MAY 2019 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

The forced-birthers are picking up steam. With God on their side, how can they lose? Here’s a couple samplings:

1. Michigan State Senator Kim LaSata. Everyone knows that God hates women who get abortions. In fact, one of the earliest books in the Hebrew Bible—Numbers—has a “pleasant” story about God’s priests giving women a special “potion” that would induce an abortion. According to the Bible, it was a punishment for adultery. So, abortion is OK if God wants it done to punish women.

Michigan state Sen. LaSata doesn’t read those kinds of bibles. She reads her own special bible and has big thoughts and feelings about what God wants. She and other forced-birther zealots in the Michigan state legislature have been trying to get their own abortion ban through.

With Alabama’s decision to outlaw abortions in virtually all cases, forced-birther types like Sen. LaSata want everyone to know that they are overjoyed by their victory in protecting the “sanctity of life.” The Detroit Free Press explains that during examination of medical experts, LaSata became angry after testimony that by banning standard second-trimester procedures for abortion, the Michigan legislature would be putting women into painful and dangerous scenarios. Sen. LaSata’s response was the kind of Jesus-empathizing you might expect from a good Christian like herself:

“Of course, it should be hard! And the procedure should be painful! And you should allow God to take over!! And you should deliver that baby!"

LaSata has talked about her own personal abortion story, where she attempted to get an abortion, it didn’t work, and she ended up giving birth to a stillborn baby. She called the experience an intervention by God, forcing her to go through with what must have been a truly emotional and physically brutal experience.

It seems that what LaSata wants is for other women to experience, regardless of the situation, the trauma she experienced. In her mind, based on her words, she thinks that God did that to her so other women should get to experience God’s work in the same way. Bring on the pain.


2. GOP Lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, etc. Southern and Mid-West legislatures are racing to see which can pass the most draconian anti-abortion legislation. First came Alabama’s draconian anti-choice law, which was then followed by a tidal wave of like-minded state actions. Particularly noteworthy among the pillars of pro-life morality is Florida Republican representative Mike Hill.

Hill filed Florida’s so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill this session, which forbids an abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat, which usually happens at the six-week mark in the middle of the first trimester—long before a woman would know she’s even pregnant.  It’s based on complete junk science. As the director of gynecology at UC San Francisco explains, it’s “a group of cells with electrical activity. That’s what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system.”

The goal is, as always, to legalize a forced pregnancy.

Unlike Alabama, the bill at least originally included exceptions for rape, incest, domestic violence, human trafficking or if the woman's life is in danger.

That is until God apparently got involved and called Mike up.

“As plain as day, God spoke to me. He said that wasn't my bill, talking about the heartbeat detection bill that I filed. He said that wasn't my bill. I knew immediately what he was talking about. He said you remove those exceptions and you file it again. And I said, yes Lord, I will. It's coming back. It's coming back. We are going to file that bill without any exceptions just like what we saw passed in Alabama.

Funny that God didn’t mention anything to Mike about protecting our children from his party’s refusal to do anything about Florida’s infamous gun violence.  After all, Florida now has more mass shootings than any other state, including the two largest in US history with Pulse and Parkland.

God didn’t tell Mike, or other GOP faithful, to do anything about young migrant children being sexually assaulted at Florida’s for-profit detention centers. Or the fact that the state ranks at the top for human trafficking, and simultaneously at the bottom for infant mortality, baby birth weight, and uninsured low-income babies.

It does strike me as slightly odd that God said nothing to Mike about doing his damn job to make things even slightly better in our bottom-of-the-barrel state for babies, especially since he’s so hyper-focused on forcing that Miami sex slave to bear child.

In fact, the Florida law will likely follow Alabama’s by only making one specific exemption, and that’s for fertilized embryos destroyed in invitro-fertilization (IVF). When asked why this was the ONLY exemption, the sponsor of the Alabama abortion ban gave this answer: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

There you have it; case closed. Do you think God is talking to Brett Kavanaugh?

3. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Another day, another horrifying dismissal of climate change by one of our top government representatives. In this case, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to describe the Arctic's melting ice caps as “new opportunities for trade,” which is possibly the worst climate-related take of the day.

Pompeo uttered this out-of-touch assertion when he appeared at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland. This probably doesn’t come as a major surprise, but the bulk of Pompeo’s speech centered on China and Russia. Russia, for what it’s worth, has long held a serious reach in the Arctic, but China is rapidly getting closer.

But you know, why not throw in an asinine statement on climate change while you’re at it?

“Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” Pompeo told the audience. “This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days. Arctic sea lanes could come before—could become the 21st century Suez and Panama Canals.”

“And its centerpiece, the Arctic Ocean, is rapidly taking on new strategic significance,” he continued. “Offshore resources, which are helping the respective coastal states, are the subject of renewed competition.”

While this is terrible, it isn’t really surprising given Pompeo’s past comments on climate change. For example, he was asked by ABC News last month how he would rank climate change among other national security threats.

“I can’t rank it,” he replied. “We’ve seen America reduce its carbon footprint, while the signatories, including China, haven’t done theirs … At the end of the day, the world is no safer.”

The previous week the Trump administration tried to remove references to climate change from the Arctic Council’s declaration. The declaration is a big deal, and all eight countries involved expect to sign it. The eight countries include Canada, Denmark (which includes Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the U.S.

“There are different tones with which different countries want to approach climate change,” Aleksi Harkonen, the Arctic Ambassador of Finland, said, as reported by CNBC. “It’s not about whether climate change can be mentioned or not. It will be there in the final declaration.”

And while everyone (hopefully) agrees that climate change is a serious issue, it’s worth noting that it’s particularly dire in the Arctic. Why? In short, the Arctic is warming at more than double the rate that the rest of the globe is. This means that the region is changing at a rapid rate, which can be impossibly dangerous for wildlife and indigenous populations. Pompeo sees all of this as just a security issue, but it’s a humanitarian one, too.

4. More IGGY Behavior from Florida GOP Legislators. After Floridians voted by a 65-35 landslide to approve a 2018 constitutional amendment to restore voting tights for as many as 1.4 million citizens who had fully completed their felony sentences, Republican legislators just sent GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill that would try to keep the vast majority of those citizens disenfranchised by imposing a measure straight out of the Jim Crow playbook: poll taxes. Their measure would require the payment of not just restitution but also all court-related fines and fees before voters could regain their rights.

​Florida's felony disenfranchisement system itself is a leftover from Jim Crow. It was given a modern form shortly after the Civil War as part of a way of keeping black citizens from voting in a state that was nearly one-half black at the time. Before 2018's ballot initiative passed, the Sentencing Project estimated that one in 10 Floridians were disenfranchised, including one in five black voters--five times the rate of those who aren't black.

Imposing a requirement to pay off all court costs is especially draconian because of the predatory ways in which Florida courts and law enforcement derive funding from harsh fines imposed on criminal defendants above and beyond restitution to crime victims. Even worse, it requires the payment of fines that have been converted into civil liens, meaning even some who have paid all of their criminal penalties still wouldn't have the right to vote. They could vote if a judge converts such debts into community service hours or if the owed party waives it, but a former judge told the Miami Herald that doing so could create a massive backlog in the justice system if hundreds of thousands apply to have debts waived.

By demanding that citizens pay all court fines and fees, Republicans could effectively roll back most of the 2018 amendment. It's unclear just how many people would have had their rights restored by the new amendment, but one analysis estimates Republicans' actions could keep roughly four-fifths of them from voting— making up to 1.1 million more people permanently disenfranchised—all because they're too poor to pay court costs. Black defendants, especially are considered less likely to be able to pay off all their court costs than white defendants, according to one study.

Voting rights advocates such as the ACLU, which played a major role in supporting the 2018 measure, have condemned the GOP efforts, and a lawsuit is all but guaranteed. However, after Republican Ron DeSantis narrowly won last year's election for governor—importantly thanks to felony disenfranchisement—Republicans now hold a 6-1 majority on Florida's Supreme Court, putting the odds of such a lawsuit's success in doubt. By the same token, the U.S. Supreme Court's dismal record on voting rights under Chief Justice John Roberts isn't encouraging for the prospects of a federal suit.

Florida’s restoration of felony voting rights was one of the few things I could cheer after the dismal 2016 election. I should have known better. Republicans are steadfast determined to eviscerate any election outcome that didn’t go its way, whether it’s Michigan and Wisconsin reducing the authority of newly elected Democratic governors or Florida gutting the felony voting initiative.
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And the winner is:

Wow, what a month for Florida lawmakers. For their bold-faced denial of the will of Florida voters and their disregard for legal precedent protecting a woman’s right to choose, I am conferring this month’s IGGY on Florida GOP legislators—God notwithstanding.