Question: What do job creation, the federal budget deficit, the war in Afghanistan, health care, and energy have in common?
Answer: Each of these important issues facing the federal government consistently ranks as a higher priority among voters than abortion, contraception, or any other hot-button social issue.
In polls -- and, more importantly, in elections -- Americans have repeatedly made clear that when the campaigning is done and the votes are counted, they expect their elected representatives to focus on kitchen-table issues. Now more than ever, families are focused on meeting the monthly mortgage payment, sending their children to college, and retiring with dignity and financial security.
The proper role for government at a time of unemployment, underemployment, and financial insecurity is to boost demand, incentivize economic activity, and help hard-working families and the most vulnerable.
That is why the culture war and attack on women's health the House Republican majority have pursued in the 112th Congress are so insulting and tone deaf.
Having failed -- so far -- to outlaw abortion through the courts, the House Republican majority's first priority upon assuming the majority was to take their argument to the tax code.
The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), would impose tax penalties on Americans who purchase private insurance plans that offer abortion coverage. Despite the fact that established law prohibits federal taxpayer dollars from being spent on abortion, the legislation would prohibit women in the military and other female federal employees from making their own legal health choice even if they pay for the care or coverage with their own money.
Just recently, the Republican majority rehashed its attack on women's health with the Protect Life Act, introduced by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA). Again, this legislation would prevent women from using their own money to purchase insurance that offers a full range of health benefits. Even worse, it would allow hospitals to arbitrarily deny women legal, life-saving care.
Currently, hospitals that receive federal funding must provide emergency medical care, including abortion if necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. Should this legislation become law, hospitals would be permitted to allow a woman to die in the emergency room if her health care provider had a moral or religious objection to performing an abortion.
During a debate on the House floor, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) courageously put a face on this medieval policy, recounting how an emergency abortion saved her life. "I was pregnant, I was miscarrying and I was bleeding," she said. "If I had to go from one hospital to the next trying to find one emergency room that would take me in, who knows if I would even be here today?"
It is an understatement to say the House Republican majority's agenda misses the moment. At a time when the federal government should be focused like a laser beam on job-creating investments and targeted tax relief, the majority takes a pass. They choose instead to rehash standard attacks on women's health, paired with new efforts to impose conservative social beliefs through the tax code and doctor-patient relationship.
If only they would apply the same creativity and innovation to creating jobs and getting our economy back on track.
Follow Rep. Nita Lowey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NitaLowey
Lisa Sharon Harper and David Innes: Christian Views on Social Issues: Abortion
http://democraticspirit.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/when-does-a-woman-give-up-her-right-to-person-hood/
Apparently this should be a big deal, really. Let's punish every murderer that kills such a cell, it's human life after all. We must all weep over their lost innocent lives, and condemn their evil murderers, and the plant crosses on lawns and rend our hair and scream and weep.
When you're convicted of the heinous crimes that your body commits on a daily basis and the evil that you contemplate when you seek out therapy for that sweet, innocent, human tumor growing in your body, the same rules will apply to you okay? You won't be allowed to kill it, you will be forced to let it grow, and as you listen to homilies about how sacred the life of human cells are. How they are exactly the same as any person who has been born, that your thoughts of your own petty life are selfish, evil and foul.
job creation - Will NOT happen until the president is changed out. Business is waiting on this. Need ObamaCare flushed, it raises the cost of hiring someone. Many folks are NOT worth the additional cost.
the federal budget deficit - First gut all the spending (This won't happen w/Obama, so skip it), Solyndra (over 1/2 Billion) was a fine example of this administrations bias toward campaign donors. Certainly we can find MORE waste like this.
Afghanistan - Tell the president. He could yang them out at any time. He hasn't. He would have kept the in Iraq if Iraq would have agreed not to prosecute US troops.
Health care - YES! We need to get rid of ObamaCare. MAJORITY of voters want it gone.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/30/healthplan_n_725503.html
If for NO other reasons than this one :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5To
Yup, the idea of making folks be responsible for their own bodies/plumbing seems reasonable. These "unplanned accidents" are shocking giving the AIDS crisis etc.
LIBERALS will always defend the defenseless, help the helpless - UNLESS IT IS AN UNBORN BABY, THEN IT IS AN ISSUE OF CONVENIENCE OVER RESPONSIBILITY.
When we put a person to death, they had SEVERAL juries of their peers.
If you kill a pregnant women, you often will receive TWO counts of murder. (Remember Scott Peterson?)
The unborn baby got nothing more than an appointment at the abortion clinic.
Scott Petersen killed a viable baby, hence the two murder charges.
A fetus is not a person.
But I can tell you this: about half of all pregnancies end in natural miscarriages, making them "acts of God". Since your only possible reason for wanting to control-freak other people over their personal medical choices has to be a misplaced sense of religiosity, it's possible you could heal yourself mentally by understanding that whatever "God" you think you believe in is the biggest abortionist of all time. In other words, no big deal really.
What if I started a religion that included the dogma that every one of my swimmers was a potential life (which they are POTENTIALLY) and that it was every female's obligation to receive, be fertilized, and incubate that life from potential to actual. Would you then respect MY nutcake religion and turn over your wife and daughters to me for that purpose? You wouldn't, would you? So where do you get off imagining that everyone should respect such invasiveness from YOUR nutcake religion?
Now, I'll take your logic a little further. 98% of people (who are born) die of natural causes, so God is also the biggest serial killer in history. Therefore killing anybody for any reason at all is no big deal either. So. apparently you would remove murder from the law books too.
I don't imagine anyone that follows that logic will ever understand the sanctity and value of life.
These people are scary. They believe every pregnancy on earth must be carried to term, even if the pregnant woman in question dies in the process. Pure end-justifies-the-means reasoning, a la garden variety Marxism or religious extremism of any kind.
So, there's no punishment of women involved. It has nothing to do with fruit. And you're ignorant of the Bible story to which you are referring because Adam also ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
I've never seen a group of embryonic cells vote, buy food at Walmart, invest in the stock market, or take out a mortgage. You again slipped in "child" when we're talking about pre-child, in the same way a seed of grain is not a plant.
It's not pro-abortion. Do you really believe women enjoy having abortions? What they do enjoy is the right to choose - thus the name - pro-choice.
You can't de-humanize a non-human. A pre-human is not a human. A group of cells is a group of cells. A = A.
"who's little heart beats away striving to grow into the toddler it longs to be" - "striving" and "longing" are your heart-string plucking personifications on biological machinery.
Modern technology has confirmed my opinion - not destroyed it - you need to study embryology before making such statements. That is not a "child in the womb" you are seeing. That is your projection of personhood onto a prototypical human, still undergoing gestation.
Surgery is bloody and messy: have you ever watched an appendectomy? Again, it's not yet a child so stop calling it one - we get your attempt at inducing guilt.
Now go say a prayer that I rot in hell.
No one - z/e/f or 30-year-old - has the right to life at the expense of violating another's bodily integrity without that other's consent. NO ONE.
- from Sam Harris
Children are not slain in the womb - since they are not yet children - real children are neglected, discarded, denied education, herded into underfunded Foster care, malnourished, not properly vaccinated, subjected to poverty and ignorance, abused in numerous ways, often ending up as addicts and criminals - some of them will be given lethal injections of potassium in state-sanctioned murder chambers for a world they inherited of which doomed them a long, slow march to institutionalization and death - this is a form of being slain - it just takes longer.
As with all fundamentalists, you can only see in black & white and have no concept of irony. Your absolute religious certainty and dogmatism about knowing everything about everything is why the country is marching back into the medieval epoch. There is no reaching you with rationality since you disregard rationality. People infected with a sense of absolute religious fundamentalist certainty are among the most dangerous to a culturally thriving society.
"all the jobs must be in my uterus, because that's the only place the Republicans seem to be lookin""
It is their standard fund raiser in every election. They can't always find a Willie Horton or a swift-boat fraud to shake the coins and votes out of the illiterati. But they always have Roe v. Wade.
Reagan/Bush I/Bush II, twenty years of GOP Presidents. Bush II had six years with a GOP Congress.
Nothing.
Everyone get ready for prosecutions of women who didn't eat right, drank too much, exercised too much, worked too much, or in some other way "caused" their own miscarriages.
These fetus-worshippers will NEVER stop. They're like freaking zombies, I swear.