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Trump Says He Will Protect Women “Whether They Like It or Not”

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2024 //
12

The New York Times reported on Trump’s rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin yesterday, where he laid out the Trump Paternalism Doctrine.

He said he would protect women “whether they like it or not.”

Like he “protected” women by stripping away their reproductive rights?

Like he “protected” the women who accused him of sexual assault?

Women want to make their own decisions.

The story in the Times by Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green pulled no punches, offered no “both sides”:

Former President Donald J. Trump said at a rally on Wednesday that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not” — remarks that he cast as paternal but only served as reminders to many of his critics of his history of misogynistic statements and a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse…

Ms. Harris quickly sought to respond, writing on X: “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not.” Her campaign posted a series of videos on social media emphasizing Mr. Trump’s remarks. And it sent out a news release that blared: “In Wisconsin, Trump reminds women how little he values their choices…

Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump and his allies have made a series of misogynistic, sexualized attacks against Ms. Harris. In August, Mr. Trump used his social media website to amplify a crude remarkabout her that falsely suggested she had traded sexual favors to help her political career. On Sunday, at his Madison Square Garden rally, one speaker referred to Ms. Harris as having “pimp handlers.” And a super PAC financed by his ally Elon Musk released an ad that called her a “C word,” although the ad eventually revealed that the word was “communist,” rather than the slur for women.

Mr. Trump has been accused by roughly two dozen women of sexual misconduct. In 2016, the “Access Hollywood” tape caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” The writer E. Jean Carroll said he raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. In civil proceedings, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll, and ordered to pay hefty fines. Mr. Trump is appealing the case.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Gender, Trump

Trump Calls Madison Square Garden Rally “an Absolute Love Fest”

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
11

The day after Trump’s Madison Square Garden, the media reacted with shock to the raw racism and misogyny on display. The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump sought to head off the major speech Vice President Kamala Harris was planning to deliver Tuesday night by casting her as responsible for all of the nation’s ills while also attempting to draw attention away from bigoted and racist remarks at his rally in New York.

Two days after he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden where several speakers made racist and vulgar statements, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of running “a campaign of absolute hate.”

Mr. Trump then headed to Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state, for two campaign stops. Ms. Harris is expected to speak at the Ellipse, the same park near the White House where Mr. Trump marshaled his supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The setting for Ms. Harris’s remarks will provide her campaign with a symbolic moment to go along with its increasingly blunt warnings about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump, who Democrats say is unstable and will run roughshod over democratic norms if he returns to the White House.

Mr. Trump’s allies have shown anxiety that the backlash to the Madison Square Garden event, and descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist, may be breaking through to segments of voters in battleground states. On Tuesday, however, the former president sought to attack Ms. Harris with the very accusations he himself has been facing, telling a group of supporters and reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that her message “has been a message of hate and division.”

In his remarks, Mr. Trump continued to push back against criticisms of his rally — which he called, unprompted, “an absolute love fest” — mocking Democrats who have pointed out that a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Election Day is one week from today. Here’s what else to know:

  • Madison Square Garden rally fallout: Republicans moved swiftly to distance themselves from remarks disparaging Puerto Rico made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was one of the opening speakers at Mr. Trump’s New York rally. The island’s Republican Party chairman is demanding an apology, and the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny stepped up his condemnation of the remarks on Tuesday.
  • Hinting at a vulgar taunt: An ad from Elon Musk’s PAC refers to Ms. Harris as a “C Word” — eventually calling her a “communist” — in an allusion to an insult against women that is one of the most obscene words in American English.
Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Racism, Trump

Barbara Bush, Daughter of GW Bush, is Campaigning for Kamala

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
6

Barbara Bush, daughter and granddaughter of Republican presidents, endorsed Kamala Harris and is campaigning for her in Pennsylvania.

According to People magazine:

Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of former President George H.W. Bush, spent part of her weekend in Pennsylvania campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris with just days to go before the 2024 presidential election….

“Barbara’s Republican father served as president from 2001 to 2009. Her mother, former first lady Laura Bush, 77, broke with the party’s stance in 2010 by saying she supports same-sex marriage and abortion. At the time, Laura said abortion should “remain legal, because I think it’s important for people, for medical reasons and other reasons.”

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Gender, Harris, Kamala

Women of America: Do You Trust Trump to Protect You?

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2024 //
110

Trump had a town hall for Republican women to address women’s issues. He sought to reassure his audience that he would protect them. This is the town hall in Georgia where he claimed that he was “the father of IVF.” No one asked him to define IVF. I wonder if he could.

Jill Filipovic wrote for Slate about Trump’s efforts to calm women voters. He needs their votes.

What, most politicians ask themselves, do women want? American women vote in larger numbers than men. Issues that affect our lives are routinely diminished as “women’s issues,” even as we make up more than half the population. Both parties, but Republicans much more than Democrats, have a male dominance problem. There has never been a female president.

So, what do women want? Last week, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump took a shot at answering that question when he sat down with Fox News host Harris Faulkner and a female-only audience for a town hall event that aired on Wednesday. Trump’s answer to the age-old question? Bizarre ramblings about safety, nonsensical talking points about reproductive rights, and strongman promises to just fix things, democratic processes be damned. What was clear, though, was how Trump and his team approach women: As dependents in need of protection, and as a special interest group that doesn’t particularly interest him outside of the fact that he needs them to win.

If you’ve watched a Trump debate or a Trump rally, very little of what he said on The Faulkner Focus will come as a surprise. His talking points are well-established, if they tend to come out in streams of gibberish and have little relationship to reality. He had the best border; Biden had the worst border. He had the best economy; Biden had the worst economy. This time, he added a few newer ones: He had the best child tax credit, although, he said, it was mostly his daughter’s idea, and Biden turned it into the worst tax credit. (In reality: Joe Biden expanded the child tax credit; Republicans, aided by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, then refused to renew it; and this summer Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have expanded it.) Trump’s Republican Party is also the best on IVF, he said, better than Democrats—and in fact, he, Trump, is the “father of IVF,” an absurd claim he boasted three separate times.

Setting aside how offensive and stomach-roiling it is to hear that phrase out of Trump’s mouth, the claim that Republicans are good on IVF couldn’t be more false. Republicans have opposed Democratic efforts to protect IVF nationally and have introduced bills that could ban it nationwide. But it’s really clear that Trump knows how bad Republicans look on this—and he credited the “fantastically attractive” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama with teaching him so this year after the Alabama Supreme Court effectively made it illegal in that state.

How he learned what IVF was this year and still became IVF’s father was left a mystery. But this Big Daddy posturing was his central theme.

It was clear from the start that Trump’s team had told him to emphasize safety—that the pro-Trump women in the audience (and they were almost all pro-Trump) wanted to hear about how Trump would protect them. Faulkner kicked off the conversation by complaining about Democratic “prebuttals” to the town hall, playing footage of Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock telling voters to get out and cast their ballots because Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump responded by bragging about his endorsements from the Border Patrol and the Fraternal Order of Police—not exactly organizations with tons of women in their ranks—and continued, “So when you talk about safety …” (Faulkner had not talked about safety). But Trump did want to talk about safety or, to put a finer point on it, to convince suburban Georgia women that they are imperiled by undocumented immigrants and criminals, and that Trump is the only one who can save them.

Trump also played the protector when asked about the child tax credit, which has become far less generous thanks largely to Republicans. Always careful to maintain a macho posture, the former president actually gave someone else credit for once—his daughter Ivanka, who he said begged him to do something to support struggling families. He suggested he didn’t have any great desire to take on the issue, but, well, his daughter demanded it, and Daddy wasn’t going to say no.

The same theme showed up in Trump’s answer to a question about transgender girls playing sports. The solution, Trump said, was simply to ban it. How would he prevent trans girls from playing sports, Faulkner asked? He would just ban it, Trump said. That’s it—he’ll be the president, after all. Just ban it.

The audience cheered.

On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has rightly been emphasizing the threat Trump poses to democracy (it is actually Democrats, Trump said in this town hall, who are the real threats to democracy). And many voters are certainly persuaded that democracy is worth defending, and that Trump imperils it. But for Trump’s loyalists, his authoritarian tendencies are part of the draw. He won’t mess around with the separation of powers or slow process of democratic lawmaking. He’ll be the president—if he doesn’t like something, he’ll just ban it. Like the women in the Fox audience, his supporters love it. And if women are good to Daddy, maybe he’ll take their problems into consideration, too.

Women are more than half of the population. There is no one thing we all want. Except, I suspect, the right to bodily autonomy when our lives or health are threatened by a situation out of our control. Trump’s pitch to women is that they won’t need autonomy. They can just trust in the man who promises to bend the country in their favor, even if he winds up breaking it.

Categories Elections, Gender, Trump

Florida: “A Man Is Nothing Without His Conscience”

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2024 //
4

The DeSantis regime threatened to prosecute television stations that aired ads supporting Amendment 4, the one that repeals the state ban on abortion. The order was blocked by the courts. When the lawyer for the state Department of Health was directed to sign a second letter reiterating the threat, he resigned.

The Miami Herald reported:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ top deputies directed a Florida Health Department lawyer to threaten Florida television stations with criminal prosecution for running political advertisements that support enshrining abortion rights in the state’s Constitution, according to new court records.

Florida Department of Health General Counsel John Wilson said he was given pre-written letters from one of DeSantis’ lawyers on Oct. 3 and told to send them under his own name, he wrote in a sworn affidavit Monday.

Although he had never participated in any discussions about the letters, Wilson sent them anyway, he wrote, setting off a firestorm that led to a federal judge last week granting a temporary restraining order against the state.

Wilson abruptly quit on Oct. 10, writing in his resignation letter that “A man is nothing without his conscience.” The letter, first reported by the Herald/Times, did not explicitly say he was resigning over the controversy.

But in his affidavit, Wilson said the decision was made to avoid sending out more letters. “I resigned from my position as general counsel in lieu of complying with directives from [DeSantis General Counsel Ryan] Newman and [Deputy General Counsel Jed] Doty to send out further correspondence to media outlets,” he wrote.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article294143314.html#storylink=cpy

Categories DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Health

Team Trump Is in Talks with Nikki Haley to Create a Joint Event

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2024 //
17

Marc Caputo reported that negotiations are underway behind the scenes to persuade Nikki Haley to moderate a town hall with Trump in the last few days of the campaign. The Trump team knows that he has poor ratings among women, largely because of the reproductive rights issue. Haley might help him with women. He has already held events with MAGA women, including former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in Wisconsin, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Michigan, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn in Michigan, Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna in North Carolina, and Fox News personality Harris Faulkner in Georgia. Haley would be a coup for him to reassure women who are angry that Trump’s Supreme Court eliminated their right to control their bodies.

Caputo writes in the Bulwark:

DONALD TRUMP’S ONETIME ambassador and former primary rival, Nikki Haley, is in talks to join him on the campaign trail in an attempt to win over disaffected Republicans, sources familiar with the discussions tell The Bulwark.

The details and dates for the joint appearance haven’t been fully worked out, but the likeliest scenario would put the two together at a town hall toward the end of the month, perhaps involving Fox News personality Sean Hannity, the sources said.

Facing a yawning gender gap, Trump’s campaign has hosted five other town halls moderated by female political figures since August, but none with the stature of Haley. The former UN Ambassador ran a tough primary race against Trump, becoming the last Republican standing against him. Though the primary ended on a contentious note, she spoke on his behalf at the Republican National Convention on July 16.

Since then, however, Haley and Trump have not appeared together. And she hinted that tensions still linger on her new SiriusXM satellite radio show last month.

“I don’t agree with Trump 100 percent of the time,” Haley said. 

“I have not forgotten what he said about me. I’ve not forgotten what he said about my husband or his, you know, deployment time or his military service. I haven’t forgotten about his or his campaign’s tactics from, you know, putting a bird cage outside our hotel room to calling me ‘bird brain,’” Haley said on her show, adding that she’s still for Trump because she thinks he “will make the country better.”

Those comments garnered some attention in Trump’s orbit. One confidant of the ex-president privately joked that talk like that is usually taboo in his circles because “if you’re with him 99 percent of the time, you’re a fucking traitor in Trump’s eyes.”

But Trump prizes winning over servile loyalty, and he recognizes that Haley’s brand as an establishment Republican—one who respectfully disagrees with him on the margins—could help in November, even if he said the opposite during the primary. 

Open the link to finish the post.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Gender, Health, Trump

The New Republic: Vance Lied about the GOP Position on Abortion in the Debate

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2024 //
14

Let’s be clear about one thing: JD Vance lied about every important issue during his debate with Tim Walz. He lied about Obamacare (Trump did not save it, he repeatedly tried to kill it). He lied about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. He lied about January 6. And he lied about abortion, expressing his sorrow that Amber Thurman died of a botched abortion in Georgia because the state ban made it impossible for her to get the care she needed. I tweeted this yesterday: “JD Vance is sorry that Amber Thurman died but happy that Roe v. Wade was overturned, which led to Georgia’s ban on abortion care, which caused Amber’s death.” So much for contrition.

Melissa Girardi Grant wrote in The New Republic about Vance and Trump’s efforts to confuse voters about their opposition to abortion:

She wrote:

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Trump tried to bail his running mate out of an abortion question with a series of half-truths and lies. “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” Trump posted to social media, “BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!).”

This is a nonsensical sentence for many reasons. Among them: No one is saying that Congress would pass a new federal ban and hand it Trump to sign or veto. What Trump might do—what his allies want him to do—is enact a ban by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which can’t be vetoed since it’s already on the books. Trump’s misdirection distracts from his consistent anti-abortion record while in office, what the Republican Party platform states, and the very public plans of his former staffers detailed in Project 2025, which Trump also pretends he has nothing to do with. That is part of the Trump-Vance campaign’s plan on abortion: to do whatever they can not to talk about that plan, or at least to confuse the public about what that plan is.

The questions moderators posed to vice presidential candidates Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance on Tuesday night did little to clear matters up. They were not about abortion or abortion rights; they were questions about whether the candidates were lying about abortion.

The question one moderator asked Walz reinforced anti-abortion misinformation spread by Trump. “After Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no? Is that what you support?” asked Norah O’Donnell of CBS News. “I’ll give you two minutes.”

O’Donnell’s own news organization debunked this same “ninth month abortion” point after the last debate. “Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed during Tuesday night’s presidential debate that Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports the ‘execution’ of babies after they are born, repeating earlier false assertions that Democrats support killing babies,” CBS News fact-checker Laura Doan wrote way back on September 11.

Walz answered the question posed to him about Minnesota’s abortion law very, very briefly—“That’s not what the bill says”—before pointing out the simple truth that, via his appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump helped end the federal right to an abortion in this country. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v. Wade, 52 years of personal autonomy.”

Trump typically responds to this kind of argument by talking about “the will of the people,” as he did in his all-caps post. But when voters have been asked directly about abortion through ballot measures, they affirm the right to abortion. Trump is going to have his say as one of these voters: As a Florida resident, he will be able to vote on the Florida ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s post-Dobbs six-week abortion ban. He has said he would vote “no.” The Republican Party’s platform advances the idea that a fetus is a legal person with rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—which, should the courts agree, would effectively make abortion a crime in every state. Failing that, Trump’s former head of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, argues that a national abortion ban already exists, in his section of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” This argument that the Comstock Act of 1873 could be enforced today to ban abortion is legally dubious at best, but it enjoys the support of 145 Republican members of Congress and has already been entertained at the Supreme Court by Justices Thomas and Alito.

The first abortion question moderators posed JD Vance was about whether he and Trump would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. “No, Norah, certainly we won’t,” he said, before launching into a lengthy digression about how the Republican Party needs to win back Americans’ trust on “this issue.” But having affirmed the importance of trust, in subsequent questions, he went on to lie spectacularly on two fronts: First, by saying “I never supported a national ban” (in 2022 he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks), and later, by making an utterly bizarre claim about Minnesota abortion law. “The Minnesota law that you signed into law, the statute that you signed into law,” Vance said to Walz, “it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

“The idea of abortion being performed after birth is sometimes used to stigmatize abortion care received later in pregnancy,” as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists write in a fact sheet responding to such misinformation. Talking points like Trump’s also distort perinatal palliative care, ACOG points out, which is given to reduce the discomfort of sick or disabled newborns whose conditions cause them to die shortly after birth. “At no point in the course of delivering a newborn with life-limiting conditions and subsequently providing palliative care does the obstetrician–gynecologist end the life of the newborn receiving palliative care.”

Walz tried to push back again, to say this isn’t what the law said. Vance adopted a know-it-all debate club stance: “What was I wrong about? Governor, please tell me. What was I wrong about?”

In this way, the debate became more about competing claims of what the other person said than about clarifying the candidates’ actual positions. If this sounds tedious to you and impossible to follow, well, you’re not alone. The meta-debate about abortion is boring and exhausting. But you can see why Trump and Vance would prefer to stay there, in the meta-debate. So long as the campaign sows confusion and rewrites reality around a policy position that is wildly unpopular—restricting abortion access—it helps Trump.

Democrats should take every opportunity to argue for what they want and reassert reality, as Walz tried to do. But there’s still a lot further to go: According to a May 2024 Times/Siena poll, around 17 percent of registered voters in swing states said that Biden is more responsible “for the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion” than Trump. Twelve percent of Democrats in those states said the same thing. What more proof do Democrats need that they have more and better storytelling to do?

Yes. However, I would say that Democrats need more truth-telling to their voters. Leave the storytelling to JD.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Gender, Georgia, Health, Lies, Vance, J.D.

Rachel Maddow on JD Vance: Who Is He?

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
20

Rachel Maddow often manages to come up with a very different take on the news as compared to other talk show hosts. She is fascinated with history, so she often takes her viewers down new paths.

When she was trying to figure out JD Vance, she discovered two of the men who influenced his views. One is a podcaster named “Jack Murphy,” whose real name is John Goldman. He is known for racism, misogyny, and his association with the alt-right. He is very big on the idea of women’s submission to men. He even wrote a book about it.

The other is a man named Curtis Yarvin, a podcaster who is known for his anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian views.

Watch this segment.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Vance, J.D.

Mother Jones: A Former Christian Nationalist Recants

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
12

Mother Jones published an excellent article by Reverend Rob Schenck about how he became a leader of the Christian nationalist movement and why he decided to leave it. He recalls when real estate developer and playboy Donald Trump was first introduced to the world of evangelicals. And he describes his own role in connecting rich donors to Republican Supreme Court justices.

Reverend Schenck begins:

In 2014, at an elegant gala inside the Supreme Court’s gilded Great Hall, a tuxedoed Justice Clarence Thomas turned to me and voiced his approval for my work. I glanced over to where Chief Justice John Roberts and his wife, Jane, were entertaining two of my associates, trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, a private, nongovernmental entity for which Roberts served as honorary chair. At that moment, I knew the secretive operation I had run, aimed at emboldening Thomas and his conservative colleagues to render the strongest possible decisions in favor of our right-wing Christian agenda, had succeeded.

My organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, had created an initiative we called “Operation Higher Court” that trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries,” befriending Thomas and his wife, Ginni; Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito; and Antonin and Maureen Scalia—­lavishing­ them with meals at high-end restaurants and invitations to luxurious vacation properties. Alongside these amenities, our ministry offered prayers, gift Bibles, and the assurance that millions of believers thanked God for the decisions this trio of justices rendered on abortion, health care, marriage, and gun ownership….

But Reverend Schenck began to understand that his activities and beliefs were toxic to democracy. What triggered his change? Perhaps it was his late-in-life doctoral studies, when he read about the German Christian movement in the 1930s, which supported the Nazi party. He wrote: One of the most respected Bible scholars of that period, Paul Althaus, declared Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship to be a “gift and miracle from God.”

He was shaken by his research. He began to change his views. He wondered whether Christian evangelicals in the U.S. were on the same dangerous path.

Following the insurrection of January 6, when Christian banners, Bibles, and prayers in Jesus’ name appeared in the assault on the Capitol, I felt even greater urgency in warning my fellow evangelicals of the grave danger Trump and his MAGA cult posed to Christianity and US democracy.

My change of course so late in life has been painful, disorienting, and costly. Besides losing decades-long friendships and enduring menacing threats, my wife and I have faced a significantly reduced income. I’ve even driven Uber to cover household expenses. One night, I picked up an organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event in which I had once played a significant role. I was wearing a mask and said little, but then, with trepidation, I realized I would be dropping him at the home of a congressman I had worked with closely for more than 20 years. When my passenger got out, I was relieved to have gone unrecognized. Still, I’ve never questioned the decisions that brought me to that moment.

In my third conversion, I realized that when religion is placed at the service of a political party, it corrupts both. To claim that one political figure uniquely represents God’s will for the body politic is a form of anti-Christian idolatry. To elevate one set of spiritual beliefs above another and do it by force of law removes a nonnegotiable tenet of evangelical faith—free will. We are born again when we choose to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, not when we’re forced to do so.

Because it is immoral, I believe Christian nationalism is inevitably doomed. But in the meantime, the pain, suffering, and injury it will inflict will be enormous—just consider women facing difficult pregnancies, trans children seeking care, librarians attacked for certain books. “We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess.” This may sound familiar—maybe some overheated Republican talking points. In fact, it’s what Adolf Hitler promised the German people in 1933.

Categories Courage, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Religion, Separation of church and state

The Georgia Court Decision Overturning the Abortion Ban

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
5

This decision by Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney is well worth reading. It’s a thoughtful analysis of why the state ban on abortion at six weeks of pregnancy in Georgia deprives the pregnant woman of her rights. The decision is 26 pages. Start reading on page 6: The Issue.

One of the best passages appears on pp. 14-15, where the judge writes:

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could–or should–force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the sake of another.”

Categories Gender, Georgia, Health
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