a bird and a bottle

Not so shockingly, the US government has sold out American military women yet again. There’s news today (via Majikthise) that Congressional Dems have withdrawn legislation that would have required U.S. military bases to stock emergency contraception. Here’s a snippet:

For reasons that remain unclear, Michaud [the sponsoring Congressman] withdrew the legislation the next morning. According to [his press secretary], it was purely a logistical snafu: “Key supporters had to be in their districts.” But sources close to the issue tell a different story: The legislation, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, with bipartisan support, was dropped by a Democratic leadership unwilling to go to bat for pro-choice issues. Despite Michaud’s confidence that the votes were there, Democratic leadership wasn’t so sure, and they didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. The legislation might not have sunk, but they jumped ship anyway.

Newsflash for all of you women in fatigues: if you are sexually assaulted by a fellow officer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to EC. How’s that for supporting our people in uniform?

The fabulous Ms. Lindsay Beyerstein has taken a new job as a reporter for In These Times. Her first piece, up today, takes on the Democrats and their recent support for abstinence only funding. What do the Dems have to give up, she wonders, in order to secure the success of some of their other priorities? Here’s a snippet:

Even opponents of abstinence-only education might concede that a few extra million for abstinence education is a small price to pay for easing the passage of a very important domestic spending bill that contains a lot of spending that’s important to Democrats.

Yet, principle is at stake here. Few people realize that the CBAE program promulgates out-and-out quackery and barely disguised religious dogma. These programs don’t just encourage students to remain abstinent as teenagers. By law, they are required to teach “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity,” among many other stipulations. In other words, the program must teach that all sexual activity outside of marriage, even between consenting adults, violates some nebulous “expected standard.”

Go check out the whole thing here.

I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, but I still haven’t decided whom - if anyone - to “endorse” going into the Democratic primary. It’s still early. I might. But not yet.

That said, damn Obama’s rhetoric works for me.

Andrew Sullivan’s got the full text of Obama’s recent speech (which Sullivan somewhat derisively though perhaps somewhat accurately calls a sermon) at Hampton University. Obama used the story of the shooting of a pregnant woman (in white, natch) during which the bullet lodged in the arm of the woman’s fetus. The fetus survives but has scar as a reminder.

The story makes my skin crawl a little. But what he does with it is damn good. There’s this:

And so God is asking us today to remember that miracle of that baby. And He is asking us to take that bullet out once more.

If we have more black men in prison than are in our colleges and universities, then it’s time to take the bullet out. If we have millions of people going to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma; it’s time to take the bullet out. If too many of our kids don’t have health insurance; it’s time to take the bullet out. If we keep sending our kids to dilapidated school buildings, if we keep fighting this war in Iraq, a war that never should have been authorized and waged, a war that’s costing us $275 million dollars a day and a war that is taking too many innocent lives — if we have all these challenges and nothing’s changing, then every minister in America needs to come together — form our own surgery teams — and take the bullets out.

And this:

If we want to stop the cycle of poverty, then we need to start with our families.

We need to start supporting parents with young children. There is a pioneering Nurse-Family Partnership program right now that offers home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income mothers and mothers-to-be. They learn how to care for themselves before the baby is born and what to do after. It’s common sense to reach out to a young mother. Teach her about changing the baby. Help her understand what all that crying means, and when to get vaccines and check-ups.

This program saves money. It raises healthy babies and creates better parents. It reduced childhood injuries and unintended pregnancies, increased father involvement and women’s employment, reduced use of welfare and food stamps, and increased children’s school readiness. And it produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family enrolled in the program.

This works and I will expand the Nurse-Family Partnership to provide at-home nurse visits for up to 570,000 first-time mothers each year. We can do this. Our God is big enough for that.

So he hits my two pet issues in a single speech: first, the country’s unconscionable jailing of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and mostly black men and women; and second, the empty rhetoric of the American “pro-life” movement and what an America that really supports families would look like. And he gets both issues right.

Sullivan calls Obama a compassionate conservative — made in the model that Bush supposedly was. I don’t buy that. It aggrandizes Bush and ties Obama to his sinking ship at the same time. It’s also patently false. Obama’s speech rings more of the Democratic Great Society era than of early 21st century compassionate conservatism.

At root, it doesn’t really matter how we label Obama’s speech. The bottom line is that he’s talking about important issues, connecting faith to progressivism, and doing what’s even more improbable — inspiring this cynical blogger.

The mantra in the six weeks or so since the Supreme Court handed down its truly awful decision in Gonzaels v. Carhart has been that elections have consequences. After Gonzales, that phrase was used to wag fingers at all of those supposed social liberals who voted for Bush. The phrase has also been used to rub Republicans’ faces in the new Democratic congressional gains.

However it’s been used before, I am feeling today like it’s a bit of a silly phrase, lacking meaning. Why? Because a Democratic Congressman, David Obey of Wisconsin, is pushing for an increase in funding for abstinence only programs. Obey, who is part of the Democratic House leadership and the head of the House Appropriations Committee, is supporting an increase in Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) funding by $27 million — up to $150 million. CBAE is one of the many abstinence only programs that has been proven to be both ineffective and filled with lies. And yet, a Democratic leader in the House is throwing bad money after bad money in support of abstinence only programs.

I’m sure this is a political move on Obey’s part to placate some of te more conservative members of his home state. I get that politics is a game. But Obey shouldn’t roll the dice when young people’s lives are on the line.

SIECUS has an action alert. Got tell Pelosi and Obey what you think.

Over the last few years there has been a drumbeat of paternalistic rhetoric in American politics, particularly in the realm of women’s health and reproductive justice. In South Dakota, which last year passed an abortion ban that made exception only if the woman’s life was in danger, those who supported the ban touted it as necessary to protect women from the emotional and medical perils that supposedly would befall them if they had an abortion. The line was such bunk that anti-abortion wingnuts (er, activists) “>had to recruit fake doctors to make an ad in support of it. (The South Dakota law was subsequently rejected by popular ballot.) The siegelin South Dakota (pdf). But for perhaps the first time, it gained adherents. And it seemed to work.

Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court’s truly horrendous decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which exalted the paternalistic, daddy state knows best language about abortion rights and echoed the rhetoric used to support the South Dakota ban. As Linda Greenhouse noted in the NY Times, the language of the decision was groundbreaking:

But never until Wednesday had the court held that an abortion procedure could be prohibited because the procedure itself, not the pregnancy, threatened a woman’s health — mental health, in this case, and moral health as well. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that a pregnant woman who chooses abortion falls away from true womanhood.

And then there’s news today, via Broadsheet, that a pharmacy in Montana refused to dispense the birth control pill to a local woman because they were trying to “protect” her health. Nevermind that the woman was 49, unable to conceive, and using the pill for medical purposes (I really don’t think that should matter, but it’s worth mentioning). According to Broadsheet:

When the woman called the pharmacy to inquire why the pills were being discontinued, the owners claimed that the pills are dangerous for women.

This from the same pharmacy that ran a Mother’s Day ad that included this language:

On this Mother’s Day 2007, we wish to express our gratitude to all mothers for their unselfishness in our behalf. As health-care professionals, we call upon the American people to once again reaffirm the right to life for future generations of the unborn and join with us in our efforts to restore respect, dignity and value to each human life — born or unborn.

Apparently, this pharmacy, under new ownership, has decided across the board to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Daddy state (or daddy pharmacist) apparently knows what’s best for his women clients. And now he’s got a Supreme Court decision to back him up. And, in keeping with the paternalistic, anti-woman slant underlying the decision of both the Court and the pharmacist, such decisions are ok. Because, dammit, if a woman is going to open her legs for sex, she better be willing to open them for labor.

The UVVA. Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Laci & Conner’s Law. Sounds nice enough, right? We want to be able to punish people who commit violence against pregnant women, because we are concerned both about the heightened risks of violence against pregnant women and about doing as much as we can to ensure a healthy birth outcome.

If only it were that simple…UVVA’s, as many of you probably know, were imagined and implemented with a much more political and much more suspect purpose — to establish fetal personhood and support anti repro justice crusaders.

Want more evidence? Well, around the country, prosecutors have attempted to rely on UVVA’s to prosecute pregnant women for not ensuring a perfect birth outcome.

Last week, RH Reality Check’s Amie Newman took on the issue, in the context of Kansas’s new UVVA, which was signed into law by the state’s “pro-choice” governor, Kathleen Sebelius. And what’s funny about Kansas, and what makes the UVVA’s political purposes so blindingly clear, is that the state already had a law protecting pregnant women. Newman has more:

In fact, in Kansas, this law repeals statutes already on the books that criminalize injury inflicted upon a pregnant woman. Twelve years ago, Kansas enacted “Motherhood Protection” laws (K.S.A. 21-3440 and K.S.A. 21-3441) that, according to the reproductive justice advocacy organization ProKanDo, “recognize the particularly heinous nature of crimes against pregnant women by providing separate criminal charges for those who interrupt a pregnancy in the commission of a crime.” These laws were put into place over a decade ago as the result of anti-choice advocates who, at the time, desperately wanted a UVVA in Kansas. What they got instead were laws that heightened the consequences of intentionally harming pregnant women, recognizing the atrocious nature of this type of crime, without defining fetuses as full people.

Fast forward to 2007 when anti-choice advocates in Kansas were finally able to pass the full UVVA that mirrored their ideology while serving their political purposes. Kansas’ law, according to Julie Burkhardt, executive director of ProKanDo, “contains extreme language when talking about life beginning at fertilization or conception — similar to about fifteen other states’ UVV laws.” So what reason can there be for repealing legislation already in place that ensures that perpetrators of violence against pregnant women will be prosecuted uniquely for their crimes? And why did the law pass now — with a pro-choice Governor and five failed attempts in previous years? There may be many reasons; though none have anything to do with justice, protection or concern for the victims of violent crimes.

Some evidence that the UVVA is neither meant to really address violence against women nor effective at preventing such violence: as Newman notes, in none of the 30 states that have state UVVA laws has violence against pregnant women declined. Not only do the laws not help women, but they put women’s reproductive lives in to jeopardy:

Perhaps what is most disturbing about the steady stream of laws like these around the country is their insidiousness. Julie [Burkhardt, director of ProKanDo, a pro-choice political action committee in Kansas] says, “With this type of bill, anti-choice advocates are hitting the spectrum of women’s reproduction.” While many reproductive justice advocates have wondered for years how anti-choice activists could scream so loudly for the punishment of abortion providers while somehow absolving women who access the abortions, it is no longer a puzzle.

“There is a real disconnect — when people think of reproductive health we think about abortion because that’s the hot button issue. It drives voters. But it’s also good for everybody to look at laws like Kansas’ law - it doesn’t just hurt women who need abortions but hurts women who want to continue their pregnancies and be mothers,” Julie says. Women who get abortions are women who chose to become or are already mothers at different points in their lives. Laws like these punish women across the entire reproductive continuum.

So what next? When supposedly pro-choice governors are signing UVVAs into effect, can we really have hope that we can stop their passage? Well, I don’t know. And I’m not particularly optomistic, particularly since these laws appear to protect both women and fetuses, at least on their face. What will it take to get the message across about the perils of the UVVA? How many women will have to end up in jail and how many others will have to end up injured or worse?

Two unpleasant news items today: first, via Feministing, I learn that pregnancy discrimination is up. Then I head over to the NY Times and bump head-on into an article about the antis’ increasing reliance on the argument that abortion should be banned because it is bad for women.

And then it struck me: these two news developments are inextricably related.

Here’s what I mean: pregnancy discrimination is up because there is little government mandate not to discriminate against pregnant women. Sure, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act says that where Title VII applies (larger employers, usually), employers cannot discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, but that leaves a whole lot that’s not covered (smaller employers, cases where it’s not discrimination but requests for extra benefits related to pregnancy). The slight nod of acceptance regarding pregnancy discrimination — it’s still not considered unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy even if it is against federal law — links directly into the thinking underlying the Times article: women are not rational actors when their fertility is concerned, and pregnancy is the prime example of that.

In the case of the anti-abortion rhetoric, the thinking goes that women who are pregnant and who are considering abortions cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions for their own mental health or for their families (when the Supreme Court accepted this argument in its recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, I threw up a little in my mouth). If the Supreme Court’s decision is any indication, that way of thinking, in all its condescending and backwards glory, seems to be gaining adherents. And it’s fed into by the pervasive notion in American culture that pregnant women are somehow less human…less intelligent, less able to make decisions. Why, if that’s the case, then it all but makes sense to discriminate against them at work!

See what I mean about those dots being connected?

Abstinence only “education” programs are chock full of misogyny and are totally ineffective. This we know.

Yet the Bush administration has allotted more and more money to them at every turn.

That’s the bad news.

The good news? With the help of the new Democrat-controlled Congress, that might be about to change. Jessica’s got the word that Congressional Democrats are planning to let Title V — the main funding stream for federal abstinence only programs like the one Jill wrote about here – quietly die.

How’s that for legislative inactivism?

(also at Feministe).

Yesterday the U.S. Sentencing Commission released its 2007 cocaine report 2007 (PDF). The report - the fourth of its kind in recent years - aims to address the disparity between sentences for crimes involving powder cocaine and those involving crack. The 100-to-1 difference has resulted in harsh sentences for low-level crack users — and has decimated low income communities and communities of color. Wealthier, whiter communities, where cocaine is more popular, have gone mostly untouched.

In its report yesterday, the sentencing commission stopped far short of actually addressing this sentencing disparity. It made only three recommendations (and buried them in 200 pages of analysis). The ACLU summed up the report’s proposals:

· Increase the amount of crack cocaine required to trigger the five-year mandatory minimum sentence, as current law subjects low-level drug offenders to the same or harsher sentences as major dealers.

· Repeal the mandatory minimum penalty for simple crack cocaine possession.

· Reject proposals to lower the amount of powder cocaine required to trigger the five- and ten-year mandatory minimums, as the Commission finds “no evidence to justify such an increase.”

Ok. I’m with them on the first two. Increasing the level of crack required to trigger a harsh five year minimum sentence is an important step to reducing the impact of the misguided “War on Drugs” on low level dealers and - worse — people who possess for their own use. Repealing the mandatory minimum for possession is clearly ancillary to that. But it’s that third recommendation that really stings, and that reduces the positive impact of the other two. In the third bullet point, the commission rejects the idea of getting rid of the 100-to-1 disparity by saying that there’s no need to bring the level of powder cocaine needed to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence down to be more in line with that of crack cocaine.

Now, in a vacuum I agree with that third recommendation. I don’t think we should be punishing cocaine use more harshly. We should be punishing crack and cocaine use less harshly. But U.S. drug policy does not exist in a vacuum. By refusing to address the disparity here, the commission condones its continuation.

In fairness, not nearly all of the blame can be placed at the feet of the sentencing commission. This is the fourth time in twenty years that the commission has urged Congress to act to change drug sentencing laws. But Congress has remained inactive. Unsurprisingly. There’s some hope though: Recently, a bipartisan coalition has been pushing the Drug Sentencing Reform Act, which would reduce – but not equalize — the disparity. And there is a general push toward more humane prison policy from some conservative senators.

But by ignoring the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity — or at the very least, refusing to recognize its impact in its recommendations — the sentencing commission has enabled Congress’s inaction and allowed a racist policy to continue.

(also at Feministe)

Actually, quite a lot.

N.Y. Governor Spitzer announced recently his proposal to greatly expand the use of DNA testing in the New York criminal justice system. Under the current system, DNA is collected from people convicted of only the most serious crimes — rape, murder, burglary. Spitzer’s proposal, which has been kicking around the state legislature for some time now, would require that DNA be collected from ALL people convicted of ANY crime, including misdemeanors. Get convicted of pot possession? The state’ll have your DNA. Get arrested and convicted for protesting against a political convention? Yep, your DNA gets sampled too. The plan would also require the collection of samples from everyone currently incarcerated, on probation, and on parole.

The upshot to Spitzer’s proposal, and what makes it different from the old proposals, is that criminal defendants would have access to the state DNA database too, and could use it to prove their innocence. It would also require that prosecutors notify the court if they find out that there might be DNA that would exonerate the accused.

The upshots sound pretty good. DNA evidence has been used to exonerate over 200 people who were wrongly convicted and who have spent up to 30 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. DNA can be as powerful a tool for defendants as it is for prosecutors. But NY’s plan - for all the talk of equanimity - goes too far.

First of all, prosecutors are already under a duty to report evidence that exonerates the accused. The NY plan just codifies that. Second, DNA is not like fingerprints, which can only be used for a specific purpose. DNA evidence, once collected, provides a wealth of information to the government. Information that may have nothing to do with whether or not the person from whom the DNA is collected committed a specific crime. I don’t know about you, but I am not too keen on turning people’s most sensitive information over to the government at a time when it’s clear that the government does not respect its citizens’ privacy. Third, DNA evidence is not foolproof — but juries often think it is. The New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposed a similar program proposed by NYC Mayor Bloomberg last year, reports on the perils of relying too heavily on DNA:

In the past five years the use of DNA by law enforcement has come under increasing scrutiny by critics who have documented cases in which the use of DNA has been subject to gross negligence and intentional abuse. The Houston Police Department closed its DNA lab in 2003 after it released from prison two men who had been falsely incriminated by faulty lab work. In 2004, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer report documented 23 errors that the Washington State Patrol laboratory had made in the investigations of serious crimes.

So what are we to do? We want to protect people from wrongful convictions while also ensuring that convicted rapists can be easily caught should they rape again. I’m not saying DNA should never be collected. But there’s a balance that can be struck. The governor’s proposal ignores the possibility of a more evenhanded approach and puts a heavy hand on the justice scale.

Last week, in a flurry of chest puffing and pounding, President Bush threatened to veto the hate crimes bill passed by the House and headed toward approval in the Senate. The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, would expand the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, gender, gender identity (i.e. trans men and women), or disability. Bush laughably claims that state law already protects the rights of these groups.

The trouble is, the L.A. Times, whose editorial page is usually spot on, seems to have taken the Bush bait. In an editorial yesterday, the paper lauded the bill as it applies to sexual orientation, but claimed that it’s unnecessary to protect people from gender or gender identity motivated violence:

The problem is that the House bill goes further, by including gender and disability in its definition of hate crimes. According to the FBI, fewer than 1% of hate crimes in 2005 reflected a bias against the disabled. Although the FBI doesn’t keep count of gender-bias crimes, California does, and only 1.3% of the state’s hate crimes in 2005 involved “anti-gender bias.”

Huh? I wonder how the FBI and the state of California got those statistics. Because it seems to me that they must have relied on a very narrow understanding of what violence is gender motivated. Take rape, for example. I would argue that rape can be a hate crime (usually against women). But I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t included in that 1.3%. For perspective, according to the FBI, hate crimes based on sexual orientation account for over 14% of the hate crimes nationwide.

And what about gender identity? According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, while 29 states have laws that protect people based on sexual orientation, only seven and D.C. protect people based on gender identity. Transgender people are estimated to be 7-10 times more likely to be murdered than the national average. Yet gender identity is only implicit in the new hate crimes bill; the bill’s sponsors in the House have indicated that they intend “gender” to cover gender identity, but it’s unclear whether the Senate will agree.

The LA Times is right to point to the importance — necessity, really — of a law that explicitly protects the rights and safety of gay women and men. But by minimizing the need for a similar spotlight on women and transgender men and women, the article plays a part in the continuing normalization of violence against them.

(also at Feministe).

I don’t often post on the Iraq war around these parts. Mostly, that’s because there are many many many other bloggers saying what I would say already. And also because those bloggers, on the whole, know much more than I do.

But I did think this was worth pointing out: via C&L, check out this slide show the Boston Globe put together. The question the show tries to answer is this: What does $456 billion buy? Why that number? Because that’s how much has been spent on the war in Iraq.

Here’s the part I found most moving/shocking/eye-opening:

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.

Go see the rest.

(image: prison crowding in a California state prison)

Prisons around the U.S. are full to bursting these days. California has most notoriously battled the problem of the prison bulge. But the problem is not limited to CA. With more people incarcerated than ever before in the U.S. — almost 3 million, about 491 people per 100,000 — more and more states are likely to face prison crowding crises in the coming years.

Today comes word (via Sentencing Law & Policy Blog) that Nevada’s prison system is buckling under ever more crowded conditions. From the Nevada Appeal:

The inmates at Nevada’s Warm Springs Correctional were still adjusting to their cramped quarters and new cellmates when Gov. Jim Gibbons toured their cell block.

After walking down a hallway between 12-by-12-foot cells now holding four prisoners each, he urged state lawmakers to vote for bigger prisons.

“It doesn’t take much more than that to force the system into a meltdown,” Gibbons warned of the crowded conditions, and lobbied for lawmakers to pass his $300 million budget request for prison expansion.

The causes of the near-meltdown of Nevada’s prison system — as well as those in Connecticut, Texas, Kansas, and Nevada — are clear, while the benefits remain doubtful at best:

The federal government was offering extra grant money to states that used such “truth in sentencing” laws, and by 1996 most states had one.

Sentences for violent offenders around the country nearly doubled, hitting an average of 88 months, according to one U.S. Department of Justice study.

Ten years later, the costs of tougher sentences continue to mount, while the benefits have remained elusive. State legislatures have a case of “spending fatigue” when it comes to prisons, says Michael Thompson, director of the Justice Center at the nonpartisan Council of State Governments in New York.

“Why aren’t we doing any better in terms of recidivism rates?” Thompson asked. “We’re spending that much more money, and the same number of people are going back to prison. We should be getting better outcomes.”

So what can we do? Well, getting rid of mandatory minimums is a good first step. Reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine sentences, a process that has already begun but that could be stalled by Congress, is another important move. Of course, fixing this problem long term requires longer term policy changes. We’ve got to stop treating addiction like a crime. We’ve got to lower recidivism rates by providing real job training and education to people who are incarcerated and by providing support and job assistance when they are released.

Basically, we’ve got to make it politically unpopular to be a “law and order” candidate in any traditional sense of the phrase.

I’ve been writing angry a lot recently. So much doom and gloom. Particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart a few weeks ago.

But not today. Or at least, not this post. Because I’ve got a reproductive justice victory (!) to report on. And believe it or not that victory occurred in one of the reddest states.

Last Friday, I was able to take part in a conference call with reproductive rights advocates from Oklahoma. The advocates — doctors, lawyers, and even a sewing circle! — in April helped defeat SB 714 (PDF), a bill that would have prohibited the provision of abortions at state funded hospitals except for to save the life of the woman. After the bill passed in the state legislature, the governor, who has a mixed record on abortion rights, vetoed it. A veto override in the state senate failed.

The situation for reproductive rights in Oklahoma is pretty bleak: There are only 3 abortion providers, 96% of counties are without abortion services, planned parenthood does not provide abortions, and there is nowhere in the state to procure an abortion after 17 weeks. SB 714, had it become law, would have made it even more difficult for women to terminate their pregnancies in the state.

After listening in on the conference call (which was organized by the wonderful women at National Advocates for Pregnant Women), a few things were clear. First of all, the call made clear the importance of coalition building. The bill was defeated in large part because doctors spoke out against it. The governor — and most importantly, the senator who provided the decisive vote on the override — listened to the doctors. While it’s frustrating that the voices of women were not strong enough, it’s also vital to recognize how powerful the alliances between the medical community and the legal/political activist community can be. Also, I now know that sewing circles don’t necessarily involve sewing. As the circle’s leader Wanda Jo Stapleton put it, “We comfort the needy and needle the comfortable.”

Unfortunately, while the import of this victory is clear, the fight may not be over. The veto override failed, but only one by one vote. A Democrat state senator, Charlie Laster, originally voted for the bill but, after listening to the doctors’ advocacy, changed his mind and voted to uphold the veto.

The activists who took part in the conference call worry that the bill may yet reemerge, since a re-vote on the veto override can happen at any time until this legislative session ends one year from now (OK has two-year sessions). So they’re continuing to work together to fight for reproductive justice in OK. You can help shore up their efforts and build on their victories here.

After waiting five years to exercise his first veto, President Bush is going veto crazy. Continuing in the backwards tradition of his first veto (of the stem cell bill), the President seems to only pick up his veto pen for laws that might actually do some good. Of course, there’s his veto the other day of the war spending bill. But that’s not it.

Cases in point: two current veto threats.

The first is Bush’s threatened (promised?) veto of the new hate crimes legislation. The bill would expand federal hate crimes protection to include gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It’s headed for approval in Congress. But Bush has already got the cap off of his veto pen. Why, you might ask, would the President veto so common sense a bill? Here’s the reasoning:

The statement said state and local laws already covered the violence addressed in the legislation. “There has been no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement,” the administration said.

It’s laughable, really. Apparently, this administration felt that abortion regulation — with the exception of its basic foundation, something generally left to the states — needed to be federalized. But providing added protection to citizens who are often part of “discrete and insular minorities”? Not so much.

Anyway. This brings me to veto #2. According to today’s NY Times, Bush has “warned’ of a veto over any legislation that would allow federal funding for “the destruction of human life.” Why the veto warning now? Because Congress is thinking about repealing the global gag rule, therefore allowing US funding of international organizations that discuss or provide abortions and ending US promotion of abstinence-or-die.

Of course, a White House mouthpiece said that this is not about veto power but about the president standing firmly behind his beliefs. Apparently the president’s conviction for protecting life ends at birth — at least if one is a woman, has a chronic illness like MS, is gay, or is trans. Excuse me while I go scratch out my eyes at the irony of all of this.