Sunday, October 30, 2011

A Simply Frightful Amendment

By Zamboni

On this Halloween Eve, let us pause and consider the scariest thing on today's political scene.

Nope, it's not the GOP 2012 clown college. They're mostly just good for a laugh (and the one guy who isn't, is roundly hated by the Republican base). It's not even the nervous-making state of the economy. It's the "personhood" amendment.

The state of Mississippi is on the verge of approving a constitutional amendment that would define an embryo as a full person. Its off-the-radar-right-wing creator and the religious nutcases who support it think they're taking a brilliant new tack in the fight against abortion. But what it could actually do is outlaw many forms of birth control and take away the ability of women (and men) to control their own lives.

It's this kind of stuff that makes us cats so, so, SO glad that we no longer can have kittens. Thanks to that long-ago bit of surgical intervention, we know that no matter how hard they try, the personhood-pushing fundamentalist maniacs can't touch us. But women in Mississippi and maybe even in other parts of the country would lose their right to self-determination if this horrific thing passes.

The right wing likes to scream about how important it is to keep government out of our lives. But somehow they manage to make an exception when it comes to the work of scary people like the great American pictured above.

We cats SNARL. Happy Halloween, everyone.

UPDATE, October 31: Ironic, of course, that people are crusading for this amendment as the world's population hits 7 billion — today.

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