If I was writing the speech ...
I would have Hillary hold up a coat hanger and ask the PUMAs out in the audience "Is this what you want?"
McCain could not have made it clearer that his vision of the future is a return to illegal and unsafe back-alley abortions, simply to punish young women for their sin. As if he has the right to cast the first stone.
But it is actually worse. If he got his way and made every fetus a protected human life from the moment of conception, every woman who had a miscarriage would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter and those who smoked or drank might be considered guilty of voluntary manslaughter or third degree murder.
With that focus, maybe the PUMAs would no longer be tossed softballs by interviewers when they pretend that a true Hillary Clinton supporter would celebrate a McCain victory. My conclusion is that every last one of them must be a racist.
4 comments:
It's not as simple as you're making it out to be, Dr. Pion. I voted for Hillary Clinton and I have to admit, the more I get to know about Barack Obama, the more disappointed I get. That doesn't mean I'm going to vote for McCain, but I hate the idea of having to hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
The cudgel of "Roe vs. Wade will be overturned if you vote for the Republicans OMG!!!!!" is losing its power. In too many states (my own included) abortion is so difficult to come by that Roe vs. Wade has, for all intents and purposes, been overturned. Middle-class and above women will always be able to get safe abortions if they need them, and poor women can't get them now, so pretty much nothing will change.
So instead, I and many former Hillary supporters are going to vote based on other issues. My hot-button issues are such that I will pick Obama, who might at least not make things worse in the marriage-equality and health-insurance-coverage departments. But if those issues were not important to me, then there might actually be a reason to vote for McCain.
I understand your naivete. You probably never lived in the pre- Roe v. Wade era. I did.
Middle class women could only get an abortion by traveling 1000 miles (literally, I am not exaggerating) to New York. That included getting one for the result of date rape (in the case of a girlfriend's roommate).
Something will change, even where you live. In fact, the changes will be most dramatic where you live.
The people who refused to hold their nose and vote for Humphrey in 1968 got Nixon and 25,000 more deaths in Vietnam as the result of his "peace" plan.
And only time will tell if McCain's gunboat diplomacy with Russia and Iran will lead to the major conflict in the middle east that his supporters dream of as the sign presaging Armageddon and the Second Coming.
Yes, traveling 1000 miles is exactly what I'm talking about. I would be able to do that. A woman working minimum wage would not. But, a woman working minimum wage would have a hard time getting an abortion as it stands right now. She'd have to travel to one of the bigger cities in the state, walk through crowds of protesters on her first visit to the clinic, wait for the required waiting period, and then, pay hundreds of dollars from her own pocket. In this state, we even have a legislator who's trying to make them issue death certificates for abortions! So while it's possible, it is difficult enough to deter a lot of women.
Whether or not my point is naive, you must see that it's not racist to not immediately fall in line behind Obama, especially when he panders to evangelicals with lines like "women shouldn't be able to get an abortion if they're just feeling blue." Because yeah, when I was pregnant? I was totally depressed one day and realized that the only thing that could cheer me up was to get an abortion. It's the same old "can't trust women to make choices about their own bodies."
And call me cynical, but "change you can believe in" strikes me as nothing more than "the same old crap repackaged."
A "hard time" and "illegal" are two very different things, just as nominating Scalia is not the same as nominating Ginsburg. There is a clear choice in this race, and the choice WILL determine whether Roe -v- Wade is overturned in the next two years.
Again, objecting to a nuanced approach to moderates on this issue is exactly how we ended up losing 25,000 men in Vietnam when the left chose Nixon over HHH.
And, of course, if Palin had her way, there would be a national law banning abortion and undoubtedly a Presidential Order banning abortions for soldiers who were raped while on active duty.
And I stand by my position: Anyone who supported Hillary and her strong Pro Choice position must have irrational reasons based on deeply held prejudices for choosing a Ban All Abortions candidate over one that is also Pro Choice. Now I grant the possibility that there were people who might have voted for Hillary simply because she is a woman, that is, purely out of prejudice, despite being against everything she stood for in this campaign.
If you supported Hillary because you were against abortion and in favor of an immediate attack on Iran or Russia, you should support McCain.
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