Sebelius v. Fetus Fetishists, Round Umpty-two

Oy. Seems both JJ at Unrepentant Old Hippie and I here spoke too soon.

At the federal level, while not one fetus-fetishizing senator brought up her pro-choice credentials as an impediment to her confirmation as Health and Human Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius is still governor of Kansas and her home-grown fundies have just thrown her a doozy.

Across the Excited States, various state legislatures have been busily erecting more legal barriers to abortion. In Kansas, they recently passed a law requiring doctors to make an ultrasound available to women seeking abortions.

As a Kansas City Star editorialist puts it:

The bill was a win-win situation for abortion opponents. If Sebelius signed it, they'd get what they wanted. If she vetoed it, they'd raise a fuss in advance of her Senate confirmation hearings for the job of U.S. health and human services secretary.

She signed the bill.

They came up with a new one -- a bill

that would allow patients and their relatives to sue doctors for damages if they came to believe that a late-term abortion was illegal. Physicians would also have to give a detailed medical accounting to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment after performing a late-term abortion.

The editorialist and I agree -- she has to veto it. Imagine the shenanigans of zygote zealots trying to manipulate a woman who's had an abortion into 'coming to believe' that it was illegal. (WTF does that even mean?) And the detailed medical 'accounting' puts patient privacy at risk.

Sadly, while the grown-ups seem to be taking charge at the national level, the state houses are still full of panty-sniffers.

And those who defend pedophilia crawl out ...

from the underside of a big rock that was lifted to shed some light upon the sexual exploitation of children (emphasis ours).

oldowleyes wrote: "Wow, if your male your not even allowed to pay cash or ask for a quiet private room w/o out being suspected of being a pedophile. What a bunch of clowns Canadian governments are turning out to be, go back into your holes of institutional discrimination. While your at it, I suggest you get those illegal Family Relation Laws* off your books, or someday soon your going to be on the hook for billions in a class action law suit."

boardhead wrote: "Great. Now any 35 year old man with a young looking 20 year old girl will get a label. I'm all for the initiative as well, but most 18 yr. old girls these days are promiscuous with older men, and some look younger than 18, which will cause problems for some guys who are doing nothing wrong."

Most of the commenters who responded favourably to this campaign appeared to be women. The purpose of this initiative from the government of Alberta, Child and Youth Services division is to target adults who sexually exploit vulnerable girls and boys in rooms rented from commercial lodging establishments such as resorts, hotels and motels.

I have traveled with my daughter and her girlfriend, when they were teenagers. If I had seen hotel staff chat informally with them to ensure that neither had been kidnapped or were being coerced to participate in child prostitution, as part of precautionary measures that screened all guests, I would not have reacted in anger or fear. But perhaps men like Dickie Evans who engage in duplicitous sexual behaviour know that they have something to hide.

* This appears to be the legislation that oldowleyes finds objectionable.

The Queen gets hug. In public view. From commoner.

"Bet that's the first time a black woman ever put her arm around your Queen!" said my New York friend on the phone. Oh, come on, I said. Aren't you being slightly racist here, for a good East Coast Democrat? She's Queen of Jamaica, too, you know, and half the Caribbean, and Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea. I'll give you that Michelle Obama is the tallest black woman who ever embraced the Queen, but no way is she the first.

From here. There was a frisson that rippled through the media when Queen Elizabeth II was photographed at an official G20 function with US First Lady Michelle Obama, arms extended around each other's waist ... errr, given the difference in height, Obama actually reached around The Queen's shoulder, in a spontaneous BFF gesture.

It always helps to have the right touch, and the Obamas apparently do. ... The latter gesture — a near hug that caused the British press to drop its crumpets — was the touch heard ’round the world, rehashed and analyzed on television and the Internet as both a major breach of protocol and a kindly, inoffensive act.

The photographs of the event, and some of the tongue-in-cheek discussion that followed was a welcome antidote to the shameful removal of two Israeli cabinet ministers from public view by two fundamentalist Jewish publications this week.

North Dakota: Grown-Ups in Charge

There are several 'personhood' initiatives at various stages in various US state legislatures. Fetus fetishists want to use a religious -- as opposed to accepted medical -- definition of pregnancy and to create rights for a two-celled blastocyte.

While the measure passed the House in North Dakota, the Senate is obviously saner.

Senators voted 29-16 Friday to reject legislation that sought to define as a human being "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens." The "personhood" status would include a developing embryo from the moment of conception, whether inside or outside the womb.

Hmmm. 29 to 16. Pretty convincing majority of normal people, eh?

Yeah, well, we know they will never give up. Blob Blogging Wingnut said of the 'personhood' initiatives:

It's only a matter of time before the equality of all human beings is recognized. Get used to it.

Um. No. YOU get used to having grown-ups in charge.

Hundreds of women were murdered on Terrazas' watch.

Demonstrations in Montréal, Ottawa and Mexico were held today to express opposition to the presence of Francisco Barrio Terrazas, Mexico's new ambassador to Canada.
From here:

[He] assumed the cushy diplomatic posting on February 26th, 2009. He had previously served as mayor of Ciudad Juarez, known as the Murder Capital of North America, and later as governor of Chihuahua state.
...
Representing the regime of Felipe Calderón in Canada is a man who governed a city where more four hundred women have been killed since 1993. Many of the women killed were sexually assaulted first. Barrio Terrazas refused to call for an investigation until 1998.

"We can't accept that Canada, a model country that's culture is based on the respect of human rights and rule of law, could shelter a person who tolerated the murder and rapes of women and girls," reads a statement concerning Barrio Terrazas' appointment from May our Daughters Come Home, a women's group based in Juarez.

In Montréal several organizations, including la Fédération des femmes du Québec released statements protesting his appointment and deploring his complicity in allowing the murders of women to continue unchecked and undermining investigations into the criminal activities that have brutalized women in Ciudad Juarez.

Removing women from the picture, deliberately.

Two fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish newspapers in Israel altered an official photograph of the new cabinet picture to remove the two female cabinet ministers.

Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo.

But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

Publishing pictures of women is viewed by many ultra-orthodox Jews as a violation of female modesty.

I heard about this on Radio-Canada this morning. Are fundamentalist zealots in the planet's three major religions conspiring and competing to see who can put on the most MASSIVE display of misogyny? The actions taken, which range from allowing men to rape their wives with impunity in Afghanistan to the Pope's deliberate obfuscation of scientific research, are a clear violation of women's basic human rights. Using photoshop to remove women from view seems benign, in comparison but such incidents demonstrate that religious clerics persist in using doctrine and ideology to punish women who dare to act like human beings.

Fetus Fetishists 0, Normal People 1 more

Despite strenuous SHRIEEEKING from the fetus fetishists, The Hill reports today that 'Senate gives Sebelius kid-gloves treatment'.

Health and Human Services secretary-designate Kathleen Sebelius had an easy morning in front of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, despite admitting to unpaid taxes and facing a campaign against her by anti-abortion-rights groups and other conservative activists.

Republicans on the panel, which has the authority to recommend her confirmation to the full Senate, challenged Sebelius, the Democratic governor of Kansas, on aspects of President Obama’s plan for comprehensive health reform but declined to make any attacks on her abortion-rights record or her revelations Tuesday that she recently paid more than $7,000 in back taxes.

Indeed, no senators raised the subject of abortion even though ranking Republican Chuck Grassley (Iowa) advised her to expect questions on the subject. In addition, Grassley alone mentioned her tax issues, during his opening statement, but no members of the panel followed up on the subject.(emphasis mine)

Hee. No senators. Like, not one. All that SHRIEEEKING and NOT ONE question?

Must be tough to be a zygote zealot in the Excited States these days.

SoCon Or Bust = Member of the Catholic Taliban

SoCon Or Bust's recent bout of brain diarrhea is a mess of hysterical, vituperative and deranged attacks on the Youth section of the internationally respected Development and Peace organization. Warning: sit back from your screen when you read it, you might retch.

According to SoCon, fundamentalist Islamist and Catholic men share the same agenda: return women to the control that religious political authority allows men to enjoy.

His remarks about the programs that Development and Peace support: For SoCon Or Bust, this is ...

The whole thing is one big hate-fest against men and the traditional family, not to mention the promotion of sexual license, “reproductive rights”, and abortion.

This is what gets him foaming at the mouth:

Women participate in their government The East Timor Women’s Network that works towards empowering women and promoting democracy: Hosted legal workshops which enabled the participants to lobby the national parliament to pass a pending law against domestic violence.

His obsession with death reveals much about the demons he keeps corked up in a bottle. He is completely uninhibited about displaying the neuroses and phobias that feed his religious zealotry. Since sex is the ultimate evil, allowing women to die by being infected with AIDS is a validation of the Vatican's doctrinal authority.

Whenever I read SoCon's vile, overwrought, agonizing screeds, it brings to mind the martyr Saint Sebastian in all his representations. He should post that icon on his website, and not Mary who was asked by God to consent to being Jesus' mother and who chose to do so.

Merci to unrepentantoldhippie who giggled at Blob Blogging Wingnut's shrieeeking at this. DAMMIT JANET! doesn't find SoCon quite as amusing.

Social deprivation, not genetics, accounts for children's deaths.

An international, groundbreaking new study led by Dr Janet Smylie of the Centre for Research on Inner City Health based at the Keenan Research Centre, St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto has released its findings. The infant mortality rate for native babies in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand is higher, as much as four times that of non-native newborns. It also identified spikes in occurences of SIDs, injury, suicide and accidental death among aboriginal kids in all four countries.

"Every infant who dies … I believe is a tragedy we should follow up on," Smylie said. She also spoke of stereotypical and at times racist treatment received by native people.

"I saw a lot of challenges when I was delivering babies here in Ottawa. Young aboriginal moms who had perfectly good networks of family support — sometimes they were being referred to have the social worker see them even though their family was strong. I remember [another] … patient who had called into the hospital in a little bit of a panic. She had some anxiety and a strong accent. The triage nurse called me and said: 'There's something wrong with your patient. I think she's retarded.'"

"Those are stories that are just a little too frequent."

The organizations and researchers who instigated, implemented, charted and compiled the results of the study hope that the information produced by this report will become the basis for stronger policies and programs to improve children's health in the aboriginal and indigenous communities.