I’m sure you’re shocked, downright shocked, to hear that this story comes out of Texas.

Marlise Munoz lies in a North Texas hospital, 19 weeks pregnant but with no chance of seeing her child born.

Her husband, Erick Munoz, says a doctor told him she’s brain dead, but John Peter Smith Hospital is refusing to allow him to take her off of life support. The hospital says Texas law prohibits it from following a family directive when a pregnancy is involved, although three experts say the hospital is misreading the law in question.

[…] John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth is pointing to a provision of the Texas Advance Directives Act that reads: “A person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.”

It doesn’t happen often kids, but I’m at a complete fucking loss for words. I don’t know where the hell to start.

[ABC News: Pregnant, Brain Dead Woman Kept on Life Support]

Proving yet again their hypocrisy and fixation for the pre-born over the born, a week before the government shutdown the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to Congress urging them to include the revocation of contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act as one of the Republicans’ hostage demands over the shutdown and raising the debt ceiling.

As Congress considers a Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling bill in the days to come, we reaffirm the vital importance of incorporating the policy of this bill into such “must-pass” legislation.

(emphasis theirs)

I guess it’s okay that the 53% of LIVING American babies who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants & Children (WIC) will go without assistance ($109 million in unpaid vouchers as of this morning); that Head Start programs close their doors for early-childhood programs; that VA employees are being worked like rented mules to get benefits out the door for disabled veterans, and there aren’t benefits being paid to survivors of dead soldiers; that NIH and NSF have had to cut off funding for scientific researchers that can stop illnesses and prolong lives; that the CDC has food inspectors furloughed so nobody is around to investigate salmonella outbreaks affecting people in 20 states; or that money from HUD to assist in funding affordable housing will dry up if this lasts much longer.

The important thing is that the church make sure those uppity whores who dare to have sex for any reason than to have a baby not have access to birth control.

Speaking at the graduation ceremony at Southern Virginia University, a Mormon college in Lynchburg, VA, failed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney advised the students there to get married as soon as possible and get busy making a “quiver-full of kids,”  because young people who wait until their 30s to marry are “going to miss so much of living.”

Mr. 53% went on to note that it’s okay to squeeze out the children even if you aren’t making money because “God doesn’t care if you’re rich.” Okay, good luck with that.

Mother Jones notes that the “quiver-full” reference is a nod to Psalm 127,  and a dog-whistle to the evangelical Christian Quiverfull movement that advocates a virulently anti-contraception position and embraces Biblical patriarchy.

Its followers see feminism as a slippery slope, starting with family planning—which is viewed as women taking unlawful ownership of a body that rightfully belongs to God—and ending with gay rights, abortion, divorce, and witchcraft (really).  Given their view of feminism as “a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God’s role for women,” the movement’s leaders instead suggested a sort of Renaissance woman alternative for conservative Christians: They would be submissive wives, prolifically fertile mothers, and home-schoolers who train their children (especially their daughters) to grow up and do the same. The children of these families, the “arrows,” are the tools of spiritual warfare for a community that envisions a long-term campaign to win the culture wars demographically—by having more children than its opponents.

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, we dodged a bullet in that election.

[MoJo: Mitt Romney’s Advice]

This was my favorite book as a kid. The idea that a girl could run away and have a grand time in the grandest museum in the world was delicious beyond belief. I wanted to be Claudia Kincaid’s best friend.

When I walked into the Met for the first time when I was 24, I almost began to weep realizing I was in Claudia’s home away from home.

I’ll go be verklempt over there in the corner, with all the other female Generation Xers.

[NYT: E.L. Konigsburg, Author, is Dead at 83]

[New Yorker: Postscript]

[TPM]

Well boys and girls it’s a new year, so that means a new legislative session in states across the nation (except for the Texas Lege which thankfully saves its kkkrazy for only the even-numbered years).  So you know what else that means?

That’s right! It’s time for GOP politicians to find new creative ways to crawl all up inside American women’s lady-bits and bonus points for involving rape.

Read more »

Our guest columnist is a Congresscritter from Georgia who has been medically accredited to get up your twat since 1975.

Part of the reason the Dems still control the Senate is because of comments made in Missouri by Todd Akin and Indiana by Mourdock were considered a little bit over the top. Mourdock basically said “Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially.” Now, in Indiana, that cost him the election.

And in Missouri, Todd Akin … was asked by a local news source about rape and he said, “Look, in a legitimate rape situation” — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, “Hey, I was raped.” That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that. But then he went on and said that in a situation of rape, of a legitimate rape, a woman’s body has a way of shutting down so the pregnancy would not occur. He’s partly right on that.

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