Roe v Wade was overturned? Quoi c'est bordel?

 I say that because there has always been a simple solution if we use the concept of Separation of Church and state under the First Amendment. It's what's being pointed out here in France's making Abortion a constitutional right and why it is a constitutional right.

Big hint, if the Judges who overturned Roe are Catholic, then you have a glaringly obvious example of how this simple way to make it a constitutional right also works in the United States. It's one I've thought about writing about for a while, but this post is now truly necessary.

The first amendment states:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" 

And can't forget Article IV, Clause 3:

"no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 

Laîcité is how France keeps religion and government separate to effectuate those principles. Here's an explanation of the concept.

 As she points out that "faith is a private matter for each individual citizen, and when it comes to the state: it's a no god zone."

Which is where laïcité, or secularism, comes into play when one sees a group of Catholic judges banning abortion, or any other religious person for that matter, then one can safely infer that religion is involved.

So, if the reasoning is based upon any metaphysical belief rather than an actual scientific one, then it's probably unconstitutional under secularism.

And given the amount of miscarriages and the high cost of malpractice insurance for obstetricians, we can add that it's wrong anyway.

So, given that I believe that if there is a god, he also believes that abortion is no biggie and should be a right. After all, he's more than willing to end a pregnancy.

That makes the choice to terminate a pregnancy one that belongs to the woman and her health care provider and no one else. 

The founders created the United States as a secular because they didn't want religion to mix with public life for pretty much the same reasons that the French did. They knew that religion and politics don't mix.

Unfortunately, the influence of religion is far too pervasive in US society. It's time to look to Laïcité. 

And join France in making abortion a constitutional right. 

The right to life: France v Texas. (avis: ici est un peu de polémique)

 OK, this is my French homework. Those who might read my personal blog know that I am studying for the DELF level B2 French language proficiency test. This was inspired by the reportage from the France 24 evening news and Le Monde's coverage of Macron's and Badinter's speech at the Pantheon (read the other linked articles) . It's been translated, but you can read the original french version at my blog, which is linked to on the left ("Encore mes devoirs: un peu de polémique"):

The Texas Rangers take a lesson from the Gestapo.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, says he believes everyone has a right to life. This is fascinating since Texas has both the death penalty and the "stand your ground" law. Self-defence laws change the concept of self-defence to depend on the subjective fear of the person invoking this legal defence. In contrast, Emmanuel Macron wants to "relaunch the fight for the universal abolition" of the death penalty, which he announced in a speech made at the Pantheon to mark the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in France. There is a clear difference between the attitude towards the right to life in Texas and in France. 

The Texas government seems to believe that the death penalty is effective in preventing crime: even extrajudicial killings. But is the death penalty effective in preventing crime? One of Britain's former executioners, Albert Pierrepoint, disagrees. He said: "It didn't deter them then and it didn't deter them when they committed what they were convicted of. All the men and women I faced at that final moment convince me that in what I did, I did not prevent a single murder...". Robert Badinter, the former Minister of Justice who led the repeal of the use of death Penalty in France in 1981, agrees with "absolute conviction: the death penalty is doomed to disappear in the world because it is a disgrace for humanity. It does not defend society, it dishonours it (...). Long live universal abolition! 

One moves from criminal justice issues to health issues when linking the right to life to family planning choices. Instead, Texas chose to remake Claude Chabrol's Une Affaire des femmes. It is a story set during the German occupation of France. It is based on the true story of Marie-Louise Giraud, one of the last women guillotined in France. Madame Giraud's crime was to provide abortions to poor women in France. The Texas law may not be so extreme, but the effect is the same: it is the poor who will be affected by this law. Wealthy women will be able to go to places where abortion is legal, which is not an option for the poor. 

The abortion providers for the poor would be women like Ms. Giraud, not medical professionals, but women who want to help other women. I have to wonder if Texas really understands what a criminal justice system should do? Does it seek justice or revenge?

 Maybe not too far out:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/abortion-law-germany-nazis-women

Hey, I could have gone on a lot longer if I had the time. I would really pass the examination if I could crank out something like this during the exam!

Just thinking

One of the 1 Aug 1966 University of Texas victims was an unborn child. 

How many more Gun Violence victims have been unborn children? By the pro-life way of thinking, these "unborn children" are innocent no matter what their parents are like.

Usual question: where are the pro-lifers on this one?

Sorry, but you can't say you are pro-life and go with the gun lobby's pushing the envelope on self-defence to make it easier to kill people. Traditional common law makes self-defence (1) a mitigation, not a complete defence, (2) places the decision on whether force was necessary to the finder of fact (usually the jury), and (3) makes excessive force, even deadly force, a hard hurdle to get past.

But even more importantly if you are going to be against "killing babies", then you should be firmly against guns.

Sorry, but you can't be pro-life and pro-gun without being in serious denial.

Footnote: the University of Texas shooting pretty much put the pro-gun arguments to rest: especially armed civilians stopping the incident. According to people who were there, there were armed civilians, but they made the situation much worse.

Do you believe life begins at conception?

We all know the US anti-abortion movement is full of shit when they call themselves "pro-life" otherwise Sandy Hook would have been the US's Port Arthur (if the gun control mess was even able to become as bad as it is).

That said, science fiction writer Patrick S. Tomlinson tweeted this scenario:

Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I've been asking for ten years now of the "Life begins at Conception" crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly.

It's a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question.

Here it is. You're in a fertility clinic. Why isn't important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help.

He is in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos." The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one.

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C." "C" means you all die.

In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will.

They will never answer honestly, because we all instinctively understand the right answer is "A." A human child is worth more than a thousand embryos. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Because they are not the same, not morally, not ethically, not biologically.

They are lying to you to try and evoke an emotional response, a paternal response, using false-equivalency. No one believes life begins at conception. No one believes embryos are babies, or children. Those who cliam to are trying to manipulate you so they can control women

We can make this even more interesting by saying the embryos may not make it full term, whereas the child would grow up and make a significant contribution to society.

The reality is that we don't know if these viable embryos can actually make it to full term.  Doggone has said that god is the most prolific abortionist since quite a few pregnancies end in miscarriage (I'll leave it to her to explain all that).

All I know is that  foetus is not guaranteed to be born alive (or in perfect condition).  On the other hand, someone who is alive really has a right to life.

The Massacre of the Innocents.

Today's lesson comes from Matthew 2:16–18: The Massacre of the Innocents.

When [the Magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old or under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.

It is part of the Narrative of the Birth of Christ, yet this incident is only mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew and later Christian authorities who use this gospel as a source.  It is repeated each year with the singing of the Coventry Carol, which came from that City's Mystery Play:

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lullay, thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we do sing

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Herod, the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might, in his owne sight,

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!

And ever mourn and sigh,

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Some people have doubted this was an actual historical event since it is only mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew.  Some people see this as being a contrived feature of the Gospels to show that Jesus was the Messiah by fulfilling the prophecy of being called out of Egypt.

Today is the anniversary of a mass shooting where 20 small children were shot.  This incident was well reported and documented, yet there are some who would deny that it happened.

Unfortunately, this is only one incident where children fall victim to firearms violence.  It seems that children are shot both intentionally and accidentally on a daily basis in the States.

There are those who would twist an archaic passage in the US Constitution which deals with an obscure institution, the Militia, which some would like to say would cause this to be an unintentional consequence of a "right" to own weapons outside the context of that institution.  This is despite the Constitution's purposes of  "insuring domestic tranquility" and "promoting the general welfare" as well as saying that people should not "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".

Instead, we see people acting like Herod and countenancing a new slaughter of the innocents.  For what purpose?

Unlike the unborn, these are not speculative lives: they are persons who were living, breathing, and playing.  They had parents who wanted to bring them into this world. They would have had futures had there not been the easy access to firearms which leads to these new massacres of the innocents on a daily basis. 

For those who would say they want to protect the unborn: why do they not wish to also protect the born?   As Sister Joan Chittister pointed out:

I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

I will add that you cannot call yourself pro-life if you tolerate the daily massacres of the living innocents on top of the"pro-birth" attitude mentioned by Sister Joan Chittister.

Not only was the Nazi regime pro-gun, they were also pro-life.

In Nazi Germany, the penalties for abortion were increased. In 1943, providing an abortion to an "Aryan" woman became a capital offense. Abortion was only permitted if the foetus was deformed or disabled in accordance with Nazi eugenics policies.

The Nazi mother's cross award

A case in point, Marie-Louise Giraud (17 November 1903 - 30 July1943) was a housewife and mother who became one of the last women to be guillotined in France. Giraud was a convicted abortionist in 1940s Nazi occupied France. She was executed on 30 July 1943 for having performed 27 abortions in the Cherbourg area.

In fact, the Nazi execution of abortion providers seems to fall in with radical pro-lifers extra-judically killing abortion providers.

Quite frankly the Nazis had very firm ideas about the role of women in Germany. Hitler thought that the population of Germany had to increase for the country to become more powerful. Therefore women were forced to give up work and have children.

On 5th July 1933 the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage was passed. This act gave all newly wed couples a loan of 1000 marks which was reduced by 25% for each child they had. If the couple went on to have four children the loan was wiped out.

Girls were taught at school that women had to have children and look after their husbands. They were told not to smoke or diet as it could affect their ability to have healthy children.

Unmarried women were also encouraged to have children and for those without a husband they could visit the local Lebensborn where they could be made pregnant by a racially pure member of the SS.

Quite frankly, anyone who is not historically ignorant should be afraid of where the US right is has been going.

See:

•  Ferree, Myra Marx (2002). Shaping abortion discourse: democracy and the public sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge University Press.  
• Women in Nazi Germany

Testing the Limits of "Stand Your Ground"--can you really get away with murder?

Calling these laws "get away with murder" may not be as inaccurate as the "pro-gun" side might like to admit with lots of murderers and would be murderers finding that if they say they were scared or protecting their home that they might actually be able to pull a George Zimmerman.  Although, it didn't work as well as Michael Dunn had hoped it would in his case: even though he may actually get away with murdering the one person he intended to kill.

It was those stray shots that got him found guilty (attempted murder).

Wonkette addresses this truly US legal phenomenon in the post: OUR COLD DEAD HANDS--These People Trapping And Shooting These Teenagers Are Not Very Nice, No, Not At All

Thankfully, with a lot of states broadening the scope of what counts as “self defense,” several brave Responsible Gun Owners have taken to killing folks for the sake of finding out what kinds of homicide are justified. No applause necessary; these everyday Second Amendment Heroes just see it as their civic duty.

Some people see these wonderful new laws that prove that life is worth less than property and that the concept of "right to life" by not having life arbitrarily taken is something that means they can see if they can indeed "get away with murder".

Wonkette's conclusion:

And so our glorious experiment in ground-standing continues; future cases will no doubt help us gain a better understanding of just when it becomes OK to purposefully set a trap for a human being you want to kill. We bet there will be lots of volunteers from the Responsible Gun Owning community to serve as the armed portion of those experiments, and tough shit for those who get killed, because they never should have been there in the first place.

These laws prove that the US is in no way a "Christian Nation" which believes in the sanctity of life.