential associates in some very high places.

from Talk to Action

As Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards got right with Jesus and the only "single-issue voters" that rate the Democratic Party's approval, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried talking the talk to enlist "pro-life" support for funding stem cell research.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has drawn guffaws from the pro-life community for comments saying that embryonic stem cell research, which involves the destruction of days-old human embryos, is a "gift from God." Her remarks came after the House approved a bill to force Americans to fund it.

"Science is a gift of God to all of us, and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure... And that is embryonic stem cell research," Pelosi said.

As Pelosi speaks of God’s gift of science, a Democratic Congress votes to spend $27 million more on abstinence-only programs and crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) than Bush had even asked for — thereby ensuring an increase in the rate of sexually transmitted infections and abortions among young people — while dumping millions of our tax dollars into the coffers of the same Religious Right abstinence-only industry working to criminalize safe abortion care, abolish stem cell research, and defeat the Prevention First program that Democrats claim to consider a high legislative priority.

While these politicians might fudge their positions on "a woman's right to choose," this action undeniably stamps them as just what the Religious Right accuses them of being: pro-abortion — because despite all their meaningless cant about "reducing the number of abortions," increasing the number of abortions is the only thing that abstinence-only programs guarantee to accomplish.

from Talk to Action

As Rick Santorum, Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback and Barack Obama packed to attend Jim Wallis' Pentecost 2006, some wondered about Wallis' true agenda.

The source of Wallis' appeal is his apparent moderation, both political and theological. His argument is compelling in its simplicity: An overriding commitment to social justice is more basic to Christianity than the issues championed by Christian fundamentalists. But to prevail he must avoid seeming too militantly progressive. "The country is not hungry, I don't think, for a religious left to counter the religious right," Wallis [said]. "The country is hungry for a moral center."

Before his elevation as an "evangelical progressive" celebrity, together with a Who's Who of the Religious Right -- Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, James Dobson, Robert George, William Kristol, Beverly LaHaye, Richard Land, Bernard Nathanson, Frank Pavone and Ralph Reed -- Jim Wallis signed a lengthy document that said plenty about his moral center, culminating in a call for a constitutional amendment to criminalize abortion entirely.

And to this day, Wallis has yet to repudiate a word of it.

from Talk to Action

Johnny Castle and Baby could have taken lessons from Texas Speaker of the House Tom Craddick and Joe Pojman of Texas Alliance for Life. With the Speaker's one-man rule of the House facing an unprecedented challenge from within his own party, with the passage of a high-impact antiabortion bill at stake, and with the Texas legislative session in its final days, Craddick and Pojman were caught dancing the political payola polka.

"One of the sources of irritation with the Speaker this session is the amount of blood spilled and floor time that has been committed to socially conservative issues," but Craddick and the "pro-life" lobby are longtime partners — and one good move deserves another.

In the Texas Legislature, dirty dancing is only politics as usual.

from Talk to Action

In The New Republic, Christine Stansell writes on "Partial Law: A Lost History of Abortion."

"Thank God for President Bush, and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito," intoned Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention last week, after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, the so-called partial-birth abortion case. But Land also should have thanked Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose majority opinion dangerously reframes the abortion debate.

Kennedy ... reasons that the ban on D&X procedures--the medical name for what the anti-choice movement calls partial-birth abortions--should be permitted because it is meant to protect women from making a choice that goes against their nature. "Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child," Kennedy declares. Concerned that women may learn the details of how the procedure is performed only after the fact, he writes, "The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed."
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In Kennedy's words, one hears the echo of the anti-choice movement's new emphasis on abortion as a de facto violation of something at the very core of women's being. Medical technicalities take up the bulk of the Court's majority opinion, but the reasoning concerns the nature of women and the integrity of their moral choices--an implicit rejection of the most mainstream tenets of modern feminism.

An implicit rejection of women's moral capacity or authority, an echo from the past — and a recapitulation of the arguments that made abortion illegal over a hundred years ago.

from Talk to Action

About the author: In addition to the less noteworthy accomplishment of being my friend, Carole Joffe is Professor of Sociology at UC-Davis and the author of Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe V. Wade . With co-author Diane di Mauro, Professor Joffe recently published The Religious Right and the Reshaping of Sexual Policy: An Examination of Reproductive Rights and Sexuality Education [pdf link] in Sexuality Research & Social Policy, the journal of the National Sexuality Resource Center. She has granted permission to post the text of her essay in full. -- moiv

“Well, I used to do them—there is less blood loss, and in some situations, it just seems safer. I’m not sure what I will do now.”

The speaker is Dr. Jacob Clark (not his real name), a fit man in his 60s, an obstetrician/gynecologist who has spent his life serving poor women in an East Coast city. Over coffee, he is discussing over with me his deep frustration and confusion over the recent Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v Carhart, upholding an abortion ban.

The banned procedure—referred to by medical professionals as “Intact Dilation and Extraction”, and by antiabortionists as “Partial Birth Abortion”—is quite rare, less than 1% of all abortions performed in the United States. But Dr. Clark is one of those who performs this procedure, when the situation, in his judgment, calls for it.

Dr. Clark and I are attending a medical conference, shortly after the Court announced its decision. We’ve just heard the medical director of a large clinic address her colleagues from across the country, and succinctly state the dilemma that abortion providers now face: “We’ve got to keep our patients safe—and ourselves out of jail.”

from Talk to Action

Many professed shock after last week's attempted bombing of an Austin women's clinic. Others felt shocked by their shock, since the religious right's thinly disguised rhetoric of hatred has so permeated our public discourse as to have become the norm. But for some it is easier to pretend not to see what is before their faces, far easier to remain willfully blind.

In 1998, nurse Emily Lyons lost her left eye, was partially blinded in her right and sustained other permanently disabling injuries when another bomb — similarly packed with nails that flew as deadly shrapnel — was detonated at a Birmingham clinic by Eric Rudolph.

"Many may find the graphic images of my trauma ... to be offensive. I hope so. Violence is ugly. You should be offended by the senseless damage caused by the attack. It isn’t the photographs that are bad; it is the act of hate that created them."

Hers are powerful words. But are Emily's courage [pdf photo link] and Emily's words more powerful than the rhetoric of hate that made them necessary?