No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Guns don't kill people, doctors kill people?

Sorry for being "off the air" yesterday - my web hosting was up for renewal, and the company never sent me a reminder beforehand, they just waited until the time ran out and pulled the plug on me. Good job I had backed up all my files. I've signed up for another year but I will be keeping an eye out for a more customer-friendly host.

Anyway, it kills me how the wingnuts who smugly smirk that shooting sprees like that at Virginia Tech are a small price to pay for the sacred right to "pack heat" with no restrictions or accountability are today hailing a SCROTUS (Supreme Court - Republican - Of The United States) decision that fundy-pandering politicians can infringe the hell out of a woman's right to control her own body, overruling doctors in the process and showing reckless disregard for living, breathing human life. I'm referring to the upholding of the federal ban on "partial-birth abortion" - a medically meaningless term, deliberately chosen to be inflammatory, and a horribly vague law that aims to shut down a wide range of procedures that are sometimes necessary to save a woman's life.

Maha has a couple of great posts that clear up the (deliberate) confusion and explain why forcing the complexities of modern medicine into the straitjacket of religious thinking is a recipe for tragedy. See in particular the story linked to here, where religion-based policy led to two fetii being stillborn when one could have been saved.

But then the "pro-life" fetus people are no more pro-life than the gun nuts. It's all about thumping their chests and braying about how morally superior they are to us evil librulls - the only thing that changes is whether they call us baby-eaters or unarmed sheep deserving of slaughter.

By constantly fighting in the most knee-jerk and mouth-foaming manner against any attempt at gun reform, the NRA has more innocent blood on its hands than the IRA. And as for the Compulsory Childbirth Brigade... I couldn't even guess at their toll in both deaths and destroyed lives, but it has to be up there.