It looks likely that a petition to ban abortions in Albuquerque after 20 weeks will make it on to the ballot this October in the municipal elections.
Chances are this blatantly sexist, sinister, anti-woman initiative will make this city election one of the most hotly contested since the l970s.
Any candidate who thinks they can skirt reality and not take sides on this matter should be banished from politics and never heard from again.
What we’re seeing is Tea Party Fundamentalism invading our city with a basically unconstitutional, unenforceable legal ploy to galvanize support for the Far Right’s wide-ranging assault on the rights of women, minorities, and impoverished people that have been won through the struggles of the last 100 years.
This ballot initiative is serious stuff and should not to be dismissed as another Right Wing prank, though prankish it appears, once you study it. Most abortions, 99 percent according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, occur well before 20 weeks. Usually, only the most tragic cases of fatal, malformed births are performed after five months gestation.
This so-called anti-abortion ballot initiative has almost nothing to do with abortion. It’s all about politics, all about co-opting religion in a culture war that disguises free market extremism and its mission to undermine the legal system, undermine government, and do whatever it pleases when it pleases and to whom it pleases in the name of profit and power.
But as bogus as this all is, and as sure as it is that no court would support it in the light of Roe v. Wade, it could inflame the already violently confrontational and murderous wing of anti-abortion fundamentalism. And it could the source of violence here as it has been in the past.
Planned Parenthood offices were vandalized in Albuquerque around Christmas 2008. Some weeks earlier the offices of a physician who provided abortions was burned to the ground. In l999, the same physician’s offices were destroyed. Numerous incidents of anti-abortion harassment, threatening phone calls, stalking, name calling, in your face behavior, and verbal assaults have disrupted life here.
Across the country, the most violent domestic terrorist movement is run by pro-life gorillas, brutal thugs who bomb women’s health clinics and set them on fire, create anthrax scares though the mail, kill physicians, kidnap health workers, stalk them, vandalize their homes and offices, and terrorize helpless young women. This is known in law enforcement as “single issue terrorism.”
This is the KKK version of Texas Tea Party Fundamentalism using “moral” fervor as a weapon in a nefarious political war in the service of wealth, elitist power, and corporate greed. It deploys racist and sexist scare tactics and propaganda to try to keep well more than half the world’s population “in their place.”
The Anti-Defamation League contends that while anti-abortion violence peaked in the early l990s, it “has actually remained a consistent, if secondary, source of domestic terrorism and violence.” I’d hate to see it happen here again.
So this weird ballot initiative is more than another political dirty trick. This could mean life or death for our daughters, our grand daughters, our friends in need, and our friends who are nurses and doctors.
Demand to know where mayoral and city council candidates stand on this ballot initiative, This will tell you more about their core values than just about anything else I can think of.
(Creative Commons image via Flickr by Steve Rainwater.)
July 29, 2013