Reality is What Red State Governors Can Get Away With

 

NEW AUDIO: Brian Kemp says he is open to banning contraceptionhttps://t.co/8SVPoL2uT0

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) September 15, 2022

I noted in my comments regarding Sen. Graham's 15 week abortion ban proposal that it is always reasonable to define Republicans as being just as extremist as they tell us they are--and here is another proof.

Gov. Kemp., who isn't the biggest fan of democracy, doesn't care that a lot of women do use birth control or at least feel like this is a good option for women to have.  If the Dobbs decision means he can ban birth control, despite the needs or desires of the women of his state, he feels like this is okay--because once you start culling the voter rolls of voters you don't think are with you, you stop giving a fuck about whether you are aligned with the voters' needs or concerns. You just side with the right-wing ideologues who brought you. 

Georgians, check your voter registration. If you are not on the rolls, you have until October 11.  Your governor does not care about your choices and wants to take them away. 

I hate governors who want to take rights away. This is why I am dead-set against Doug Mastriano in my neck of the woods, who is the same or worse. He scoffs at "my body, my choice", too. And I will live with my body my whole life, but I won't live comfortably if I didn't fight against someone who wanted to make choices for everyone else without considering their whole life experience and reality. Or rather, just keep government out of it. 

It's not their right. And they should not be in a position to pretend it is. 

UPDATE: Because we are not ever finished with radical Republican, woman-hating ideas, I have two related stories to add. First, there's a Michigan candidate for Attorney General who thinks Plan B should be treated like fentanyl. Yes, Plan B, the "morning after pill"--which is an emergency contraceptive. If life starts at conception, preventing conception would be, um, not taking a life. Don't worry, though, because the gentleman would do this having no idea how any of that works. He is just really certain that if you were the recipient of unexpected penis, you need to deal with unexpected fetus. And carry it all the way through. Why yes! He is a Republican. (My beloved friends and acquaintances let's don't ever have GOP AG's. They really are the worst.)

The other vicious nightmare of a potential Republican future is criminal penalties for abortion patients. They want to imprison people who terminate pregnancies, or worse.  Probably the death penalty. After all, if you want to say abortion is murder, what better way to signify that you are "pro-life" than to put someone to death for ending a pregnancy? And I can easily imagine people on death row for miscarriages, because why wouldn't someone with their head up their ass about the "miracle of life" add miscarriage of justice to the tragedy of potential life lost? 

The SCOTUS Dobbs decision has legitimized the logic of the clinic-bombers into law. To my mind, the vagaries of human sexual intercourse and development of human embryos are such that the law should back the whole hell off of trying to codify what is collectively right and leave a space for pregnant individuals to be respectfully treated as unique private persons with their own moral, physical, mental, economic realities. There was a lot of wisdom in the Roe decision, and today's partisan court totally lost the plot.