GOP - IVF = RIP
June 13: IVF votes … Israel bombs safe zone … Asylum ban sued … Gender-affirming care ban …
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The Southern Baptist Convention (America’s largest Protestant denomination) and its political arm, the Republican Party (Washington’s largest Protestant denomination), are both voting against in vitro fertilization this week, possibly aborting the party’s gestating presidency.
The party gave birth to its first Donald Trump presidency in 2016 and ever since has been desperately hoping to have another, even if it means artificially inseminating the Electoral College. But opposition to in vitro fertilization — the last baby-making resort for whomever in our increasingly infertile population can afford it — puts the right-wing Christian faction at odds with pretty much everyone else in the country.
The Senate will vote today on whether to protect in vitro fertilization, as a number of red states look to shut it down. Republican senators are planning to vote against it.
Which is just what the Southern Baptists, with 15 million people in 45,000 churches, voted to do yesterday. Why ban IVF? Because it often produces more embryos than even Jesus could fit in a single uterus with all of His magic powers, so some embryos get thrown away or sent to patch roofs in red states with lax child-labor laws.
The reason it’s considered okay to discard these excess embryos is because they don’t have faces. Or three dimensions unless you’re looking at them on a slide through a microscope. In fact, even if you specifically ask them if it’s okay to throw them away, they never object.
That’s not okay to many right-wing Christians, however, because despite their microscopicity, even frozen embryos — popularly known by their brand name, Dippin’ Dots™ — have souls™. Which is weird because that would mean magic is real?!?
Voting against IVF is also weird because Americans love IVF almost as much as they love old-fashioned F. How many Americans support IVF?
86% of all the people
83% of evangelical Christians
78effing% of self-identified PRO-CHOICE people!
But this is no longer just about saving the souls of Dippin’ Dots™. Senate Republicans say they actually lurv IVF. They just have to vote against the Democratic bill today because it’s got too much other stuff, like requiring everyone to follow the law even if their magic book tells them not to.
That’s right, Newsfuckers, the “religious freedom” cudgel that Democrats handed Republicans with the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is back!
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) complained earlier this year that Democratic IVF legislation wouldn’t be subject to RFRA. Meaning? Meaning that even churches that oppose IVF would have to include it in employee health-care plans.
Can you believe this infringement on their believing-based freedom? As if magic-believers were no better than lowly, godless, soulless empiricists! Requiring them to obey human law? Satan’s work!
Plus, Hyde-Smith hidebound-says, IVF would be the right of anyone! “This would allow, for instance, a child abuser to use reproductive technologies to have a child,” she says, envisioning a beautiful future America where everyone has to prove they meet Hyde-Smith-ian standards for baby-having. Because religious freedom.
Israel Suddenly, Violently Revokes “Safe Zone” Status
The “safe zone” of Al-Mawasi, a southern Gaza coastal town, lost its official status this morning, Israeli officials said with bombs. The notification of its new status as a “holy fucking shit run-away and hide zone” was delivered early this morning by multiple means — specifically, land, sea, and air bombardments — to ensure residents got the message.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA said the Israeli navy conveyed the news via machine-gun fire from off-shore, one of the many well-known surgical methods traditionally used to ensure minimal civilian casualties.
Just a month ago, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ordered refugees in eastern Rafah — which also lost its coveted “safe zone” status — to “immediately head to the expanded humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi.” It now appears the IDF was just kidding.
In another bureaucratic development, some paper-pushing desk jockey issued some boring form or something yesterday that said a million people could face death and/or starvation by mid-July.
Asylum Ban Draws ACLU Lawsuit
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups sued the Biden administration yesterday over its executive order tightening the rules for asylum-seekers seeking asylum in the country that once prided itself on providing asylum.
Pres. Joe Biden last week announced that he would unilaterally shut off asylum applications at the border if crossings topped 2,500 per day.
The ACLU suit was filed on behalf of Texas immigrant-advocacy organizations including Las Americas and RAICES. The suit claims that Biden’s executive order violates immigration law, and that it didn’t go through the proper rule-making process. It’s a technicality, people, that’s what the ACLU does!
“There is no legal daylight between this asylum ban and the Trump ban the courts struck down,” said ACLU lead counsel Lee Gelernt, who would know since he also got then-Pres. Donald Trump’s ban struck down.
The argument for Biden’s executive order, of course, is that if Biden doesn’t crack down on immigration, then Trump could win the presidency and largely shut off asylum by violating the rules and immigration law.
And, since it’s been a while since I pedanted this particular pedantry, a lot of asylum-seekers are fleeing conditions created by American upscrewery of their home countries. Can we executive order not doing that?
House GOP Discovers, Perverts Antitrust Law
When do House Republicans care about monopolies and antitrust laws and price-fixing? When those things jack up the price you pay for meat and poultry? Nope! What if it’s Big Oil fixing gas prices? Nyet!
But when it’s companies “colluding” to fight climate change, well, sir, now we’re talkin’!
The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday released a “report” alleging collusion between big asset managers and environmental advocacy organizations trying to get them not to invest in companies torching the human ecosphere; groups like Ceres, Climate Action 100+, Net Zero Asset Managers and and even “blue state pension funds.”
Like a kid trying to pretend they’re grown-up enough to write reports, they slap quotation marks everywhere to signal their sophisticated skepticism of “net zero” and “collaborating” and other “fact” things:
Equally hilarious, the phrase “The Committee has obtained evidence…” — about campaigns that were actively seeking publicity. It’s The Case of the Purloined Fucking Letter, I tells ya!
Their ““evidence”” consists of “““non-public documents””” which they got by asking for them…on the basis of these totally public campaigns, and by questioning participants who agreed to discuss these totally legal, aboveboard, environmentally and fiscally sound efforts.
Like too many movies, the report is both terrifying and unintentionally risible. U.S. law already has mandates pushing companies to do only that shit which will make money (which never seems to be an issue when they spend millions on lobbying and political campaigns).
Now, however, we’re looking at government intimidation to prevent company owners, the investors, from engaging in efforts which actually will make money in the future because it’s really really hard to rack up solid quarterly revenue numbers when your company headquarters is a cinder.
But it also shows how shallow even the business-over-everything, libertarian-enterprise GOP ethos really is. Just as they do with with everything from whose genitalia touches whose, and what women do with their uteri, if Republicans don’t want investors putting their money in “green” companies or even actually green companies, they’ll find a way to stop it.
The good news on this one is, they haven’t yet. And if they keep pulling shit like this months before a presidential election, eventually they’ll wake the elder gods of BlackRock and Vanguard.
(And yes, the committee chair is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who usually cares as much about real antitrust violations as your everyday, average wrestling coach would care about reports of sexual abuse.)
Got Medical Debt? Here’s a Band-Aid™!
The Biden administration this week proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules to bar lenders and credit agencies from screwing you over because of medical debt. This means your crappy credit score or loan rejection will now be entirely due to other predatory debt proving your lack of moral character.
Banks will still be able to deny you loans based on other reasons, such as lack of money, which you need to have in order to borrow money.
Some credit agencies have already voluntarily scaled back on the you-screwing. As recently as March 2022, 43 million credit reports included medical bills uglifying up the joint. That number was down to 15 million as of this April.
If you’re wondering who this affects disproportionately, that’d be poor people and/or people in the South. Because nothing affects everyone proportionately!
On a totally related note, the rule will likely never be implemented if Donald Trump becomes president again.
Judge Guts DeSantis Transgender-Care Ban
Federal Judge Robert Hinkle on Tuesday performed radical transformative surgery on the state’s law against gender-affirming care. The ruling represents the second time this year a septuagenarian has surgically removed the male genitalia of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
Hinkle wrote in his ruling that “The State of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment.”
He pointed out that the law doesn’t ban medications wholesale. Instead, the law just bans these medications for this specific use on the basis that this specific use gives DeSantis the heebie-jeebies. Hinkle noted that the gender-care “medications [are] routinely provided to others with the state’s full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient’s transgender identity,”
Other things in the eviscerated law that DeSantis can’t do now, even if Jesus tells him to:
Take custody of children to prevent them from getting gender-affirming care
Prohibit some gender-affirming care for adults
Bar registered nurses from assisting with gender-affirming care
Bar other non-physicians from assisting with gender-affirming care
Bar the use of telemedicine in gender-affirming care
Force gender-care patients to get X-Rays more often than medically indicated
Force gender-care patients to sign informed-consent forms even for shit they’re not doing
A spokesperson said that DeSantis will be appealing, which was not the case in the Republican presidential primary.
And just in case anyone didn’t get the gist of Hinkle’s ruling, he added extra bonus gist: “In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished.”
Five Quickies
Attorney General Merrick Garland should turn over the audio of Pres. Joe Biden answering questions from prosecutors. Not because House Republicans (with one exception) voted to hold Garland in contempt for refusing — which is toothless since Garland is the guy who would enforce it (although maybe he’ll appoint a special counsel to investigate himself). And not because the GOP wants to use the audio against Biden politically, which they’re allowed to do. The Justice Department should release the audio because it’s ours.
The Washington Post did one of those gigundo-investigation thingies that everyone ignores and few people read but gets them awards. This one’s about cops who’ve raped or abused people — most of them young people, most of them girls — and largely gotten away with it. There’s lots of grisly, infuriating details, if you’ve got the stomach for that kind of thing. This isn’t a cops-are-inherently-bad story, it’s yet another story about yet another institution that treats insiders as essential and/or heroic and/or above scrutiny or accountability. Don’t do that, institutions.
Salon Senior Writer Amanda Marcotte takes a different path on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s covert audiotapes, but ends up pretty much where I did, responding to his suggestion that our left/right rift is irreparable:
“We only have problems now because so many people, including Alito, have talked themselves into an ahistorical claim that they should be allowed to impose their beliefs on others. Someone who so profoundly rejects a founding principle of the nation has no right to be sitting in judgment of its laws.”
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has an important piece on an important/illegal tool that re-Pres. Donald Trump will have in his plus-size tool belt to gut decades-old American agencies, should he be made president again by voters and/or Republican members of Congress. Bottom line: He can simply not spend money that Congress has allocated, despite, y’know, Congress having the legal authority to determine those allocations.
TCB
DCC3FRFP I dropped it today given the landslide of opposition in yesterday’s comments. TFN is nothing if not responsive to the people.
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
Had to run to my dictionary for “microscopicity”, ha!
“ He can simply not spend money that Congress has allocated, despite, y’know, Congress having the legal authority to determine those allocations.”
On the other hand, President Biden has not used this tool _when its use has been patently warranted_ (as in: continuing to ship arms to Israel throughout an interval of repeated atrocity).
This is yet another reason why many understand the D side to be weak and ineffectual.