The War of Religious Fanaticism Wages on against Women

No matter what the source of religious extremism, the war against modernity and science continues to place women on the front lines. Europe is fighting to free women from the islamofascists that force women into burqas.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats and a vice-president of the European Parliament, has called for a complete ban on the Islamic full-body covering in an interview with the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

In her editorial, Koch-Mehrin said that the full veil “openly supports values that we do not share in Europe.”

Koch-Mehrin said personal and religious freedom should be defended, but should not “go so far as to take away a person’s face in public.”

“The burqa is a massive attack on the rights of women. It is a mobile prison,” she wrote.

Meanwhile,American women are losing the war against christofascists that continue to push through laws that put our rights to our bodies lower than the “right to life’ of non-sentient clump of cells. One of the worst states to live as a woman–and I ought to know because I was raised there–is Nebraska. Without absolutely any medical or scientific evidence, the Governor signed into law law that bans most abortions after 20 weeks (a new threshold) because it’s been hypothesized by religious fanatics that a fetus feels pain at that point in gestation. Theses bill are meant to go to the Supreme Court to challenge two seminal laws defining when the government can begin to weigh the life of the women and fetal viability(now 25 weeks). Those would be Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. Since the swing vote now appears to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, this bill appears to be one of many coming out of states to test the waters.

At the same time, Nebraska has ended Prenatal care for Illegal Immigrants. So evidently, the pain of some clumps of cells are more important than others. Does this mean undocumented women in Nebraska will die with pregnancy complications too? (My doctor daughters says the University Med Center is now eating the costs of prenatal care for pregnant and undocumented women. Maybe the right to life movement should consider holding bake sales for future american citizens living in “illegal” wombs?) I guess I’d call this the let the Latinas die bill.

Less than 48 hours after a top state lawmaker told Nebraska Watchdog he was confident Governor Dave Heineman (NE-R) would back a controversial move to provide pre-natal care to the unborn children of illegal immigrants, the Governor has issued a statement clearly indicating he won’t.

The Nebraska I feel-your-fetal-pain bill is essentially begging the court to rethink the current standard. Rather than viability, it uses the possibility that the fetus could feel pain as a new dividing line at which abortions could be banned. Again, scientific evidence appears to be irrelevant to this current law. There’s another agenda at work.

Will the courts turn on almost 40 years of precedent, and trade in the viability standard for one that considers the possibility of fetal pain a more “compelling” point? It’s doubtful: the court has, on numerous occasions, reaffirmed its commitment to the viability standard. Moreover, I think it’s important to note here that research suggests fetuses cannot feel pain at 20 weeks, undermining this particular bill’s scientific credibility.

As pointed out by Charles M. Blow today in a NY Times’ Op-Ed, Florida joined the ranks looking to push challenges to current abortion law on Friday. There are other challenges that have been passed in Mississippi and Oklahoma that are meant to annoy women enough to give up on their right to choose to be a state forced incubator or a person with the right to self determination and ability to protect their health and individual sanctity. Would these kinds of things happen if we had more women in elected positions?

On Wednesday, Mississippi’s Legislature sent a bill to the governor that forbids public financing of abortions. The prohibition stands even in cases of severe birth defects.

Tuesday, the Oklahoma Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to pass two abortion laws. One requires women, even those seeking to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, to have an ultrasound and have the fetus described to them. The other prevents mothers from suing doctors who withhold information about fetal birth defects.

And on Friday, the Florida Legislature passed a bill also requiring all women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Even if the women don’t want to see the image, the doctor must still describe it to them.

We now have so many special interest wars on deck that I suppose these folks believe that no one will notice that we continue to pass one set of laws for men and potential men and another set for women. I imagine that they’re now full speed ahead on this because the fight over the health care bill showed how quickly the White House and the Democratic leadership will throw over women and their right to physical self determination for corporate interests.

More disturbing are signs that civil rights activists are having to fight on so many fronts, that we may be losing the message in the culture wars fought by determined religionists with an endless source of funds and fanaticism. There are so many moves against modernity that it’s hard to chose battles.

Proponents hope that some of these measures will force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, public opinion is inching in their direction. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Friday found that the percentage of people who think that the Supreme Court is too liberal is at its highest since they began asking the question, as is the percentage of people who say that if Roe v. Wade were to come before the court again, the next justice should vote to overturn it. They’re not the majority, but it’s still not good.

It might be tempting to think of this as a temporary blip — a conservative swing during tough times, but that would be shortsighted. There is a long-range trend of public opposition coming from unexpected quarters.

Unexpected quarters indeed. We can no longer rely on the Democratic party to protect our rights and yet they try to convince us we have no place else to go. Nearly every other developed nation has fought off the established efforts by churches and others to push women’s health issues back to the 1950s. Prior to the 1980, the Republican Party supported both the ERA and a woman’s right to choose. It now endorses neither and actively supports candidates that can at best be described as troglodytes on issues impacting women and children. But what do we call the likes of Bart Stupak who was the clear winner of the Great Congressional Health Care battle? We also see these same group of people continuing to rewrite textbooks and history to shape public opinion so that ignorance rules the day. It is obvious that after 30 years of fighting, christofascists will continue the battle. Will we?

It is time we enjoin them again. We must fight people who seek to replace evidence with opinion and facts with myth. It is time to beat our hard drives into swords so that we fight the good fight for truth and freedom. We cannot rely on Democratic elected officials to block their efforts any more.

No more Jane Crow! No more Stupakistan!!! No more laws enacting religious persecution of women!!!!