From the hairpin, The Best Time I Took My Baby to the Emergency Room
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This is still a little too raw for me to really want to talk about it, but I got a bit of a guilt-nudge from yesterday’s post on criminalizing bad mothers. All parents do something stupid at some point, and most of us get away with it. That’s the truth. Usually, it’s not doing meth while you’re pregnant, or putting your baby on top of a bear in Yellowstone so you can film it. But it’s something, and you usually get away with it. And if you get away with it, it’s a funny story, and you’ll eventually laugh about it with other parents. If you don’t get away with it, people will make themselves feel better about their own mistakes by pillorying you. But there’s no difference between people who do something stupid and get away with it, and people who don’t get away with it. It’s luck. Don’t kid yourself.
From Religion Dispatches, A New Goal for Anti-Choice Activists: Targeting Sex-Selective Abortion
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PRENDA could be this year’s Pence Amendment—named for its author Indiana Rep. Mike Pence (now running for Governor of Indiana) and his attempt to bring down Obama’s health care law over the federal funding of Planned Parenthood. PRENDA, like the Pence Amendment, is red meat for the anti-choice mission to defund and defame Planned Parenthood. It will also serve as a pure political tool to electrify the single-issue voter to recruit carloads of right-wing voters to the polls.
PRENDA, like the Pence Amendment, will likely not pass in the Senate. But if it passes the House we can expect a joint Boehner/Franks press conference designed to use the victory as reinforcement of a growing GOP meme: this bill will save millions of baby girls! The Democrats voted against saving the lives of potential women! Who’s waging the real war on women, Democrats? We are the true women’s rights advocates!
In a recent op-ed at Politico, “Battle Hymn of the Anti-Abortion Feminist,” Lila Rose begins, “In the ongoing debate over women’s health care, one voice has been mostly absent: that of the anti-abortion feminist.” Rose casts herself—and other anti-abortion activists—as the true champions of women, just like the rest of the GOP. Although PRENDA addresses “black genocide” again, this year’s focus is decidedly on sex-selection abortion.
From NPR, From Minister to Atheist: A Story of Losing Faith
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MacBain glances nervously around the room. It’s a Sunday, and normally she would be preaching at her church in Tallahassee, Fla. But here she is, sneaking away to the American Atheists‘ convention in Bethesda, Md.
Her secret is taking a toll, eating at her conscience as she goes about her pastoral duties week after week — two sermons every Sunday, singing hymns, praying for the sick when she doesn’t believe in the God she’s praying to. She has had no one to talk to, at least not in her Christian community, so her iPhone has become her confessor, where she records her private fears and frustrations.
“On my way to church again. Another Sunday. Man, this is getting worse,” she tells her phone in one recording. “How did I get myself in this mess? Sometimes, I think to myself, if I could just go back a few years and not ask the questions and just be one of those sheep and blindly follow and not know the truth, it would be so much easier. I’d just keep my job. But I can’t do that. I know it’s a lie. I know it’s false.”