Good As You

One of the reasons christian totalitarians get hysterical about gay and lesbian equality is that they've lost the battle over a woman's right to choose an abortion. Try as they might their attempts to limit choice have little long term success.

They also had to learn to keep their mouths shut about their racist feelings. Beginning in the late 1960's and 70's African Americans got tired of the trappings of racism and began to make it politically and physically uncomfortable for EuroAmericans who flaunted their bigotry.
So we and immigrant workers are all that’s left. Christian totalitarians are haters. They suffer from an obsessive disorder what first found expression during the Dark Ages. It’s a howling madness that compels christians to punish, injure, repress, and when they can get away with it, beat and kill. The National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs logs about 20 lynchings a year, most of them shocking and some involving torture, plus about 2000 beating a year.
Ultimately, if we’re to survive, the christians and their irrationality and superstition will have to be suppressed. The people who’ll do the suppressing are beginning to crop up all over the place: American high school students who bash back at bigot warmongers; Canadian high school students who wear pink shirts to shame and isolate bigots; Australian 10 and 11 year olds confidently coming out causing their teachers to scramble to set up gay curricula studies. All are part of a global, vibrant, vigorous radicalization of young gays and lesbians who, more than ever before have the clarity of mind to reject bigotry and internalized homophobia (the word really applies to us, not them; we’re taught to fear it, they hate it) and the audacity to fight the bigots whatever the cost.
The radicalization of these young gays and lesbians and their allies is very much like the youth radicalization of the 1960’s and 70’s which saw millions of young American GI’s and civilians and millions of the young Vietnamese resistance fighters who ignored the cost of fighting and so won.

"[T]he courts are not these big, bad, scary bully pens, wherein robe-clad activists frequently futz with American freedom."

Know that for a fact, do you? You can demonstrate that American courts -- and the Supreme Court of New Jersey in particular -- have historically behaved themselves and stayed out of the policy-making business?

"[D]espite what the "pro-family" team would lead folks to believe, the public does not have an automatic constitutional right to weigh in on marriages!"

So we can assume then you know the part of New Jersey's constitution that explicitely forbids distinguishing marriage as known since the country's founding from any same-sex relationship? Please quote it so we will know for certain that popular sovereignty was not usurped by the court in this instance.

Until you can do these two things, Jeremy, it is fair to assume you are simply having a knee-jerk 'hooray, its pro-gay' reaction to the court's actions -- just as you did with Judge Hanson's ruling in Iowa.

As for the New Jersey Supreme Court's ruling on the recent abortion case, you are being unfair to both Tony Perkins and your readers. Perkins isn't linking gays and abortion in his post, he is simply comparing the Court's behavior in two cases and finding the Court inconsistent.

As for your readers, you are lying to them by omission. The woman, Rose Acuna, did not argue that the doctor should have told her there was a 'human being' in her womb. She argued that he should have informed her that she was carrying an embryo that was biologically "a member of the species Homo sapiens." That is hardly a demand for a bit of "medically unsound" dogma.

Walter M. Weber wrote about this case at

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODA4MjAzMzRkMjgzNTY0OTgzOGY1ZTg5MDIwODM4YmU=

Here is how he discribes the beginning of the matter:

"Is there a “baby in there”? That’s what Rose Acuna wanted to know from her obstetrician-gynecologist. She was six to eight weeks along at the time. “Don’t be stupid. It’s only blood,” the physician, Sheldon Turkish, allegedly replied. (Turkish argues that he probably said, “It’s just tissue.”) So, three days later, Acuna went ahead with the abortion.

Acuna then suffered complications. She’d had an “incomplete abortion,” and a hospital nurse informed her that “the doctor had left parts of the baby inside of you.”"

Acuna's case charged the doctor with malpractice for not giving her a proper chance at informed consent. But the Supreme Court of New Jersey was not impressed by Acuna's case for rather strange reasons, as Weber explains:

"The court did not even try to defend Turkish’s embarrassingly inaccurate response to Acuna’s question. Instead, the court said it didn’t matter. “Despite defendant’s ‘don’t-be-stupid-it’s only blood’ remark in describing the developmental stage of her embryo, [Acuna] understood that without [an abortion or] miscarriage, she would give birth to a child in seven more months.” In other words, so long as the woman is told she’s pregnant, the would-be abortionist can feed her the most preposterous nonsense about what’s actually going on in her womb."

It seems you were right, Jeremy, that this is a case were "one side is very clearly in the right." You were just wrong about the right party being the New Jersey Supreme Court.

By leaving important details out of your account, you made the story sound like a triumph for women's reproductive freedom. But in actual fact it was the exact opposite.

David: Considering you are anti-abortion activist who runs a website called "Stop The Tyrants," I would be scared if we DID see eye-to-eye on either reproductive freedom or judicial tyranny. But that being said, please do not accuse me of lying to my readers. This is from the ruling:

Plaintiff specifically contends that defendant had a
duty “to explain that the procedure [would] terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.” Plaintiff contends that “there is a critical difference between agreeing to a procedure that would prevent a human being from coming into existence, and agreeing to a procedure that terminates the life of an existing living human being.”

It is completely fair to say that "anti-choice advocates were trying to make it so that doctors would have to inform women that their embryo is an "existing human being" before performing an abortion."

"I would be scared if we DID see eye-to-eye on either reproductive freedom or judicial tyranny."

With that sentence you reveal just why I've been communicating with you. I want you to be less of a feeler and more of a thinker.

That was the point of my post on the judicial activism queston -- to which you didn't respond. It was also the point behind my accusation of unfairness toward Perkins -- to which you also did not respond.

As for Acuna's case against Turkish, it is completely UNFAIR to say that "anti-choice advocates were trying to make it so that doctors would have to inform women that their embryo is an "existing human being" before performing an abortion." The case was brought by one woman who asked an ob-gyn what was happening inside her uterus.

The Court was free to distinguish between "human being" in a "moral, theological, [or] ideological" sense, and a human embryo as "a living member of the species Homo sapiens" in a biological sense. Indeed, since Acuna sought Turkish's services as a medical doctor and not as a philosopher or theologian, that is exactly what the Court should have done.

In your post you never dealt with the Court's dismissal of Acuna's suit because she understood she would give birth in 7 more months without an abortion "[d]espite defendant’s ‘don’t-be-stupid-it’s only blood’ remark in describing the developmental stage of her embryo." I'm sorry, Jeremy, but I don't see how that doesn't amount to a lie of omission.

And if allowing a doctor to give false and misleading information to a woman before performing any procedure on her repoductive system is consistent with a woman's reproductive freedom, then the moon is made of green cheese.