On abortion, a few more links to add to the blog omnibus.

I have a few links to add to the post of May 17.

On abortion, a blog omnibus: Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Daysand other thoughts.

To begin, solid reasoning from Katha Pollitt.

A Man’s Guide to Abortion, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

You don’t have to be a woman to stand up for reproductive rights.

As abortion bans spring up in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and elsewhere, it’s a good time to talk about men. Where are they? Polls show that in the United States there is little difference of opinion between men and women on abortion. According to Pew, 60 percent of women and 57 percent of men say abortion should be legal in “all or most cases.” But checking a box on a questionnaire doesn’t tell us much, because polls don’t measure intensity. There is no box for “sure, babe, whatever” or for “Yes! Abortion rights is the hill I would die on.”

In my experience, there’s a big difference in intensity between genders on the pro-choice side. Men are all over the anti-abortion movement—staffing and running organizations, protesting at clinics, harassing patients, and participating in mass protests like 40 Days for Life. I’ve been involved with reproductive rights for decades, and I have never seen more than a sprinkling of men at any conference, meeting, fund-raiser, or volunteer activity on the pro-choice side. With the exception of gatherings of abortion providers, many of whom are men, just about the only time I see our pro-choice brothers representing us is when there’s a really big march. And even then, they’re way under half the crowd.

Why? It’s obvious. For anti-choicers, abortion is about “the unborn,” who are as likely to be male as female—which means actually caring about how women fare isn’t required to be part of that movement. It’s also about maintaining traditional gender roles that put men in charge of women and cast women as wives and mothers. (And if the track record of Republican politicians is any guide, pro-life men don’t seem to have much trouble ignoring the sexual-responsibility and marital-fidelity requirements of those arrangements. Among many others, just look at thrice-married Newt Gingrich, Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford, and of course, the pussy-grabber-in-chief.)

On the pro-choice side, even when abortion isn’t dismissed as a cultural issue, it is nonetheless upheld, often by both sexes, as a women’s issue. The whole basis of the pro-choice perspective is that the woman is the protagonist: She, not the fertilized egg or embryo or fetus—and certainly not the man who impregnated her—is the one with rights. This is as it should be: Women are the ones whose physical well-being is at risk in pregnancy and childbirth and whose personhood is denied when abortion is made illegal or inaccessible. They, not their impregnators, are the ones who are punished for becoming pregnant outside marriage. Motherhood has a huge effect on women’s futures in every way, and it’s usually much greater than the effect that fatherhood has on men. That’s why the decision to end a pregnancy must always be up to the pregnant woman—and her alone. Anything else turns her into a vessel and a vassal.

That doesn’t mean men can sit back, though. After all, they have a big personal stake in keeping abortion safe and legal. I’m not talking about reproductive criminals—the rapists, hit-and-run artists, and men who refuse to wear a condom—or those who practice reproductive sabotage, putting holes in condoms or throwing away their partner’s pills. I’m not talking about men who ghost when a girlfriend gets pregnant. I’m talking about reasonably decent pro-choice men who think they have more important concerns than standing up for our rights. Because for every woman with an ill-timed, unwanted pregnancy, there is probably a man who is unhappy about it, too.

Men, too, can have their lives stunted by unwanted childbearing. They, too, suffer when a pregnancy pushes them into marriage, or into marriage with the wrong person. For men as for women, ill-timed or unwanted children can mean giving up ambitions and dreams. It can mean decades of regret for not doing right by children you didn’t mean to have or have no real connection to or perhaps have never even met. These are things women think about all the time. They know the stakes can be very high. But when you consider how few men use condoms every time, it doesn’t seem that nearly enough of them have absorbed the message. Where is the men’s mass movement demanding a male birth-control pill?

Men: With abortion becoming ever harder to access and no doubt with birth control soon to follow, you have to do better. A lot better ...

This one also makes a great deal of sense to me.

Abortion: White Panic Over Demographic Dilution? by Manuel Garcia, Jr. (CounterPunch)

What is behind the bigotry masquerading as sanctimonious religiosity fervently opposed to abortion in the United States?

One motivation for US conservatives’ opposition to abortion – “a woman’s right to choose” – as stated by demographer Ben Wattenberg (in his increasingly neoconservative later years, after the 1970s), and cited by the wonderful educator, Jane Elliott (“White Fear”, in her anti-racism teachings, is that white supremacists’ great fear is over demographic dilution.

American conservatives’ opposition to abortion is not primarily concerned with preventing Blacks, Latinos, minorities and the poor from procreating too many — and “too costly” to the public purse — non-white babies, but in fact to prevent white women from producing too few white babies. 60% of the 1.6 million abortions annually in the United States are for white women ...

To conclude, other ways of restricting abortion access.

The Subtle Ways Cities Are Restricting Abortion Access, by Sarah Holder (CityLab)

... Abortion clinic deserts can be created by local protesters, who intimidate centers into closing or out of opening at all; or by states, which—long before the latest wave of abortion bans—have implemented what are known as “TRAP laws,” or the “targeted regulation of abortion providers.” States with TRAP laws define abortion clinics as distinct from other health providers, and regulate them more strictly.

And cities have found another way to place uneven burdens on abortion clinics—by finagling their zoning laws, and fiddling with their land-use codes. Since 2013, at least nine city governments have used the strategy to shutter or restrict clinics’ operation, according to Rewire News.

On abortion, a blog omnibus: Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and other thoughts.

Two days ago at Twitter, with the Alabama legal fallout spreading, a friend made a comment encompassing all the males of the species.

"I can’t tell if silence from men on abortion is you not caring or you not knowing how to talk about it."

That's a fair point, and it needs to be covered first. I borrowed the two sentences she suggested as a starting point for commentary, and went from there, posting this statement at Facebook.

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I support safe, legal abortion access. Women should retain control over their own body and be trusted to make the right choice for themselves.

Allow me to add that I also support comprehensive sex education and access to contraception. To me, much of this is a church-state issue, and consequently I'm not interested in hearing about what YOUR God has to say about it.

Moreover, I'd appreciate my fellow males pausing to THINK for once about ways to cure OUR various neuroses and hypocrisies about abortion, health, sexuality, reproductive behavior -- on and on, ad nauseam -- rather than continue mistaking our stupidity and insecurities for a rational position, and barking nonsensical commands to women accordingly.

That is all. I understand this position will put me at odds with some friends and acquaintances. I know you'll be differing, debating and expressing annoyance (or worse). Yes, we can still talk about the tyranny of the local political patronage machine, pay-to-play and ruinous expenditures. But what I'm stating here is core to my system of values, for better or worse or whatnot.

Do and say as you will, and don't worry -- I'm not "running" for (or from) anything.

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I've talked about abortion here at NA Confidential, but of course this fact alone is no guarantee that the chat has been coherent. Following is an overview, beginning with my friend K, who sent this solid link last evening.

What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion, by Amy Mackinnon (Foreign Policy)

Romania under Ceausescu created a dystopian horror of overcrowded, filthy orphanages, and thousands died from back-alley abortions.

Opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating ...

I've only visited Romania once (in 1997), but regular readers will recall my fascination with the country's postwar history. In the context of Ceausescu's abortion ban, I've touched on Romania at least twice in past columns. One of these columns from 2010 was reprinted in this space in late 2018.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

When I hear the word “abortion,” I think about the dingy gray apartment blocks in Bucharest, capital of Romania. It is probable that few readers will have the same reaction, so kindly permit me to explain.

The following column from 2009 was written for publication in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune, where I was a paid columnist from 2009 - 2011. According to the rules of the game at the time, I linked to the column at the newspaper's site, but did not post the text here at the blog.

Consequently this is the first time at NA Confidential for the text of this discussion of Romanian cinema, including the film about one woman's abortion called Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

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Foreign films, universal concerns.

Admittedly, my tastes in film are narrow. They derive from wearisome experience, because out of every 10,000 cinematic excuses to squander two hours of my life, all but a dozen invariably are absolute wastes of time.

I’d rather read a book, and generally do.

Of the dozen or so exceptions to my cinematic rule screened during the past year, four are products of the revitalized Romanian film industry. Taken as a group, these are serious films that offer a measure of thematic unity with respect to the country’s ongoing, often lurching recovery from 40 years of Communist mismanagement. It helps to know a bit about Romania’s 20th-century history, but you can enjoy these movies without such grounding.

Focusing their narratives on individuals and intimate relationships within small groups, the filmmakers eschew the grand, sweeping epic. These films are quiet, not loud. They utterly lack car chases, gratuitous violence, special effects, transformers and appearances by former members of Saturday Night Live, for which I am eternally grateful.

“The Way I Spent the End of the World” is an elegiac look at an ordinary Romanian family’s efforts to maintain a semblance of normalcy during the waning days of Communist Romania in 1989. It adroitly sketches a society teetering on the edge of madness, as long years of internal tensions stoked and exploited by the crazed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu finally coalesce into open revolt.

In “12:08 East of Bucharest,” fifteen years have passed since the wrenching changeover, and the owner of a shambolic television station in the degraded provincial Romanian city of Vaslui, far from the country’s capital and epicenter of Bucharest, decides to devote his daily talk show to a discussion of his city’s role in the anti-Communist revolution. When the phone lines open, it becomes clear that there was no role -- purely selective memories of non-participants to the contrary.

Also set in contemporary times, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” documents the last hours of an ailing, isolated, alcoholic pensioner unable to find peace in post-totalitarian Romania. As the dying man is shuttled from one hospital to the next by an exhausted ambulance crew, the country’s own attempted rehabilitation from the ravages of Communism to prospective membership in the European Union is metaphorically examined.

None of these films prepared me for the visceral impact of “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” a gritty, harrowing and compelling account of a Romanian university student’s illegal abortion in 1987.

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Romania became Communist shortly after the conclusion of World War II, and during these years of postwar economic and political dislocation, reliable contraceptives generally were unobtainable. However, owing perhaps to the custom followed by Romania’s overlord, the USSR, abortions were readily available and absurdly cheap, and it is suggested that there were four abortions for every live birth by 1966.

Around this time Ceausescu, who dubbed himself the "Genius of the Carpathians" in spite (or perhaps because) of his background as a semi-literate, peasant cobbler, came to power and commenced grafting the personality cult of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung onto the pathetically grandiose public theatrics of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, creating a stunted and strangulated fiefdom in one of the continent’s least equipped socio-economic milieus. The result was a tragic quarter century.

In 1967, concluding that his impoverished country needed more citizens, Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal overnight, bringing the full powers of Romania’s police state to bear in enforcing the ban. The immediate effect of the decree was an abrupt doubling of the birth rate. This bulge was followed by a fast and steady decline in births, and by 1987, the country’s population had ceased to grow at all, but Ceausescu had already moved on to other, equally catastrophic projects, including the systematic bulldozing of countryside villages and the transfer of their inhabitants to virtual enslavement within “agro-industrial” complexes.

Significantly, one Romanian population statistic steadily increased during the years following the abortion ban: The maternal mortality rate tripled. Demographers have since learned that in terms of statistics, the deaths of women succumbing to botched illegal abortions in Romania were included with those of women dying during childbirth.

At the time documented by “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” all parties involved in transacting an illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, and in the continuing enforced absence of legal contraceptives (a ubiquitous black market notwithstanding), a Romanian woman who sought to terminate a pregnancy could be arrested, convicted, imprisoned and her career left in ruins.

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Taking all these dire factors into consideration, the film serves as a chilling case study of what happens when a government bureaucracy denies women control over their bodies, their destinies and their very lives. In Romania, the interference stemmed from a psychotic dictator’s whim, and his motivations were purely secular. Far more often in places like America, they are religious in nature.

Reproductive decision-making in many locales tends to reflect the patriarchal concerns of men rather than those of women, even as females remain responsible for bearing the children. It is a regrettable state of affairs that cuts across religious and secular concerns.

Oddly, when I heard the news of Dr. Robert Tiller’s murder by a terrorist during a church service in Wichita, it made me think of gray, desperate, soot-stained blocks of flats in Bucharest, along with legalities, illegalities, ideologies and the universality of human suffering.

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In conclusion, a collection of blog links on the topic of abortion, dating back to 2012.

Abortion: "The number of unintended pregnancies has fallen in America as the use of contraceptives has spread, particularly among young people."

Dolt supremacy: Remembering Bill O'Reilly's role in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

Dunman (and Lady Parts Justice): "Bevin and his allies can’t ban abortion, no matter how much they hate it."

"Planned Parenthood Videos Explain Abortion Process."

"Pence’s attack on women’s rights, and on Indiana."

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

"Free Abortions on Demand Without Apology," in The Nation.

The Stutzmans, Zoellers and Pences bleat and wail.

Keller: A personal defense of abortion rights.

ON THE AVENUES: Shelter from the Strom.

At The Nation: "Whoever says that contraception and abortion aren’t economic issues should take a second look."

Are you a “pro-conception-to-birth, indifferent-to-life conservative?”

Abortion: "The number of unintended pregnancies has fallen in America as the use of contraceptives has spread, particularly among young people."

A current factoid about abortion, followed by a column repeat.

The Economist explains: Why the number of abortions in America is at a historic low

The drop is particularly pronounced among teenagers

Abortions are now at their lowest numbers since the passage in 1973 of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court’s ruling that declared abortion a constitutional right. The drop can be seen in all age groups, but is especially pronounced among teenagers. From 2006 to 2015, the abortion rate for 15- to 19-year-olds more than halved. The report also showed that abortions are being performed earlier in pregnancy, and therefore more safely. The percentage performed during the first six weeks of gestation rose by 11%.

The reasons for these changing numbers offer grounds for hope. As has happened across the developed world, the number of unintended pregnancies has fallen in America as the use of contraceptives has spread, particularly among young people ...

This column was published in March of 2016. I've left the introduction intact.

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ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

This column originally was published in 2010, and repeated four years ago after the primary election. In my 2012 opening remarks, I noted the irony attendant in Indiana's “Democratic” party nominating John Gregg for governor.

Not only is Gregg noted for his anti-abortion stance, but at the time, he'd made public his opposition to equal marriage rights in Indiana. Gregg came closer than expected in a losing effort against the abysmal Mike Pence, who recently signed legislation further restricting abortion rights in a state where it's already under onerous siege. The Des Moines Register gets it:

Over the years, anti-choice activists have successfully convinced policymakers to restrict access to abortion, to inconvenience or humiliate women, and to discourage medical professionals from providing the outpatient procedure. But the Indiana law is in a league of absurdity all its own.

Indiana's Democrats are too intellectually flaccid to deserve my 2016 vote against Pence, but I'm likely to cast it anyway. I trust we'll have a Libertarian. In the meantime, here's the reprise.

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May 24, 2012

In January, 2010, Scott Roeder went on trial in Wichita, Kansas and was convicted of murdering Dr. George Tiller during a church service in May, 2009. Roeder methodically stalked and killed Tiller because the doctor was an “abortionist” – just like John Irving’s fictional Dr. Wilbur Larch in Cider House Rules, although Tiller’s life ended somewhat more suddenly, and far less whimsically, than Larch’s.

When I hear the word “abortion,” I think about the dingy gray apartment blocks in Bucharest, capital of Romania. It is probable that few readers will have the same reaction, so kindly permit me to explain.

Romania’s 20th-century history was decidedly turbulent. Its pro-fascist leaders entered the Second World War on the German side, mimicking their Nazi overlords by expelling, and later savagely murdering, native Jewish and Gypsy populations. Romania volunteered troops for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but when the fortunes of war reversed, the country lay squarely in the path of the Communist military steamroller as it drove westward.

The Kremlin fiddled, and Romania danced. As a Soviet client state during the decades that followed, Romania’s socioeconomic ideology mirrored that of the USSR’s. Consumer goods were not a priority, and contraceptives generally could not be obtained. However, as in the Soviet Union, abortion was perfectly legal, readily available and absurdly cheap. Some estimates suggest that there were four abortions for every live birth in Romania by the year 1966.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1960’s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had consolidated power, embarking upon a quarter-century reign of thuggish oppression, personal megalomania and sheer doltishness noteworthy even by rock-bottom Warsaw Pact standards.

Accordingly, Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal in 1967, a change that occurred over night, without warning. Apparently the self-described “Genius of the Carpathians” had determined that Romania’s population needed to be increased, and a ban on both contraceptives and abortion would help achieve his aim – not that any thought had been given on feeding the extra mouths, or how they would be educated and employed, or where they would live.

Ceausescu’s abortion ban had the abrupt, short term effect of doubling the birth rate, but this spike was not accompanied by commensurate gains in material living standards. Romanians managed to adapt, and a steady decline in births commenced, to the point that some twenty years later, the country’s population had ceased to grow at all.

Black market contraceptives were one factor in the birth rate’s fall. Another development was more lethal in its effect, because the only Romanian population statistic that steadily increased during the years following the anti-abortion decree of 1967 was the country’s maternal mortality rate, which cruelly tripled. The likeliest explanation is that those women dying from the effects of botched, illegal abortions were included with statistics documenting those who had died during childbirth.

Until Ceausescu’s long overdue toppling and immediate execution in 1989, the Romanian governmental bureaucracy actively intervened in the sex lives of the country’s citizens, sating the dictator’s psychotic desire that greater numbers of New Communist men and women be created to man the steadily decaying ramparts of a collapsing society. Ceausescu’s motivation was purely secular, although it just as easily might have been religious. Either way, the effects would have been just as damning.

“Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” available through Netflix, is a harrowing and compelling Romanian film that tells the story of a university student’s illegal abortion in the year 1987. It is reality at its grittiest, and not an easy movie to watch. There are no flatulence jokes, car crashes, gun battles, transformers or “Sex in the City” romantic escapism.

I shan’t reveal the plot, which is eloquent in its simplicity, but it bears repeating that the film’s action takes place against a stifling backdrop of sanctioned, stifling fanaticism, in this instance big government’s punitive intrusion into the lives of ordinary people. In 1987, as for twenty years before, all parties involved in transacting an illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, a Romanian woman who in the enforced absence of legal contraceptives sought to terminate a pregnancy could be imprisoned and her career – her very life – irreparably ruined.

There may be little outside of cynical Cold War politics and a certain dollop of regional backwardness to justify the dismal record of tin pots like Nicolae Ceausescu, and yet there exists a minority among us, right here in America, some resplendent in their gated communities, others with no worldly possessions, but irrespective of station, possessed of a fervent belief that leaden control must be exercised over the individual’s reproductive freedom.

If asked, at least some among this minority would advocate the imposition in America of the semi-literate Romanian strongman’s solution: A complete ban on abortion, and whatever expansion of a police state is necessary to universally enforce it.

There are still others – a tiny handful, perhaps including the convicted murderer Scott Roeder – advancing purely terroristic violence as a means of curbing a practice that they decry in precisely the same terms, which may be an eye for an eye, but makes little sense from the “prince of peace” religious standpoint in Christianity. That’s enduringly frightening to me.

Speaking only for myself, no single issue better illustrates the struggle for equality on the part of fully half the world’s population than the right of reproductive choice for women. While a woman’s freedom to choose the option of abortion may well represent the extreme component of reproductive choice, one surely capable of being reduced in frequency with continued education and access to contraception, a clear majority of Americans believe that it should remain just such a legalized, regulated, and defined option.

What happened in Romania (for that matter, in Kansas) should not happen in America.

Should it?

Time for a pro-choice spine check, local "Let's Pretend We're Democrats."

Nationally, the question is this: To what extent will Democrats contradict themselves and gut their principles to win back the House?

Locally, it's phrased this way: To what extent will Democrats contradict themselves and gut their principles to keep Jeff Gahan in the mayor's office?

Damn -- the hypocrisy meter's flashing "TILT," and I'm fresh out of Adamite Sickness Bags.

No 'litmus test' on abortion? Shame on Democrats backing anti-choice candidates, by Jamie Peck (The Guardian)

While Hillary Clinton stood firm on the issue during her 2016 election campaign, she also said that ‘of course’ you could be anti-abortion and a feminist

As Donald Trump and his cast of flatterers continue their incompetent war on the American people, the Democrats seem more determined than ever to bungle their comeback from 2016’s humiliating defeat.

From small-thinking policy proposals (as outlined in Chuck Schumer’s New York Times editorial last week) and slogans that read like satire (“I mean, have you seen the other guys?”) to their quixotic obsession with wooing “moderate” Republicans and the rich to the detriment of progressives and the poor, their strategy is, at best, a wet fart. At worst, it’s a plan to sell out everything they once stood for.

The latest principle to be jettisoned like so much dead weight, or at least the latest one people are talking about: a woman’s right to choose.

Dolt supremacy: Remembering Bill O'Reilly's role in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

The White Supremacy of Anti-Abortion Extremism

Occasionally when provoked, this 2010 column comes to my mind.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

It's just a bonus to be able to tie, Bill O'Reilly, Mike Pence, Nicolae Ceausescu and anti-abortion terrorists together in one big ball of "go away -- preferably to another planet."

Bill O'Reilly's Dangerous War Against Dr. Tiller, by David S. Cohen (Rolling Stone)

O'Reilly waged an unflagging harassment campaign against the abortion provider before Tiller was murdered in 2009

On May 31st, 2009, Scott Roeder assassinated Dr. George Tiller. Roeder had been waiting patiently that morning in the pews of Tiller's church. Right after Tiller finished his job as an usher, Roeder walked into the church foyer, pressed a gun against Tiller's forehead and shot him. He died from the single gunshot wound.

Roeder killed the doctor for one reason, and one reason only: Tiller was a prominent abortion provider – maybe even the most prominent in the country at the time – and Roeder wanted to stop abortion. No one questions that Roeder's radical anti-abortion views were responsible for Tiller's death.

But this, the day Bill O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, is a good time to remember O'Reilly's role in the Tiller tragedy – especially in the context of newly released statistics showing that harassment of abortion providers in various forms is on the increase.

O'Reilly had waged an unflagging war against Tiller that did just about everything short of urging his followers to murder him.

Dunman (and Lady Parts Justice): "Bevin and his allies can’t ban abortion, no matter how much they hate it."

For me, links to essays like Joe Dunman's (below) are helpful segues to further reading.

Consequently, I stumbled across the web page of Lady Parts Justice, which has proven to be helpful and informative over Sunday morning coffee.

Mission Statement

Lady Parts Justice is the first not safe for work, rapid response reproductive rights messaging hub that uses comedy, culture and digital media to sound an alarm about the terrifying erosion of reproductive access so people will get off their asses and reclaim their rights.

About the Name “Lady Parts Justice”

The name “Lady Parts Justice” came from an incident involving a former Michigan state representative and a tireless advocate for abortion rights named Lisa Brown. In 2012, at the same time we were developing our organization, Lisa was fighting against dozens of horrible regressive anti abortion bills in Lansing. In one contentious battle, The Speaker of the House banned Lisa from the statehouse floor for using the word vagina when arguing against a transvaginal ultrasound bill- a bill that would have forced pregnant people to undergo a state mandated transvaginal probe before they could have an abortion. When she asked what she SHOULD use instead of vagina, the Speaker of the House suggested something less offensive like “lady parts.” The actual offense – a politician who was offended by the word vagina yet felt an absolute entitlement to legislate it – inspired us to take Lisa Brown’s fight and expose this kind of hypocrisy by choosing Lady Parts Justice as our name.

Like “Nasty Woman Unite” or “Pussy Grabs Back,” “Lady Parts Justice” is a clap back to yet another extremist politician feeling entitled to legislate bodily autonomy. At LPJ, we don’t connect reproductive parts with gender, and we advocate strongly for the reproductive health and rights of trans men, trans women, and all non-binary people. We believe whatever your gender identity, you have the right to access safe, dignified and affordable reproductive healthcare.

Now, to one of our favorite activist mouthpieces.

Commentary: Bevin and his allies can’t ban abortion, no matter how much they hate it, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

Ambulance services and hospitals automatically transport and treat all emergency patients no matter where they come from. That’s what they do. If any kind of medical emergency arises, a call to 911 is all you need to secure ambulance transport to a hospital for immediate treatment.

But under Kentucky law, abortion providers must enter into written agreements with hospitals and ambulance services by which they agree to transport and treat abortion patients who encounter “unforeseen complications.” In other words, abortion clinics must go out of their way to get hospitals and ambulances to promise to do the job they’re already obligated to do.

Why? Because in 1998, the Kentucky General Assembly passed KRS 216B.0435, a law that creates medically unnecessary red tape for abortion clinics. Laws such as this are commonly referred to as “TRAP” laws, or Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, and they are purposely designed to complicate and burden the provision of abortion services.

TRAP laws have been used to shut down clinics all over the country. And now, they’re being used by Gov. Matt Bevin to effectively ban abortion in Kentucky.

On March 13, the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services sent a letter to the EMW Surgical Center in Louisville, revoking its license and ordering it to stop providing abortions. Why? Because, the cabinet claims, EMW has deficient “transfer agreements” and is therefore in violation of state law.

"Planned Parenthood Videos Explain Abortion Process."

1. Because the opening paragraph is expository writing at its finest.

2. Because the Confidentials as a family support Planned Parenthood, which is of far more importance as a whole than any separate part.

3. Because it's fine by me if Teen Vogue becomes the voice of the Resistance even as Democrats can't seem to locate a guiding principle.

Planned Parenthood Videos Explain Abortion Process, by Brittney McNamara (Teen Vogue)

Planned Parenthood explains in two videos.

With more and more restrictions on legal abortion being made law, it's important that we know all the facts. That way, instead of talking about abortion in hypotheticals or scenarios, we can talk factually, about what's really going on. To do that, we not only have to know what you can and can't do regarding abortion, we also have to know what actually happens when you get an abortion. Abortion is a safe, common and legal medical procedure. Planned Parenthood made it even easier to get educated on what abortion actually is with two recent videos, outlining the two different kinds of abortions you can get.

Jeff Speck on HWC Engineering's bicycle-free, two-way streets abortion: "I guess that's what you get when you ask engineers who do not value biking to change a plan."

The photo above was tweeted yesterday by Jeff Speck, and shows the protected bike lanes being installed according to his recommendation in Cedar Rapids.

When Speck made his proposals for New Albany, a bike lane protected in this way was his standard template for a biking network he envisioned cohabiting the current one-way street grid following its conversion to two-way traffic.

Here is Speck's tweet about Cedar Rapids.

Noting that between the efforts of Team Gahan and HWC Engineering, roughly 95% of Speck's recommended bicycling infrastructure improvements has been removed from our heroically under-performing "bare minimum" Option B, I replied to Speck's tweet -- and he went straight to the heart of the matter in response.

Damned if he didn't "like" it.

Option B is an inept compromise, and we must put the debit where the debit's due, with Mayor Jeff Gahan himself.

Neither Gahan nor his illustrious crew of hee-hawing suburbanites has ever understood the future significance of bicycling, and as I predicted all along, Jeff Speck's 21st-century grid plan was run through New Albany's 19th-century sausage grinder and stripped of most aspects (biking and design) that might have served as two-way mobility multipliers in years to come.

Yes, we're going back to two-way streets as they were, not forward to two-way streets as they might be. For anyone who ever spent five minutes with Gahan, this should come as no surprise.

For a glitzy park system, no expenditure is too great for Gahan's TIF fetish, but for transformative transportation, we mustn't ever transform too much, and the Potemkin plan we devise, more surface show than real, must be calibrated for available federal financing, with its familiar sluices for widespread beak-wetting. We can find millions for an indoor practice field, but can't spend an additional penny on getting streets right.

It's amazing what inferior education and electoral ambition can do to stunt one's cognitive ability, and whatever we get from HWC Engineering comes equipped with the usual campaign finance siphons, and so as such, what's Gahan running for next?

If it's any office beyond dogcatcher, I'd think twice.

"Pence’s attack on women’s rights, and on Indiana."

And Ron Grooms sticks to Pence like glue.

Tully: Pence’s attack on women’s rights, and on Indiana, by Matthew Tully (Indy Star)

Time and again, Gov. Mike Pence has hurt Indiana with his ideological obsessions. This time, he has signed an abortion bill that has been condemned by doctors and many others.

For the 11 years I’ve written this column, I’ve largely avoided one topic: Abortion.

I've avoided it for many reasons. For one, I saw no way that anything I wrote could help, even a little, in a debate that is as fierce and divisive as anything in American life. Second, and much more important, I truly believe that on this issue the voices of women are more powerful and compelling than any words I could produce. And, finally, I have to be honest and admit that I have never once felt comfortable writing or even talking about this topic.

I'm sorry.

I apologize because my desire to avoid this topic led me to keep my mouth shut in recent months as Gov. Mike Pence once again thrust Indiana into an unnecessary and harmful culture war. I'm sorry because my discomfort led me to sit by as Republican state lawmakers and our horribly misguided and miscast governor waged a war on women’s rights and continued to damage the state so many of us love so dearly.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

This column originally was published in 2010, and repeated four years ago after the primary election. In my 2012 opening remarks, I noted the irony attendant in Indiana's “Democratic” party nominating John Gregg for governor.

Not only is Gregg noted for his anti-abortion stance, but at the time, he'd made public his opposition to equal marriage rights in Indiana. Gregg came closer than expected in a losing effort against the abysmal Mike Pence, who recently signed legislation further restricting abortion rights in a state where it's already under onerous siege. The Des Moines Register gets it:

Over the years, anti-choice activists have successfully convinced policymakers to restrict access to abortion, to inconvenience or humiliate women, and to discourage medical professionals from providing the outpatient procedure. But the Indiana law is in a league of absurdity all its own.

Indiana's Democrats are too intellectually flaccid to deserve my 2016 vote against Pence, but I'm likely to cast it anyway. I trust we'll have a Libertarian. In the meantime, here's the reprise.

---

May 24, 2012

In January, 2010, Scott Roeder went on trial in Wichita, Kansas and was convicted of murdering Dr. George Tiller during a church service in May, 2009. Roeder methodically stalked and killed Tiller because the doctor was an “abortionist” – just like John Irving’s fictional Dr. Wilbur Larch in Cider House Rules, although Tiller’s life ended somewhat more suddenly, and far less whimsically, than Larch’s.

When I hear the word “abortion,” I think about the dingy gray apartment blocks in Bucharest, capital of Romania. It is probable that few readers will have the same reaction, so kindly permit me to explain.

Romania’s 20th-century history was decidedly turbulent. Its pro-fascist leaders entered the Second World War on the German side, mimicking their Nazi overlords by expelling, and later savagely murdering, native Jewish and Gypsy populations. Romania volunteered troops for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but when the fortunes of war reversed, the country lay squarely in the path of the Communist military steamroller as it drove westward.

The Kremlin fiddled, and Romania danced. As a Soviet client state during the decades that followed, Romania’s socioeconomic ideology mirrored that of the USSR’s. Consumer goods were not a priority, and contraceptives generally could not be obtained. However, as in the Soviet Union, abortion was perfectly legal, readily available and absurdly cheap. Some estimates suggest that there were four abortions for every live birth in Romania by the year 1966.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1960’s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had consolidated power, embarking upon a quarter-century reign of thuggish oppression, personal megalomania and sheer doltishness noteworthy even by rock-bottom Warsaw Pact standards.

Accordingly, Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal in 1967, a change that occurred over night, without warning. Apparently the self-described “Genius of the Carpathians” had determined that Romania’s population needed to be increased, and a ban on both contraceptives and abortion would help achieve his aim – not that any thought had been given on feeding the extra mouths, or how they would be educated and employed, or where they would live.

Ceausescu’s abortion ban had the abrupt, short term effect of doubling the birth rate, but this spike was not accompanied by commensurate gains in material living standards. Romanians managed to adapt, and a steady decline in births commenced, to the point that some twenty years later, the country’s population had ceased to grow at all.

Black market contraceptives were one factor in the birth rate’s fall. Another development was more lethal in its effect, because the only Romanian population statistic that steadily increased during the years following the anti-abortion decree of 1967 was the country’s maternal mortality rate, which cruelly tripled. The likeliest explanation is that those women dying from the effects of botched, illegal abortions were included with statistics documenting those who had died during childbirth.

Until Ceausescu’s long overdue toppling and immediate execution in 1989, the Romanian governmental bureaucracy actively intervened in the sex lives of the country’s citizens, sating the dictator’s psychotic desire that greater numbers of New Communist men and women be created to man the steadily decaying ramparts of a collapsing society. Ceausescu’s motivation was purely secular, although it just as easily might have been religious. Either way, the effects would have been just as damning.

“Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” available through Netflix, is a harrowing and compelling Romanian film that tells the story of a university student’s illegal abortion in the year 1987. It is reality at its grittiest, and not an easy movie to watch. There are no flatulence jokes, car crashes, gun battles, transformers or “Sex in the City” romantic escapism.

I shan’t reveal the plot, which is eloquent in its simplicity, but it bears repeating that the film’s action takes place against a stifling backdrop of sanctioned, stifling fanaticism, in this instance big government’s punitive intrusion into the lives of ordinary people. In 1987, as for twenty years before, all parties involved in transacting an illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, a Romanian woman who in the enforced absence of legal contraceptives sought to terminate a pregnancy could be imprisoned and her career – her very life – irreparably ruined.

There may be little outside of cynical Cold War politics and a certain dollop of regional backwardness to justify the dismal record of tin pots like Nicolae Ceausescu, and yet there exists a minority among us, right here in America, some resplendent in their gated communities, others with no worldly possessions, but irrespective of station, possessed of a fervent belief that leaden control must be exercised over the individual’s reproductive freedom.

If asked, at least some among this minority would advocate the imposition in America of the semi-literate Romanian strongman’s solution: A complete ban on abortion, and whatever expansion of a police state is necessary to universally enforce it.

There are still others – a tiny handful, perhaps including the convicted murderer Scott Roeder – advancing purely terroristic violence as a means of curbing a practice that they decry in precisely the same terms, which may be an eye for an eye, but makes little sense from the “prince of peace” religious standpoint in Christianity. That’s enduringly frightening to me.

Speaking only for myself, no single issue better illustrates the struggle for equality on the part of fully half the world’s population than the right of reproductive choice for women. While a woman’s freedom to choose the option of abortion may well represent the extreme component of reproductive choice, one surely capable of being reduced in frequency with continued education and access to contraception, a clear majority of Americans believe that it should remain just such a legalized, regulated, and defined option.

What happened in Romania (for that matter, in Kansas) should not happen in America.

Should it?

---

March 24: ON THE AVENUES: Introducing New Albany Craft Beer Week, May 27 – June 4, 2016.

March 17: ON THE AVENUES: Erin Go Blagh -- a timeless classic for a green-hued holiday.

March 10: ON THE AVENUES: A funny thing happened on the way to a city council nightcap.

March 3: ON THE AVENUES: Since 1960, outside looking in.

Gather the plastic bags, mama -- Ron Grooms is doing that pro-life thang.

Ron Grooms is so busy speaking out on pro-life legislation that he hasn't bothered reading a newspaper.

2 Abortion Foes Behind Planned Parenthood Videos Are Indicted, by Manny Fernandez (NYT)

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

Can't he just go back to suppressing local environmental initiatives and seeing to it that One Southern Indiana's oligarchs get their full complement of subsidies, tax breaks and brothel gift cards?

Ron Grooms is speaking out on pro-life legislation.

Like millions of Americans, I was appalled last year to watch videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing how the organs of aborted children were preserved and sold to medical researchers.

More recently, a medical waste facility in Indianapolis was fined $11,250 for receiving aborted fetuses from a Missouri Planned Parenthood clinic.

This session, legislation is being considered to address this issue. It would put a stop to the trafficking of aborted baby remains in Indiana, ensuring that such remains are treated with dignity and respect.

House Bill 1337 would make it a Level 5 felony for an individual to acquire, receive, sell or transfer fetal tissue. It would also prohibit abortions based solely on race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex or a non-lethal disability. An abortion performed solely on the basis of these factors suggests that certain lives have less value than others, or that life is not worth living for certain categories of people. This is not consistent with Hoosier values.

HB 1337 was approved in a Senate committee on Wednesday and is expected to be considered by the full Senate next week.

"Free Abortions on Demand Without Apology," in The Nation.

The Nation is a wonderful corrective to right-wing claptrap.

Free Abortions on Demand Without Apology, by Jessica Valenti (The Nation)

When did so many feminists get polite on abortion? I cannot take hearing another pundit insist that only a small percentage of Planned Parenthood’s work is providing abortions or that some women need birth control for “medical” reasons. Tiptoeing around the issue is exhausting, and it’s certainly not doing women any favors.

It’s time resuscitate the old rallying cry for “free abortions on demand without apology.” It may not be a popular message but it’s absolutely necessary. After all, the opposition doesn’t have nearly as many caveats. They’re fighting for earlier and earlier bans on abortions, pushing for no exceptions for rape and incest, fighting against birth control coverage—even insisting that they have the right to threaten abortion providers. The all-out strategy is working; since 2010, more than fifty abortion clinics have stopped providing services.

The anti-choice movement isn’t pulling any punches—why should we?

Europe vs. Texas: Trimesters sans context.

And in so many other ways, too.

Do American Anti-Choicers Really Want to Live With Europe's Abortion Laws?
Smacking down the the latest anti-abortion fallacy, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

When it comes to abortion, is Europe like Texas with fresher fruit and topless beaches? ... Here’s what’s really different about Western Europe ...

"Raw abuse of power?" Why, that's the Republican way.

Isn't that right, Commissioners Bush and Seabrook?

I'd ask Keith Henderson what he thinks, except he's amid the cedars of Lebanon, up Boone County way, Groucho mask in hand, preparing to conduct the shadow prosecution in the Third Time Lucky case.

Not really. He's convening a grand jury in pursuit of missing information. It is unclear whether Dan Coffey will accept company in pursuit.

I'm sure powerhouse GOP chairman Dave Matthews much appreciates the Supreme Court's appeasement of Southerners perpetually re-fighting the Civil War a full 150 years after Gettysburg, with the ostensible topic this time being voting rights.

Todays SCOTUS rulings on same sex marriage cases have churchgoers nationwide biting their nails and contemplating flight to human rights sanctuaries like Belarus, where the gays aren't permitted.

Meanwhile, in Texas ...

Texas abortion bill defeated after missing deadline, by Helen Davidson (Guardian)

... Wearing pink trainers, (Senator Wendy) Davis rocked from hip to hip and slowly paced while she read testimony from doctors and women who would be affected by the bill if it were passed. "What purpose does this bill serve? And could it be, might it just be a desire to limit women's access to safe, healthy, legal, constitutionally protected abortions in the state of Texas?" she said.

Hmm, could be. What do you think, Steve? How 'bout you, Mark?

Texas Vote Passing Abortion Bill Is Rendered Moot, by Manny Fernandez and Erik Eckholm (NYT)

... The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. (David) Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation, both by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights.

“The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Perhaps it isn't the appearance at all. That's the way it is here, too. It's what today's Republican reactionaries are, at root ... whether in DC, Texas, or right here at home.

The Stutzmans, Zoellers and Pences bleat and wail.

And that's good enough for me.

Indiana Planned Parenthood declares victory after Supreme Court declines to hear funding case, by Jill Disis (Indy Star)

The U.S. Supreme Court will not disturb a lower court ruling that blocks Indiana’s effort to strip Medicaid funds from Planned Parenthood because the organization performs abortions among its medical services ...

... The law would have also defunded family planning programs throughout the state.

“We are happy that the Supreme Court’s action lets stand the Appeals Court ruling that the state does not have plenary authority to exclude a class of providers for any reason,” said Jane Henegar, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, in a statement issued Tuesday. “Federal law protects the right of Medicaid patients to choose a health care provider free of interference from the state.”

Keller: A personal defense of abortion rights.

Safe, legal and rare -- Keller's position, and mine, too. His essay is far too eloquent to suit the tub-thumpers, but then again, this is L'America.

It’s Personal, by Bill Keller (New York Times)

This will not be “succinct,” or simple, or likely to satisfy anyone who can reduce abortion to a slogan.

The closest thing I have to a guiding text on the subject of abortion is not a volume of constitutional law or a summary of the latest biological research on the origins of life. It is a black, three-ring binder containing hundreds of letters from readers who lived and suffered with the subject.

The letters arrived in response to a column called “Charlie’s Ghost,” which The Times published on June 29, 2002. It recounted the decision my wife and I made to end a badly troubled pregnancy, and the strong countervailing emotions that decision entailed.

C. Everett Koop: "Then, strikingly enough, he changed."

Did the office make the man? It seems that once C. Everett Koop was elevated to surgeon general, he was able to separate his personal views from the requirements demanded by the job. As Perlstein observes, "You don’t see his like much any more, in that there Republican Party."

C. Everett Koop, 1916–2013, by Rick Perlstein (The Nation)

A decent enough interval has passed, I hope, to begin to think about an interesting figure of our recent history in a bit of a critical temper. C. Everett Koop died on February 25 this year, the former surgeon general of the United States, between 1981 and 1989—the only person to hold that title to have become a household name, not least for his goofy half-beard and his charming insistence on wearing his ceremonial brocaded Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style uniform everywhere. But also for, it has to be said, serving as an exemplar of honor and courage in a dishonorable time.

The Nation: "The Message and the Meaning: Is 'Pro-choice' Passé?"

That's exactly my view: I believe that whether or not a woman keeps a pregnancy is up to her.

Indeed, language, words and meanings are crucial. They define humanity beyond the cave, and I see no reason why redefining them need be some exclusive right of the Right.

The Message and the Meaning: Is 'Pro-choice' Passé?, Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

... I often find public relations a bit bewildering, so maybe it’s my problem that I worry when people say the term “pro-choice” is “oversimplifying” and “extreme” and call for “moderation” and an acknowledgment of “gray areas.” To me, “pro-choice” means you believe that whether or not a woman keeps a pregnancy is up to her—the position most Americans say they support when asked about Roe. That is the “moderate” position. The exact opposite of the pro-life position would be to override the woman’s will and let others—parents, doctors, social services, the government—decide she must have an abortion, as is happening in China. An “extreme” pro-choice position would be the one pro-lifers falsely claim Roe protects: it would permit abortion on demand up until the day before birth. No pro-choice organization calls for that.

ON THE AVENUES: Shelter from the Strom.

ON THE AVENUES: Shelter from the Strom.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’ll begin this week’s column with a robust act of good will by saving the little people of New Albany the trouble of griping, grudging trips to their attics to locate moldering thesauruses last consulted during the Ford Administration.

In England (the country, not the ex-mayor), “crackpot” arose several hundred years ago as two separate words, first hyphenated as cracked-pot, and then later joined together as one: Crackpot.

Then as now, something broken or faulty was cracked, and as far back as the Middle Ages, one’s head or skull might be called a pot. Literally, a cracked-pot was a “faulty head,” similar to one of my personal favorite derogations, numbskull, which I’ll always associate with the Three Stooges even if its prevalent usage goes much further back in history than the advent of Larry, Moe and Curly on celluloid.

Which is to say, I ran into one the other day – not a Stooge, but a crackpot.

---

In retrospect, there were warning signs on the road ahead even though the conversation began sensibly enough with a generally benign chat about various aspects of American history. I should have known better, seeing as my point of view tends to differ from the 50-year-old white male demographic, and yet fleeing was not an option. I’d only just bought a beer and lit a cigar, and damn it, it was a clean and well lighted place.

Instead, I shifted into autopilot and imagined myself reading old telephone books and electronics manuals. It’s a sanity defense mechanism of long standing, reflecting too many years of listening to the beer-fueled babblings of barflies.

Soon we arrived at a crossroads of sorts. He’d already made a fleeting reference to the “mistake” of American women being granted the vote. I ignored it, but it was only a matter of time; his tone of voice subtly was changing, and a sense of agitation gradually was becoming palpable. Obviously, we weren’t quite finished with the female franchise, and when it finally arrived, requisitely red-faced, his argument proceeded roughly like this.

Women are innately different from men, which is to say that women are innately superior to men, this being because as opposed to men, women are both “compassionate” and “nurturing.” Precisely owing to the superior nature of women as compassionate and nurturing, they should not be allowed to vote, because voting is about government, and not only should government never should be about compassion or nurture, but it is a misreading of the Constitution to suggest otherwise.

I waited in vain for the punch line, and heard only crickets chirping. Then with resignation, it came to me. The guy was dead serious.

Frankly, this revelation shouldn’t have stunned me. I had expected some manner of illogical utterance, but the fellow fairly pole-vaulted over the bare minimum comprehensibility. In my everyday world, such an argument would have been openly, blatantly satirical – a gag, a joke, a late night talk show skit making the rounds on YouTube, or an anonymous posting at Kitchen Fable.

In fact, if his rant had been uttered in the context of the Seventies-era sitcom “Barney Miller,” Det. Harris surely would have made the usual deadpan remark to the Captain:

“Looks like we have a new customer for the enchanted kingdom.”

The guy was absolutely sincere. I thought to myself, hmm, maybe I need to get out more often.

Or: Never go out, ever again.

---

In truncated form, the preceding anecdote duly was posted on Twitter, and I smugly kicked back my heels to receive the inevitable plaudits from all my like-minded friends who hang out there, except that Bluegill promptly answered by going me one better. Seems he’d been having chats, too.

I was told male dominated gun ownership was the only fair thing do given that women have so much power to murder via abortion.

Now I’d been thoroughly pole-vaulted, both deflated and forced to concede that yes, in the comparative struggle to quantify cluelessness, the derision implicit in the assertion reported by Bluegill rendered it far more disturbing. At least my guy had something good to say about women in the general sense.

Abruptly, I realized that the last time I’d heard such an observation equating women with murder, it had emanated from a woman, one who probably supports her own right to vote.

But perhaps a woman in opposition to abortion would agree with a male who favors stripping women of the vote, seeing as any “real” woman imbued with compassion and nurturing wouldn’t ever choose abortion, anyway, although wouldn’t this stance imply that such anti-feminine traits like “murdering” children actually make her more masculine, thereby entitling her to both guns AND the vote?

If so, would her possession of both guns and ballots prevent a preacher somewhere (Christianity only, please – we’re ‘mericans, not rag-heads) from deciding under which circumstances she might have sexual relations and bear children?

Once again, surveying the world of crackpots, just staying home really began sounding like the best idea of all.

---

Most expository writing instructors would suggest that I come to a conclusion at this juncture. Insofar as any closing point can be reached, mine comes in the form of a memo to my fellow white heterosexual male Americans.

“I know you’re feeling all forgotten, marginalized, excluded, neutered, angry and terrified of a changing world, but seriously, you really need to stop embarrassing me, okay? You’re going to have embolisms and coronaries if you don’t chill out. Worse, you’ll fall off the planet into space like the dinosaurs did. Watch some golf, listen to your old rock & roll records, and have a drink – even ice cold swill’s okay if it calms you the $%@# down.”

Thanks, fellows. I won’t keep you any longer. After all, the ferry to Fantasy Island departs very, very soon.

Indiana constitutional same-sex marriage ban 2: "Rep. Ed Clere, gay marriage and various rights to life."

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

The following was published on October 27, 2010. Ed Clere (Republican) was running for re-election to his District 72 seat against Democrat challenger Shane Gibson, a race Clere won.

From this point forward, the Clere Channel Network has pointed to Clere's stance opposing the constitutional same-sex marriage ban as proof of pragmatic, technocratic and centrist instincts, even as his record indicated a steady adherence to the GOP's far-right bottom line.

Clere's "opposition" to the constitutional same-sex marriage ban, first as it pertained to a GOP pledge of fidelity (below), and later when the initial roll was called in 2011, consistently has been delineated by the representative and his cadre using an ever-expanding series of extraneous reasons, none of which address the moral and ethical parameters of the same-sex marriage issue itself. Meanwhile, eschewing technocratic aloofness, Clere has actively embraced another sticky ethical/moral issue by eagerly seeking to appease anti-abortion crusaders.

For this reason, I've taken it upon myself, in the absence of a newspaper that gives a damn, to ask the obvious question:

Why one and not the other?

---

REWIND: Rep. Ed Clere, gay marriage and various rights to life.

More than once during the past two years, it has been suggested by State Representative Ed Clere's (R-72) supporters that I might gauge the veracity of his political self-description (as a non-ideological public servant for all his constituents, not merely the ruling party) at least in part by his ongoing, principled refusal to sign a pledge of support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

I am perfectly willing to do so, with a necessary caveat.

As next week’s election draws near, much has been written and gossiped about Rep. Clere’s and the author’s seeming inability to “agree to disagree” on political matters. Much of what has been said is incorrect or conveniently omits facts, but that’s the way it sometimes goes in a small town. It also is both sad and fully emblematic of the willfully spiteful times in which we’re living.

Recognizing this, I have edited and re-edited this essay so as to phrase it in as non-confrontational a way as possible, given my predilection for polemics, and while at the same time not ducking issues that are very important to me – whether I’m a constituent, taxpayer, citizen, voter or any other label one cares to affix.

I’ve asked myself this question: If I had no prior personal experience with Rep. Clere, no back story, and no history … if I did not know him at all, except as a name in the newspaper … would I still write this essay the same way? The answer being “yes,” it is then safe to proceed.

Accordingly, whither Rep. Clere’s refusal to sign a pledge of support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?

Given the famously virulent theocratic fascism practiced by numerous of his House GOP contemporaries, Rep. Clere’s stance surely has made political life slightly difficult (in his relations with them), and his refusal is commendable (for his constituents) insofar as the considerable surface demerits of a demeaning and divisive pledge are concerned.

Good for him, but only as far as it goes, and there’s the rub, because it needs to go further.

Pending clarification and elaboration, mere refusal to sign the pledge doesn’t necessarily indicate support for the notion of marriage irrespective of sexual orientation as a human right, which I, and many others, support. After reading Rep. Clere’s explanation of his pledge position, as recently proffered in the Courier-Journal’s campaign capsule, it seems legitimate to examine this under-reported aspect of the campaign a bit more closely.

If one is to judge solely by Rep. Clere’s comments about the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment as presented in this article, his position appears to consciously sidestep the concise issue of record: Gay marriage as a pillar of fundamental civil rights in a modern, enlightened civil society.

Instead, Rep. Clere seems unwilling to address the larger issues of fundamental civil rights that preface the very subject of gay marriage. He offers a stolid, utilitarian explanation for his refusal to sign the pledge: There must be legislative prioritization, and the truly important matters up for discussion rightly usurp those secondary topics that might “distract” legislators.

Speaking only for myself, I must emphatically disagree. Human rights never should be considered secondary. Not now, not ever.

I find it difficult to abide such triage when it comes to basic rights and freedoms. I find it hard to accept that the civil rights and human dignity of real, living, breathing people must be postponed indefinitely while we confuse property tax rates with freedom. I’m willing to concede that there are arguments to be made for and against gay marriage rights, but I cannot endorse deferring the discussion. Not now, not ever.

What’s more, amid the prevailing claim that legislative imperatives about the economy trump social concerns, the rights of which I speak surely are something that money cannot buy – not now, not ever.

I believe that without constant vigilance in regard to civil rights and personal freedoms, the whole historic American experiment is reduced to a form of base capitalist greed supposedly blessed by one or the other unverifiable God.

And so, shall we patiently wait just a bit longer for human rights to be magnanimously bestowed by one’s undistracted betters?

I’m sorry, but no. A cursory review of American history reveals just how scandalously long these cynical waiting periods can last, and the lengths to which injustice can endure, when the struggle is deemed insufficiently “focused” by the leadership class, and when it doesn’t suit the fashion tastes and comfort levels of a privileged society, precisely the one not afflicted on a constant, grinding, daily basis by dehumanizing discrimination.

Mythology aside, this is America’s most shameful legacy, and indeed, when it comes to distraction, institutionalized discrimination often has been, and remains, buttressed by the sort of intolerant Christian religion widely practiced in the Hoosier state, which is why the rigorous separation of church doctrine from the secular state is the single best solution to the problem.

And yet, unfortunately, I digress. All apologies.

In fairness, Indiana Republicans keen to avoid considerations of civil rights and personal freedoms in this context have a sizeable legion of allies across the aisle in the form of Indiana Democrats, who generally aren't Democrats, and who are fond of introducing themselves with the self-emasculating disclaimer, “But I’m conservative, too.” Indiana Democrats have not distinguished themselves to any appreciable extent on this issue.

To be honest, the Dems have been cowering knaves, too, and such is the faux, damning “bounty” of alikeness that we reap by having a grand total of two major parties to comprise a dysfunctional political system – and no real choice at all offered by either.

Straight up: It is not my aim to unduly attack or smear Rep. Clere, because as I’m endeavoring to make clear, the looming specter of a discriminatory gay marriage amendment clearly discredits both parties, and exposes persistent educational inadequacies and pitiful superstition among the general populace.

I will observe, however, that Rep. Clere, who seeks always to present himself as a technocrat and non-partisan policy wonk, is openly willing to take a clearer stand on another controversial social issue, one frequently and lamentably purloined by the type of wild-eyed ideologues that he surely is not: Witness his recent “Right to Life” snail mailing.

In the mailer, perhaps the first such political missive financed by Rep. Clere’s campaign itself, as opposed to the steady stream of mercenary slimings from monied interests elsewhere (and, regrettably, coming from both “sides), we learn that he intends to speak for the unborn, and accordingly, has been endorsed by Indiana Right to Life.

It would seem, then, that gay marriage rights are subservient to the economy, but a public commitment to what plainly is an anti-abortion stance is not subservient to the economy.

As such, it is my sincere hope that somewhere down the line, after various legislative prioritizing is finished (if ever), Rep. Clere forthrightly and succinctly states his position on the legal right of women to have an abortion. Rep. Clere is sworn to uphold the law, and I have absolutely no qualms that he will, except that upholding an existing law is hardly the same thing as refraining from support for efforts to change it.

When, as in the case of Rep. Clere’s rationale for not signing the gay marriage pledge, he displays a preference for touting seeming compromise, but to the convenient exclusion of the crux of the issue at hand, then I’m compelled to ask aloud those questions that might have otherwise remained silent.

I’ll reiterate: Civil rights and personal freedoms do not have the slightest thing to do with money, taxes, the state of the economy, what’s showing at the multiplex, or one’s personal religious beliefs.

Human rights and individual dignities are not negotiable conditions to be expediently deferred until we’re all wealthier, happier, saved, or recovered from our raging prejudicial demons thanks to pyschotherapy.

Rather, civil rights and personal freedoms must be established and maintained before all the rest, simply because they preface all the rest.

It's possible that Rep. Clere might actually agree with me on this point. If so, it is my earnest hope that he supports a woman’s right to choose, and permits his view on gay marriage to evolve from the safety of the breach he currently occupies to a place more pro-active in nature. I fully support trashing the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment, and I am for enacting the right of gays to marry, secularly, without the interference of organized religion ... and politics.

Here’s the link to Weidenbener’s C-J piece, and the relevant passage.

... If Republicans win the House, lawmakers likely will face another vote on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. When the GOP controlled the House and Senate in 2005, the proposal passed.

But a constitutional amendment must pass two separately elected legislatures to be put on the ballot for ratification. When Democrats took control of the House, Speaker Pat Bauer of South Bend said it was unnecessary because Indiana already had a law banning same-sex marriage and the issue never came to a vote of the full chamber.

The issue is not part of the House Republican agenda, but caucus leader Brian Bosma of Indianapolis said he wouldn't block a marriage amendment proposal if it was introduced.

Unlike many Republicans, Clere has not signed a pledge promising to vote for the constitutional amendment.

“I believe in marriage. I support marriage. I am married,” Clere said. “But we have a lot on our agenda and I think we have to make sure we keep the focus on protecting Hoosier families first and foremost by passing a responsible balanced budget and a lot of the other items on the caucus agenda.”

The marriage amendment could distract from that work, he said.