When I see Chris Smith there in the picture in makes me pissed off as hell.  The nation looks and sees an overweight, middle-aged white guy with all his hair from New Jersey, telling young women (particularly non-white, poor women) that they should be living a more “moral” life and to help them he’s going to make them even poorer, and make their life even harder, all in the name of HIS religion and in violation of the 1st Amendment.  He represents New Jersey’s “Florida” district, where a lot of retirees move who don’t want to go South, in and around the Jersey shore at Lakewood.

Being an overweight, middle-aged white guy with glasses and all his hair from New Jersey, I can tell you I find this clown disgusting.  I may LOOK more like him than I care to, but I sure as hell don’t THINK like him!  For that I’m grateful. You can’t tell a book by its cover, even a heavy book.

You’d think a NJ Republican would have more sense, and some do, but they are becoming rarer.  The only GOOD thing about my Republican rep is he doesn’t do much, doesn’t originate bills, doesn’t stir up trouble, but also spinelessly supports the leadership of the party, no matter the issue.  So, at least he’s not as bad as Smith.

The funny thing is, if the Dims can play on the lack of snow removal there (Smith’s district was one of the WORST examples of Chris Christie’s failure to clear snow), they could get rid of him.

Gulam, May 10 at 11:30 am

Oh yes, the Jews own everything as you state. How could no one understand this? Why is it that folks like you cannot understand why they remain alone and outside mainstream America?

Mack, May 9 at 8:21 am

While I appreciate the response I am puzzled that you never addressed the points I made, instead wandered to another subject entirely.

At this point in the story, there should be no one out there of reasonable intelligence who still believes the RepubliNazis are doing things for the good of anyone other than themselves and their wealthy keepers. If you can look at the RepubliNazi agenda and see anything other than lies and the theft of our personal rights and freedoms, then you are a certifiable idiot. I don’t care to have a bible jammed up my ass by people who can’t tell the difference between the story of Peter Pan and the story of some supposed god or other. They are both fairy tales, fictional stories suited in the fist case for children, and in the second case, for indcredibly brainless adults. Get your stupid religious beliefs out of our government!

When the American military and the aid industry
took over Kabul it was hard, if not impossible
to get across to the aid industry bureaucrats who
came pouring in that there were virtually no orphans
in Afghanistan. There were no unwanted children,
for if their relatives did not want them, then stronger
families in the community certainly would not see
children out on the streets. Much of abuse against
women in the USA is alcohol related, and when
Americans took over in Kabul soon the city had bars and whore houses with
hookers brought in from outside countries, things that not even Karzai would
have allowed without a gun to his head. Suddenly the crystal clear mountain air
was suffering the pollution of Denver on a bad day. All research and police
experience teaches that it is better to tolerate cannabis and forbid alcohol, yet
we force the Muslims at gun-point to change to our drugs. I never heard about
any heroin use by Afghans before 20002, and when I traveled deep in the
countryside during the brief but peaceful rein of the Taliban everyone said that
they had halted all opium production. The right-wing assault on rights that you
cherish in America is nothing compared with what the West has done to
women and men abroad. Ever been to Thailand? Ask the women of Okinawa or
Saigon how much Americans have done for them. When Napoleon invaded
Egypt women lost rights that they had had for centuries under Islam (Following
Mohammad, Karl Ernst, 2003).

American women have not voted to end these wars, and there is the constant lie
in America’s undeniably Jewish-owned press that Muslims have it in for
women. Feminist complicity with these war against Islam, and the way that
feminist and gay alliances flaunt their growing power will one day push America
so far to the right in its reaction that it will take many many decades to inch
back to the 1950s. If these military adventures or the current bank pillaging
brings down the American empire, you will have a military commander running
the country with an officer corps of Christian fundamentalists. We could easily
see a repeat of the holocaust, given the names all over the banking fiasco,
those with authority to police it, and the comedians who make jokes about it.
European history teaches us to expect just this to happen not if but when the US
Empire goes down.

Your objectives regarding the rights of women to control their own bodies are
certainly positive, but allowing Hollywood and academia, feminism and gay
liberation celebrations to so flagrantly defy ancient public expectations
regarding gender has set the stage for a a very ugly backlash. It is in the order
of things that anyone who is so completely on his high horse as is America will
surely fall, and all the foreign economists assure us that it is coming soon. It
would be most wise for those who believe as you do to find allies among those
communities that will be strengthened by coming disaster. When police can no
longer be paid or the prisons staffed, when order is gone, some of the
institutions that feminists have considered oppressive will suddenly be the only
form of public order available and the only source of moral pressure standing
between them and their worst nightmares. Crashing the fleet or the dollar is not
going to bother the Amish. At this point in time Mormon and Pentecostal
women probably stand a greater chance of protecting American women in the
coming years than those on the left whose safe, urban world will vanish like
dew before the morning sun when this Ponzi scheme economy does its
inevitable swan song.

I will never believe a “Pro-Life” anti-abortionist is actually pro-life until I see him/her:
1. Advocate funding and neo-natal care.
2. Promote contraception by means other than abortion.
3. Promote the insurance needed that children will get the care and education they need, as a RIGHT.
4. Encourage the easing of adoption laws and procedures and the tightening and reducing ways to reverse when, 5 or 6 years down the road, the birth mother has a change of heart and wants “my baby back”.
5. Adopt a child that would be homeless or in an orphanage themselves, rather than preachin’ about it.
6. Stop supporting blatantly pandering politicians and televangelists who then get caught with their pants down or their hand in the till.
7. Unconditionally and without reservation condemn all anti-abortion terrorists and work with the legal authorities to have these bastards thrown in jail for life.
8. Stop trying stealthy means to subvert the laws of this nation by ceasing supporting pharmacists who refuse to provide birth control pills to unmarried women and other such judgmental medical providers. Stop trying to re-write laws to circumvent the laws in place when they don’t have the votes to repeal therm.
9. Recognize that the majority of Americans believes in Choice, and that 99% of them believe in it when it’s their daughter or sister, or they are the woman herself. (ie, the “rules” change when you are in the fire)
10. Recognize that Pro-Choice means pro-CHOICE, not an advocating of free sex, followed by “Oh, I’ll just get an abortion.”  Do you think the workers in women’s health clinics don’t know FAR better than you what agony the decision to abort brings a woman?

“I just might believe him if his bill also defunded the Pentagon budget”

Similarly, I don’t take any article about women’s reproductive rights seriously unless they also champion men’s reproductive rights—because men have far fewer such rights.

Inherit the Wind I stand corrected. Well done. You do seem to have given this area
far more thought and study than I. While I do think that it is very dangerous to
introduce women into the traditional male domains of war and politics and the
education of young men, it is probably equally flawed a strategy to allow men to
dominate the birthing of children and women’s health. I have not read enough of
Kristeva yet but from what I gather more advanced voices among feminists often
talk of women losing power when they concentrate on inverting ancient traditions
and weaken the camaraderie of gender.

Somewhere in my formative and formal years of education, I remember hearing
God breathed a soul into a child at the time of birth (attributed to St. Augustine, if
I may make such a quote on this forum.) Perhaps abortion never became an issue
until such time as medicine advanced to a point where such medical procedures
took place at a more alarming rate and endangered the life of both mother and
fetus/child.
There are so many social issues that are ignored because of the abortion factor,
perhaps purposely so. There is much spin for the sake of advancing certain
agendas. Eventually this issue will be a thing of the past as the morning after pill
takes precedence. One concern is that just as the negative affects of hormones
were not known until years after, the morning after pill might also have that
result.

The Research Council is Tony Perkins (the PAC man, not the actor).  Tony Perkins is radically homophobic, among other things.  His stand against abortion is hardly surprising, since most homophobes are also anti-abortion.  Don’t you feel sorry for Mr. Perkins’ wife.  She is viewed as nothing but a “help mate,” with her rights subordinate to those of Tony.  Practically speaking, she has no rights.  She is also married to one of the most closeted queer people in the world.  No way he could be so anti-gay without also being a closeted homo himself.  If these people don’t want abortions, they shouldn’t have them.  They should simply go on having sex in the missionary position only when the wife is fecund.  That is what their centuries-old Booble limits them to.  If they want to obey 6,000 year old laws, go right ahead.  Some of the rest of us use our brains, reason instead of superstition.  Pssssst.  They’re losing.

Gulam:

You are entitled to your opinions but you are not entitled to your own “facts”.

Christianity didn’t consider abortion “murder” until the 15th or 16th century unless it was after 3 months of pregnancy. At that time all abortion was declared a sin.  Then, it was reversed back to the old 90 day standard until the 19th century, when the current policy went in.

Despite the ultra-orthodox rabbis and imams, abortion wasn’t forbidden in either Judaism or Islam either until they “discovered” it in Talmudic and Shariat law.  And it CERTAINLY was never forbidden in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Shinto (and there are more followers of these 3 three religions than there are Abrahamics).

So your position that “all” religions oppose abortion is pure, undiluted, unsupported CRAP!

As I said, you aren’t entitled to your own facts.

Over of the past fifty centuries of recorded history,
the only century in which women in large numbers
played a formal role in politics, voted, and directly
influenced public policy was the 20th century. That
was also a time of world wars, mass killing on an
unprecedented scale, environmental destruction much
more virulent than ever before, and a dramatic increase
in the gap between the rich and the poor. One of the first things that German
women did after receiving the right to vote was to help elect Hitler. Anyone who
traveled in Eastern Europe and Russia during the decades of Communist control
will remember being confronted again and again by large, humorless
bureaucrats with crooked lipstick. The World Wars and revolutions of the 20th
century were not only conflicts in which many civilians were caught up in the
violence, moves were made again and again that intentionally slaughtered vast
numbers of civilians, and a lot of feminist ideology is a primary propaganda
weapon used to keep western armies in Afghanistan. Feminism and industrially
enabled mass killing, they are two phenomena that arrived on the scene at the
same time. They are part of the same overall end-of-a-cycle decadence. Do
you really think that American woman have discovered social realities that
eluded mankind for all of the last one hundred thousand years?

i really wish this wasn’t even a political issue.  You never really know where people REALLY stand.  if it wasn’t for their political parties opinions maybe people would feel differently

This abortion on demand that you claim as a basic human
right has been regarded as murder by every major religious
tradition on earth until the arrival of the so called “Enlightenment”
After many centuries of nearly abandoning the practice of reading
altogether, when they learned to read Greek and Aramaic
from the Muslims, reading Plato convinced Europeans that
they could be self-enlightened and make up their own rules.
The ownership the press and academia in America by a small, wealthy, verbally
aggressive clique of self-proclaimed secularists who intentionally undermine all
social institutions that compete with them for control over Americans has made
such a fundamental moral inversion possible. You may well believe that
abortion is a basic right, but there is not one of our great-grandfathers in a
thousand who believed this. The outcome of this on-going attack on the values
of the religious majority around the world by these self-proclaimed secularists
can only end in far more severe discipline down the road and far fewer choices
for women for many many generations to come once the American crash is
over.

The USA and her Union armies have set themselves up to be an example for the
rest of the world, and so shall it be. Their dramatic fall from power, the
televised self-destruction of Israel and the Anglo/American empire that she
controls is going to be one fantastic show that will live on in the imagination
and memory of mankind for eons. However, one is advised not to take too close
a seat, for it will be a messy spectacle. This is an extraordinary rerun of the
self-destruction that an arrogant and contentious Israel has brought down upon
her own head many times before (see Flavious Josephus’ The Antiquity of the
Jews (3 volumes) and The Jewish War; also see Braudel, The Mediterranean….,
Volume II, Chapter 3). When Americans decided that they were a new Israel, I
suppose it did not occur to them that repeated destructions due to their own
sedition and arrogance was part of the script.

And so it goes…
The war on women can be traced back to the end of the
goddess culture in the Anatolia region and the
subsequent beginnings of the cult of Yahweh.
It seems there is no end in sight, pity…

Women take birth-control pills to avoid pregnancy.  Why
is it surprising that women also may choose to abort a
fertilized egg.

The next civil war to occur in this country will be between the forces of sanity and the republican party and their sympathizers! The incessant moralizing and hypocrisy of this sub-species is beginning to wear a bit thin on those of us who would like to live in a world where their sick ideology isn’t rammed down throats foreign or domestic!

That’s interesting, a comment that could lead one to conclude that a woman got pregnant all alone. Men should face that unwanted pregnancy every bit as much as women as that fetus/child was created by not one but two people and both are
responsible. Some entity must also represent the fetus/child.
*************

I never said anything to the contrary.  But the obvious thing is: If two people get a woman pregnant, SHE is pregnant and bears, in reality, the responsibility for dealing with it, if the man won’t should his share.  HE has a choice to be responsible or a shit.  She has no choice.

I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s a disparity created by biology.

BTW, I was never one to say “we are pregnant”.  My wife was pregnant, not me.  I was there every minute for her, and still am.

Schockley: According to the Guttmacher Institute, six in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers.

And, of course, what we must do as a nation is putrefy the lives of the other four (out of ten) with an unwanted birth from an unwanted father with unwanted consequences (that is, the welfare payments to single-parent families).

The Media is abuzz with Muslim Fundamentalist news. Our own variety of Christian Fundamentalists are just as berserk who think they can decide how a woman should and should not behave - which is an injustice to her personal freedom of choice?

Moreover, legislating what a woman must do with her body is the worst possible sort of democracy. She is responsible for the fetus and if she decides not to keep it, it is her decision and no one else’s.

Women have been making the decision of whether or not to birth a child for centuries Abortafacients have been commonly known down through the centuries.

The Catholic Church was one of the most adamant against abortion since its inception. It is, today, the sole state in Europe to still not authorize abortion. See here.

Of course, that might change the day we see a female Pope in Rome. But I wouldn’t want to be hanging from a tree-limb till then ...

It would be helpful if the ‘The Morning After’ pill was sold over the counter.  The FDA has approved the pill for over the counter sales, but it is still unavailable.  Maybe because the drug companies lose profits in commercial sales?  It is a concentration of the same chemicals that are used in birth control pills.

It would help get the men off our backs (or underwear) that feel they have a claim to our bodies (there are plenty of woman who are anti abortion but it is men who dominate the legislature). 

No one can call an unimplanted egg a person.

ITW: Since whether or not the fetus has a “soul” and is therefore “human” is a matter of religion, it amazes me at the mental gymnastics the religious will go to in order to justify blatant violation of the establishment clause.
Naturally, most of the arguers are men, who never have to face an unwanted
pregnancy.

That’s interesting, a comment that could lead one to conclude that a woman got pregnant all alone. Men should face that unwanted pregnancy every bit as much as women as that fetus/child was created by not one but two people and both are
responsible. Some entity must also represent the fetus/child.

ITW,

I happen to be pro-choice as well.  I am not advocating making abortions illegal.  I realize that it is better to have it be legal when so many women insist that they legitimately need that service.

My daughter got pregnant as a junior in high school, and we, including her, made the decision to bring the baby into our family and bring her up rather than put her up for adoption or abort her.  This is the type of decision many have had to make, and I understand that it will be different for everyone, depending on their beliefs to a great extent, but also the economics of it, among many other things.

But many, who see the baby developing in the womb through modern technology, cannot buy into the idea that it is not a living human being.  And the thought of the procedures used to abort that living thing, over and over, millions of times annually in this country, becomes incompatible with their belief systems, and to them it is murder, true or not.

Watching cows being killed in the cattle yards will change your mind about the beef industry possibly.
And there are a thousand opinions on whether it was legitimate to murder Osama Bin Laden in his own house as well.  Does everyone believe the same?  Absolutely not.  But ideas are not illegitimate because they are different. 

It is all in the perception.  It is the perception, rightly or wrongly, that shapes our thoughts and beliefs and guilts and sorrows.  People are not guilty because of the thoughts or beliefs or ideas that they have, many wishing they did not have to confront these ideas in the first place. 

There is really no easy answer to it.  As a nation which values liberty, there has to be an avenue for all beliefs, but there also has to be a neighborhood of similar beliefs, in which local customs can thrive, and people can live amongst like-minded inviduals without having to pass by establishements which are wholly offensive to them or individuals who hate them.  This is also a part of choice and liberty, to be free from having your face rubbed into what you find abhorent, offensive or demeaning. 

In today’s America, we must grind against each other, each struggling to have his case legitimized, his opinion heard and his values accepted.  This should not be what life should be like.  It should not have to be a constant struggle. 

I am ready to accept the fact that some strongly held political, cultural and religious beliefs make some groups incompatible with others.  Not one better than the other, just different.  Why do we have to deny that in the name of political correctness?  Why do we insist in the one-size-fits-all mentality when it is obviously not working out that well? 

As I said earlier, a house divided cannot stand.  And nothing divides more than diverse and extreme positions in politics, culture and religion.  We will never all be the same or think the same.  It will never happen.  And it does not appear that some magic wand of enlightment is going to wash away all our faulty thinking real soon either.  We are what we are, and it ain’t that pretty - so far.

To encapsulate my own argument, I want to be free to be me, and I want you to be free to be you, and I want to be free to stop feeling guilty about not wanting to live in close proximity to those who hate me and hate what I believe.

Firstly, I would ask Mack why he is so convinced that the Democrats are key to resolving our myriad of problems? History shows plainly that they are just another part of the problem. Do you not remember the recent past when a fifty nine seat majority in the Senate, combined with a majority in the House and a democrat in the White House brought us only a continuation of the policies of Shrubya?

Secondly, this pandering to a small majority of so-called Christians and a denial of basic rights to a vast majority of American citizens must stop. It is more like the Taliban than like Democracy. I think, for those like Mack, such GOP strategies will cost them dearly in the coming election. I think also that those like Mack will be bitterly disappointed that a Democratic Party majority will bring us little to no relief.

Inherit The Wind, May 8 at 4:35 am

================================
Good comment; women are treated like silly little girls
by far too many. An attitude that hearkens back to the
Victorian era. Cheers.

And I’ll go one step further, Dave:

How many unwanted children have you, personally, adopted?

I see a few, but not many of those who oppose all abortion who extend themselves to the next step, and now take in an unwanted child.

If you aren’t willing to face that real, one person problem of a child whose mother can’t or won’t raise him, then all the religious yammering about a soul and what’s a person is just…yammering.

BTW, I know from what I speak.  I am pro-Choice, always have been, and my younger child wasn’t wanted by his third-world mother, who gave him up at birth.  If I had a shred of religious faith, I’d say my family was blessed to have him.  Because that’s how we feel.  I’m going to go watch Sponge Bob with him now.

Dave,
Allow me to encapsulate your argument:
“Because I believe in my religion that certain unprovable things are true, YOU have to live according to my beliefs.”

Sounds a lot like the Islamic fundamentalists demanding that the nation they live in even if it’s Britain or France, live according to Shariat Law.

Or that all Israelis must live according to the strict (and crazy) interpretations to Talmudic Law adopted by the Chasidim and Ultra-Orthodox.

Since whether or not the fetus has a “soul” and is therefore “human” is a matter of religion, it amazes me at the mental gymnastics the religious will go to in order to justify blatant violation of the establishment clause.

Naturally, most of the arguers are men, who never have to face an unwanted pregnancy.  It’s like someone naturally thin judging fat people for “not controlling themselves.”  Until you’ve been fat and faced it, you aren’t qualified to judge, because you aren’t qualified to understand the issues.

You can’t end abortion, even by making it illegal.  But you can reduce it far more by giving people, particularly women, more available and better options to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.  Start by recognizing that “Abstinence Only” programs result in INCREASED pregnancies, and increased pregnancies result in…more abortions.

The best way to limit abortion is limit unwanted pregnancies! Period. And until the religious fascists recognize that they will NEVER reach their goals regarding abortion.  Never. They are already making the problem worse.

The left constantly debates “apples to oranges”, confusing the real issues.

The real issue is when does an ebmbryo become a separate human being, capable of suffering and pain in its own right?  When that occurs, it is not a matter simply of women’s rights, but of human rights, including the small human in the womb.  Courts have, I believe, found women guilty of child abuse for substance abuse while pregnant, a paradox, considering she apparently has the right to terminate the kid at her discretion. 

This issue goes to the heart of the problems of multi-culturalism, and it is why it is so hotly debated on both sides, being rooted in the heart of each side’s ideology.  The basis of the split is whether or not God exists, IMO.  Everything else flows out of that basic issue.

Since science does not consider itself to have application regarding the supernatural, the idea of a non-corporeal entity, such as soul or spirit, as you will, does not become an issue of legitimate scientific concern.  But it is a basic concept for the believer in God. 

Given insistent absolute separation of the state from anything supernatural which has religion as a significant component, the state’s capacity to define and control this issue is by law, non-existent.  You cannot legislate when a person becomes a complete person, given that you cannot define, legally, what is a complete person, except from a natural perspective, which would be an incomplete description in the eyes of perhaps 3/4ths of the world’s population, which must be at least given lip service.

Separation of church and state does not give the state jurisdiction to define things confined to the realm of the church and to God.  This is also why many begrudge the state legislating the definition of marriage, which was a concept in biblical literature describing marriage as being symbolic of the union of Christ and the Church.

So, this issue will never, ever die, and if progressivism is linked to eradication of everything religious, church or God, then it will be strongly resisted by a great portion of the world’s population, and could be the basis for Christian/Muslim alliances in the future, as the two do have much in common in contrast to the socialist’s apparent need for total veneration of the state.

I am coming to think that it will become more and more difficult for a believing public and an atheistic public to exist peacefully under the same legal system.  This is because as the US becomes more and more secular, the old laws and many customs, most based somewhat on Judaeo-Christian concepts, must be reformed.  Add in the growing Muslim population and their desire to become subject to Sharia law, and it could get very complex to live in a multi-cultural society.

I am thinking of the saying, “A house divided cannot stand”, and it becomes evident that the US is headed down a path of continued and increasing division, strife, confusion and weakness, at best. 

I don’t believe the founders considered such a great falling away from the basic Judaeo-Christian beliefs which were built into the founding documents, as much as the left hates to admit it.

As far as going back to 1840, I would have to say that mankind has not progressed in many important regards since that date.  We live a little longer, but we have the ability to kill a lot more people a lot quicker, and we certainly go about doing it.  Also, we have more toys now than we did then.  Other than that, who gives a shit.  1840, 1940, 2040, pick your poison, man is a despicable murdering, lying, low-life thug in all eras, with no real progress evident.  They just go about it differently, but the results are identical.

it’s quite appropriate that H.R. 3 was passed in time for Mother’s Day. Chris Smith and the republican party are, definitively, a despicable gang of ‘muthers’.

I am so sick and tired of this. I think there are some congressional districts and some
southern states that should be kicked out of the Union. We’d all be better off without
them. At most they can have no more than several million in population. We should then
quarantine those states so they can’t infect others with the intellectual plague of their
supposed thought process.  Let them go back to 1840 if they wan’t to.

Simply astounding; the differences between Muslim
society and western xtian society (U.S.) regarding
women’s rights are becoming less and less. I guess the
next logical step is to ban women from driving motor
vehicles.

Let’s face it. Nothings going to change unless we make some real fundamental changes. Elections don’t and haven’t work to change anything. We will continue to go down with all hands on deck.

Wake up America! It’s time… “THE REVOLUTION HAS STARTED”
Read “Common Sense 3.1” at ( http://www.revolution2.osixs.org )
“Spread the News”