Compassionate Conservatives? Not If You're A Woman

Enough compassion already. The country can barely survive it. How about a little common decency instead?

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision criminalizing a form of abortion is a new low in the Right-wing campaign against women's reproductive rights and the rights of doctors to serve them.

Even the majority opinion acknowledges that the law in question gets many of the essential facts wrong about what is termed by conservatives, "partial-birth abortion." The fact that there is no such medical procedure anywhere in any medical school or teaching text doesn't stop them. They went ahead and invented this incendiary term in order to inflame our passions. Who could be against ended an abortion that is, in fact, a birth? (I don't know what the hell a "partial birth" might be, come to think of it.)

Who cares if a woman's health or even her life is at stake? There's a little Republican in there, waiting to get out and vote for God's next fantastic Decider. (Come to think of it, didn't the legislation saving Terri Schaivo from the evil-doers in her family also grant her an automatic vote for her local Republican candidates in all upcoming elections?)

Medical science is quite clear and unanimous: there is indeed a need for this type of abortion, despite what a group of legislators without any medical knowledge not found in the Bible claims.

Of course, many of those pushing to re-enslave women to their bodies regardless of their wishes don''t believe in science at all and are in fact hostile to it; a majority of them refuse to acknowledge even the most agreed-upon of scientific theories, such as evolutionary theory and geology theory. They say that since these are "just theories," they are not proven scientific fact. I would remind these people that arithmetic, aerodynamics, gravity, as well as the germ theory of disease, are also "just theories."

If living creatures don't evolve, then these people should have no problem agreeing never to use modern antibiotics, since the evolution of penicillin-resistant bacteria never took place. It was God who decided humans didn't deserve to be cured of bacteriological infections. Being cured would be an affront to the Lord, a victory for Satan.

83% of Republican representatives refuse to acknowledge the science of global warming, by the way. They call it a "hoax."

Let's be clear, ladies: the people who imagine they are doing God's will by erasing decades of your hard-won American freedoms don't care about science. Nor do they care who impregnated you. The baby (not a fetus, not an embryo, not a zygote, always a baby) has an iron-clad right to your womb whether it was put there by a friend, lover, husband, father, brother, priest, rabbi, rapist, or tax collector. They don't care if you're twenty-nine or nine. Gang-raped? Failed condom? Victim of incest? Comatose and raped by nursing-home orderlies? Couldn't matter less. A life is a life is a life.

And you must not take a life.

It's only okay to kill Iraqis. The president heard the voice of God telling him to do so.

It's only okay to kill poor, penniless, retarded Texas death-row prisoners with inexperienced lawyers who fall asleep during your trial. God told him so.

It's only okay to kill "evil-doers." The president decides who is evil and who is good.

He's the decider, see.

If you have no confidence in our glorious C-minus Man and his decider-isms, you should have no confidence in those who groomed and supported him, told him what to say and who to hire. Who to nominate to the Supreme Court. What to believe about good and evil.

And you should have even less confidence in this tortured and shameful Supreme Court decision.

Again, enough compassion. Enough is enough. Or too much.