Would that men had wombs
Conservatives and right-to-life fanatics may be putting a stranglehold on Tennessee and the country, but never doubt the determination of free-minded women with a cause.
That reminder came to the Tennessee General Assembly in Nashville on Tuesday -- complete with about 60 protesters chanting "pro-choice, pro-family." They carried signs with slogans such as "Keep your laws off my body," and "Politicians make crappy doctors."
The protesters had split off from hundreds attending a nearby "March on Nashville" rally. And they put our lawmakers on notice that, despite the squeaker 52.6 percent passage of an abortion amendment last fall giving Tennessee lawmakers more leeway to restrict abortion here, opposition is alive and well.
"What I hope we did was make the politicians aware there's a very strong, very vocal anti-Amendment 1 contingent that's not going to stand by and let legislation get passed," said Rose Brannen, a protester and nurse from Nashville who said she personally backs "common-sense legislation, which means if we want to reduce the abortion rates we have to do things like increase access to contraception, things like [provide] comprehensive sex education."
The protest followed a news conference of a group of female Republican lawmakers and Tennessee Right to Life officials who had stated their objective is to re-pass three abortion-related laws that had been struck down in a 2000 ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court. Those laws deal with "informed consent," a mandatory waiting period and regulation of all abortion facilities with rules designed to make them, but not other health clinics, too expensive and difficult to operate.
The Tennessee fight for choice is beginning anew -- as is that same fight in many other GOP-controlled states which recently enacted a record-breaking number of laws attacking abortion. Over the past three years, state legislatures enacted a staggering 205 restrictions on reproductive rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Guttmacher researchers found that more abortion restrictions were enacted in the years 2011-2013 than in the entire previous decades -- despite massive public outcry against some of those restrictions. Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, has said the timing of the recent state legislative onslaughts is no coincidence and can be tracked back to 2010 "when out-of-touch tea party politicians picked up key seats in legislatures across the country, promising to create jobs and boost our economy -- but immediately focused [instead] on ending access to safe and legal abortion and limiting women's health care options."
Let's keep this new heat for choice on our lawmakers.
It is terror that oppresses
Give peace a chance.
No, do more than that. Demand it.
There is all manner of terrorism in our world, and it doesn't really matter if that terrorism is ascribed to a religion or a nationality or a Mother Goose book. Whatever its so-called root, is is still inhumane, tragic, brutal, fearful terrorism.
Paris got a lot of attention last week for some very visible, visceral and hateful attacks when self-styled jihadists stormed a satirical magazine office and a kosher grocery store, then in separate incidents killed several police officers.
Within days of thousands lining the streets of Paris in a show of international support of free expression and grief over the loss of 17 lives there, some began questioning why the world isn't grieving similarly for the estimated 2,000 people killed by the Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria in the past month. Some were reportedly killed when terrorists strapped a bomb to a girl said to be as young as 10. Those terrorists sent the child into a crowded area before they remotely detonated the bomb she bore.
Boko Haram (the names means "Western education is forbidden") is the same group that last April kidnapped nearly 300 girls from a school in the Nigerian town of Chibok. The girls are still missing.
Picking up the thread, some Twitter tweeters made the "why Paris not Nigeria" question one about race: #BlackLivesMatter. Others made it about location, location, location: Paris is everyperson's city and Nigeria is remote.
But New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last week made another excellent point (see it elsewhere on this page) about the world needing a million-person march against jihadists within the Arab-Muslim world -- and one not prompted by the western hemisphere or involving or not involving our president or any other world leader.
I would take that suggestion one step further. Make it a billion-person march against all terrorists of all stripes everywhere.
Let's start now. Here. In each of us. For each of us -- all of the family of man and woman on our earth.