In which the Taliban aka Killer Creighton take a slot in the lizard Oz ...

 

As the tedious election campaign drags on, the reptiles are clearly hurting, but there's always Klive's kash in the reptile klaw as consolation ...

Meanwhile, Alice was worked up about Kelly country ... what with teal looking worse than the left over fire engine red the pond once splashed on a gate ...

Fancy that. Who'd have imagined anyone being so pissed off by the lesser Ned that they might turn teal?

Never mind, on to the United States and the pond refused to believe Lawrence O'Donnell yesterday when he ranted about how a twelve year old might be forced to carry to term if raped by a stranger (who knows, perhaps a Russian soldier not satisfied there's enough action in Ukraine), or incestuously by father, step dad or kindly uncle...

Who could support such a barbaric, primitive mindset? Who would deliberately torture a twelve year old in this way? 

And yet ... there it was in WaPo ... (paywall)

An opportunity for a 13 year old?

There's more, but the pond felt extreme nausea, and anyway, it wasn't O'Donnell's hypothetical 12 year old, the victim offered that grand opportunity was 13.

So the pond went looking and struck out again ... it could only find an eleven-year-old ...

An 11-year-old girl in Ohio was allegedly raped by a 26-year-old multiple times, leaving her pregnant, according to police reports. A state law passed in April, but not yet in effect, says that victims like her won't have a choice to have an abortion — they would have to carry and deliver their rapist's child.

The law prohibits women from obtaining an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, about five or six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women even know that they're pregnant.

The law provides no exceptions for rape or incest.

In an email to CBS News on May 9, the Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost defended the statute. "Sometimes, the evolution of the law requires bold steps," Yost said, quoting a statement that was issued when the law was passed in April. "In the last 46 years, the practice of medicine has changed. Science has changed. Even the point of viability has changed. Only the law has lagged behind." (CBS here)

Astonishing, and what a deeply inhuman fuckwit that Yost sounds like ...

The pond kept searching and did turn up another 13 year old ...

When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed an unusually restrictive abortion ban into law in May, Dr. Bhavik Kumar was pained to think about the people it would hurt the most — patients like those he's served as an abortion provider at the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston.

The law, which went into effect September 1, forbids abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and makes no exceptions for rape or incest.

"While politicians pass these laws in faraway buildings, we actually see these people, we take care of them," Kumar told Insider. "There are people depending on us. They have names. They have families. And their ability to access care will make the world of difference to them."

The story of a 13-year-old girl remains salient. She'd been raped by her grandfather and told her mom when she stopped getting her periods. A doctor confirmed she was pregnant, but the girl couldn't get an abortion close to home in Texas, where abortion access is already limited, so she was driven hours to Kumar's clinic. (Insider here).

And so on and so on ...

What astonishing cruelty, how amazingly Taliban. Who could support a situation where such things might come to pass? 

The pond immediately rushed off to do a survey of the lizard Oz reptiles to see if someone had some thoughts to offer ...

It was almost a dead loss, what with thee lizard Oz editorials in a row, but at least the pond had its answer.

Who could support barbarism and cruelty of a medieval kind? Come on down Killer ...

The pond usually likes to crack the odd joke about Killer, but truly on some days he loves to be so barbaric, cruel, vile and loathsome that it's hard ...

The pond also struggled to find a cartoon to lighten the mood ...

Nope, that wasn't funny, that was just an accurate reflection of how fucked the United States is at the moment ... and indirectly, a reflection on how fuckwitted the Killer can be ...

Say what? There might be a few people in the United States who care what happens to innocent victims?

As it so happens, the pond had been reminded by O'Donnell that the collective brain snap back in 1973 had involved some five Republican appointed judges, since politics matters so much when it comes to justice in the United States ... and then ...

During their 12 years in power, the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations had five opportunities to appoint justices to the nine-member Supreme Court, raising the possibility that they could have installed a majority willing to overturn Roe a generation ago. But in a 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court instead reaffirmed a constitutional right to abortion.

The majority in that case included Reagan appointees like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy and the Bush appointee David H. Souter. They turned out not to be strictly conservative in the mold of others appointed around the same time like Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom wanted to overturn Roe.

Calvin TerBeek, a University of Chicago political science graduate student who unearthed a copy of Mr. Meese’s 1987 speech in St. Louis for his dissertation, said the fallout from that case prompted the conservative legal movement to demand greater ideological vetting.

“O’Connor, Kennedy and Souter were Republicans first, rather than conservatives first,” Mr. TerBeek said. “That is why the conservative legal movement — especially places like the Federalist Society — have put such a premium on better predicting what a justice is going to do once they get on the court.” (paywall affected NY Times)

And so here we are, with justices of the Brett Kavanaugh/Amy Coney Barrett kind having clearly lied just to get a seat at the table, or if you will dissembled, misrepresented and misled fools of the Susan Collins kind ... and so, as everyone apart from the fools expected, here we are ...

Why should the pond care? Well the pond is routinely outraged by the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the outrageous behaviour of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, and for that matter, the rabid attitudes of angry Sydney Anglicans and the Catholic church ... so of course the pond will pay attention to the Taliban at work in the United States ...

What a fuckwit. Correction, what a male Killer Creighton fuckwit, full of bullshit and the usual blather about authoritarian elitism. No, it's actually about who should control a woman's body ... a bunch of men, or the woman, and in the end, age doesn't matter when it comes to that principle, though the fate of a 12 year old raped girl surely make everybody except a Taliban of the Killer kind stop and think and even contemplate empathy and humanity.

That was enough for the pond this day. Too much Killer, even in small doses, can be fatal, and aware of reader sensibilities, the pond sent petulant Peta off to a late arvo slot, and turned to the immortal Rowe for some consolation and healing.