Alabama, Goddamn

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn ~Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddamn

So yesterday, the Alabama Senate voted to effectively ban abortion in the state...with the specific intent of trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Listen, I'm a former conservative Christian, I used to be a moderate (and by default, pro-choice) Republican. I've heard both sides of the argument here more fucking times than I can count or care to remember. That doesn't matter now.

This. Is. Wrong.

This is gaming the political system, for ends most people don't want or approve of.

This is exactly the kind of bullshit that leads to revolution because the masses got sick of the privileged shitting on the vulnerable.

For one thing, it's going to likely cost the Republican Party women's votes basically forever, or at least any woman that's ever had any kind of pregnancy-related issue or has a brain in her head or the sense to know that these goddamned fanatics will probably neither be satisfied nor even consider stopping here. For that matter, they can't, because anti-abortion bullshit has been their single biggest openly-used wedge issue since 1973.

Granted, open racism seems to be making a comeback as well. I don't think that's going to end well for anybody, either, but I digress.

Listen, I don't give a damn which side of the argument you're on here. Control over your own body and what goes on with it, and what you allow into it or what you don't...is a basic human right. Perhaps it is THE most basic human right. It applies to women just as much as it does to men. We're all human beings, here. This should not even be up for debate.

As a non-religious person, I firmly believe that right should come without strings attached. In order to have sovereignty over her own body, a woman should not have to wear a Hijab and modest clothing and go about with a male relative for a bodyguard. This is America, and it sure as fuck isn't the 11th Century. As far as I'm concerned that should not be up for debate either.

But it's more than that, and worse.

These "Pro-Life" motherfuckers are the same damn people who want to destroy public education and health care for anybody who can't pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, and get rid of the social safety net, and gut wages and benefits to reduce anybody who isn't already wealthy to penury while increasing access to firearms and then putting guns in every single environment imaginable, including churches and schools and then shitting on the future and wrecking the environment in every single way fucking possible, because Jesus profit!

Ya know, it seems to me like there's a hell of a lot of contradictions here, but at the heart of it, does any of this seem Pro-Life to you, Really?!?

Let's consider that there's no exceptions for incest or rape, here, for starters. I'll never understand that one, not least because aren't these the same damn people who get creepily obsessed with genetics every so often? (And whenever the "wrong" people come around, but I digress, again.)

There need to be exceptions for incest and rape, and here's why:

Look, if a couple of cousins want to fuck, or whatever, I don't think that needs to be anybody's business. Granted, I don't wanna see it or know about it, but so long as it's consensual and on even terms and they don't breed it's not my business or society's. Now, if they have an "oops" and want to do something about it...that option needs to be available.

Why? Because if they have a kid, especially one they don't want or aren't willing or able to deal with potential serious medical bills from, it becomes society's business. Also, it's a serious (if, hopefully, rare outside of Kentucky) problem, unless we want our civilization to start resembling the old Russian royal family after awhile.

Plus, I keep seeing this pop up in my feeds today and I don't give a goddamn what you think, no girl or woman should ever be forced to have her rapist's child, period, regardless of the circumstances. Likewise, any legal mechanism that would allow a rapist to continue to re-victimize their victim in any way, shape or form needs to be removed from the equation, period.

Likewise...and I think, far more pressing in the kind of crazy situations that religious dumb-fuckery can create, there's the issue of sexual abuse of a girl by older male relatives. Granted, this is something that shouldn't happen in the first place, but it does. As a society we need to plan for the sick and wrong bullshit we have, not the sick and wrong bullshit we want. I've personally known social workers who've been forced to deal with these type of messed up situations. It happens.

Look, I know these ain't ya'll favorite pro-choice talking points, but they have to be addressed.

What I want to know is why in the fuck "Conservatives" seem to far too often be at least tacitly okay with abuse, incest and rape...and seem to think that the consequences for these acts should fall upon the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Don't come at me with talk about Original Sin or patriarchy or whatever, no, I want you, conservatives, to tell me to my face what societal benefit you think derives from making a woman who was assaulted and raped bear her assailant's child?

Don't hand-wave, don't look away, and leave God and any of your theological navel-gazing out of it. Rape and incest are forbidden in the Bible just as much as by secular law, and if anything, religion tends to be even more squicky about such things than medical science or secular people.

Who, or what, benefits from this? Show your work.

If your answer is that some dude gets to show off the power of the penis, Fuck. You.

ANY rapist or sexual abuser, as far as I'm concerned, needs to be either in prison or better yet explaining their misdeeds to their deity, in person.

The truth is that abuse, rape, and unwanted pregnancy in general don't benefit anybody...and those things are the main reasons that abortion exists and continues to.

Why do you think so many cities and even small towns in developing countries have hordes of street children? Does some kid being run out of their family and forced to survive doing crimes or menial work, or worse trading sex for food or money (and perpetuating the cycle of abuse, disease, and quite possibly more unwanted kids) benefit the human race, really?

There's not exactly a shortage of human beings in this world, at least not yet.

Abortion is a medical procedure, not a theological concept. In various forms, it's been around forever. Abortion existed in the ancient world, yet God and Jesus and all the Books and Prophets of the Bible never saw fit to mention it even one time. There wasn't any shortage of humans then, either, though there were fewer of them than there are now, in relative terms. though Rome still spent much of its imperial history as a city of over a million.

This isn't about the Bible, and it's not about making the lives of any living people better. Plus, the second that kid is born and becomes a human rather than an idea, the first thing Republicans are going to do is start finding ways not to help that kid or the mother.

At best, it's about power and control, and that's pretty fucking bad. At worst it's about fanatics who've been conditioned to believe...BAN ______________ AND EVERYTHING WILL BE *GREAT!!!* and "Abortion" is simply the subject-of-fanaticism du jour.

Except, it never is. To be quite honest, anti-choice bullshit, stagnant wages, threats to health care and all this other insanity that "Conservatives" have forced upon the rest of us is likely a factor in declining birthrates in America.

And I guarantee you, when things turn sideways there will be hardly a fanatic to be found, and those that are will want to blame everybody but themselves.

Ya'll could ban abortion in all 50 states, and it don't change the fact that in most families both the husband and the wife (or both partners if its some other situation) have to work just to make ends meet. It doesn't improve access to health care. It doesn't make wages go up. It's not going to make more women have more babies, trust me, it's not, and as long as Big Pharma has more and better-funded lobbyists than your local state "Pro-Life" org does, birth control and condoms aren't going to go away anytime soon.

And anybody who can afford it will simply go somewhere else. Those who can't, will likely  avail themselves of the services of people willing to break the law...and just wait until that particular self-inflicted social problem starts resulting in grisly deaths.

And then there's the matter of women threatening to go on a "Sex strike" until this kind of stupid bullshit goes away...and if you try and force your way across that particular picket line it's called rape.

I strongly suspect the viability of anti-choice bullshit as a right-wing wedge issue will not long outlive public awareness of the consequences of abortion bans as actual, enacted, public policy. It's hard to rationalize it away when somebody that you care about dies for no damned good reason.

Granted, I don't live in Alabama, but neither does Alyssa Milano or any of the other people I've seen promoting this idea, so this definitely could affect me, and I'm not some kind of anti-choice nut and never have been. I don't necessarily "like" abortion, but I'm a guy, so it's none of my business.

Not that it would have to be.

Bodily autonomy is a human right, for all people, and you can make all the laws that you want but that truth will never change. That's not a Left issue, that's not a Right issue, it's a human thing.

And if the State can violate a woman's bodily autonomy, especially in the service of somebody else's religious bullshit (despite the Constitution clearly forbidding such) who's to say I'm not next, or some other dude might not be next?

Think about it.

If you're worried that women won't fuck you because of abortion or equal rights or feminism, maybe the problem is you, and you just need to stop being a poor excuse for a man and a shitty person in general.

And that, too, is a truth that will never change, unless you stop being an asshole.