Here’s a typical, arbitrarily-selected example of the standard rhetoric from anti-choicers who just happened to be the leading supporters of so-called fetal homicide bills at the state and federal level:

I don’t buy the theory that any fetal homicide laws in existence, nor the one recently vetoed by Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, would have the effect of criminalizing abortion. Abortion rights are as safe in California as they are just about anywhere else, and have always been so, but Scott Peterson is still considered a double-murderer. Good.

— Xrlq (2004-12-10), comment on SayUncle 2004-12-09: Healing the divide

You heard this from nearly every conservative legislator and Concerned Woman for America over and over again as these bills moved through the legislature. Problem is that that was all a goddamned lie. All that sentimental law-making was not about protecting pregnant women from domestic violence; it wasn’t about punishing men who attack women and it wasn’t even about protecting fetuses from assaults on their mothers.

It’s about abortion. Specifically, it’s about creating the legal groundwork for enforcing murder statutes against anyone who helps young women obtain an abortion unauthorized by the government. (The second part of the one-two punch, of course, is that anti-choicers are working hard every day to ensure that as many kinds of abortion as possible are unauthorized by the government.)

Pro-choice groups said this over and over again when the debate over manipulative bills like Laci and Connor’s Law came up. For it, they were denounced as paranoiacs and bitter partisans. But guess what? They were right.

A few months ago I mentioned test case #1, in which a Macomb County prosecutor decided to indict a 16 year old boy for manslaughter after he helped his girlfriend in a desparate, home-made abortion by hitting her (with her consent) with a baseball bat until she miscarried (she was about four months pregnant at the time).

Think that was just some rogue prosecutor with an axe to grind? Well, oops–they did it again. In test case #2, a Lufkin, Texas prosecutor has decided to raise the stakes by charging an 18 year old boy with capital murder for helping his 16 year old girlfriend with a desparate, home-made abortion by stepping on her stomach.

They didn’t go through the extensive bureaucratic paperwork, privacy-invading parental notification measures, artificially inflated expense, traumatic harassment by screeching fundamentalists, or invasive surgery that the states of Michigan and Texas impose on young women seeking an abortion. And for that, the prosecutors are going after them with a charge of murder.

Of course, since the authors and supporters of the bill clearly weren’t trying to do anything like this when they passed it, obviously they are raising howls of protest.

Right?

A co-author of the state law said it was intended to protect women and unborn babies from domestic violence, drunken drivers and other assaults.

We didn’t consider a case as ridiculous as this, said Rep. Ray Allen, a Republican. I feel sad for these immature, stupid people. But the law is what the law is.

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2005-03-04

Of course they didn’t mean for any of this to happen; but hey, it’s not like legislators can change the law or anything, right?

Meanwhile, the prosecutors in both Macomb County and Lufkin mainly seem to regret that they can’t haul the poor girl before the magistrate and have her sent to a pro-life prison or perhaps a pro-life lethal injection. They regret that their hands are tied by the laws’ explicit exemption of the mother from legal liability.

Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith said his hands were tied when it came time to decide whom to charge in the baseball bat beating death of a fetus being carried by a teenage girl.

He decided Tuesday to do the only thing one state statute allowed: charge the boyfriend who wielded the bat, hitting his girlfriend in the stomach repeatedly over a two-week period, but let the girl off the hook, uncharged.

…

Although Smith called the case shocking and reprehensible, he added, we are bound by the law. We don’t have the option of charging (the girl).

—Detroit News 2005-01-05

Prosecutor Clyde Herrington said it was startling that they completely leave the female out of the criminal penalty.

It doesn’t seem entirely fair, Herrington said.

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2005-03-04

(You might think that the explicit exemption for punishing the mother is evidence that the laws weren’t intended to be applied in cases of unpermitted abortion. Horsefeathers. Even most strident anti-abortionists mainly favor bans that would punish abortion providers but not the woman who has an abortion; and the fact that they would think it’s necessary to exempt the mother from liability shows, if anything, a specific intent to apply it broadly to cases in which the mother consents to inducing the miscarriage. Otherwise there’d be no need for the exemption.)

What were those stupid, immature, shocking, reprehensible kids thinking, anyway? Don’t they know abortion is illegal in this country?

This is no accident. They are coming for the young and desparate first; they are the easiest to go after. They have already created a byzantine system of explicit restrictions and burdensome regulations to create a limited class of authorized abortion providers and make the conditions of obtaining an authorized abortion from them as harrowing as possible. Now they are moving to back up those restrictions with a charge of murder for any provider who steps outside of the ever-narrowing magic circle of what the courts will uphold from Roe. The purpose is to make the equation of abortion with murder a standard and accepted part of legal practice, and to bring closer the day in which there are no protections left at all (because, after all, they would be unfair). Lucinda Cisler warned us that this was a trap back in 1969, just four years before Roe: giving the State the power to limit who is authorized to provide an abortion and under what conditions (whether or not the woman consents to those conditions) is furnishing the ground from which to launch the counterattack against abortion-law repeal, and it means that the most desperate women will be targeted first.

Welcome to 2005. Here we are building a culture of life, one hangman at a time.

…, or at least in the April 2005 issue of Reason. This is from the leading page of Homeschooling Alone by Greg Beato. Here we have three young children under Mother’s watchful eyes in Tempe, Arizona:

This is a family of home-schoolers starting their day–by uttering the Pledge of Allegiance. When they don’t even have to.

You want an argument for thick libertarianism over thin libertarianism? There it is.

N.B.: this is not a diatribe against home-schooling, or even against the article. The article is mostly intended as an article about why private foundations and corporate donors seem resolutely determined to keep throwing their education reform money down the hole of proven failures–like mostly-useless charter schools and technology-in-schools fads–rather than, say, offering scholarship funds to homeschooling families or co-operative organizations of home-schoolers. It’s decent as far as it goes, but here as elsewhere the cadences of the hard Right–who are withdrawing their kids from school, by and large, so that they will be unconstrained in their ability to teach their children a bunch of lies in a resolutely authoritarian atmosphere–are lurking behind the voice of almost everyone who’s allowed to speak on behalf of homeschoolers.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who homeschools is like that of course, and it sure doesn’t mean that that’s what homeschooling as such means. It isn’t; that’s just what the most obnoxiously vocal part of the movement is about. A lot of people are doing amazing things with their kids. And, hell, it doesn’t even mean that the kids being homeschooled by hard Right fundamentalists ought to go back into government schools (let alone be pushed back into it by the heavy arm of the State). Everyone has the right to flee the institutionalized education system, and it’s hard to say how they’d be better off (on balance) if they were stuck back into one of those desks. Homeschooling means a step, even if it’s a small one, towards learning in freedom The less bullying that anyone gets from the government about getting out of the institutionalized school, the better–and that means that no bullying is best of all.

But what kind of a standard is Well, at least it’s not as bad as the government schools for an anarchist to uphold? Freedom is better than coercion, sure–being left alone is better than being stomped on, and leaving other people alone is better than stomping on them. But that’s not the end of the story; while I’ll go to the mat supporting the right of parents to keep their kids out of government schools, and the wisdom of doing so even if their views about education, history, science, politics, etc. strike me as abhorrent, it’s worth pointing out that those things are abhorrent. Besides being bad in their own right, some of those views are directly opposed to maintaining a free culture. Like taking your kids out of government schools to ensure that you can hold on to an obsessive theo-nationalism and chant out UNDER GOD! every morning, for instance. The hard Right wing of the homeschooling movement may be tactical coalition partners; they may be people that I’m obligated, by principle, to support against government aggression. But they are not my friends.

Nor should they be.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, this Friday Random Ten is neither Friday, nor Random, nor Ten. But it is (I think) a good idea; thanks to Random Thoughts and to Trish Wilson for it. Here’s the idea: you’ve probably all heard of the Friday Random Ten music game. This is sort of like that, except that it’s ten links. The links go to ten worthy posts by webloggers outside of the usual club of folks you link to. Why? Because weblogging, and political weblogging in particular, is interesting and fun and increasingly important but it’s also got a tendency to be inbred and clubby. Most of us are not atop the A-list “dominant link hierarchy,” but we participate in it, and if we don’t try to break up the cartel a bit, who will? The Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere? I think not. So here’s mine:

1. When it comes to the hand-wringing and the bloviating over the Left’s attitude towards feminism, abortion, and sexuality, media girl 2005-02-24: Not negotiable puts it better than I could in just three sentences:

   What a lot people — mostly men — don’t seem to understand is that women’s control over our own bodies is not negotiable. We are not slaves. We are not breeding machines to be regulated and controlled by the government.

   Read the whole thing.

2. Bitch, Ph.D. 2005-02-22: The Washington Monthly points out that it’s that time of the three months again: Kevin Drum has come down with a nasty case of QMS, and it’s made him impulsive and irrational enough to start spouting off without so much as bothering to so much as search Google for female political bloggers first. Or, as we have it from the good doctor:

   Oh look. We have another well-meaning non-sexist liberal non-discriminatory fuckwit around being all concerned about how women just don’t choose to talk about politics. Or maybe it’s that they’re innately less comfortable with the “food fight” nature of political discourse.

   Hey Drum, you moron, try doing some goddamn research before you shoot your mouth off, ok?

   How the fuck do men ever manage to succeed in any kind of intellectual endeavor without bothering to find out what the fuck they’re talking about before shooting their mouths off? Oh yeah, right, it’s the magic power of the cock. Jesus.

   Read the whole thing.

3. Bean has a new blog (you may know her from her posts on Alas, A Blog), and in Cool Beans 2005-03-03: The Invisibility of Feminism she points to another one for the what is seen and what is not seen file. Here we have one of the countless examples of why men in the media seem able to confidently declare feminism dead once every five years or so, without the least bit of circumspection: because nobody seems to feel obligated to actually, y’know, look up feminist publications before they gather their data and start spouting off.

   Read the whole thing.

4. Jill Walker at misbehaving.net 2005-02-27: The Debian Women Project notes the lack of women in open source development, or at least in Debian development specifically.

   Hanna Wallach posted her slides from a talk she gave on Debian Women yesterday. She showed statistics showing that 10-20% of computer science undergrads are women, and that 20-35% of IT professionals are women, and yet there are only 4-8 women among the nearly 1000 developers of the open source Debian "universal" operating system. That’s less than one percent. While Hanna mentions possible reasons briefly, her main concern in the talk is to show what is being done in Debian Women.

   It’s good to see that the topic is being addressed, and everyone’s best wishes should be with Debian Women, which seems to be off to a good running start; one can only pray that the boys will keep tabs on the organizing and action that’s going on, instead of treating everyone to a trimonthly outbreak of oblivious Where are all the female software developers? e-mails on devel mailing lists…

   Read the whole thing.

5. Mouse Words 2005-03-05: 10 things you need to know about men demonstrates once again that shooting fish in a barrel can be damn funny if you have the talent (as Amanda clearly does).

   From iVillage and by Richie Sambora. Sambora couldn’t tell you shit about playing guitar, and he’s a guitarist. So why do we assume he knows something about being a man? As usual, we women are presumed pretty clueless when it comes to men. Men, however, know everything they need to know about us.

   …

   We want you to be our mothers.

   Heather Locklear is a saint. And now I have the unfortunate image of her man calling her Mommy and I’m all upset.

   We don’t mind it when you dress us.

   If he asks for a sponge bath next, I hope Locklear takes a moment to remember that she is a stunning beauty who has exactly zero reason to fear that she’s headed for spinsterhood if she suddenly gave up playing Airplane in order to get her husband to eat.

   Read the whole thing.

6. Avedon Carol 205-03-05: How you become crazy takes on the pervasive idiot notion that any ideological skew in the media, if it exists, is prima facie evidence that the media is doing something wrong and therefore needs to change:

   I have never understood why this should be a criticism of the media, anymore than it makes sense that this is a negative trait of academe; if the people who are best educated and most aware of what is going on are more liberal, maybe that’s because you have to be ignorant to swallow conservatism. What is really suggested by this “criticism” is that the alleged “bias” isn’t bias at all, it’s just a recognition of what is, and that bias is required to lean to the right of this “liberal” position. Indeed, the behavior we’re seeing from the administration is fairly explicit in that we are told that simple facts are “biased”. The news media are not supposed to tell the public the truth about anything because that would bias us against the administration. The real question is not, then, about a bias toward liberalism or conservatism, but rather a belief that “news” should make some attempt to serve the public rather than just the corporate hierarchy.

   …

   Those people really do need reminders. They need to be told every single time they spew right-wing bull. They need to be reminded over and over that reality still holds sway for at least half of the population. Most of all, they need to be told that we’re not talking about forgetfulness and errors and “misstatements” from Condi and George and friends, we’re talking about lying, and they should call a spade a spade.

   Whether Avedon’s right or not about all that (I think she’s clearly right about the media’s limitless charity for Bush administration fraudsters, probably right about some parts of reporters’ policy skew, and probably mistaken about others), the underlying point is awfully damned important: the demographic arguments that “liberal media” bloviators (and their “corporate media” comrades on the Left) aren’t enough to show anything in particular. The perverse sort of ideological identity politics that the Right especially loves these days needs to be called for what it is: pure bluff.

   Read the whole thing. (Thanks, Trish.)

   [Update 2005-03-27: Incidentally, the name is Avedon Carol, not Carol Avedon as I originally wrote. Oy. My bad!]

7. What Is Past Is Prologue 2005-03-04: How Low Can You Go follows up with this fine look at how the Great Americans at MSNBC ensure that the tough questions get asked in spite of the fiendish plot of the liberal media hegemons:

   Then he went on to flagellate that old tired concept that everyone knows is a lie: The Vicious Liberal Media. His commentator? The resentful Ari Fleischer, clearly still smarting from his days as White House Press Secretary

8. Clancy at CultureCat 2005-03-04: Orphan Works: Tell the Copyright Office Your Stories calls for shedding light on one of the rarely-seen but often-onerous unintended consequences of the intellectual enclosure regime: valuable works are left in limbo when you can’t find their copyright holders. I’m sure that making works completely impossible to reproduce for a good 70 years or so is really incentivizing some creative excellence. Somehow.

   Read the whole thing.

9. Micha Ghertner at Catallarchy 2005-03-06: Small Is Beautiful points out something that you just don’t see in most discussions of prying education out of the hands of the bureaucratic State: the way that government monopolization of schools and politicized pressures constrict schools into multimillion dollar all-things-to-all-people facilities–thus forcing down the number of groups that could reasonably get a school off the ground–thus forcing them into crowded splinding-and-sorting centers for thousands of students:

   Would people want to send their kids to small, simple, less expensive schools? Would some parents drop off their kids at an individualized schooling program for a few hours, and then take them to the gym or the community center for a sports league or a friendly pick-up game with other children? Those who are satisfied with the current system of institutionalized babysitting may want to stick with the status quo. Those who would prefer a close-knit atmosphere, where everyone knows each other by name, and where the programs and costs are specially tailored to each individual student’s needs, may conclude that bigger is not always better.

   Read the whole thing.

10. Alina at Totalitarianism Today 2005-03-01: International aid worthy of the title? reminds us of the dirty little secret about government-to-government foreign aid: when you give money to the government instead of to the people in distress, they just waste it.

11. Voltairine de Cleyre (1907-04-28): They Who Marry Do Ill argues (under the title of a particularly delightful turn of phrase) that marriage — whether government-sponsored or wildcatted, whether religious or secular — offends against individualist principles:

    Some fifteen or eighteen years ago, when I had not been out of the convent long enough to forget its teachings, nor lived and experienced enough to work out my own definitions, I considered that marriage was a sacrament of the Church or it was civil ceremony performed by the State, by which a man and a woman were united for life, or until the divorce court separated them. With all the energy of a neophyte freethinker, I attacked religious marriage as an unwarranted interference on the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals, condemned the until death do us part promise as one of the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his future to his present feelings, and urged the miserable vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony, by which the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made topic of comment and jest by the public.

    By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear. Need I recall, for example, the unprinted and unprintable floating literature concerning the marriage of Alice Roosevelt, when the so-called American princess was targeted by every lewd jester in the country, because, forsooth, the whole world had to be informed of her forthcoming union with Mr. Longworth! But it is neither the religious nor the civil ceremony that I refer to now, when I say that those who marry do ill. The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed. Now my opponents know where to find me.

    Read the whole thing.

O.K.; that was eleven, not ten. And the eleventh isn’t exactly a blog link anyway. But I did warn you ahead of time that Friday Random Ten would be a name here, not a definite description. And if the dominant link hierarchy in the weblog world is worth breaking up, then I’d have to say that it’s also worth breaking up weblog reading with a bit of material that was written before the turn of the 21st century. Enjoy the subversion!

Things have been a bit slow lately because I’m out of town for my Spring break (visiting Auburn first, and then taking a delightful little drive down to southern Illinois to pick our car up from the shop); I’d intended to keep posting from the road, but I’ve been too preoccupied with visiting and with computer projects around the house to keep myself motivated to post. There may be some lazy linking over the next few days, but mostly I’m on break until next week.

Cheers! Talk to you soon.

The latest news from the Traditional Values front comes to us from Roseville, Michigan, where we find that the defenders of public decency are marshalling their forces to preserve our precious culture and heritage–by launching a legal assault against a local artist for his reproduction of part of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling for the Sistine Chapel:

In Ed (Gonzo) Stross’ eyes, his variation on Michelangelo’s Creation of Man mural is art.

In 39A District Judge Marco Santia’s eyes, it’s a crime.

Santia ordered jail time, a fine and probation — a sentence that sounds a little harsh to a state senator, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and fellow artists.

Santia ordered Stross, 43, to serve 30 days in jail, do two years’ probation and pay a $500 fine for violating a city sign ordinance. Roseville officials said letters were prohibited on the mural and Eve’s exposed chest is indecent.

Besides jail time and the fee, Stross is to tastefully cover Eve’s breasts before reporting to the Macomb County Jail on Monday morning, and to paint over love by May 1.

— Detroit Free Press 2005-02-18: Muralist’s vision has jail staring him in face

(Link thanks to Copyfight 2005-02-23 and No Treason 2005-02-22.)

Of course, a bare-breasted Eve wasn’t too much for Pope Julius II; he not only approved of its public display, but was glad to have it on the ceiling of the most important church in all of Western Christendom. You might have thought that some of our traditional values include glorifying God and Creation through beautiful art, or at least respect for the achievements of our forebearers. But when it comes to the community standards of our day–which are, after all, mostly set by reference to the sensitivities of the most obnoxiously vocal and litigious segments of the Religious Right–it appears that all of these pale in comparison to the importance of ensuring that no child see boobies, ever. Anyway, since when have traditional values had anything to do with history?

This, it seems, is the modern Religious Right: a horde of know-nothing busybodies, apparently hell-bent on making Mencken’s definition of puritanism look plausible, and going to the mat to enforce the values of a past that–fortunately for the achievements of Western civilization–never existed.

Further reading

• GT 2004-03-10: Traditional marriage