Once Bitten, Twice Shy?

 

The mean eyes of
Keith Kitwell

Republican NCHouse member Keith Kidwell filed H 804 which would outlaw abortion in North Carolina at every stage of pregnancy, but new House Speaker Destin Hall quickly announced that the bill had been assigned to the Rules Committee where it will die a quick death, because Destin Hall is no fool and he knows that another extreme anti-abortion bill could be a killer of Republican careers.

“I don’t think there’s any real desire in our caucus to hear that particular bill, and so, it’s not going to be heard in committee,” Hall told reporters. End of story.

Granted that last year the expected backlash against the NCGOP for reducing the legal window for abortion from 20 weeks to 12 didn't quite materialize, at least not to the point of decisively ending the super-majority of Republicans in the General Assembly.

The meanness of old white guys about women's bodily autonomy gets put in the corner by the good sense of young white Republican men who understand better the political winds, not that he necessarily respects women more.

Robinson, Wrapped Around the Axle

 

“I have not changed my view about abortion, but I’ve changed my approach to it.” 

--Mark Robinson, candidate for Governor, on WBT's “Good Morning BT with Bo Thompson & Beth Troutman”

"I have not changed my mind about eliminating humanity, but I've changed my approach to it. No thunder or lightning."

--Jehovah, to Noah

"The trick is not to approach at all." 

--Abbie Hoffman 

With Trump's calling Kamala Harris a communist, and now Mark Robinson's saying he's sorry for preaching too much and too loudly on abortion, the 2024 Blue Wave is looking more formidable by the day. Especially so, when men like Robinson attempt empathy and display only a creepy paternalism and condescension toward women:

“I've changed my approach to [abortion] because I really believe that if I’m a person who is seen as an individual who’s standing on a stage pointing down at a young woman saying, ‘You can’t have an abortion,’ that is not the right approach. The right approach is to come down off the stage, embrace that young woman, and tell them about the reasons why I believe she should choose life, and then ultimately leaving it up to her based on the laws that we have on the books.”

Yeah, that's the ticket, Mr. Robinson, mansplaining to a young woman, who knows her own mind, how you of all humans available to her know what's best.

Republicans: Just Stop Talking About Women's Bodies. That Is All

Okay ... all together now ... The mouth's connected to the esophagus, the esophagus is connected to the stomach, the stomach is connected to the ... vagina?

A Republican lawmaker in Idaho, who's pushing for even less access to abortion, wondered aloud why a woman couldn't swallow a little pill containing a camera and thereby have her lady parts examined remotely by a doctor.

“It cannot be done ... simply because, when you swallow a pill, it would not end up in the vagina,” a doctor testifying before the lawmaker's committee answered.

They laughed at the Idaho Republican when that doctor pointed out the obvious. Note to Republican muckety-mucks everywhere: It's a short step from laughter to rage, you idiots.

Maybe some Republican lawmaker would like to propose a Drone Pregnancy Test Enablement Act, since there's a whole new technology now available for snooping.

Renee Ellmers, Your Door Prize Is Almost Ready!

Jim Duncan

Hattip: Roll Call

PITTSBORO, N.C. -- Rep. Renee Ellmers, the North Carolina Republican who led the charge to pull the House GOP’s 20-week abortion ban bill this week, could have a bruising primary from the conservative wing of her party in 2016.

Jim Duncan, the chairman of the Chatham County Republican Party, is mulling a bid against Ellmers, according to multiple GOP sources in the Tar Heel State.

Duncan could not immediately be reached for comment. But GOP operatives say Duncan was looking at a primary challenge against Ellmers before this week. Operatives say Thursday’s events — in which a group of anti-abortion protesters in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life demonstrated outside her Longworth office — could push Duncan toward entering a primary race.

Ellmers already started the 2016 cycle with a couple cracks in her hold on the seat.

In 2014, local activists were angry over her support for giving undocumented immigrants earned legal work status, and she received a primary challenge. She defeated Frank Roche, a radio host whom Republicans called a weak and underfunded challenger, with 58 percent of the vote.

Republicans say Duncan, a retired businessman who ran a computer disaster recovery company, is a more serious candidate than Roche. Duncan has better ties to the conservative base in the district, both because of his role as chairman of the Chatham County Republican Party and as a co-founder of the Coalition for American Principles, a group that seeks to elect Republicans in the Raleigh-Durham area.

This Man Simply MUST Win the Republican Primary for US Senate!

OB/GYN Doc Greg Brannon, who's also now a convicted swindler and a notable plagiarist, knows why women abort. It's because they believe in evolution! No kidding! Believing in evolution will totally screw up your mothering. And you know what else? Planned Parenthood wants you to be able to murderize your children up through three months of age.

All of which is the Gospel Truth and the reason why I believe this man simply must be the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from North Carolina!

Thom Tillis who?

Rep. Stam Pokes His Big Nose Right on Up Into Those Lady Parts

Stam the Ram

Most health organizations, from the Centers for Disease Control to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, do not consider prior abortion to be a risk factor for preterm birth, let alone a "cause." Yet the NC House (that is to say, all but two of the Republican majority) has voted to teach -- teach -- 7th grade girls that abortion is a "cause" of premature births and miscarriages later in life.

This large piece of crap (S 132) was aggressively pushed by the nastily anti-choice representative from Apex, Paul Stam, who's never seen an anti-woman piece of legislation that he didn't love.

The even more hateful and regressive NC Senate has already passed a slightly different version of this bilge.

Not only anti-woman but anti-science, all rolled up together in one tidy package. We don't get more 19th century than that, North Carolina.

How the Formerly Pro-Choice Virginia Foxx Learned To Sob (Dry-Eyed) for the Unborn

The Christian right has not ceased praising Jesus for the performance Virginia Foxx delivered on the House floor (video below), but having learned the hard way that Representative Foxx can turn on (and off) the fake fighting-back-tears act, I would remind all those good Christians about the various things Jesus actually said about the fakery of Pharisees.

I've watched that video full-screen a number of times, trying to detect any actual tear or even incipient moisture in the Congresswoman's eyes. No, it's just the acting class example of the catch in the throat, the dramatic pause for effect, and sighing and heaving of a Congressional Meryl Streep strutting her fake emotional connection to unborn and "murdered" babies.

This is the same woman who was militantly pro-choice before she started running for (first) state and then national office, who campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, who now leads her rural constitutents to think she's actually a Baptist instead of a Roman Catholic, who has only recently discovered how surprisingly devoted she is to Catholic dogma on abortion.

It's a fundraising bonanza for one of the phoniest human beings on this or any other planet.

Mourdock? What''s a 'Mourdock'?

The Hits (On Women) Just Keep on Coming!

Now it's the Republican senatorial candidate in Indiana, Richard Mourdock, who brought the revealed will of God to the political stage last night in a debate with his opponent:

I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

Apparently, God has to be on one side or the other in a rape, and it ain't the woman's, according to Mr. Mourdock.

The willingness to impose that kind of religious belief on American women is shared by the Republican 2012 national platform, and by vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

Stupid Stuff Republicans Say. What's Worse, They Believe It

Republicans who oppose abortion under all circumstances -- which is most of them, at least the ones running for office -- go to great lengths to justify their intellectual position that women are breeding stock and have no rights over when and if they give birth. Which is why Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin of Missouri relieved himself publicly of this opinion: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing [pregnancy] down."

He opposes abortion under all circumstances, so he apparently needs to believe that a woman who's preggers from rape wasn't really raped at all. She must have consented, else those magical secretions every woman is capable of would have fried that sperm in mid-swim.

Turns out that this is a perennial myth touted by some Republican men (and some Republican women, eh, Virginia Foxx?). Robert Mackey has written a handy primer on the recent history of "God's little shield," which includes one dentist from North Carolina, Henry Aldridge, a Republican member of the NC General Assembly at the time he claimed this: “The facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

"Legitimate rape," "true rape," "forcible rape" (which is what Mr. Akin eventually said he meant) ... what gives here? The parsing of words is necessary for the stupidity to work. If the myth sez "real" rape can't result in pregnancy, then women who say they're pregnant from rape are fudging the truth, and therefore, O my brethren, the Republicans in the U.S House (including the ineffable Virginia Foxx) felt fully justified in 2011 in the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" to redefine the rape exception in federal anti-abortion law as applying only to "forcible rape." This law kicked up a hell of a fight in Congress and did not ultimately pass, though Mr. Akin, along with Paul Ryan and Virginia Foxx, voted for it.

Because they believe that shit.