Obama Starts Off On The Right Path

First, apologies to the two people who sometimes read this blog. I've been traveling and am now preparing to leave Israel to return to the US.

Now, today I read that President Obama has reversed the ban on US support to international family planning organizations that offer abortion or even information about abortion. This ban has been on (Reagan/Bush I), off (Clinton), and on (Bush II) again. Now it's off again, and I can only hope that it is off permanently.

Justifications for the ban are generally that no American tax payer should be forced to pay for what they believe are morally reprehensible programs. This is a silly argument on its face in that we all pay for things we would rather not - with our tax money. I would certainly prefer not paying Blackwater to terrorize various parts of the world on behalf of the US. I would certainly prefer not to have paid a penny towards the war in Iraq, which I was against from the very start. I would prefer not to pay for religious-based rehab programs. There are several morally reprehensible things my tax money supports.

Justifications for lifting the ban include the fact that funded programs offer many, many valuable services to women and families, including HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programs, birth control provision and counselling, and general health and preventive care programs. It seems unfair that poor women and families cannot have access to these things while wealthy women and families can pay to go to private clinics, even traveling out of the area to do so.

This is one of the many reasons I have a problem with abortion restrictions here in the US as well. The wealthy seventeen-year-old who chooses abortion can afford to go just about anywhere to get one. The poor seventeen-year-old has no choice. She can't afford to travel to another county, state, or even country. Even if she can scrape up enough cash to go to some other county, she has to be "counseled," shown ultrasound pictures of her fetus, and otherwise delayed and delayed and delayed until she risks being fired from her job, missing important classes at school, or otherwise forced to take chances that the wealthy seventeen-year-old is not. This is a class and gender issue, not a moral one. If one set of morals apply to one woman and another set to another woman, that is just the type of moral relativism that the so-called Right to Lifers abhor. It is also annoying that, as the immortal George Carlin pointed out, right-wing fanatics' concern for life stops at birth - after that, they're on their own and social conservatives who made damned sure that they were born, wanted or not, able to be cared for or not, do not want to lift a finger to help them survive and thrive after they're born. Again with the moral relativism!

An interesting video is up on Youtube. A man visited an abortion protest and asked this question: If abortion is made illegal, what legal penalty should be placed on women who get an abortion. Most of the respondents were stumped by this question. One woman had the intestinal fortitude to admit that if abortion is killing a human, than murder laws and penalties should probably apply. She still hemmed and hawed with talk of "looking at the circumstances," but at least she is aware of the problems inherent in making abortion illegal.

Hmph. Rant over. Thanks President Obama. Let's try to work together to provide education and birth control to all the world so that abortion will be minimized.

Priorities, Priorities

A Catholic priest has been jailed and suspended from his job for selling cocaine out of his church.

He is now in jail with a $50,000 bail. He's not FIRED or DEFROCKED, just suspended.

Still, that's more than the penalty for child molestation when Catholic priests are involved. That particular penalty is usually being inconvenienced by having to move and find new victims.

Because we all know it's better to be a child raper (traumatized victim) than to SELL DRUGS (victimless)!

Who's Making the Decisions Now?

August 1, 2007: Obama says we need to go into Pakistan with or without local permission to find bin Laden and shut down al Qaeda.

September 4, 2008: US confirms incursion into Pakistan without local permission to shut down al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Troops entered an area suspected to be a bin Laden hideout.

I don't know if this was already in the works last August, when Senator Obama made his statement. Perhaps that was why the administration didn't slam him too hard. Instead, it was his fellow Democrats, Sen. Chris Dodd and Gov. Bill Richardson, who were running against him in the primaries at the time, among others, who chastised him.

If not, could it be a case of "that's not a bad idea, let's do it and take credit?"

The current administration has been very vocal in its support of Pakistani President Musharraf, and surely knew this would piss him off. But since his resignation last week and in light of today's election to replace him, in which the favorite is a Pakistani People's Party member and the widower of murdered former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, it may be that Bush's people decided the worst we would get would be a frown and slap on the hand.

It is disturbing to note that, while the PPP's stated goals include the "establishment of an egalitarian democracy and the application of socialistic ideas to realize economic and social justice," (source), this party is also home to Minister Sadiq Umrani, whose brother is currently NOT under investigation for possibly having a leading role in the murders of at least two, and possibly five, Balochi women.

If Minister Umrani is serious about his party's platform, he needs to at the very least, support this investigation and work to bring his constituency under the rule of law. Any representative who supports egalitarian democracy and social justice will most emphatically NOT turn a blind eye to murders of women who simply wanted to exercise their legal right to marry where they chose.

But I digress.

I find it interesting that, as Ed Brayton writes, Bush decided to do just what Senator Obama suggested after the very idea was criticized roundly as bad form.