"... moving, for example, to replace the phrase 'a woman’s right to choose' with 'a person’s right to choose.' That well-intended inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people unfortunately blurs the essential message that the coming abortion ban is a frontal assault on women’s rights. Instead of playing into the talons of the opposition, let’s make sure every voter knows what these toxic turkeys are up to as they shrug off sexual assault and push for a nationwide abortion ban: They are vitiating a half-century of progress for women."
From "The turkeys of toxic masculinity strut their stuff" by Dana Milbank (WaPo).
1. The reference to turkeys has to do with an actual turkey that has been biting and scratching people on Anacostia Riverwalk Trail in Washington D.C. There's an analogy there. It's intended to be funny. An aggressive bird. Like the bird is a jerk. But surely the Republicans are jerks.
2. Milbank wrote "the coming abortion ban" just before the draft opinion leaked. I don't think he had any idea how soon it was coming.
3. There's a price to be paid for all the speech control that been undertaken to display superficial deference to transgender and nonbinary people. We've been suppressing awareness of the difference between male and female bodies, as if the vulnerability to pregnancy does not dramatically affect life for a woman. Life isn't just about how you feel inside about things you think of as gender. There's an outward reality that has to do with a very particular right that we fought so long to get acknowledged, struggled for 5 decades to keep, and lost just yesterday. And we're supposed to modify how we speak and not say "woman"!
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There's a price to be paid for all the speech control that been undertaken to display superficial deference to transgender and nonbinary people.
In other words: it's hard to keep all our lies straight!
I say: a little more rope oughta do it.
The Dems message consistently. Everyone understands what the Dems want.
Milibank advocates for disinformation since the Dems agenda is unpopular.
The fundamental problem with the Democrat Party is they eat their young. The only ones they allow in the spotlight are plastic Stepford drones like Kamala and Major Pete. The octogeraniums keep striking out swinging for the fences. I am sure they are wetting themselves that the destruction of Roe will be their midterm Savior that will allow business as per usual to continue unaborted.
Milbank wrote "the coming abortion ban" just before the draft opinion leaked. I don't think he had any idea how soon it was coming.
I'll forgive Milbank for being an ignorant hack but the Dobbs decision not an abortion ban and you know it.
We're been suppressing awareness of the difference between male and female bodies...
Suppressing the truth.
Life isn't just about how you feel inside about things you think of as gender. There's an outward reality...
This is true about unborn children as well. Ideological people deny the baby's reality, and her life. But that biological reality is unescapable. You can pay a doctor to stab or poison the baby, and remove the little body from your uterus. But that just becomes a new reality. You had a baby and you aborted her.
The left has become a place where narrative overrides truth. Women want to "choose" to become un-pregnant, and women want to "choose" to become a man. But we don't have that power. Doctors can abort babies and perform plastic surgeries. But biological reality remains.
and push for a nationwide abortion ban:
WHO, exactly, is pushing for THIS? Returning power to the states == a nationwide abortion ban
????
Federalism.. You keep using that word. I do no think that word means what you think it does.
The problem with Democrats is they cannot be honest about what they are doing.
Nobody wants open borders.
Nobody wants babies chopped up and sold by planned parenthood.
Nobody wants war with Russia.
Nobody wants 5$ gasoline.
Nobody wants food to cost twice as much.
Nobody wants the ministry of truth and censorship.
The Biden regime is illegitimate and everyone wants them gone. Biden will not be president for 4 years. He will be removed.
84% of voters want voter ID.
The Democrats and their republican gope allies do not stand a chance in any kind of honest election.
"...a very particular right that we fought so long to get acknowledged, struggled for 5 decades to keep, and lost just yesterday."
Lost? Not yet. That draft is just a bunch of words right now. If the Progs get their way, and put enough horses' heads in enough Justices' beds, the "very particular right" may be preserved.
Lost? Not even if that draft or something like it should take effect. The issue will simply return to the states, and if "we" are sufficiently active and numerous, "we" can direct "our" state legislators to arrange state law to "our" liking. To hell with the opposition.
And if this means that, out in flyover country, some poor girl can't get the help she needs? Planned Un-parenthood can send her airfare; or a home kit, no? Less convenient, no doubt: but freedom isn't free.
This is a shake-up in current arrangements. It is the not the end of the Republic: although the fund-raisers will try to make it look that way.
Althouse said...
It's intended to be funny. An aggressive bird. Like the bird is a jerk. But surely the Republicans are jerks.
"You jiiive turkey. See, you got to sass it... A turkey is a bad person."
Democracy Dies in Darkness!
Birthing person to woman and back and forth.
Clown nose on, clown nose off.
Damn right it undercuts their arguments.
'Health care decisions should be between a woman and her doctor...'
--Klobuchar
First, what is a woman? Sounds sexist to me.
Second, did you feel the same way about vaccine mandates?
Hint: she voted to keep Biden's vaccine mandate for large businesses.
Non-conformists regarding speech and thought control are having five minutes of Schadenfreude. Please respect that.
... and push for a nationwide abortion ban:
Pushback on that hyperbole. It helps your cause.
Joe Biden once voted to return decisions on abortion law to the states.
'With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier.
The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joseph R. Biden Jr.'
Oops...
But surely the Republicans are jerks.
Nope. You are, and so are the Dumbocrats. The GOP has (finally!) figured out which way the wind is blowing.
"...well-intentioned inclusion"
Even the Propaganda Machine in its desperate effort to save the Democrats from humiliation can't come to grips with the fundamental reason why Biden and Company are facing an apocalypse -- how can pushing the obvious lie that man minus dick equals woman be well-intentioned?
All the "get the vaccine" people are now talking about "their body, their choice"So precious.
Yes, things come around eventually and so the twisting of word meanings has a price to be paid. One of those prices is that words cease to have meaning. Who is a woman to the left these days? What is a woman? Can men actually have babies, breastfeed, have periods? Based on articles I've read over the past year, there are many on the left who are pushing for others to buy into that.
It's hard to fight for 'women's rights' when one cannot clearly define what a woman is.
BTW- just an open question to Dana Milbank: Who's shrugging off sexual assault? Please identify.
Yes, the Dems are in dismal shape. They have no unified or proactive message to convey, and, while they posit themselves as the party of the people, of workers, women, oppressed minorities and the poor, etc., they are simply covert Republicans, beholden to their corporate benefactors, (who also are benefactors of the Republicans), with no demonstrable commitment to passing polices that will actually benefit those they claim to be their constituents. Even alleged leftist firebrand, (non-Democrat) Bernie Sanders, when aced out of any real access to the nomination by higher ups in the Democratic party hierarchy, tells his followers to vote for Hillary Fucking Clinton, a hard-ass Goldwater Girl grown up, a moral cretin who cheerfully chanted "We came, we saw, he died," referring to Muammar Gaddafi's lynching by bayonet-up-his-ass.
The Dems are blind, completely unaware they are the authors of their own falling support. Their only message now (and for some years) is: "Vote for Us; We're NOT THEM."
Nonsense! Democrats have a consistent national message: Open borders; eliminate fossil fuels; LGBT rights including grooming children; buy votes with tax dollars; graft and corruption; racism and whiteness bad; inflationary policies, etc. You know, the usual. Oh, and Republicans are evil.
The right of the people of each state, through their respective representative governments, to set policy on a subject not even remotely addressed in the Constitution has been reestablished.
An encouraging trend that cannot be allowed to stand if one is to believe our betters.
I've been talking for decades about how it should be a person's right to choose, not just a woman's right.
It is not just about abortion. Of course a man can't choose to have an abortion. Anyone needing an abortion is a woman no matter how much dress-up they play or hormones they take.
It is about "my body, my choice" in everthing. It is about who owns my male body and who gets to decide what to do with it.
Male/female doesn't enter into it at all.
Nothing to do with abortion either.
John LGKTQ Henry
The people's right to govern themselves has been shorn up. This will be very upsetting to our betters.
"Choice" is not the issue. We all have the freedom of choice regarding any action. I have the "choice" to throw a brick, should I choose. However, if my exercise of that choice harms another individual or an individual's property, there are consequences. This is the longstanding basis of a huge body of law. Nearly all of it, in fact.
Despite multiple warnings, my former wife continued to choose a pattern of serious physical abuse against our daughter, now 11 yo. I had her arrested and removed from the home. She was convicted, spent some time in jail, and now has only highly-restricted access to the child. CONSEQUENCES for a tortious choice.
One of the few clearly legitimate roles for government is protection of the weak against the predations of the strong, especially when violent. No individual is weaker than a baby in the womb. Nothing is more violent than killing that child. Abortion has been a bizarre outlier to this principle for half a century, in that under the guise of "choice" women have been able to avoid any legal consequences whatever for inflicting the most severe possible injury upon an utterly helpless individual.
It is time for this brutal exception to normal law to be removed, forever, from the books. It is worth noting, as well, that here in Kansas -- as well as quite a few other states -- the fact that one or more others are inflicting potentially-fatal violence upon a helpless individual is adequate justification for me to deploy lethal force in order to stop it.
I shall add here that there is a clearly-neutral MEDICAL criterion which can be applied to establsh a key limit on unrestricted abortion.
We define the **end** of human life by the sustained absence of particular brain-waves. We should define the **beginning** of human life by their presence. There may be a faith-based reason for some people to define the beginning of life as "before the sheets are dry" but such extremism has no place in our legal system.
There might also be a larger legal framework for determining consequences. Very roughly ... human brainwaves present --> Manslaughter; potentially viable with a 5 percent chance of survival --> Murder. The small number of tough cases like ectopic pregnancy, anacephalic child, fatal genetic defect, etc would be clear exceptions akin to "justifiable homicide".
Personally, would be inclined to charge abortion providers and personnel, rather than the women, at least at first, and certainly in all cases of a potentially-viable fœtus. Some state-to-state variability is to be expected, though there's good justification for a federal law in the case of potentially-viable children ... because there is a readily available option, which is to C-section the child. NICU personnel are very good at determining which children have a decent chance of making it.
The right to representative self-government has been shorn up. Penumbras and emanations do not "rights" make. This will be upsetting to our betters.
I love the it. Losing the forest for the trees.
Point 3 is the most interesting to me. It became stark to me in a video nearly a decade ago from UK’s version of the show “Big Brother”. In the clip, a trans female yells at 3 women that they have no idea what it is like to be a woman. The UK general reaction was the trans female had the better of the argument. I was floored. This was a man telling women they don’t know what it was like to be women, and many otherwise sensible people agreed.
That showed to me feminism was now a dead political movement. Pussy hats and Kavanaugh were last hurrahs, but the impact was negligible as the attempts laughable. #MeToo wiped out mostly leftest males that wore feminism like a beard to hide their true beliefs. Less than a month ago, we had a woman refuse to define a woman. If a woman can’t know what it is like to be a woman nor even define a woman; how can they have an unique right only to them?
If this leaks is indeed the final ruling; I wonder how many might regret putting people like JK Rowling under the bus. She’s but one person that tried to warn you. She was a canary that many ignored.
"that we fought so long to get acknowledged"
You mean, to get fabricated by judicial edict.
An honest fight would have focused on a constitutional amendment or state legislative changes. The so-called fight was always a bad-faith power play.
Name calling betrays an unwillingness to delve into the arguments. Same with cursing 🤬
Dana clearly does not suffer from an excess of masculinity, toxic or otherwise.
I am reminded of teacher Mx. Garrison in South Park, and xis quest for a life-affirming abortion, though he lacked the necessary anatomy.
as if the vulnerability to pregnancy does not dramatically affect life for a woman.
Why are only women vulnerable to pregnancy? Is there not an impact to the man who conceives as well? There may not be a physical impact, but there is certainly an emotional one. The whole idea that pregnancy is only a "woman's thing" is destructive.
Takes two to tango.
Political congruence. Semantic games. Emanations from penumbras. Pro-Choice "ethical" religion.
Transgender conversion therapy through surgical, medical, and psychiatric corruption that science has determined produces progressive returns, mandated for the general population, for social progress. The exception given to so-called "stable" conditions, including: homosexual, bisexual.
Feminism, masculinism, gender toxicity.
Wicked solutions.
The latest lefty on the Court cannot define woman. Hilarious.
Pushing abortion as their number one issue in 2022 elections.
Hmm. Just like in 2020 and 2018 and 2016 and 2014 and 2012 and 2010 and 2008 and 2006 and 2004 and 2002 and 2000 and 1998 and 1996 and 1994 and 1992 and 1990... you get the idea.
Could it be time to retire "toxic masculinity"? At least in contexts where other explanations - class, ideology, convictions, ungendered aspects of personality -- explain behavior better.
I don't think the headline correctly describes what Milbank is talking about. There's also some pandering involved, as mansplainer Milbank tries to ingratiate himself with female abortion supporters and dismiss those who take other views as male chauvinists.
When you are a male person of a certain age, you're likely to have prostate cancer. Several of my friends contracted--and were treated for--prostate cancer. Recently I "joined the club" and am just winding up radiation therapy.
The guys have been circulating a joke about a conversation between a doctor and a patient.
Doctor--"Sir. ...."
Patient "No--address me as Ma'am"
Doctor "Ma'am you have prostate cancer."
Rachel Levine (now aged around 60 or so) may have that conversation later in life.
Howard said, regarding the Democrat gerontocracy: “…Octogeraniums…”
Genius! Just add water.
That well-intended inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people unfortunately blurs the essential message that the coming abortion ban is a frontal assault on women’s rights.
But it's not an assault on women's rights. It's an assault on the rights of all uterux-having persons. After all, men can get pregnant too. Dana Milbank outs herself as a transphobic monster.
"Milbank wrote "the coming abortion ban" just before the draft opinion leaked. I don't think he had any idea how soon it was coming."
Perhaps he didn't, but it may prove convenient to gin up fear that their precious rite, er, right, will be taken away if the wrong party is elected.
@ Bart Hall
We define the **end** of human life by the sustained absence of particular brain-waves. We should define the **beginning** of human life by their presence. There may be a faith-based reason for some people to define the beginning of life as "before the sheets are dry" but such extremism has no place in our legal system.
There is an error in your logic. You reference sustained absence. To a point, when we have someone with a lack of certain brain-waves, we often take extraordinary efforts in hopes of restoring those brain-waves. Only when we have concluded that we cannot, do we declare death. On the other end, we usually have hopes that those brain-waves will manifest themselves and have to take steps to terminate the life before they manifest should we NOT want the life. In other words, these are not comparable situations. On one hand we we terminate when there is no expectation of brain-waves and on the other we terminate because we have the expectation of brain-waves and want to prevent them. In one case we allow death to proceed naturally and do not intercede. In the other we precipitate death through our intercession.
" a very particular right that we fought so long to get acknowledged, struggled for 5 decades to keep, and lost just yesterday. " You should have chosen a different fight. Instead of the tactically foolish reliance on what Sebaastian aptly describes as "a fabricated right" obtained through "a bad faith power play". You should have fought strategically and passed laws and/or a constitutional amendment. Of course, that would be a lot harder and require you to actually persuade your neighbors that it is a good idea. Set up enough ballot drop boxes and mail out enough absentee ballots and it may even look like you succeeded.
"My body, my choice" has also become...awkward, in light of vaccine mandates. I am looking forward to the Woke meltdown in the event the dissenting opinion uses the offensive female pronouns in referring to those whose rights are being deprived. "Person(s) of pregnancy" will have a cow if Sotomayor disrespects they gender.
The fundamental problem with the Democrat party is mental, as so many of them would be classified as clinically insane if encountered by professionals.
The guys have been circulating a joke about a conversation between a doctor and a patient.
Doctor--"Sir. ...."
Patient "No--address me as Ma'am"
Doctor "Ma'am you have prostate cancer."
The first transgender, Christine Jorgensen died of prostate cancer in my hospital.
Clarify issues that are distinct to women? Justice Jackson may not be much help.
Party of the Pretzel seeks PR group to formulate clear message. The problem in three examples:
Not the Church and not the State/ Birthing people must decide xyrs fate
People are born free but everywhere they decide your gender without asking
I do represent Biden fulfilling his pledge to Jim Clyburn to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court but my gender was forced upon at my appointment. Going forward my pronouns are liar and/or lawyer.
'And we're supposed to modify how we speak and not say "woman"!'
Does that mean no pussy hats?
Perhaps a winning message would be a push for a constitutional amendment that defines both defines a woman and how the uniqueness of a woman grants them the special right to an abortion and ability to have women, as defined, only sports. Bonus, it would save people having to consult a biologist before answering an US census form.
They'll have to double down on sexually denaturing children to put a stop to releasing the birthing units.
Just kidding. Left is now in hold my beer mode with post birth viability window.
Leland, a plucked chicken was used to refute Plato's definition of a human as a "two legged animal without wings" so be careful making suggestions about defining half the populace in the Constitution. Only lawyers will profit. And they will do so with whatever correlates to a plucked chicken versus Plato.
Milbank is the white version of Eugene Robinson.
Neither of them can form an argument and persuade through reason. They just emote and repeat the cliches they heard growing up.
It is amusing to see the mental gymnastics now being performed in defending the rights of women.
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