Constitutional Rights don’t Discriminate

I was horrified this morning to read this headline and the accompanying article in the Hill: McCain: ‘Serious mistake’ if car bombing suspect was Mirandized’.

It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime leading Republican on national security issues, said he expected the suspect in the case could face charges that might warrant a death sentence if convicted.

“Obviously that would be a serious mistake…at least until we find out as much information we have,” McCain said during an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” when asked whether the suspect, 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan.

“Don’t give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it’s all about,” McCain added.

From everything I’m reading about the suspect that was arrested this morning for the failed incendiary device left in a car in Saturday’s fail attack on Time’s Square, says he is a U.S. citizen. He may be a horrible one, and traitorous one and a potentially murderous one, but he’s still a U.S. citizen. There was a time in our country when that meant something.

Investigators believe Faisal Shahzad, a recently naturalized U.S. citizen living in Shelton, Conn., paid cash for a Nissan Pathfinder that was found packed with explosives Saturday night on a tourist-crowded block in Midtown Manhattan. The vehicle was set on fire, but a homemade bomb inside failed to detonate.

Investigators located Shahzad after a two-day investigation that yielded what senior White House officials described as a flood of international and domestic clues. It was not immediately clear whether there was any link between Shahzad and videotapes that police circulated widely on Monday, showing men near the site of the attempted bombing who may have been acting suspiciously.

The Constitution grants specific rights because the colonial governments who ruled this part of the world did things to their colonies and their own citizens that were capricious. Many things done to colonists, the colonized natives, and indeed to people not within the power structure or threatening the power structure didn’t even recognize their basic humanity. Our constitution is there to protect every one from the abuses and excesses of a powerful central government. Even the ones we do not like. This is because when government is allowed to run rampantly over one set of citizens, it eventually means it can run over any and all of us. If you’ve ever been hauled of to jail having done absolutely nothing or been shot and killed for standing on your campus during the lunch hour–as was done 40 years ago with Kent State May 4 student killings by the Ohio National Guard–you are fully aware of the capriciousness of a state that has police power.

This just seems to be yet another attack on the rights of individuals to the justice and liberty we’ve established in our constitution and with our rule of law. We’ve just recently seen complete overstep by the Arizona government to deal with crime problems coming from Mexico. If you haven’t read former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s take on the new Arizona round ’em up and document ’em law, please do.

In her first public comments on an issue that has embroiled her state in controversy, Justice O’Connor said she understood why Arizona passed the bill last month allowing local police to question a person’s legal residency. Like California, she said, Arizona is a border state that suffers from smuggling of drugs and people from Mexico.

But she expressed doubt on whether the state had the authority to enact such a law. “It is essentially the job of the federal national government to secure our borders,” Justice O’Connor said Monday at a luncheon here hosted by St. Ignatius College Preparatory, the high school alma mater of her late husband, John. Arizona “may have gone a little too far in its authority,” she said.

The retired justice suggested that one potential issue with the new law, signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, could be racial profiling by police. Immigration-rights groups have raised concerns the law could result in the targeting of people who look Hispanic.

The question courts may have to decide, she said, is whether the law “does too much to allow officers to arrest people because they look Hispanic. It might not read that way, but it might work that way.”

The justice predicted the law would be the subject of legal challenges, and added: “We will be locked up in court for a long time” over it.

We supposedly have a movement afoot that is mad over the powers wielded by the Federal Government. But what laws are they supporting? This year we’ve had states pass laws that stick the government’s nose squarely in the uterus of pregnant women, laws that allow the police to ask you for papers just because, and now a senator suggesting you don’t read a U.S. citizen his Miranda Rights. What’s next, asking every one with an accent or a slightly foreign look for a portfolio of documents? Perhaps we should just suggest we all get permission slips from the government before we go for plastic surgery now or take an ESL course so they can determine if we might be up to something that goes against certain religions or political mindsets. Maybe they should just barcode us all so the police can figure out which level of constitutional rights we get? Teaparty on dudes!

WTF is going on here?

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!!!!