I'm Calling Digby Out. (in the nicest way possible)

I was going to link to this Digby post in a quick update to my post on the Health Care Access and Availability Act because it illustrates nicely how the bill works for the insurance companies who own Congress as well as the Dominionists who want to take women's reproductive rights away completely,  including birth control.  But it's a long post and Digby ends up writing this: (emph mine)

An awful lot of people don't understand that this [jailing women who have abortions -eR] is where this argument inexorably leads. That means we have to engage at the dinner table and the water cooler as well as among ourselves. We must make some people look more closely at their own self-interest in this issue, particularly men.

But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

This is not an issue for tweaking. Let's tweak on the Ten Commandments or public funds for parochial schools or something else if it is necessary to adjust for this family values crap in order to win elections. State mandated forced childbirth and denial of access to birth control cannot be negotiated or finessed. This one's going to have to be fought out head to head, day to day to a final reckoning. That's what they are going to do and if we don't recognise that and act accordingly, we will lose.

And that's when my inner Cato took a break from prying the razor blades from my inner Semmelwies' hands and reminded me of my role as one of blogtopia's leading hair shirts on this topic.   

So Digby, if you mean what you say, and I'm sure that you do, then there is no alternative for you but to make some time and find some bandwidth to support the candidacy of Chuck Pennacchio in Pennsylvania and encourage your readers to do the same.  Not one.

As always, my Cato has the last word:  Chuck Pennacchio must be elected.

Welcome overnight Firedoglakers.  Jane Scott kindly linked to this section of my blog.  If you're short on time and need to find out about Chuck fast, please be sure to check out these posts about him and the Dem Sen primary in PA:

Learning from Ciro's race.
What Michelman's candidacy means.
Pennacchio Online Petition Drive Wrap-Up  with lots of links to other bloggers who support Chuck.

Comments

[DavidByron]

They don't have the stomach to jail women. In the legislation pro-life groups have already pushed for it's a positively feminist "blame the nearest man" theory of criminality.

If a woman kills her own unborn child it's no foul. If she gets a male doctor or a male boyfriend to help her THEN it's an offense --- for the man.

The Republicans aren't stupid enough to attack the priviledged sex. They attack the minority group that they know nobody cares about. It's the same with the way poor and/or black women have more difficulty getting an abortion. They know THAT isn't going to cause an outcry.

We must make some people look more closely at their own self-interest in this issue, particularly men.

This from a guy who apparently only realised the other day that men have a stake in pregnancy and reproduction.

[Thomas Nephew]

They don't have the stomach to jail women.

Maybe not yet, but soon. There'll be a lot of talk about loose lifestyles, and taking responsibility for one's actions and how it'll be for women's own good; no more "self-loathing." The link isn't about some major figure, but a Tennessee blogger I ran across. They're cranking up a kind of passive-aggressive state constitutional amendment ("no right to an abortion") in Nashville to halfway keep up with South Dakota.

No response from digby?

[eRobin]

The trackback didn't work. I'm way off the radar without a trackback.

I don't know why people think that women won't be jailed for having illegal abortions. I don't see that being a difficult hurdle to clear.

[DavidByron]

Not difficult per se but it would require they step out of their comfort zone. It's like anything; like genocide for example; you have to work hard to get up to the big stuff. You don't jump in there on day one killing people by the thousand. You have to work up to it.

So you start by attacking the easiest targets; men and other minority groups (in both cases). The way the US trains death squads for example, you start by killing animals.

Even from a totally sex selfish perspective feminists would have been well advised to protect the rights of men and other minorities simply because... well you know:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist.....

But they never cared about anyone but themselves. And now who shall have sympathy with them?

[DavidByron]

So what's going wrong with the trackback anyway? Do you have a HaloScan account?

[eRobin]

Good idea. I used the Haloscan site and it went through.

[WebMan]

Hi ! Your site is very interesting. Thank you.