Wo Magazine

This is intense. Thanks to feministing for the link.

This is an article from Salon about the last [tag]abortion[/tag] clinic in Mississippi being under-siege by [tag]christian fundamentalists[/tag]. And it seems abortion is only the warm-up to the Crusades mark 2:

Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals “stole the colors of the rainbow,” several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, “We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ.” Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd — hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them — and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.

The protesters have likened abortion to the Holocaust (didn’t Hitler persecute queers too?)

At the Capitol, demonstrators formed two makeshift walls with huge signs that juxtaposed photos of aborted fetuses with lynching victims and corpses piled up at Nazi death camps. Behind them rose a statue — a monument honoring Confederate women — of garlanded ladies succoring a fallen man. Organizers set up speakers and played the kind of celestial music that signifies heaven in Hollywood movies, lending the proceedings a kitschy intensity. Standing before the assembly, Benham, a sturdy Texan with sun-cured skin, short brown hair, and the hearty manner of a high school football coach, cried out, “What is happening in Jackson today is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany!”

It seems that the nutjob who was leading proceedings at the protest also was encouraging martyrdom of the young christian children present:

Before him sat a small grill like the kind football fans use at tailgate parties; he asked the two dozen or so children in attendance to gather around it.

One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions.

[…]

As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum.

“There’s coming a time when it might cost you your life to stand up for King Jesus,” Benham told the children. “It is our prayer that if you go down, you go down standing up in the name of Jesus.”

Thank fuck the fundies aren’t so nuts [and populous] here yet. Dangerous, as far as political power goes, yes. Nuts, some, but not enough to pull off something this crazy.

I just read a really good piece here about the so-called “pro-life” movement in the states. As Jill from Feministe points out, life doesn’t have much to do with it:

Today, 90 African women will die from illegal abortions. Ninety more will die tomorrow, and 90 more will die the day after that. While only 10% of the world’s abortions happen in Africa, that continent accounts for about 50% of abortion-related deaths. One in 12 women who have abortions in Africa die. For every woman who dies, 20 to 30 women have their reproductive systems permanently damaged.

This is what happens when abortion is illegal and birth control is difficult to obtain. This is what “pro-life” policies bring.

Indeed, deaths from abortions were incredibly common in Australia before abortion became available legally (though as yet still not totally decriminalised).

The book Lost: Illegal abortion stories made the reality increasingly clear, despite my always being pro-choice, of the dangers to women that come with abortion being illegal and unsafe. I recommend reading it.

Here’s an excerpt as told by a former nurse:

The woman the policeman was questioning had septicaemia. She’d been done in a backyard somewhere, possible with knitting needles. Some were done with those and some were even done with hat pins, those great long hatpins that women wore then. They did the abortions themselves with these things–they simply pierced the thing in and hoped, but it never all came away fully, they would nearly always need to be curetted. But often, it would be too late for them by the time they got to hospital.

And they call themselves “[tag]pro-life[/tag]” ironically. And of course their railing against reproductive rights doesn’t end with abortion. This is another quote from the article at the Rude Pundit:

Reproductive rights have done amazing things for American women and families. They’ve helped to decrease poverty, allowed women access to college and the workforce, and given us greater autonomy in our romantic and personal lives. But that doesn’t stop our own anti-choicers from doing their damndest to raise the abortion rate in the name of all the little babies. They outlaw abortion in places like South Dakota, and only lament that the law is imperfect because it doesn’t also ban contraception. They refuse to fill prescriptions coming from reproductive health clinics — even prescriptions for antibiotics and pre-natal vitamins. They cut funding for contraception, because giving women the right to prevent pregnancy means that you’re promoting promiscuity (married and/or monogamous women have apparently never tried to prevent pregnancy). Indeed, they’ve declared a full-on war against contraception. They oppose programs that give accurate information about reproductive health and sexuality, opting instead for failed “abstinence-only” ideology. Some of them even go so far as to oppose a cancer vaccine, because apparently preventing death from cervical cancer would remove one of those icky “consqeuences” of fornication, and that just ain’t right.

Not surprisingly, the christian “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” that have apparently been becoming increasingly prevalent in the US, are responsible for comparing condoms to Russian Roulette, so obviously their concerns about unwanted pregnancies are limited.

At Jackson’s Center for Pregnancy Choices, which gets roughly $20,000 a year in payments from the state’s sale of Choose Life plates, I picked up a pamphlet about condoms. It warns that “using condoms is like playing Russian roulette … In chamber one you have a condom that breaks and you get syphilis, in chamber two, you have an STD that condoms don’t protect against at all, in chamber three you have a routinely fatal disease, in chamber four you have a new STD that hasn’t even been studied.”

I guess one has to wait until chamber five before the “condom gun” shoots a blank. This obviously isn’t aimed at stopping people from having sex so much as it is at stopping people from having protected sex. No need to point out the extreme wrongness of that.