Abortion

Holy Rick Santorum, Batman!

February 8, 2012 By mario piperni 7 Comments

No two ways about it, Rick Santorum had a good night. Not only did he sweep Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri but he also got off the best line of the night.

“I don’t stand here to claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.”

A slap to the side of the head of Romney while pushing him aside and casting himself as the one and only true conservative who has the creds to take on the Kenyan guy – and he did it with a single sentence. Impressive.

Is there more to this Santorum fellow than any of us give him credit for?

Not really. He’s still the bigoted, narrow-minded, gay-bashing, religious zealot you always knew him to be. The only reason people are still talking about Santorum at this stage of a Republican primary is that he’s fortunate enough to be running at a time when the GOP decided to put on a clown show instead of a true presidential nomination race where thinking adults articulate intelligent ideas based on strong conservative ideals.

Instead, the GOP has offered the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich who have embarrassed themselves and insulted the intelligence of Americans with…

Wanting to do away with the minimum wage. (Bachmann)
Wanting to build a 20 foot high electrified fence at the border that would kill Mexicans attempting to cross it. (Cain)
Wanting to eliminate Dept. of Education/Energy/Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, IRS and implement a $1 trillion budget cut in the first year. (Paul)
Wanting to deregulate the oil industry further because the Gulf oil spill was simply an “act of God”. (Perry)
Wanting to colonize the moon. (Gingrich)

You could fill pages with stuff like this. Whatever world Republican candidates are hoping to make better, it sure as hell isn’t the one we’re living in.

And into this field of misfits, loons, pretenders and grifters comes a Rick Santorum whose main appeal is to social conservatives who agree with Santorum that:

women who get pregnant by way of rape or incest should be forced by their government to give birth to the baby because that pregnancy is a “gift” from God.
homosexuality is on the same level as adultery, bigamy, incest, bestiality and pedophilia.
contraception endangers the country and should be banned.

“Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Fear not. Rick Santorum will not be the Republican nominee. While he may be the anti-Romney flavor of the week, he lacks the the organization and money to take on Mitt Romney nationwide. He also lacks the support of the Republican establishment which is putting its money on Romney. They understand that selling Romney to the masses in a general election will not be an easy task but selling a hardcore crazy evangelical like Rick Santorum would be an impossible task.

Enjoy the moment, Rick, as fleeting as it may be.

(The Rick Santorum source image for this illustration is a Creative Commons licensed image from photographer Gage Skidmore.)
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Filed Under: Abortion, Conservative Madness Tagged With: 2012 Republican primary

Susan G. Komen Chooses Politics Over The Poor

February 2, 2012 By mario piperni 5 Comments

The Planned Parenthood/Susan G. Komen story is another clear example of how right-wing ideology has forced its way into just about every aspect of American life. Pushing conservative social policies involves demonizing organizations like Planned Parenthood which provides vital breast cancer screenings to low-income and uninsured women.

Komen’s choosing to cease funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization is under investigation by Congress is simply another attack on women’s rights. The real reason PP is being defunded by Komen is because the latter is controlled by right-wing ideologues who have allowed politics to guide their decision making. They have given in to anti-abortion zealots who have been running a boycott campaign against Komen.

Komen has been under pressure from anti-abortion groups to drop its funding for Planned Parenthood, which received $680,000 from the anti-cancer group in 2011. Most recently, abortion foes forced a Christian publisher to stop printing pink Komen bibles and pressured bookstores to take them off shelves. Groups have also called on supporters to boycott Komen entirely, and decried the group as a “lie from the pit of Hell.”

As for those right-wing ideologues controlling Komen…

Breast cancer charity giant Susan G. Komen for the Cure on Tuesday did not renew a grant to Planned Parenthood to fund breast exams. The move comes less than a year after Komen hired a new vice president, who has publicly stated her opposition to abortion, a service provided at some Planned Parenthood facilities.

Komen’s new vice president, Karen Handel, had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an aggressively anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood platform and was endorsed by Sarah Palin because of her opposition to reproductive choice. Handel wrote in her campaign blog that she “do[es] not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

and…

Komen’s founder is pretty conservative, too. Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker, who founded the foundation in memory of a sister who died from breast cancer, was the chief protocol officer for the United States from 2007 to 2009 under the George W. Bush administration, and before that served as his ambassador to Hungary.

Brinker is also a major Republican donor, and has given more than $175,000 to Republican candidates and the Republican National Committee since 1990…

and…

sitting on Komen’s Advocacy Alliance Board is Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the virulently anti-choice and anti-science Susan B. Anthony List and of its Political Action Committee. Among other involvements, Abraham helps direct the Nuturing Network, a global network of crisis pregnancy centers, organizations widely known for spreading ideology, misinformation and lies to women facing unintended pregnancy and to use both intimidation and coercion in the course of doing so.

Here’s the bottom line: given a choice between their personal agendas and helping low-income Americans deal with vital health issues, the Susan G. Komen charity made the decision to go with the former.

That Komen–an organization ostensibly dedicated to scientific exploration of cures for breast cancer–has invited on its advocacy board women so closely allied with organizations that so blatantly ignore science and medicine and spread outright lies to other women about their health and welfare speaks volumes about Komen’s ethical principles as an organization.

And as a result of Komen’s decision, women will needlessly die.

Petition here.
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Filed Under: Abortion, Conservative Madness, Medicine Tagged With: Planned Parenthood

All In Favor Of Public Hangings, Say “Aye”

January 29, 2012 By mario piperni 3 Comments

From the compassionate conservative wing of the Republican party, Rep. Larry Pittman of North Carolina speaks out.

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

How long before execution by guillotine for liberals and atheists is proposed by Republicans?

The surprise or concern is not that wingnut politicians say stuff like this. Republicans have been running on CRAZY for a while now. No, the real worry should be that enough Americans voted for this guy to get him elected.

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Filed Under: Abortion, Republican Madness Tagged With: capital punishment

Florida’s ‘Save The Fetus’ Womb Invasion

January 5, 2012 By mario piperni

Give Gov. Rick Scott and his Tea Party pals in the legislature another year to screw around with Florida, its laws and it’s people and he’ll have successfully turned what was once a backwards state into a Bronze Age state.

Florida state Rep. Charles Van Zant (R) is starting 2012 with yet another radical effort to ban all abortions in the state unless the woman’s life is in danger. Declaring that “the Legislature acknowledges that all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that first among these is their right to life,” the Florida for Life Act would essentially (and unconstitutionally) make it a felony to perform an abortion except when a physician meets very specific circumstances.

The proposed legislation would impose a maximum penalty of life in prison for any doctor who contravenes the law. What? No lethal injection? It appears that the right-wing’s call for smaller government only applies to Washington politics. In their view, states are free to impose their politician’s religious beliefs on the citizenry no matter how unconstitutional those beliefs may be. How convenient for small-minded anti-choicers.

Meanwhile, on another part of Planet Wingnut, Rick Santorum preaches on the evils of contraception.

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

And that last line pretty much says all anyone needs to know on how Republicans and conservatives view government’s role in people’s lives. From Florida’s abortion ban, to Santorum’s contraception ban, to the entire Republican party’s same-sex marriage ban, all the way to Newt Gingrich’s call to rid the courts of any judge who renders a judgement from the bench which differs with strict conservative ideology…the entire Republican party paradigm is based on the premise that ‘we’re always right, you’re always wrong – end of story.’

If ever there was a political party that needed to be told in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves and to simply let people lead their personal lives as they wish, today’s GOP is that political party.

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Filed Under: Abortion, Conservative Madness

The Uterus of the United States of America

October 21, 2011 By mario piperni

From the party of smaller government…

Rick Santorum:

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”

…

“[Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.”

Herman Cain:

I support life from conception. No people shouldn’t be free to abort because if we don’t protect the sanctity of life from conception, we will also start to play God relative to life at the end of life.

Michele Bachmann:

I am 100 percent pro-life. I’ve given birth to five babies, an I’ve taken 23 foster children into my home. I believe in the dignity of life from conception until natural death. I believe in the sanctity of human life. Our Declaration of Independence said it’s a creator who endowed us with inalienable rights given to us from God, not from government. And the first of those rights is life. And I stand for that right. I stand for the right to life.

Rick Perry:

“I’m proud to fight for and was proud to sign a budget that defunded Planned Parenthood in Texas. Our obligation is not only to protect life and bestow freedom on future generations, but it’s also to instill character.”

Conservatives and Republicans are the people who will tell you that government has no right to force health insurance upon you but it does have the right to tell you with whom you can have sex with, when you can have sex and the manner in which you do so. Further, many of them will tell you that should a woman become pregnant and regardless of the manner in which it happened (consensual, rape, incest…doesn’t matter), she must give birth to that child. Americans, they insist, must live their lives by the moral and religious standards set forth by the likes of Santorum and Bachmann.

In essence, as the illustration above suggests, Republicans and conservatives are on a campaign to shrink government to the size that fits into the uterus of every woman in America.

Tell me that these people are not mad.
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Filed Under: Abortion, Women's Rights Tagged With: Republican Madness