Mandate, My Ass

[Kansas] Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two years in the post, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying on Thursday that he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases.

Mr. Kline emphasized statutory rape at a news conference here but also spoke obliquely of other crimes that court documents suggest could include doctors' providing illegal late-term abortions and health professionals' failing to heed a state law that requires the reporting of suspected child sexual abuse.

[...]

He declined to answer questions about his investigation.

[...]

Kansas is one of 31 states that have passed laws to ban or restrict the procedure. But Kansas does not ban it outright, allowing such abortions if women's health is endangered.

Mr. Kline's efforts to obtain records from abortion clinics follows his failed attempt last year to require the state's health workers to report any sexual activity of girls younger than 16, the age of legal consent in Kansas.

Health-care providers sued, and a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order.

Mr. Kline's new investigation could yield similar records. His effort became public this week when two clinics whose records are being subpoenaed filed a brief in State Supreme Court to block what they called a "secret inquisition" and "fishing expedition" that threatened the doctor-patient privilege and women's constitutional rights.

Noting that personal details like marital status, race, employment history and emergency contacts are in the records, lawyers for the clinics asked, "How can a woman's method of birth control or prior history of abortions or use of drugs and medications be relevant?"

The brief, which provided the first glimpse into a yearlong battle whose records have been sealed, said the laws cited as the basis for the subpoenas are one that restricts abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy and another that requires health professionals to report suspected child abuse.

When Mr. Kline was in the legislature, he helped write the 22-week limit.

Although Mr. Kline emphasized statutory rape in his news conference, many here on both sides of the abortion debate said they suspected that his real target was doctors who provide late-term abortions.

[...]

"These records are of the utmost sensitivity," the brief says. "The logical and natural progression of this action could well be a knock on the door of a woman who exercised her constitutional right to privacy by special agents of the attorney general who seek to inquire into her personal medical, sexual or legal history."

Mr. Kline, head of the national Republican attorneys general association, was in the Kansas House for eight years and is a staunch abortion opponent. He argued last year that Roe v. Wade should be overturned in an brief in the federal cases on abortions after the first trimester.

This goes hand-in-hand with the ailing Pope's pronouncement in his new book that same-sex marriage is part of an "ideology of evil".

There are two kinds of people in the world, okay? Those who don't think sex and sexuality are wrong wrong wrong, and those who do.

By coincidence, there are also two kinds of people in the world: Those who don't particularly want power over others, and those who do.

And, as a bonus point, there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who don't fear and hate women, and those who do.

Those points all coalesce in modern American evangelical conservatism. Which is, as some of you may remember, descended from Puritanism. (See here for links to historical documents, and here for a disturbingly modern take.) The basic idea is that God had dominion over all earthly matters. The practice is that things which distract you from God are bad.

And the upshot is that sex freaks these old church leaders out.

There are so many contradictions in their attitudes that it makes one's head swim -- e.g., how the Catholic Church can view homosexuality as so detestable, and yet work so hard for decades to protect priests who molested little boys. Even straight sex within the Church begins with one of those timeless contradictions: "be fruitful and multiply" versus the book of Leviticus. If you want to go back even further, you can consider the lost tale of Adam's first wife, Lilith, a warning against letting women get uppity.

There was a time when I truly had no idea why you would want to stop making new members of your species.

But there is something I'm truly curious about here. What is it with those who believe that God is going to torment the wicked in some afterlife, that many of them also believe that they should "help God out" by tormenting them in this life? God's divine judgment not good enough for you?

What we have is the Church dictating their version of the will of God. Let's try that again: We have a bunch of old, ostensibly celibate men, telling sexually aware people what they have to do with their own bodies.

Sounds pretty Republican, after all, doesn't it?

There is no good reason -- none whatsoever -- for Kansas' Attorney General to have access to people's sexual histories. He can look for porn on the Net just like the rest of us. No, what he wants is that control -- over women, over sex.

There is no good reason -- none whatsoever -- for the Pope to give one shit in the woods about gay people getting married. Same-sex marriage affects society in exactly the same way that male-female marriage does: not at all, unless they start making out in front of you, in which case tell 'em to get a room.

From the top: Women have absolute control over their own bodies in general and childbirth in particular. Couples of the same sex who want to get married aren't trying to destroy it, they're trying to buy into it. And those groups really are on the same side.

The questions that are never answered by any of the people who feel so threatened by sex, by gays, by abortions, by whatever, is: How, really, are you threatened? And, if you aren't threatened, what business is it of yours, anyway?

# posted by filkertom : 11:20 AM