Radical Right-Wingers

Victory!

Nice work, everyone:

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation reversed its decision to cut funds for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood affiliates and apologized to the American people for what it said was casting doubt on its “commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.”

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Women refuses to give raped daughter EC, brags about it on internet.

Ah, the kindness of pro-lifers: [trigger warning]

My Dark-Haired Daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder and limited cognitive abilities, went missing last Monday. For more than 48 hours, we had no idea where she was. Without all the gruesome details, after she was found, it came to light that she’d been brutally and repeatedly sexually assaulted. She’d been taken to the local women’s shelter, where (at least in our area) they do the exams in such cases.

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Five Ways to Support Health for All Women

As Caperton covered yesterday, the Komen Foundation recently pulled $600,000 in annual funding for Planned Parenthood, making it even more difficult for low-income women to get necessary cancer screenings. Nona over at GOOD offers a list of five other ways to support women’s health, and offers organizations to support that don’t put so-called “pro-life” values ahead of actual women’s lives. If you’ve got some extra cash, consider putting it toward actual health care.

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Birth Control: Kind of Like Pork Chops

“Pro-life” Catholic colleges are all salty about a new law requiring insurance plans to cover birth control. Because even though 98% of Catholic women will use contraception at some point in their lives, male Catholic leaders have decided that a baby is a gift from God and expecting insurance providers to cover birth control is like expecting pork to be served at a Jewish barbeque:

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Santorum to Rape Victims: When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade!

In an interview with Piers Morgan, Rick Santorum clarified his view that abortion should be illegal even where the woman was raped. Why? It’s a gift from God, and don’t look a gift-god in the mouth:

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The Sexual Counterrevolution

A very good article by Tracy Flory-Clark about the GOP’s war on sex – as we’re all getting more liberal in the bedroom, conservatives are trying to turn back the clock. It’s what Susan Faludi was talking about 20 years ago.

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Daughter of the Patriarchy: Admissions

“When I was your age, my parents wouldn’t send me to college,” my mother was telling me. “I had to work my way through on my own. I don’t want you to have to stop. I will do everything I can to help you keep going to school. Your education is the most important thing to me.”

We stood in the kitchen, a printed letter lying on the counter between us. It was not good news.

I glanced up at my mother with a strained smile. I knew that if wishes could be cashed at the bank, I’d be writing my admissions essay to an ivy-coated castle. Instead, I was trying to find a way to pay the bill from my last semester of community college in time to register for fall classes. It was already August.

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Ideological zealots: Usually bad news.

The latest battleground in Israel’s struggle over religious extremism [...] has the unexpected public face of a blond, bespectacled second-grade girl. She is Naama Margolese, 8, the daughter of American immigrants who are observant modern Orthodox Jews. [She has] become terrified of walking to her elementary school here after ultra-Orthodox men spit on her, insulted her and called her a prostitute because her modest dress did not adhere exactly to their more rigorous dress code.

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Whoops.

I am fairly confident that this could have been avoided.

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Personhood Amendments and the Pro-Life Long Game

I’m writing in the Guardian today about the real purpose of personhood amendments. A taste: Pro-lifers don’t actually believe that a fertilised egg is the moral equivalent of a newborn baby – if they did, there would certainly be major pushes for research on why more than half of all these cellular human beings are [...]

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Common Sense Time.

So Congressional GOP members want to extend Mississippi’s asinine personhood amendment to the whole country. Caperton wrote about the Mississippi bill, and detailed many of the ridiculous ways it will interfere with basic rights — one of the goals of the bill is to outlaw many forms of birth control, and it will undoubtedly be [...]

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Or maybe just don’t beat your kids.

Well this is disturbing, and I hope someone sues the hell out of these folks (alternately, I hope that they’re criminally prosecuted). The pastoral mood in the hills of Tennessee offered a stark contrast to the storm raging around the country over the Pearls’ teachings on child discipline, which advocate systematic use of “the rod” [...]

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