BUY THIS ALBUM

The new Dixie Chicks album is coming out on May 23rd, but there's an INCREDIBLE preview on their website of one of the songs, "Not Ready To Make Nice". Listen here:

http://www.dixiechicks.com/

I'm not a huge country music fan or anything, but beyond the politics, that song just kicks ASS. It's defiant, brilliantly performed, technically flawless, emotionally strong, and powerful. And the politics are totally correct AS WELL.

Bravo to them.

Abortion Solution

Upon the passage of the radically stringent and completely unconstitutional anti-abortion law in South Dakota, Legislator Bill Napoli was asked to expound upon exactly when "he of no womb" would consider it appropriate for a woman to obtain an abortion.

Many observers noted that Napoli responded in what seemed an increasingly excited manner, as if it were not mere theory, but a personal fantasy:

“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.”

And perhaps it was a personal fantasy for a small man such as himself, to have control over these life and death decisions regarding women.

It begs the question, what is really at issue here? Abortion of fetuses, or the life and freedom of women to govern themselves? It seems an odd pairing that supposed Conservatives would favor government intervention in such deeply personal matters, but that is the road they have walked down.

But why?

First, a few facts.

To begin, courtesy of the Guttmacher Report on Public Policy:

Prior to the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, illegal abortion in the United States was common; some 700,000 to 800,000 abortions were estimated to have taken place annually in the 1950s and 1960s. Poor women, mostly young and minority, suffered the health consequences, and maternal mortality rates were high.

Looking back in time is one way to reflect upon what women face in a world without access to safe, legal abortion; looking beyond the borders of the United States is another. Today, one in four of the world's women—and half of the women in the developing world—live in countries that severely restrict or block entirely their ability to obtain a legal abortion.

Indeed, some of the world's lowest abortion rates may be found in countries with the most liberal abortion laws, where services are easily available and even subsidized; by contrast, high abortion rates (and, generally, high maternal mortality rates as well) may be observed in countries where the procedure is severely restricted.

And this from the English newspaper, the Globe & Mail:

Even without the new law, getting an abortion in South Dakota is not easy. Planned Parenthood runs the sole abortion clinic here, forcing women in the far western part of the state to travel hundreds of kilometres each way. The clinic operates only one day a week with doctors from Minnesota because no South Dakota physician will handle the operation.

Elaine Roberts, a pro-choice legislator, said she knows of a married woman who was refused access to contraception by her own doctor. When she went to a second physician, she was told, "Since you're married, I'll consider it, but if you weren't, I would not." [The woman's a LEGISLATOR for Heaven's sake, and her doctor thinks he has the right to treat her like a child in that manner???? What in flipping hell is going on in that state?]

Even women holding a prescription for birth-control pills can run into trouble. A law passed by a previous legislative session says that pharmacists can refuse to dispense contraceptive prescriptions if it's against their conscience.

Mrs. Roberts, a 65-year-old retired teacher, said that legislators like Mr. Napoli still harbour a wild-West kind of mentality about relations between the sexes. " 'We take care of our own,' they say. Women have a certain place in society but men are really in charge."

What really upsets Mrs. Roberts is that the legislature seems more interested in unborn babies than it is in South Dakota's live children. "Children don't fare very well in this state," she says, citing high child-poverty rates, low teacher salaries and the recent decision to lay off 17 state-employed social workers simply to save money.

"We have 1,000 young people in protective custody. They've been taken out of their homes because parents can't take care of them. What about those kids?"

And finally courtesy the Planned Parenthood website:

She was 16 years old and was hemorrhaging after having had a clandestine abortion in Chile, a country where abortion is illegal and considered immoral.

"I remember the nurses telling me that if I didn't give them the name of the doctor who gave me the abortion, they would let me bleed to death," Maureira says.

She lived to tell her story, but many women don't.

"It's mostly poor women who end up going to the hospitals for their complications of an illegal backstreet abortion and some of the doctors or the midwives working in the maternity wards used to report the women to the police right there," says Casas. The maximum penalty is five years in prison.

But despite such legal risks, Latin America continues to experience abortion rates that are much higher than most countries where it is legal.

There are an estimated 4 million abortions every year across the region. Up to 200,000 clandestine abortions take place in Chile every year — twice as many as in Canada, which has 100,000 a year — and Chile has half the population.

The abortion rates are highest in Chile and Peru (where one woman in 20 has an induced abortion). In Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, it's about one woman in 30, and in Mexico approximately one in 40. (In the United States, the rate is 21.3 per 1,000 women.)

While abortion is legal in cases of rape or a threat to life, the actual mechanism to get permission to have a legal abortion is so complex that it discourages women. Alonso points out that last year in Mexico City, only 17 legal abortions were approved, yet there are 30 rapes reported to police per day there.

Do we really want to become like THAT?

It's not just that the Banana Republicans want to turn us into a Third World country through their awful cheap labor policies, its that they want us to mimic the Third World in EVERY way. They want a huge gap between rich and poor, no middle class, scarce resources, slave labor, women who are nothing more than chattel, and themselves safely ensconced in luxury mansions behind high walls and razor wire.

Nice vision of the future they have there, eh?

The article continues, referencing conditions in Chile:

Ramiro Molina, a doctor and the director of the Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Chile, led a 10-year study in three impoverished communities on the outskirts of Santiago. Clinicians provided direct medical attention for women at high risk of pregnancy. A social worker also called them regularly and worked around their schedules. They had access to all birth control methods, education, counseling and follow-up visits. The abortion rate dropped 82 percent in some communities after this intense grassroots intervention.

Public health advocates cite the study as proof that abortion rates can be lowered through improved availability, delivery and quality of contraception and the establishment of post-abortion contraceptive counseling in hospitals.

That's a TEN YEAR study people. In depth, not some random survey, but an actual social experiment that PROVES that making the OPTION of abortion available, safe, and legal --- also makes it RARE.

Fact is, if you're Pro-Life, then be Pro-Choice. If you REALLY want to lower the number of abortions in this country, then improve access to sexual education, contraception, AND abortion, as well as providing moral guidance and adoption services as options.

Fact is, if you're Pro-Life, then be a Democrat. Abortions WENT DOWN over 40% while Bill Clinton was in office. The abortion rate has TRIPLED under George Bush. The Neocon Republican way simply DOESN'T WORK -- for anyone. Like basically every other policy they have come up with, things like the global gag rule, abstinence education, permitting pharmacists to act like priests instead of medical professionals -- all that stuff is a magnificent, whopping horrible FAILURE.

Even if you think it's the right thing to do, the FACT is, it simply doesn't lead to the RESULTS you want.

And I think this is the real crux of the matter.

If you are Pro-Life --- if your REAL GOAL is to reduce abortions as much as possible (because realistically they'll never be fully eliminated) --- then by the shear time-tested evidence WORLDWIDE, you should be Pro-Choice.

If that's what you really want -- to reduce abortions.

BUT....

If you are Pro-Life because your REAL GOAL is the subjugation of women, then back these anti-abortion laws, because THAT's what they're REALLY about, and that is their REAL consequence.

And if you ARE for the subjugation of women -- consider -- the overall economic health of a nation is closely tied to the health and FREEDOM of it's women. You risk yourself as well if you do not act equitably towards them.

So the REAL QUESTION here is not, "Are you Pro-Life, or not?", it's "Are you Anti-Female, or not?"

Which is why I'm not particularly concerned with changing the minds (and I use that term loosely) of men like Bill Napoli. Clearly, we understand what THEIR real agenda is.....

But what we need to do is speak to those people who are not "anti-female", but who think they are actually protecting the lives of children when they back these anti-abortion laws.

It's clear when you pull the politics OUT and look at the raw data, that such anti-abortion laws only exacerbate the problem.

It's those well-meaning people, or even people of real faith, that we need to speak to so that they fully understand what PRECISELY we're dealing with here.

Nobody on EITHER side thinks abortion is some spiffy option. That fact must be communicated as well. But the point is, how do we REALLY address the problem? What is the best way to achieve a real SOLUTION?

And that will never happen as long as we allow men like Napoli to obfuscate the issue with their anti-female agenda.

We need to simply remove them from the equation, and the best way to do it, I think, is to get down to brass tacks with these Red-Staters. Don't simply deny their concerns, but rather point to the facts, and present THEM with an alternative that helps E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y.

The American Taliban Speaks

The Rightwing Pundits are at it again....

JOHN GIBSON: "Minorities ought to have the same sense of tolerance about the majority religion -- Christianity -- that they've been granted about their religions over the years."

JANET PARSHALL: "And number two, I have to tell you, I don't know when they held this election and decided that tolerance was a transcendent value. I serve a god who, with a finger of fire, wrote, he will have no other gods before him. And he doesn't tolerate sin, which is why he sent his son to the cross, but all of a sudden now, we jump up and down and celebrate the idea of tolerance. I think tolerance means accommodation, but it doesn't necessarily mean acquiescence or wholehearted acceptance."

So you stay nice and quiet in the closet with whatever you do and believe, and we won't bash your head in..... Yeah. That has the aroma of freedom. More like "Eau 'd Fascism"....

One of the primary problems here is that these people think they have "granted" those with other faiths the right to believe as they do. As if we merely accepted the blessing from our Overlords (them of course, more even so than God) on high.

Uh... no.

We TOOK BACK that right in a little thing called the Revolutionary War. The right to be free is the natural state of Man. It isn't "granted" by anyone. You as individuals are ENTITLED to freedom - and not just toleration, but respect. It is your very birthright as an American, and it came at the price of much blood. Freedom is TAKEN, not given.

And it was taken, ironically, from Europeans who in the 1700's, thought EXACTLY as Ms. Parshall does. That freedom and justice was theirs to dispense or withhold at their Lordly discretion.

These Fundie Rightwingers don't even know what country they're living in. They don't even understand what "America" is as a CONCEPT. They don't understand that the entire American experiment is a BREAK with the Church -- ANY church, or mosque, or temple, or synagogue, or even any atheist organization. It is APART from that discussion entirely. Those matters are for individuals to decide, and with that freedom comes the RESPONSIBILITY to respect the rights of others to do the same.

I think Ms. Parshall's religious views are impossibly ignorant and deluded. But my REAL problem with her isn't even her religion - as wacked as I personallly believe that is. Indeed, I would fight to the death to protect her right to believe in her notion of God, in the hopes that one day she would find happier thoughts upon which to base her life, rather than a mindless devotion to a small, vengeful, petty Deity she created in her own image.

My real problem with Ms. Parshall and her ilk like John Gibson, is that they have abbrogated their RESPONSIBILITIES to the other half of that American bargain - that they do more than merely "tolerate" those with differences, but that they understand that it is our very differences that make this country RICH. And I don't mean monetarily, though frankly, it's helped. I mean wealthy in the sense that wondrous diversity is the very REASON why America possesses any greatness AT ALL.

Diversity isn't something to be grudgingly "tolerated", it is something to be CELEBRATED.