Thursday, March 09, 2006

Prohibition and Shotgun Weddings in South Dakota          biblehelp.org Gov. Michael Rounds describes it as "a direct, frontal assault" on Roe v. Wade as he signs the South Dakota abortion ban into law on Monday. This reaction from the Chicago Tribune editorial page: As Prohibition proved, a mere law can't make people abandon something they value. Changing behavior requires changing basic attitudes--to eliminate not just the availability of abortion, but also the demand for it. Though the activists on both sides of this debate get most of the attention, many people favor the goal often stated by President Bill Clinton, which was to make abortion "safe, legal and rare." The anti-abortion movement has had some successes in recent years, notably on "partial-birth" abortion and parental notification laws. But it has not been able to convert widespread ambivalence about abortion into firm opposition. What South Dakota lawmakers have approved may shake some people out of ambivalence, but not in the direction the lawmakers favor. The ban allows no exceptions for rape, incest or serious dangers to the mother's health. Only when the mother's life is at risk would it be allowed. Faced with this ban, voters on the fence are more likely to be pushed toward the abortion-rights camp than pulled away from it. And here's Sen. Bill Napoli, (R- Rapid City) explaining why he's for the total abortion ban and sounding like he's straight out of HBO's Deadwood, eager to go back to the idealized frontier way of doing things: "When I was growing up here in the Wild West, if a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married, and the whole darned neighborhood was involved in that wedding. I mean, you just didn't allow that sort of thing to happen, you know? I mean, they wanted that child to be brought up in a home with two parents, you know, that whole story. And so I happen to believe that can happen again. ... I don't think we're so far beyond that, that we can't go back to that."   Molly Ivins has a thing or two to say about Napoli and shotgun weddings. 8:52:47 PM    comment []

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