The South Dakota Taliban

By now most people have probably heard that South Dakota has banned all abortions except in one case, the life of the mother. Forget things like incest and rape, the victim still must carry the fetus to birth.

You've got to hear the reasoning of Republican state Senator Bill Napoli, if you can call it reasoning. As he explains (and as I supplement in blue), "When I was growing up here in the Wild West how old IS this guy? if a young man got a girl pregnant, birth control was only a dream they got married, you know, of the shotgun persuasion and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding don't want the couple to get cold feet while escaping across the river. I mean, you didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, that's two "I means" he must be a bit confused they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, who cared whether the couple loved or even liked each other? you know, that whole story. Napoli does seem to be spinning a story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again...loveless forced weddings I don't think we're so far beyond that, that we can be like the Taliban that we can't go back to that."

I have to wonder about that whole neighborhood business Napoli speaks of, since the abortion he banned included cases of rape and incest, maybe his memory of the old neighborhood was a town filled with inbred rapists, that was some Wild West I never read about. Was Napoli's old Wild West the place where Jane got her nickname of "Calamity?"

The South Dakotan politicians that voted for this bill are not even conservatives, they are Talibans forcing the entire state to live up to their ancient religious practices of forced pregnancies and apparently forced marraiges (I guess that will be a law to come). If they reach back far enough into the Bible, they could bring back ritual sacrifice.

The real story of the not too distant "Wild West" was of the religious families that were so embarassed by their pregnant out-of-wedlock daughter that the girl had a "vacation" or "illness" while visiting an out-of-town abortion doctor. These abortion laws are really about parents who in their minds can't control their daughters. In the old days they snuck their daughter out of town for a few days, today they want to be proud parents of a controlled daughter, and worse, proud that they can control other peoples daughters as well. This is not about religion (abortion is not in the Bible) except as modern fundementalists have been told to believe. It is really about who controls whom within a family and as well in a community/society.

Of course we all know this is really an attack on the poor. The pregnant girl that wants an abortion that grows up in a wealthy family won't have any problem navigating to a state or country (Canada for instance) that allows abortions. So, South Dakota will get just what they probably don't want, poor children birthed to poor women. And if Napoli had his way, pushed into loveless marraiges as well, to give birth to more poor children.

And we also know that this performance by the South Dakota legislature is to test the two new Supreme Court judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the abortion issue. The law has already been challenged and long before it reaches the Supreme Court the law will be ruled illegal. I will bet plenty of money that the Supreme Court won't even bother to hear the case as the law is so draconian that even anti-abortion advocates have to question it. Rape? Incest? These are cases that only the most fundementalist frenzied could like.