NH was once a model of abortion and reproductive freedom. It had no restrictions on abortion.
None. At all. Whatsoever.
That this was in large part due to the efforts of now Senator (but then Governor) Jeanne Shaheen has long endeared her to me, despite fundamental hostility towards career Democratics, politicians and wealthy faux-populists, not to mention a deeply personal dislike for a schoolmaster's voice that can and does crack glass when it's not lulling otherwise vibrant demons to their undeserved eternal rest.
Shaheen is no more, and we have instead the Keebler Elf (Governor Lynch, also a Democratic), who hasn't met a liberationist social policy he won't roll over on in the interests of political accord, favorable press and "NH's business friendly environment."
For those of you who care, it's Lynch who launched current proto-fascist darling of the right, Kelly Ayotte, into national fame by appointing her as NH's Attorney General in time for her to make her chops as the first AG to seek and obtain the death penalty in nearly a hundred years. Luckily for her, a black man killed a white cop and the rest was the history as we've all come to expect it.
Lynch* has been especially abysmal when it comes to abortion. He gave Ayotte his blessing to go all the way to Supremes, in seeking approval for a parental notification law. Over the last year, he has signaled his readiness to turn even more cheek to the Christianist zealots who took control of the NH General Court following the enactment of National Romneycare and the election of allegedly socialist Barack Obama.
They have not failed to oblige him his passivity, and in succession have passed five bills restricting abortion over the last two weeks. The General Court has passed a ban on "partial birth abortion," a bill requiring a 24 hour waiting period and "fetal development" counseling** with a 15 year jail penalty for breaking the law, created a means by which abortion "statistics" can be collected in order to further advance naked anti-woman and anti-abortion propaganda, given judges more time to rule against minors seeking abortions without parental consent, and in the dooziest of doozy woppers, banned all abortions past 20 weeks on the laughable premise of "fetal pain." This topping off decrees from the Executive Council defunding NH's already cash strapped Planned Parenthood, and a measure passed in January denying monies to any organization which performs abortions, even if those abortions are privately funded, which has the added benefit of putting NH's Medicaid money at risk, to the delight of glibertarians everywhere.
Lynch, whose greatest offense is a placid passivity, is obviously not alone in this odiousness. The Christer contingent in the NH General Court is strong in the lord, is backed by the fucking lunatics in the Freestate movement, and funded by the various national organizations who cannot manage to coalesce into formal god brigades without jamming the word "family" into their official names.
All this, leaving the fate of NH's women in the hands of the equally hateful NH Senate, a gallery of grifters, pompous fools and opportunists if ever there was one.
So that's that. From being the only state in this shitfuck Union without a single abortion law on the books at all, to being on the verge of joining the shitcrackers in Mississippi, Kansas, the Dakotas and Texas nearly overnight.
That's what the law and institutions get you. Set all the stupid dialectics aside. Turn off the spigot of noble rhetoric. Slay the chimaeras of good intentions. Put down the magic pony's bridle, and just pay attention. If there's a chance for the wealthy to capture a social instrument, they will. If there's an opportunity to use it to dump on the despised, it will be taken.
Each and every gods-be-damned time. Don't fucking doubt it unless you like playing yourself the fool. As long as the rich have their toys and peaceful sleep, they're going to get the governments for which they pay. And those hierarchies will always be used to alienate, to protect insiders by enforcing the existence of outsiders, and to secure the false scarcity we know as "power."
Right now, that means crippling the ability of women to exist in any way which even passively challenges those familial and social norms best suited to the maintenance of the extraction regime we call "America." As long as women are constantly fighting a rearguard struggle to merely define themselves as autonomous and even partially human, they are in no position to organize to challenge the familial structures which demand their unpaid servitude, upon which the larger accumulation rackets rest, and from which tomorrow's bosses and employees are produced.
The monstrous and life-sucking sanctioned family is the enemy of women everywhere. It is itself the beating black heart of misogyny. It is how women are turned into their own betrayers, working to survive in an environment inimical to their humanity by absorbing its values and training the next generation to mimic them. It is the means by which they are chained.
Every successful effort to impose mandatory families upon women is an act of war against them. It is nothing less than an attempt to domesticate them as service animals, to enforce their less-than-humanity as means to stealing their time, lives and labor.
And any man who supports these efforts is an adversary not only of women, but of human liberty itself. There is nothing that could be done to him in acts of resistance and rebellion and revolution he would not deserve.
If you meet that man on the road, fucking castrate him.
* - on paper, Lynch supports "abortion rights.' In practice, his tenure has seen an assault on women unmatched anywhere else north of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Ohio River.
** - counseling which requires language that claims a link between abortion and breast cancer
Source.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
17 comments:
We often hear that things change slowly but no so. Look how quickly things changed in New Hampshire. The laws and legislation and how the whole thing was set up in the first place makes it possible for the wealthy to get their way, it’s the whole purpose of our hallowed two party democracy. Like others have said, democracy is just a form of slavery made more palatable to the slaves via propaganda and conditioning. And don’t forget Christianity, it’s part of the equation. According to the bible women are evil, Adam and Eve, it was all Eve’s fault with her apple; she got us kicked out of Paradise. It’s ingrained into us through religion and government which are the vehicles of indoctrination. And all of this type of indoctrination exists so that our society remains patriarchal or at least that is part of it. Women bad, men good. People are so indoctrinated that they think this is all normal but it isn’t normal whatever that is. Normalcy is an invention not a natural phenomenon.
No question that Lynch is a hyena wearing a smile.
But Shaheen wasn't much better. I went to a "house party" with her as a guest during her last run for governor.
I asked her to let us know her thoughts about the death penalty. (I knew her view already, but this crowd was largely anti-capital punishment.)
She said "We have no duty to support criminals who commit murder." And immediately moved on to the next question.
"Who cares about supporting them? I'm asking about whether we should kill them," I quipped.
She ignored me, casting her smile and gaze to the next "house party" participant.
She hasn't done any better as a senator. I think she wants to get in with the foreign policy crowd.
I'm gonna call your prescription here tough love, Jack. Because I kinda like it.
Rob's comment made me think that while women probably have a certain angst re: male sexual freedom, considering male dominance, the converse fear must reside at a most frightening level of paranoia.
Rob,
The persistence of deeply ingrained attitudes despite so-called social progress is why I've come to reject the notion that progress itself works to erase those attitudes.
What happens, instead, is that the old beliefs are repurposed to fit the new modes of thought. Maybe fewer people use the word "sin," but the idea persists deep into our psychological, moral and social norms. Maybe fewer people think it's okay to be publicly racist, but that doesn't mean we don't have replacement (coded) language, instead. And so on.
Pied,
I'm no fan of Shaheen's volume of work, but on the subject of reproductive freedom, she's better than almost everyone else.
But, yes, Lynch-As-Hyena is apt, and a propos.
davidly,
Tough love? Perhaps. Fervently staked position, all the same? Oh, yes. It's at the crux of the crotch that most dudes pay attention, no?
Rob,
It is interesting to note that any movement toward authoritarianism, imperialism and mysogony is at light speed. In contrast any push toward social equality, economic equality and human rights moves at a snails pace.
This fight was inevitable. It has always seemed to me that abortion is the last subject in which it is acceptable to be outwardly mysogynistic. Every other area (work, academia, the home and even the 'boys club' of politics) has to atleast pay lip service to sexual equality.
However, in this one issue, mysogony can run rampant with (sometimes) veiled murder accusations while never moving from sexual promiscuity as the underlying cause.
I either want to laugh till my sides hurt or punch him in the throat when some asshole liberal says "but look how much progress feminism has made".
You mistake solid surface for veneer, motherfucker.
d mantis,
It is interesting to note that any movement toward authoritarianism, imperialism and mysogony is at light speed. In contrast any push toward social equality, economic equality and human rights moves at a snails pace.
You got that right. Liberals will be liberals, not much you can do about it.
Your final hideous suggestion, Mr. Crow, raises an interesting counterpoint. What if once, in a time forgotten by history, a society of women treated men unfairly? And what if, in that society, men were all castrated at birth, but for a small population of select sires, who were then slaughtered?
If an angry blogger of that day chiseled onto stone, "If you meet that woman on the road, impregnate her, and allow no abortions," would his anger be justified?
What a terrible, psychosexual aggression to bear.
Arka, in that situation you'd be the woman suggesting that castrating men isn't as bad as all that, and anyway, the ritual slaughtering of the breed males is best understood in gender-neutral terms.
Arka,
You couldn't possibly know my motivations, so let's just dispense with all that embarrassing long distance analysis.
As for the alleged hideousness of castrating men who chain women to families and other petty tyrannies - do you not allow for consequences, recompense and retribution in your worldview?
Good catch, Phil. For the subversion Arka is attempting to work, Arka would have to carry the logic of matriarchy all the way to its conclusion.
Which would be probably half way to supporting the point I'm trying to make about involuntary family.
Phil: if we posit a society in which females unfairly dominate males, and in which an angry blogger-type chisels the message provided above, that metaphorical role is played by Jack Crow, not by High Arka.
The dangerous conclusion that Jack is drawing at the end of his post is the conclusion of collective punishment driven by righteous vengeance. Jack posits:
"Because [Subgroup A] has been unfair to [Subgroup B], let us take horrible vengeance upon [Subgroup A]."
At the time, this may seem justified. For the man in the metaphor, it may seem justified to take hideous revenge upon women; for Jack now, it may seem justified to take hideous revenge upon men. And in each case--abortion, spousal beating, and castration--the form of revenge has strong sexual overtones. But that's a separate subject.
Instead, what the example can show us is that plotting collective punishment against a large percentage of humanity based upon the actions of any part less than 100% is monstrous.
There are bad people in, say, Saudi Arabia. Should the U.S. invade Saudi Arabia to punish those bad people? What about the bad people who actually were in Iraq? Some of them were bad--perhaps not the ones that the teevee said were bad, but some of them were bad. Patriarchal, even. Does that justify the "2003" invasion of Iraq? No? Then why is it acceptable to menace all males of the species based upon any given patriarchal habit?
Mr. Crow, consequences and retribution have a place. Those who focus on those aspects of change often tend to be applying them too broadly. In your case, you would castrate men for "chaining women to families." Does this mean that women who pressure men to get married should have their ovaries cut out? Or does your psychosexual vengeance point in only one direction?
Your personal problems with "family" and "petty tyranny," and the resulting anger, seem to be causing you to desire sexual vengeance against men, which is inappropriate for those men who have not committed the crimes for which you are judging them. Before enacting any of your policies, you might feel better if you explored why you feel so angry at males, guilty about maleness and your unwilling participation in it, and how you can learn to care about all humans in the living world, not just certain of them. This one would be happy to help, and you may send e-mails if you'd prefer to discuss it elsewhere.
It may seem hard to believe when clouded by anger, but there are women out there who have behaved poorly, too, and it would be awfully unfair to judge all women based on the actions of a few. We should not slash the uteri of all women as punishment for, say, Margaret Thatcher. Threatening to do so would be a terrible sexual terror campaign, just as would be threatening to castrate all men based on a different set of misplaced criteria.
Those are a lot of words wasted to reiterate an already dodgy and rejected psychoanalysis-from-afar, Arka.
Tough questions to answer. Just say "fuzzy math" and shake your head patronizingly, if you can't handle it.
Arka,
It's much simpler. I'm bored by your Mistress Cleo act.
For no payment, I enter the internet strictly for the purposes of discussing ideas with others.
However, your disagreement proves unpleasant, and therefore, it bores me. I formally register that this boredom is of such a great nature that all your beliefs and hopes are little more than the illusions created by a mass media character, who fails to entertain me.
Accordingly, I shall return to wittily lecturing others who agree with me, which I find far more stimulating.
:)
Hard to be challenged, isn't it? Much easier to lecture others on the problems they haven't already solved than to continue up the path yourself.
Arka,
It's not that you've asked some sort of set of challenging, worldview shattering questions. It's that the whole psychologizing from a far is boring.
Prove how easily you can answer this one's rhetorical questions to their conclusion, to allow us to demonstrate what a boring conclusion it would be.
Even though you already understand all of this, and have nothing you can possibly learn from me, it might assist some of your readers to watch you take the baby steps you've already mastered.
Here are some of the questions you shied from:
"There are bad people in, say, Saudi Arabia. Should the U.S. invade Saudi Arabia to punish those bad people? What about the bad people who actually were in Iraq? Some of them were bad--perhaps not the ones that the teevee said were bad, but some of them were bad. Patriarchal, even. Does that justify the "2003" invasion of Iraq? No? Then why is it acceptable to menace all males of the species based upon any given patriarchal habit?"
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