Saturday, April 09, 2011

Apple of My Eye Roundup

In NYC for my cousin's wedding. Big weekend for her, and decently large one for me -- this is Jill's roll out to my dad's side of the family. Wish us luck!

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I don't care whether they're actually happy or not, if I were the Tea Party, I would have declared victory on the budget battle.

Former top NOMer comes out in favor of full marriage equality.

The first Democrat officially jumps into the recall race, taking on highly endangered state Sen. Dan Kapanke (R-La Crosse).

I don't know whether anyone was thinking of reading Schools for Misrule based on David Bernstein's recommendation, but allow me to say: don't. It joins a Michael Moore volume as tied for the worst (and most nakedly hackish) non-fiction book I've ever read. And I'm someone who supports increased conservative representation in legal academia.

Can someone tell me what race-selective abortion even is? "Evidence shows that minorities are targeted for abortion" -- what, do they think African-American couples are getting pregnant, find out their baby will be Black, and are hoping for better luck next time? I find this utterly baffling.

Black student group condemns Israel-as-apartheid analogies. It's a group I haven't heard of -- it appears to be a grassroots organization centered on HBCUs, and has been strongly supported by AIPAC.

2 comments:

Rebecca said...

Thanks for the comment on "race-selective abortion." I had put it vaguely in the same category as "sex-selective abortion" and then didn't think any further. It's possible to find out the sex of the baby before birth - but how would you discover its race?

PG said...

(1) As noted by VC commenters, the "minorities targeted for abortion" BS comes from old rhetoric about Margaret Sanger's wanting to commit genocide against black people by making abortion available to African American women. Black women should instead be forced to bear children against their will, like in slave days. Abortion prohibitionists believe that women of color are too dumb to know what they're doing when they choose to have abortions, therefore they must be having them just because there are abortion clinics in minority-heavy neighborhoods. You know how dumb we minority women are. We're pregnant, we walk by an abortion clinic, we think, "I've already painted the nursery, but the clinic's RIGHT THERE. Guess I better have an abortion instead!"

(2) Also noted by VC commenters, this sets up for a more serious version of the Planned Parenthood stings carried out last year: this time with criminal penalties. Recruit a pregnant woman who opposes abortion to go into a clinic claiming that she wants an abortion, including among other reasons that she doesn't want the baby because of its race or sex. Wait for the doctor to sign the affidavit, then have the woman suddenly change her mind and leave, bringing the cops back with her. It's brilliant: the law has no penalties for the person actually motivated by discriminatory intent (the woman seeking the abortion), but adds another method to the arsenal of tactics designed to terrorize physicians out of performing abortions.

As the latest sex-balance statistics in India (which criminalized sex-discriminatory abortions several years ago, but has a worse ratio of girls to boys 0-6 years of age than it did before the ban) should make clear, such laws are wholly ineffective if what you genuinely care about is stopping abortions based on discriminatory intent. However, unlike India, that's not Arizona's motive at all, so the law may be a resounding success for them.