Tag: abortion

CA Sen: 75% of Independents Support Abortion Rights – Are They Really Ready to Elect a Senator Who Advocates Overturning Roe?

Jon Ponder

photo-scotus-pro-choice-signsEconomies rise and fall. The Bush Recession will end one day soon, and the California economy will rebound.

Anxiety about the economy is driving the election today, but with polls tightening to within 3 percentage points in Sen. Barbara Boxer’s reelection race, it is becoming increasingly likely that Californians could wake up when the recession is over and realize that they have elected a senator, Carly Fiorina, who advocates overturning Roe vs. Wade.

If Fiorina is elected, it would represent a radical departure for California voters, over two-thirds of whom are strongly pro-choice. In fact, Californians have not elected a senator who advocated overturning Roe, as Fiorina does, since it became law in 1973.

That’s why Fiorina has been so desperate to keep the topic of abortion out of the race. When she was asked about it in her first debate with Boxer, she confirmed she would overturn Roe “if there was an opportunity,” but quickly added that abortion “is not an issue I’m running on.”

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New Crop of GOP-Tea Party Senate Candidates Holds Radical View on Abortion: Believe Govt Should Enforce Births by Rape, Incest Victims

Jon Ponder

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On her MSNBC show last night, Rachel Maddow reported that, with addition of Christine O’Donnell to the 2010 roster of U.S. Senate candidates, there are now five GOP-tea party candidates who oppose abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest.

The others are Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Except for Buck, these radical GOP candidates were all endorsed by tea party leader Sarah Palin, who also shares this radical view — even though she once told an audience she considered aborting her fifth child, who was born with Down Syndrome.

Maddow also points to the inconsistency in this position and the tea party’s lip service to libertarian belief in limited government.

What these Republican candidates are talking about is the federal government not only monitoring every pregancy in the country to ensure it ends the way the government prefers, which is a live birth, but they’re also saying that the government should force rape victims — the government should force rape victims, under pain of criminal prosecution, to give birth to their rapist’s baby. The government must force that [outcome] any time someone becomes pregnant because of rape.

If you are 14-year-old girl who is raped by your uncle or your father, the government will force you, as a 14-year-old, to give birth to the child that is the product of incestuous rape.

Remember, this is the year of small-government conservatives. Getting government out of your life. Government just small enough to … [drown in a bathtub].

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Conservatives Show They are Anything But

Trish

ultrasoundBeing a conservative is more challenging since mass hysteria, aka, the Tea Party, entered the picture in the wake of the election of America’s first African-American president. If limited government whose purpose is not to foster social agendas was ever really what conservatism was about, it isn’t now.

Take a new law, currently on the governor’s desk to be signed (or hopefully, vetoed) in Florida. Demonstrating what happens when you get too many Republican men in a room together, the so-called conservative bill requires that women considering abortions must first schedule an ultrasound test in which the doctor describes to her the contents of her uterus, whether she wants to know about that yolk sac or not. Touting ultrasounds as non-invasive and therefore harmless led the National Institutes of Health to release this statement: “Ultrasound examination in pregnancy should be performed for a specific medical indication.”

Election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better

If the faux-conservative legislature gets its way, not only must the woman wait, with the clock ticking, for an appointment for a test she doesn’t want, she must also foot the bill for all this herself. Is it possible for government to be more intrusive in people’s private lives than this?

Marco Rubio, the so-called tea bagger candidate in the Florida Senate race, demonstrated a further failure of rhetoric with the recent announcement of his “policy committee.” Rubio, running on the outsider platform but squarely on the Republican ticket, is tapping entrenched Washington insiders Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as honorary committee chairs. No doubt they will bring fresh ideas on how to take our country back from…themselves. What’s wrong with this picture?

People who are against progressive initiatives like choice and a positive role for government are being played, again. Candidates pandering to tea bagger fears know what to say and do to appear to offer the answers, which are always both simple and vague. And election after election, the “hard-working white people”* vote for the guy or gal spouting the most extreme platitudes, and then wonder why nothing gets done in Washington, why our elected officials don’t work together better.

We as progressives have to figure out how to wake up our neighbors in this country that we all share, and get them to question the slogans and lies directed at them. If anyone out there knows a good way to do that, I’d love to hear it.

* Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in 2008 in Pennsylvania