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May 08, 2008
The Obama Boys play the Roe card to stop Hillary Clinton voters from defecting to McCain if Obama is the nominee
You knew it would happen. One day, they'd look around and say, hey, where did all the women go? We've been doing a bit of serious thinking. The consensus seems to be this: Even if we could put aside the sexism of his campaign, Barack Obama is just too inexperienced to be president. And he has shown an alarming lack of judgment. And empathy? We're just not seeing it. In short, we just don't trust him. Women have been told to back anti-choice men in top Democratic offices, time and time again. For example, the Democratic party picked anti-choice Harry Reid as Senate majority leader, who then backed anti-choice Bob Casey over a pro-choice candidate to oppose Rick Santorum. When we objected, we were told disparagingly that we are "single issue voters." As though that somehow diminishes the importance of the issue at stake. Now they tell us to be single issue voters and vote for Obama. We could say something rude. But let's take the high road, and get ready with some counterarguments: 1) Obama enthusiastically backed John Roberts until he was told it would come back to haunt his political ambitions. This is from his own site:
It was the fall of 2005, and the young senator -- still new to Capitol Hill but aware of his prospects for higher office -- was thinking about voting to confirm John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. Talking with his aides, the Illinois Democrat expressed admiration for Roberts's intellect. Besides, Obama said, if he were president he wouldn't want his judicial nominees opposed simply on ideological grounds. 2) Republican-appointed justices upheld Roe in 1992 - it is entirely possible John McCain could appoint a moderate justice. This is from Michael Farris in Constitutional Law for Christian Students:
In 1992, the Supreme Court considered the case of Planned Parenthood of Southern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 120 L. Ed. 2d 674 (1992). ...Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Stevens, and Blackmun joined together to hold that Roe was still valid and that speculation on its demise should be put to rest. 3) The SCOTUS is not in play, nor will be for the next decade. This is from an attorney named William who comments on Taylor Marsh:
I want to emphasize again: The Supreme Court is not in play in this election. Conservatives have five sure votes on almost every issue. Kennedy has moved to the right, aligning with Roberts. It will take a retirement by one of the five to change the court. Scalia is good for another 15 years, the rest for 20 or so. It's sad, but true. The key election was 2000; and a bunch of latte liberals just couldn't be bothered, and voted for Nader. So while I have cared about the court as much as any of you (I am an attorney, after all), we have to accept the fact that the basic stance of the court cannot be changed for the next decade. |
"You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave." ~ Billie Holiday
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"Probably, hanging onto the past brings more destruction than any other single cause. ...It's the Muslim fundamentalists who worship the past and ignore the reformist spirit with which Muhammad viewed women. It's the backward-looking Christian literalists who interpret religious teachings in a way that consolidates their power..." ~ Gloria Steinem
"'Inherent differences' between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world." ~ Virginia Woolf "...remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." ~ Abigail Adams "Bloody treason, murderous act Not by women were designed. Bells o'erthrown nor churches sacked Speak not ill of womenkind." ~ Gearoid Iarla Fitzgerald "Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt "If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place." ~ Margaret Mead "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?" ~ Zora Neale Hurston "Eventually, all things merge into one; and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs..." ~ Norman Maclean "There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example - where had they gone?... It was a spring without voices." ~ Rachel Carson "If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." ~ St. Francis of Assisi "I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci "God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools." ~ John Muir "How quickly nature falls into revolt when gold becomes her object!" ~ William Shakespeare "The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." ~ Edward Abbey "We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it... Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love." ~ George Eliot (Marian Evans) "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." ~ John Muir "The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object." ~ Thomas Jefferson "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~ John F. Kennedy "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison "When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C. P. Snow "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." ~ Albert Einstein "Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin "Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt "If somebody tells you you ought to quit, it's because they're afraid you won't." ~ Bill Clinton "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." ~ Robert F. Kennedy "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" ~ Martin Luther King Jr. "No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~ Marian Anderson "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis "The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." ~ Jane Addams "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt "O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." ~ William Shakespeare "I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it." ~ Martin Luther King Jr. "When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think." ~ Patricia Schroeder "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower "What difference does it make to the dead whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" ~ Mohandas Gandhi "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." ~ Agatha Christie "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." ~ John F. Kennedy "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." ~ Jesus "Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower "When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt "And thus I clothe my naked villany with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil." ~ William Shakespeare "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing... in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret..." ~ Jesus "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, ... legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." ~ Thomas Jefferson "Persecution is not an original feature in any religion, but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." ~ Thomas Paine "Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein "True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." ~ Clarence Darrow "When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~ George Washington "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell "To (say) that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it's morally treasonable to the American public." ~ Theodore Roosevelt "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." ~ Adlai Stevenson "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." ~ John Stuart Mill "I don't give 'em hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell." ~ Harry Truman "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!" ~ Will Rogers "I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights." ~ Susan B. Anthony
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