We’re now into the second month of Project Fire & Brimstone, where clinic defenders partnered with local Satanists (who consider abortion a sacrament) to take the battle to the other side by picketing their businesses and churches. It’s been a rousing success.
They REALLY don’t like us picketing their churches. It’s hard to showcase your holiness and coziness with the Almighty when a bunch of sign-waving protesters are telling anyone who’ll listen what an asshole you are. I was under the weather this weekend and couldn’t attend, but my sister said some of the kids were throwing rocks at them. Some Christians. Thinking Jesus would NOT approve.
They’re still working on the video footage, but we’re going to wind up with a lovely story about how “evangelical Christians” (a) turned people away from their church in the pouring rain, (b) cursed at us (one had to be restrained by her daughter to keep her from assaulting my sister) and (c) let their children throw rocks at us.
Kansas has a law against “disrupting church services” so we’re careful to keep quiet once the actual service starts. The one we call Fido (he chases cars) apparently used to work for the FBI and tried to threaten us with federal prosecution. Good luck with that, chump. If you can come to Planned Parenthood and express your disapproval of the staff and patients, we can do the same to you. Call it Operation #HowDoYOULikeItAsshole?
I’m thinking this is how we win. Clinic defense is just a holding action that temporarily slows them down but does nothing to solve the problem long-term. By taking the fight to them, we show them we’re not playing games and are in this for the long haul.
And they REALLY don’t like us picketing their churches. Suffer, you bastards.
To clarify, gynecological care is not the only state discrepancy. It's a main part of the discrepancy, but medical care you get in Tennessee for anything is vastly different from medical care you'll get in Maryland. There are state medical discrepancies in every single medical specialty and focus. From the type of care that's available to you to who can offer that care to who pays for that care to what laws govern your care, no state is uniform. This often and regularly results in people having to travel hundreds of miles to get the care that they need, or, alternately, they die.
Reminds me of seeing someone here saying "they would never deny care to a man". They would, they can, and they do. Native men and Black men aren't getting the same standards of care as rich white men. Hell, poor white men aren't getting the same standards of care as rich white men.
This is even true from hospital system to hospital system within the same state. It took 3 years to find a medical team for my parasitic disease. The first team treated it like it was nothing. I had to get myself into a study at the University of Chicago and get them to help me find a good doctor in my area. Our country makes people sicker by piling so much stress onto being ill. Most of the time, this isn’t the healthcare provider’s fault. They’re doing the best they can with absurd demands from administrators, insurers and now legislators. It’s unfortunate that our entire healthcare system is going to have to melt down for people to see how unreasonable they are being, how unfair it is.
Truth. I grew up in greater Boston. I moved away as a young woman, and moved back in 1985. Greater Boston has pretty much the best healthcare overall, in the country. There’s a cluster of some of the best hospitals you can find.
And still - it wasn’t until I moved to dinky little Colorado Springs that my MS was diagnosed. Part of that was that I finally had a symptom that was pretty much a dead giveaway, and part of it is that this city (not the whole state) is a huge hotspot for MS - it’s hard to find someone here that doesn’t have a friend or relative that has the disease.
But back in Boston, my symptoms were repeatedly dismissed, attributed to everything from my shoes, to a depression I didn’t have, to being a woman (seriously, one doctor told me all women have severe back problems), to perimenopause (I didn’t hit menopause for another 25 years, so pardon my doubting that one!)
A lot of it is how the system treats women, and part of it is doctors who don’t have time to really explore issues - and so just dismiss things out of hand without doing any follow up. Insurance companies don’t want to pay for testing, so unless a problem is clear cut, they deny coverage.
I have to confess a bit of schadenfreude over rural areas losing access to health care. Rural areas overwhelmingly vote Republican and as such are a cancer on the country. But then there are caveats. There do exist rural dwellers who are not part of the red mass, and they're getting hurt too. More importantly, the reason people get to be like that is because they're stuck in these god forsaken places. In an ideal world it would be easy to migrate to cities, and then anyone who chose to stay behind and be regressive would be given what they deserve. But we don't live in that world. People get trapped, and we allow these places to fester and rot, spawning MAGAts and sapping all humanity.
this comment saddens me deeply. I have, for a while now, been part of a blue dot in the extremely red state of Oklahoma. my republican-voting neighbors do not deserve what they get for voting that way. in fact, I think it's essential that as progressives, we're fighting for true progress for everyone, not better things for ourselves and blame and shame for those who didn't see the light in time. I urge you to consider that states like mine are often last/lagging in education and access to higher ed, and that we have incredibly high rates of poverty and incarceration. while some people here are choosing ignorance, others simply have never had the resources to get beyond the bubble they were raised in and learn enough to change their minds. there are extremely systemic reasons that states like mine look and vote like we do. all of us in red states deserve heath care, not just the red state residents who vote like you and me.
It saddens me too, and that's why I talked it out and equivocated. I agree with almost all of what you wrote, and it's like what I meant when I said people are stuck and these places fester and rot. The problem we're having though, is that Republican voting is one of the biggest obstacles to change there. They're waging war on us, they're biting the hand that would feed them, they're literally trying to get people killed. Sometimes I think - not saying you were doing this - this gets treated as though it were some outside force, like the weather. It's Trump, or it's billionaires spreading lies (I guess that's the same thing but I meant other right wing messaging campaigns), or it's whatever, something in the air and the water. When do we as a nation hold the people who have been voting Republican responsible for what's happening? Are they ever accountable for their own actions, or are they always helpless victims who've been duped? Because if they would stop the hate, things would change awfully quickly. And that's what makes me angry and makes me vent. But yeah I don't want to be consumed by hate either. What I want is people to be safe and protected, and that's not happening, and when I look for who is actively trying to hurt other Americans, it mostly goes in one direction.
Thank you. My husband and I provided cared for those people, often uncompensated, knowing many hated our ideas, and now we are sick, isolated, can’t move, can’t get adequate care. It’s a nightmare. I only moved back here to be near sick, dying family. It often feels like a mistake. I get victim shamed for everything that happens to me now. The voting split is 55/45, so a lot of us are reasonable.
It is a nightmare. And it sounds like you are right in the middle of it. The only thing I can hope is that Democrats can win full control of the federal government (minus judiciary), which is unlikely but not impossible, and that federal government can provide some relief to these areas, in the same way that it took a federal effort to end slavery in the South. That's a mixed analogy because back then while some relief was provided, many things remained unchanged. Still it's better than nothing.
But like everything else, those people won’t change until they lose people they love because of this, or they almost die or are severely impacted. And of they’re like my parents, they’ll chalk it up to God’s will. “God’s will” makes people accept things that are untenable.
That's why I have a very hard time accepting that faith and religion can ever be benevolent, even when I see people doing really good things with it, like one of the readers here. The ability to play the "God" card whenever needed, to justify absolutely anything, always trumps everything else. (Usually that t-verb is ruined by the connotation to 45, but in this case the double meaning actually adds something).
It’s not all religions - it’s particular the Abrahamic faiths, though Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism aren’t that far behind.
But a lot of smaller faiths are very different, particularly those which are polytheistic.
As you know, I was raised as a witch (not a Wiccan). In all my many years, I’ve met less than a handful of real pagans whose politics weren’t progressive, particularly when it comes to women’s rights.
Yeah. My issue is just that any time you have license to overrule all other arguments by saying "God" or "the gods" that's a recipe for abuse. I suspect that those who support the majority faith in their area are much more conservative and prone to that than those who subscribe to a faith considered eccentric in their community, such as pagans. The former group have a lot of power to abuse which the latter group almost entirely lack. Hence why Buddhists in America are largely peaceful while Buddhists in Myanmar perpetrate genocide. And in ancient societies in which the majority were pagan, I am quite certain that people did just as many terrible evil things in service of that religion. It's about abuse of power, and God or the gods are an appeal to justify that.
I think it's about power, yes. But it also speaks to the human craving to know what happens after we die. It's impossible to know. It will happen to each of us, and we'll find out. I'm okay with saying, "This speaks to me and gives me hope, but I realize it's absolutely not provable. Therefore, I'm not forcing it on anyone else."
Many humans cannot handle this unknown. They believe turning their faith into "certainty" or "the only truth," that will somehow force it to be so. These people truly don't understand what faith is. They are drawn to leaders who reassure them with promises of "the only truth." To me, it's a sad way to live.
In the 70’s I was stationed in West Texas which is the only reason I was in that miserable state and when I left permanently there was a mini mart and as I was getting some snacks for my road-trip near the cashier were bumper stickers for sale and one caught my eye and I’ve never forgotten it. “Happiness is seeing Texas in your rear view mirror”.
The one thing I’ll always remember about my time in Texas is that it felt like I was in another country and 40+ years later it still seems like it is run by an authoritarian regime. Another thing I remember is on Sundays during football season when the Dallas Cowboys were on tv church start time would begin so the good Christian folk could watch the game then go to church. WTF.
I’ve been back to Texas 2x since 1980 once for 3 days for work and once for 3 days when my dad died. As a person with a brain who thinks for himself and would never demand that a woman do as I say, In other words I’m not a right wing wacko I could never live in a place where females, people of color or a different faith are treated as substandard humans. With the exception of Mary any adult who is blood related to ^^^^^ should be imprisoned for the rest of their natural life. Our country has her problems and both parties are responsible but since 2015 90% of the responsibility lies upon the shoulders of every republican politician and voter.
I've only ever heard good things about Austin. But then it's a bit like old West Berlin, but without the independence from the surrounding area, isn't it? Good place set right down in the middle of hell.
Yeah that's why I was careful to say reported. They won't be able to hide forever though. And of course that victim will be heavily scrutinized, looking for a reason to blame her for her fate or at least say it couldn't be helped. If it's a Black woman the country has already proven it can ignore her just like Breonna Taylor. Sadly we need a "nice white girl".
Yeah. Most Democrats should be outraged regardless when it happens (although even there we have too many men who don't care enough). The people we need to be outraged are the pro-choice voters who've been voting for Republicans, so the 'ideal' victim is someone tailor made to their value system, which is different from our own or they'd already be Democrats.
@jessica and @grace - I wanted to point out Jane Coastens interview with Kristan Hawkins in NYT yesterday about abortion in high risk medical situations. She uses the term “maternal fetal separation”. I’d love to see you look into that. Bc guess what, it’s abortion. Thx, as always, for your reporting.
It's super gross because they're talking about either inducing or C-section even if it's before a fetus is viable. So if it dies because it's 22 weeks, then that's not "abortion." It's "maternal fetal separation". The doublethink is mind blowing.
This woman also has two... Not one...TWO kids with a preventable condition called cystic fibrosis who will suffocate to death before the age of thirty. She's a nut job.
That’s so clear, I think, from the NYT article. I was greatly cheered however, in reading through the comments on the piece.
I’m aware the readership of the Times leans sharply left, but what surprised me was how overall, they were very well informed. A number of people noted the anti-contraceptive stance of Students for Life. Most of the commenters were clear on the arrogance and self-righteousness Hawkins displayed, and the condescension toward women that seems to underpin her position.
Overall, her doublespeak, goal post moving, and her vague answers seemed to really piss them off.
She wouldn't have nearly as resentment if she had just stopped having kids after the first kid that turned out to have it. But she kept rolling the dice. Like I said. Nut job.
Story time. Last year when abortion was on the ballot, I was trying to convince a neighbor(orthodox jew) to vote pro abortion. I brought up the disease Tay- Sachs, which is much more horrific than cf. This did not sway him in the least. As an aside, he also doesn't believe LGBTQ people exist. We ended that discussion with him saying 'I am a cat'
You'll probably appreciate this. He also thinks Desantis is great. Also, my next door neighbor, who is also orthodox, thinks Trump was an amazing president. On the bright side, I really enjoyed the salmon when I have had dinner at his house.
Sharing this if people haven't seen it. It underscored the creepiness of Ho's ruling: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-22/abortion-pill-drug-mifepristone-fifth-circuit-court-judge-james-ho
Reading his ruling is like watching a horror film.
We’re now into the second month of Project Fire & Brimstone, where clinic defenders partnered with local Satanists (who consider abortion a sacrament) to take the battle to the other side by picketing their businesses and churches. It’s been a rousing success.
They REALLY don’t like us picketing their churches. It’s hard to showcase your holiness and coziness with the Almighty when a bunch of sign-waving protesters are telling anyone who’ll listen what an asshole you are. I was under the weather this weekend and couldn’t attend, but my sister said some of the kids were throwing rocks at them. Some Christians. Thinking Jesus would NOT approve.
They’re still working on the video footage, but we’re going to wind up with a lovely story about how “evangelical Christians” (a) turned people away from their church in the pouring rain, (b) cursed at us (one had to be restrained by her daughter to keep her from assaulting my sister) and (c) let their children throw rocks at us.
Kansas has a law against “disrupting church services” so we’re careful to keep quiet once the actual service starts. The one we call Fido (he chases cars) apparently used to work for the FBI and tried to threaten us with federal prosecution. Good luck with that, chump. If you can come to Planned Parenthood and express your disapproval of the staff and patients, we can do the same to you. Call it Operation #HowDoYOULikeItAsshole?
I’m thinking this is how we win. Clinic defense is just a holding action that temporarily slows them down but does nothing to solve the problem long-term. By taking the fight to them, we show them we’re not playing games and are in this for the long haul.
And they REALLY don’t like us picketing their churches. Suffer, you bastards.
Awesome! Good work!
THIS IS INSPIRED. I love it so much.
To clarify, gynecological care is not the only state discrepancy. It's a main part of the discrepancy, but medical care you get in Tennessee for anything is vastly different from medical care you'll get in Maryland. There are state medical discrepancies in every single medical specialty and focus. From the type of care that's available to you to who can offer that care to who pays for that care to what laws govern your care, no state is uniform. This often and regularly results in people having to travel hundreds of miles to get the care that they need, or, alternately, they die.
Reminds me of seeing someone here saying "they would never deny care to a man". They would, they can, and they do. Native men and Black men aren't getting the same standards of care as rich white men. Hell, poor white men aren't getting the same standards of care as rich white men.
This is even true from hospital system to hospital system within the same state. It took 3 years to find a medical team for my parasitic disease. The first team treated it like it was nothing. I had to get myself into a study at the University of Chicago and get them to help me find a good doctor in my area. Our country makes people sicker by piling so much stress onto being ill. Most of the time, this isn’t the healthcare provider’s fault. They’re doing the best they can with absurd demands from administrators, insurers and now legislators. It’s unfortunate that our entire healthcare system is going to have to melt down for people to see how unreasonable they are being, how unfair it is.
Andra,
Truth. I grew up in greater Boston. I moved away as a young woman, and moved back in 1985. Greater Boston has pretty much the best healthcare overall, in the country. There’s a cluster of some of the best hospitals you can find.
And still - it wasn’t until I moved to dinky little Colorado Springs that my MS was diagnosed. Part of that was that I finally had a symptom that was pretty much a dead giveaway, and part of it is that this city (not the whole state) is a huge hotspot for MS - it’s hard to find someone here that doesn’t have a friend or relative that has the disease.
But back in Boston, my symptoms were repeatedly dismissed, attributed to everything from my shoes, to a depression I didn’t have, to being a woman (seriously, one doctor told me all women have severe back problems), to perimenopause (I didn’t hit menopause for another 25 years, so pardon my doubting that one!)
A lot of it is how the system treats women, and part of it is doctors who don’t have time to really explore issues - and so just dismiss things out of hand without doing any follow up. Insurance companies don’t want to pay for testing, so unless a problem is clear cut, they deny coverage.
I have to confess a bit of schadenfreude over rural areas losing access to health care. Rural areas overwhelmingly vote Republican and as such are a cancer on the country. But then there are caveats. There do exist rural dwellers who are not part of the red mass, and they're getting hurt too. More importantly, the reason people get to be like that is because they're stuck in these god forsaken places. In an ideal world it would be easy to migrate to cities, and then anyone who chose to stay behind and be regressive would be given what they deserve. But we don't live in that world. People get trapped, and we allow these places to fester and rot, spawning MAGAts and sapping all humanity.
this comment saddens me deeply. I have, for a while now, been part of a blue dot in the extremely red state of Oklahoma. my republican-voting neighbors do not deserve what they get for voting that way. in fact, I think it's essential that as progressives, we're fighting for true progress for everyone, not better things for ourselves and blame and shame for those who didn't see the light in time. I urge you to consider that states like mine are often last/lagging in education and access to higher ed, and that we have incredibly high rates of poverty and incarceration. while some people here are choosing ignorance, others simply have never had the resources to get beyond the bubble they were raised in and learn enough to change their minds. there are extremely systemic reasons that states like mine look and vote like we do. all of us in red states deserve heath care, not just the red state residents who vote like you and me.
It saddens me too, and that's why I talked it out and equivocated. I agree with almost all of what you wrote, and it's like what I meant when I said people are stuck and these places fester and rot. The problem we're having though, is that Republican voting is one of the biggest obstacles to change there. They're waging war on us, they're biting the hand that would feed them, they're literally trying to get people killed. Sometimes I think - not saying you were doing this - this gets treated as though it were some outside force, like the weather. It's Trump, or it's billionaires spreading lies (I guess that's the same thing but I meant other right wing messaging campaigns), or it's whatever, something in the air and the water. When do we as a nation hold the people who have been voting Republican responsible for what's happening? Are they ever accountable for their own actions, or are they always helpless victims who've been duped? Because if they would stop the hate, things would change awfully quickly. And that's what makes me angry and makes me vent. But yeah I don't want to be consumed by hate either. What I want is people to be safe and protected, and that's not happening, and when I look for who is actively trying to hurt other Americans, it mostly goes in one direction.
Thank you. My husband and I provided cared for those people, often uncompensated, knowing many hated our ideas, and now we are sick, isolated, can’t move, can’t get adequate care. It’s a nightmare. I only moved back here to be near sick, dying family. It often feels like a mistake. I get victim shamed for everything that happens to me now. The voting split is 55/45, so a lot of us are reasonable.
It is a nightmare. And it sounds like you are right in the middle of it. The only thing I can hope is that Democrats can win full control of the federal government (minus judiciary), which is unlikely but not impossible, and that federal government can provide some relief to these areas, in the same way that it took a federal effort to end slavery in the South. That's a mixed analogy because back then while some relief was provided, many things remained unchanged. Still it's better than nothing.
But like everything else, those people won’t change until they lose people they love because of this, or they almost die or are severely impacted. And of they’re like my parents, they’ll chalk it up to God’s will. “God’s will” makes people accept things that are untenable.
That's why I have a very hard time accepting that faith and religion can ever be benevolent, even when I see people doing really good things with it, like one of the readers here. The ability to play the "God" card whenever needed, to justify absolutely anything, always trumps everything else. (Usually that t-verb is ruined by the connotation to 45, but in this case the double meaning actually adds something).
Zach,
It’s not all religions - it’s particular the Abrahamic faiths, though Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism aren’t that far behind.
But a lot of smaller faiths are very different, particularly those which are polytheistic.
As you know, I was raised as a witch (not a Wiccan). In all my many years, I’ve met less than a handful of real pagans whose politics weren’t progressive, particularly when it comes to women’s rights.
Yeah. My issue is just that any time you have license to overrule all other arguments by saying "God" or "the gods" that's a recipe for abuse. I suspect that those who support the majority faith in their area are much more conservative and prone to that than those who subscribe to a faith considered eccentric in their community, such as pagans. The former group have a lot of power to abuse which the latter group almost entirely lack. Hence why Buddhists in America are largely peaceful while Buddhists in Myanmar perpetrate genocide. And in ancient societies in which the majority were pagan, I am quite certain that people did just as many terrible evil things in service of that religion. It's about abuse of power, and God or the gods are an appeal to justify that.
I think it's about power, yes. But it also speaks to the human craving to know what happens after we die. It's impossible to know. It will happen to each of us, and we'll find out. I'm okay with saying, "This speaks to me and gives me hope, but I realize it's absolutely not provable. Therefore, I'm not forcing it on anyone else."
Many humans cannot handle this unknown. They believe turning their faith into "certainty" or "the only truth," that will somehow force it to be so. These people truly don't understand what faith is. They are drawn to leaders who reassure them with promises of "the only truth." To me, it's a sad way to live.
Very good insight; I hadn't thought about that aspect enough.
In the 70’s I was stationed in West Texas which is the only reason I was in that miserable state and when I left permanently there was a mini mart and as I was getting some snacks for my road-trip near the cashier were bumper stickers for sale and one caught my eye and I’ve never forgotten it. “Happiness is seeing Texas in your rear view mirror”.
The one thing I’ll always remember about my time in Texas is that it felt like I was in another country and 40+ years later it still seems like it is run by an authoritarian regime. Another thing I remember is on Sundays during football season when the Dallas Cowboys were on tv church start time would begin so the good Christian folk could watch the game then go to church. WTF.
I’ve been back to Texas 2x since 1980 once for 3 days for work and once for 3 days when my dad died. As a person with a brain who thinks for himself and would never demand that a woman do as I say, In other words I’m not a right wing wacko I could never live in a place where females, people of color or a different faith are treated as substandard humans. With the exception of Mary any adult who is blood related to ^^^^^ should be imprisoned for the rest of their natural life. Our country has her problems and both parties are responsible but since 2015 90% of the responsibility lies upon the shoulders of every republican politician and voter.
As much as I love visiting big Texas cities and readers there, I’m never setting foot in that state again.
I've only ever been switching planes in Dallas. But let's hope that in our lifetimes it will change enough that one day it will be safe to visit.
I’ve been a lover of Austin since my first visit in 1978.
I've only ever heard good things about Austin. But then it's a bit like old West Berlin, but without the independence from the surrounding area, isn't it? Good place set right down in the middle of hell.
I'm amazed we still don't have a reported death yet.
I’m sure we’ve had several, and they were blamed on something else. They perfected that with covid.
Yeah that's why I was careful to say reported. They won't be able to hide forever though. And of course that victim will be heavily scrutinized, looking for a reason to blame her for her fate or at least say it couldn't be helped. If it's a Black woman the country has already proven it can ignore her just like Breonna Taylor. Sadly we need a "nice white girl".
Or if she’s young, or single. Or if she has a child already, but with a different partner.
Yeah. Most Democrats should be outraged regardless when it happens (although even there we have too many men who don't care enough). The people we need to be outraged are the pro-choice voters who've been voting for Republicans, so the 'ideal' victim is someone tailor made to their value system, which is different from our own or they'd already be Democrats.
@jessica and @grace - I wanted to point out Jane Coastens interview with Kristan Hawkins in NYT yesterday about abortion in high risk medical situations. She uses the term “maternal fetal separation”. I’d love to see you look into that. Bc guess what, it’s abortion. Thx, as always, for your reporting.
Jessica wrote about the interview in yesterday’s newsletter, but glad you caught it too!
It's super gross because they're talking about either inducing or C-section even if it's before a fetus is viable. So if it dies because it's 22 weeks, then that's not "abortion." It's "maternal fetal separation". The doublethink is mind blowing.
This woman also has two... Not one...TWO kids with a preventable condition called cystic fibrosis who will suffocate to death before the age of thirty. She's a nut job.
I’ll say it again. Her stance is an outlet for her resentment. She wants to force every woman to be as miserable as she is.
Andra,
That’s so clear, I think, from the NYT article. I was greatly cheered however, in reading through the comments on the piece.
I’m aware the readership of the Times leans sharply left, but what surprised me was how overall, they were very well informed. A number of people noted the anti-contraceptive stance of Students for Life. Most of the commenters were clear on the arrogance and self-righteousness Hawkins displayed, and the condescension toward women that seems to underpin her position.
Overall, her doublespeak, goal post moving, and her vague answers seemed to really piss them off.
She wouldn't have nearly as resentment if she had just stopped having kids after the first kid that turned out to have it. But she kept rolling the dice. Like I said. Nut job.
Story time. Last year when abortion was on the ballot, I was trying to convince a neighbor(orthodox jew) to vote pro abortion. I brought up the disease Tay- Sachs, which is much more horrific than cf. This did not sway him in the least. As an aside, he also doesn't believe LGBTQ people exist. We ended that discussion with him saying 'I am a cat'
Yes I know about Tay Sachs. That's just psychopathic. Especially as a Jew in which the disease is pretty common. Just wow.
You'll probably appreciate this. He also thinks Desantis is great. Also, my next door neighbor, who is also orthodox, thinks Trump was an amazing president. On the bright side, I really enjoyed the salmon when I have had dinner at his house.
Another good collum Grace. I'm stoked too about the upcoming merch.