Abortion

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court ‘creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism’, AOC says

      by

      The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.“In fact, we have members of the court themselves, with justice Elena Kagan, saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature right now.“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.“They continue to overturn the will of the majority of the people and to make history for all the wrong reasons, legislating from the bench and being political from the bench,” she said.The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Indiana supreme court clears way for Republican abortion ban

      by

      The Indiana supreme court ruled on Friday that the state’s abortion ban does not violate the state constitution, removing a major hurdle to enforcing the ban Republicans approved last summer.The court’s decision overturns a county judge’s ruling that the ban probably violates the state constitution’s privacy protections, which she said are stronger than those found in the US constitution. That judge’s order has allowed abortions to continue in Indiana since September, despite the ban.An opinion from three of the court’s five justices said that while Indiana’s constitution provides some protection of abortion rights, the “General Assembly otherwise retains broad legislative discretion for determining whether and the extent to which to prohibit abortions”.All five Indiana supreme court justices were appointed by Republican governors.The Republican state attorney general, Todd Rokita, issued a statement praising the decision: “We celebrate this day – one long in coming, but morally justified. Thank you to all the warriors who have fought for this day that upholds LIFE.”Although the court’s decision strikes down the injunction blocking the ban, it was not immediately clear how soon the ban would take effect. The justices returned the case to the county judge for further action, and left open the possibility of a narrower challenge to the ban.Indiana’s abortion ban also faces a separate court challenge over claims it violates the state’s 2015 religious freedom law signed by GOP the then governor, Mike Pence.Indiana became the first state to enact tighter abortion restrictions, acting in August, after the US supreme court’s eliminated federal protections by overturning Roe v Wade in June 2022.Most Republican-controlled states have enacted tighter abortion restrictions since the US supreme court’s ruling last summer. All the restrictions have been challenged in court.In the past year, judges in Arizona, Iowa and South Carolina have ruled that the bans are not permissible under the state constitutions.Besides Indiana, enforcement of restrictions are on hold as courts decide the cases in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah and Wyoming. In North Dakota, lawmakers hav since adopted a different ban to replace the one that was blocked. In South Carolina, another ban has been put into place and put on hold by a court. And in North Carolina, a federal judge weighed whether to temporarily block parts of new abortion restrictions set to take effect on Saturday.Democratic-led states, such as Indiana’s neighbors of Illinois and Michigan, have mostly taken steps to protect abortion access.The Indiana ban would eliminate the licenses for all seven abortion clinics in the state and ban the vast majority of abortions even in the earliest stages of a pregnancy. It includes exceptions allowing abortions at hospitals in cases of rape or incest before 10 weeks post-fertilization; to protect the life and physical health of the mother; and if a fetus is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly.The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which represented Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinic operators, argued before the supreme court in January that the state constitution’s liberty protections provide a right to privacy and to make decisions on whether to have children.The state attorney general’s office countered that Indiana had laws against abortion when its current constitution was drafted in 1851 and that the county judge’s ruling would wrongly create an abortion right.The Indiana supreme court’s decision said the state constitution “protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk”.The majority opinion, however, also found that the constitution “generally permits the General Assembly to prohibit abortions which are unnecessary to protect a woman’s life or health, so long as the legislation complies with the constitutional limits that apply to all legislation, such as those limiting legislation to a proper exercise of the police power and providing privileges and immunities equally”.A separate court challenge to the ban is ongoing as another county judge in December sided with residents who claim it violates the state’s religious freedom law, which Republican legislators pushed through in 2015 and sparked a widespread national backlash as critics argued it allowed discrimination against gay people.The state supreme court in January turned down a request from the attorney general’s office that it immediately take up the religious freedom lawsuit. The state’s intermediate court of appeals is scheduled to hear arguments over that lawsuit on 12 September.The Marion county judge Heather Welch in December agreed with five residents who hold Jewish, Muslim and spiritual faiths and who argued that the ban would violate their religious rights on when they believe abortion is acceptable. For now it only directly affects those plaintiffs – legal experts say anyone else claiming religious protections of their abortion rights would need their own court order. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Should Gay People Seek to Be Seen as ‘Normal’?

      by

      More from our inbox:Domingo Germán, Simply PerfectTrump and EvangelicalsArt in Private Hands, Lost to Public ViewMissing: Younger Women’s Voices Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “As a Gay Man, I’ll Never Be Normal,” by Richard Morgan (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, June 25):Mr. Morgan just reinforces the concept of normalcy. Better that we just be ourselves, and ignore the labeling altogether.I live in a college town, and what I see every day is gender fluidity and sexual orientation boundaries continuing to be dissolved at a pace that middle-aged queers like me should find both inspirational and enviable. Young people today don’t care so much about the “who is normal/abnormal” space that the author writes about.We should not retreat from the many hues in our “rainbow” of people, including all those who dwell in the borders. We should neither spend too much time separating out the colors (as the author does), nor dig our heels into concepts of “true” or “pure” queerness.Young people aren’t normalizing queer; they are finding newer and braver ways of being themselves. Whether that means walking in a parade, or never doing it; whether obviously or imperceptibly gender fluid; whether in, out or through the back closet into Narnia; whether normal, abnormal, homogenized or wildly unique. Everyone belongs, and we should have a wide open door.James SeniorMarquette, Mich.To the Editor:Richard Morgan makes the mistake that countless individuals have made in equating heterosexuality with normality and being gay with … something else. Heterosexuality isn’t normal … it’s just common.Yes, Mr. Morgan, as gay folks, you and I are in a distinct minority. But why take on the burden of allowing others to categorize us as abnormal?Yes, homosexuality is less common than heterosexuality, but it’s entirely natural and entirely normal. Raise your consciousness, brother.Jim SkofieldWalpole, N.H.To the Editor:“As a Gay Man, I’ll Never Be Normal” was such a touching reflection of emotions I’ve long held myself. As a teenager I cried and prayed for the “normalcy” he described, but only now have realized that it was ease I hoped for. As a proud gay man I’m happy to have survived such a difficult and uneasy journey to adulthood.The Human Rights Campaign’s messaging for marriage equality, grounded in the claim that gay relationships are deserving of equal protection because they are just like straight relationships, did unmeasurable good for the community. But it was flawed in the sense that it set a requirement of likeness for legitimacy.We aren’t like heterosexuals; we often live and love very differently and across a wide spectrum. I’ve seen a shift in the queer community away from “we’re just like you” messaging recently, and applaud those who demand acceptance despite their differences.While this might not be the easiest path to tolerance, it’s the only path to acceptance.Austin RichardsChicagoTo the Editor:I do not agree with Richard Morgan that “L.G.B.T.Q. folks have a peculiar interest in normalization.” Whether or not he, or I, or any gay man feels either “normal” or “normalized” matters only to the individual.What seems much more important is that our legal, religious and educational institutions come to understand that a society composed of people of varying sexual and gender identities is, in the end, what is truly “normal.”David CastronuovoRomeTo the Editor:Richard Morgan is right. As a gay man, I will never be “normal,” even if I always wanted to be accepted like everyone else. I have accepted that truth now and have offered that up as my cross to bear.But I am grateful for the empathy and caring it taught me and for the kindness of strangers, and, of course, for my kind and strong husband.It’s OK to be different. Just learn to let go of the stress and anger it can sometimes bring.Patrick Sampson-BabineauEdmonds, Wash.Domingo Germán, Simply PerfectDomingo Germán of the Yankees needed only 99 pitches to complete a perfect game against the Oakland Athletics.Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Yankees Pitcher Throws M.L.B.’s First Perfect Game Since 2012” (Sports, nytimes.com, June 29):He had been so imperfect his last two starts. His statistics were ghastly. And before that, there was the 10-game suspension for being the poster child for this year’s worst sin: a pitcher with too much sticky stuff on his hands.He was a mere afterthought in the starting rotation, an asterisk caused by injury to others. Domingo Germán, hanging on by a thread.So Wednesday night seemed more likely a final chance, a last gasp at redemption rather than a ticket to baseball immortality.Maybe his choice of uniform number — zero — was prophetic. Maybe mere serendipity that he had his best stuff against a uniquely inept opponent, the Oakland Athletics. Whatever the cause, there it was, and there it will be in perpetuity.My most prized piece of sports memorabilia is a ball signed by the pitchers and catchers of the three previous perfect games thrown by the Yankees. Suddenly, that ball needs two more signatures. But I forgive Mr. Germán his transgression.Not good. Not great. Perfect.Robert S. NussbaumFort Lee, N.J.Trump and EvangelicalsIn an effort to consolidate evangelical support, former President Donald J. Trump emphasized his role in appointing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Burnishes Judicial Record at Evangelical Conference: ‘This Guy Ended Roe’” (news article, June 26):Evangelicals’ support for such a morally compromised and ethically challenged individual as Donald Trump never ceases to amaze me. Their dubious rationalization for this — that he brought an end to Roe v. Wade — borders on the absurd, given that every Republican candidate running in 2016 and today would have nominated three “pro-life” nominees for the Supreme Court if afforded the same opportunity that Mr. Trump had as president.So why continue to support someone who has made a mockery of almost every fundamental Christian value and endorse such a deplorable example of leadership for our youth when so many others are available who represent those values so much better?Ira BelskyFranklin Lakes, N.J.Art in Private Hands, Lost to Public ViewTo the Editor:Re “$108.4 Million Sale Sets Auction Record for Klimt” (news article, June 28), about the sale of “Lady With a Fan”:Art sold to private collectors is often lost to public view. As someone who spent many years researching Gustav Klimt and his work, I found that your story raised critical issues about ownership and access to important paintings.When the philanthropist and World War II restitution activist Ronald S. Lauder purchased “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” for a record $135 million in 2006, he put the portrait in the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, where it has remained on continuous display.By contrast, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” is now in private, unnamed ownership in China, and “Lady With a Fan” is now in the possession of a private collector in Hong Kong.Klimt’s paintings show us the lost world of his Jewish patrons in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Some may applaud Sotheby’s record European sale, but art is more than a commodity; it is part of our shared history.When a painting is sold to private collectors for record millions, it becomes unaffordable to museums and too often inaccessible to the people who would appreciate its beauty and significance.Laurie Lico AlbaneseMontclair, N.J.The writer is the author of “Stolen Beauty,” a novel about the creation and restitution of “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”Missing: Younger Women’s VoicesTo the Editor:Re “Nine Kansas Women on Abortion” (“America in Focus” series, Opinion, June 25):Come on! Of the nine women who discussed their thoughts and votes on abortion, the youngest was 37 years old. The other women interviewed were in their 40s, 50s and 60s!Why be so removed from the women who are the hardest hit subjects of the bans? You should have given readers a chance to hear from the many fertile women in their teens and 20s whose bodily autonomy is being challenged now.Lisa LumpkinOsprey, Fla. More

    • 238 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden has reminded us yet again that he’s a weak and lukewarm ally of abortion rights | Moira Donegan

      by

      A closed-door fundraiser for the very wealthy is a place where a lot of politicians really shine. Among their fellow elites, surrounded by people like them who like them – and are giving them money – Democrats and Republicans alike often become their truest selves. They drop the flesh-pressing affectations, the focused-group soundbites, the stiff smiles. They become something they’re usually not: honest.Honest is what Biden was at a similar fundraiser in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, this past Tuesday, when he told a crowd of his wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion “got it right”.Biden’s reassertion of his own discomfort with abortion came just three days after the first anniversary of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion right. In the year since women lost the constitutional right that the president says he is not “big on”, the bans that snapped into effect have had life-changing – life-ruining – effects for thousands.Women have been forced to carry for months babies that cannot live outside the womb, which they have had to watch die after agonizing moments or hours of life. Women and girls have been forced to flee their home states to get abortions after being impregnated through rape. Women have lost their organs to abortion bans, needing emergency hysterectomies to save their lives after incomplete miscarriages or cesarean scar pregnancies. Others have been drafted into exercises in morbid futility, forced to carry fetuses that lack major organs, such as heads, in a new reality that has been likened to torture. Other women have been forced to become sicker and sicker – suffering, risking their lives, and incurring permanent damage to their bodies in order to be made ill enough that abortion might become legally permissible.Many more women have been stripped of control over their lives – denied healthcare, denied the ability to plan their families, denied the freedom to choose the course of their own lives, for the sake of retrograde, bigoted and punitive conceptions of gender and sexuality held by others. And all American women, along with many trans people, have been degraded and humiliated by abortion bans, relegated to a lesser class of adult citizenship, informed that they are not permitted to control their own fates.The abortion data project WeCount suggests that there were 25,640 fewer legal abortions in America in the year following Dobbs. That number does not account for the number of women – the unlucky ones – who received care only after their pregnancies sickened them to the brink of death. And it doesn’t account for the women – the lucky ones, as these things go – who were able to flee their home states and subject themselves to the indignity and burden of traveling for care. So the number is conservative. But still, it represents a staggering injustice: 25,640 violations of human rights; 25,640 people who deserved better.Throughout the past year, members of the Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, have been largely absent from this unfolding catastrophe. They have not taken on an expansive view of executive authority in attempts to restore abortion rights; they have not pressed allies in Congress to advance pro-choice legislation; they have not been willing to challenge, even tentatively, an anti-choice federal judiciary that is wildly expanding its interpretations of its own power.They are not even willing to do the one thing that the president has the unquestioned authority to do: use the bully pulpit to express solidarity with American women, to grieve for their lost health, futures and dignity, and to rally Americans to the increasingly popular pro-choice cause. Joe Biden has abdicated leadership on abortion, the loss of which is causing untold suffering, and which will define life prospects for a generation of women. Because he finds it distasteful. Because he’s not “big on” it.Lest this seem like an ungenerous reading of a well-intended gaffe, it should be noted that an unwillingness to advocate for abortion rights has been a recurring theme of his career. Abortion is a test that Joe Biden has failed every single time that history has called him to it. His paeans to his Catholic faith as cover for his unwillingness to champion abortion also ring false: most American Catholics support abortion rights. And as Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, pointed out, the church also fiercely opposes marriage equality, which the president has long championed. It is not Catholicism that makes Joe Biden unwilling to issue a full-throated support of abortion rights. It is sexism.Until it became a political liability for him in the 2020 midterm cycle, Biden was among one of the last leading Democrats to support the Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision that forbade federal funding for abortions, and which, because of its ban on Medicaid coverage of the procedure, made Roe’s protection of the abortion right largely moot for poor women almost as soon as it was achieved. Biden’s assertion that “Roe got it right,” is both disingenuous to this long-held position, which curtailed Roe’s protections, and also a sign of how indifferent and uninterested he has been in the insights of pro-choice activists, who have long argued that Roe was insufficient in its protections for abortion, inadequate in its argument for the right on privacy, rather than liberty and equality, grounds, and too diminished by subsequent attacks on abortion access that were pursued by rabidly anti-choice Republicans and allowed by cowardly “pro-choice” Democrats who never had the courage of their campaign promises.But an indifference to abortion rights activists from Biden is no surprise: after the Dobbs decision, while his administration fumbled and tried to change the subject from their own incompetence and lack of preparation, it was not those who had conspired and schemed for decades against Roe who the Biden administration blamed, and it was not those who had snatched women’s rights away that they demonized. It was pro-choice activists.“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have consistently been out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party,” his then-communications director, Kate Bedingfield, sneered.Mission accomplished: pro-choice activists are not satisfied with Joe Biden. But abortion is a salient issue, one that is only growing more popular, and more electorally persuasive, every day. In light of the post-Dobbs political reality, Joe Biden’s unwillingness to give unqualified support to abortion rights is not just morally cowardly; it’s also politically irresponsible. Republicans are running from the issue, and the Biden campaign is declining to attack them on it. Voters are rallying around abortion rights, and the Biden campaign is declining to lead them.The time for apologetic, defensive, partial non-defenses of abortion rights is over, and America’s newly mobilized pro-choice majority knows it. It’s not the activists who are out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party. It’s Joe Biden.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats to Use $20 Million Equal Rights Push to Aid 2024 N.Y. House Bids

      by

      Numerous left-leaning groups are behind a statewide effort to focus attention on a 2024 equal-rights referendum, hoping to increase voter turnout.New York Democrats’ substandard performance in the midterm elections last year helped their party lose control of the House of Representatives, threatened its national agenda, and angered national Democrats.In an effort to avoid repeating the same mistake, New York Democrats on Thursday will announce support for a statewide effort to pass a women’s rights amendment that they hope will also supercharge turnout in 2024, when President Biden and House members will be up for re-election.Their strategy: Get Democrats to the polls by focusing attention on a 2024 statewide referendum, the New York Equal Rights Amendment, that will explicitly bar New York from using its power and resources to penalize those who have abortions.The campaign, backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, among others, plans to raise at least $20 million to spend on television ads, direct mail and organizing in support of the initiative. The effort is designed to complement the House Democrats’ main super PAC’s $45 million bid to win six New York swing districts next year, including four that just flipped Republican. The campaign is launching a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and ushering in near-total abortion bans in 14 states. It is in step with a national Democratic strategy highlighting the abortion record of the Republican Party — a game plan that Gov. Hochul embraced last year with mixed results, beating her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, by only six points..In an interview on Monday, Ms. Hochul argued that the threat to women’s reproductive rights represents “a highly mobilizing force” that is a proven electoral strategy in New York, her own history notwithstanding. She pointed to the victory last year of Representative Pat Ryan, a Hudson Valley Democrat, over Marc Molinaro, a Republican who favored giving states the discretion to govern the legality of abortion.The New York Equal Rights Amendment campaign is being supported by numerous left-leaning groups, including Planned Parenthood, the New York Immigration Coalition, the New York Civil Liberties Union, NAACP New York and Make the Road New York.Ms. Hochul added that the campaign chose to bring the amendment to a statewide vote in 2024, rather than this year as the state is legally entitled, to create space for its message to penetrate. The timing, during a presidential election year, should maximize the campaign’s efforts“Having a ballot initiative in our state is going to drive voter turnout overall, which will definitely help Democrats,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “The biggest reason we lost House seats was because of voter turnout.”Mr. Jeffries, the House minority leader, took a slightly different tack. “This has nothing to do with voter turnout and everything to do with ensuring that a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions is protected in New York State,” he said.The New York Equal Rights Amendment is backed by the state’s Democratic leaders, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, right, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act, which protected abortion rights in New York State. Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, regarded the law as necessary in case a more conservative Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade.That act and others render the ballot amendment “largely gratuitous and symbolic,” said Dennis Poust, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference.“The reality is, abortion is already widely available and accessible in New York,” Mr. Poust said. He urged New York to put “at least as much effort into helping to empower women who might seek to keep their baby if only they had the necessary resources and support.”But Ms. Hochul argues that the Reproductive Health Act is no longer enough.“Laws can be repealed,” she said. “There’s a much higher threshold to change the Constitution.”Voter sentiments about abortion have begun to shift nationally, in step with a drumbeat of stories about pregnant women being denied medical care and facing near-death experiences. Polls have found that pro-choice Democratic voters are more motivated to vote on the issue, and Republicans less so. Democratic leaders have taken notice.“Let’s be honest,” said Letitia James, the state attorney general. “As I travel, reproductive rights is an issue which comes up over and over again.”Electoral strategy aside, the campaign’s supporters also back the initiative on the merits. Other states have passed their own versions of an equal rights amendment, but many generally ban sex discrimination alone, the organizers said. New York’s ballot initiative would go further.Not only would it prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, but also on the basis of “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, reproductive health care and autonomy.” It would ban government discrimination based on age, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.Sasha Neha Ahuja, the former national director for strategic partnerships at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who is spearheading the new campaign, said the amendment would mean that “for the first time, discrimination of folks on the basis of their reproductive health decisions will be categorized as explicitly sex discrimination.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis’s Pitch to New Hampshire Focuses Heavily on Florida

      by

      Focusing heavily on Florida at his first town-hall event in the Granite State, Ron DeSantis drew a reception that was sometimes warm, sometimes more skeptical — especially on the issue of abortion.At his first town-hall event in New Hampshire, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida talked on Tuesday about illegal immigration in Texas, crime in Chicago, disorder on the streets of San Francisco and the wonders of nearly every aspect of Florida — a state he mentioned about 80 times.Roughly an hour into the event, Mr. DeSantis finally got around to saying “New Hampshire.”His relentless focus on Florida was at times well received in a state that will play a key role in deciding who leads the Republican Party in the 2024 election against President Biden. Mr. DeSantis’s comments seemed to especially resonate when he connected his actions at home to issues of importance to New Hampshire residents, like the flood of fentanyl and other deadly drugs into their communities.Still, his self-confident lecture about his record as Florida’s governor left the distinct impression that he believes Republican voters need what he is offering them more than he is interested in what he could learn from their questions.“Every year I’ve been governor, we’ve decreased the assumptions in our pension fund,” he boasted, digging deep into the Florida policy weeds. “In other words, you know, whatever it was when I came in was rosier. And we always reduced down to ensure that no matter what happens, our pension system is going to be funded. I think we’re like eighth-best in the country with that.”Even his jokes were Florida-centric, sometimes to the point of obscurity to the crowd of roughly 250 people who packed a carpeted banquet hall in Hollis, a few miles from the Massachusetts border. The audience reaction was muted when he joked about property prices rising in Naples, Fla., to make a point about Chicago residents fleeing south to his state.After facing criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held recent town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire. David Degner for The New York TimesThe main ideological skepticism in the audience concerned Mr. DeSantis’s hard-line stance against abortion — a position that is popular in heavily evangelical states like Iowa but less so in more secular New Hampshire.Like several other Republican women in attendance, Jayne Beaton, 65, of Amherst, N.H., said she came with questions about the candidate’s position on abortion, and the six-week ban he signed in Florida.“I predict it’s going to be an issue for him,” she said. “With everything else” in his platform, she added, “I’m onboard and excited, but I’m less sure about abortion, and the six-week ban.”After taking criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire since Thursday. Although he has rarely faced tough questions, he has seemed relatively comfortable in these unscripted moments, asking voters their names, thanking military veterans for their service and occasionally cracking jokes.Such casual interactions are especially important in New Hampshire — the first-in-the-nation primary state whose residents are accustomed to vetting presidential candidates over and over in intimate settings.“It is a little different here than it is in any other state,” Jason Osborne, the Republican majority leader of the New Hampshire House, who has endorsed the Florida governor for president, said in a phone interview before the event on Tuesday. “We’re so small, we’re the first, so the most candidates are going to touch the state than any others.”Mr. DeSantis, who has a reputation for being somewhat socially awkward, is working hard to overcome a deficit of roughly 30 percentage points in the Granite State against former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. He spent more time answering questions from voters in Hollis than he has at any event since announcing his candidacy in May.The audience, which included many out-of-staters who traveled hours to see Mr. DeSantis, seemed to appreciate that he had showed up. Several told him they admired his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida. In a veterans-heavy state, he was also thanked for his military service and received applause when he said he was the only veteran running in the Republican field.Mr. DeSantis ducked only one question. A teenage boy invited him to condemn Mr. Trump’s efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. DeSantis declined to do so. All he would say was that he did not “enjoy seeing, you know, what happened” that day, but that he had nothing to do with it and Republicans needed to look forward, not backward, because if they dwelled on the past they would lose elections.When he was finally asked about Florida’s six-week abortion ban, Mr. DeSantis seemed comfortable answering the question and, unlike Mr. Trump, he made no effort to contort himself to appeal to more moderate voters. He said he believed that in America, “life is worth protecting,” and it was important to provide services to support low-income and single mothers.Doreen Monahan, 65, of Spofford, N.H. — who asked Mr. DeSantis the question about abortion, and the burden placed on taxpayers when women who cannot get abortions bear unwanted children — said later that she had been reassured by his answer, including his mentions of beefed-up postnatal care and adoption programs.“It’s nice that they have some options,” she said. “I have friends who waited years to adopt.”She said she had reached out to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign to ask about exceptions to the six-week ban, and felt more comfortable after hearing details.Mr. DeSantis pitched two main arguments against Mr. Trump, without naming him. The first was that change could not come to Washington if Republicans kept losing elections. The second was his theme of “no excuses” — a shot at Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on core promises such as completing a wall along the southern border.An older man told Mr. DeSantis that he had voted twice to “drain the swamp,” but that it never happened. He wanted to know what Mr. DeSantis would do differently from Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis opened his response by recalling how exciting it was in 2016 to hear the rally chants of “drain the swamp.” But then he took two unsubtle shots at the former president.Mr. DeSantis said that “the swamp” in Washington was worse now than ever and that to “break the swamp,” a president must be disciplined and focused, and have the “humility” to understand he cannot do it on his own. The audience cheered when he promised to fire the Trump-appointed F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”Mr. DeSantis made a campaign stop on Monday in Eagle Pass, a Texas city on the border.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis seemed at his most animated toward the end of the rally when a woman asked him about Covid vaccines. In response, the governor denounced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, calling their efforts to promote vaccines a “total disaster.” He also attacked big pharmaceutical companies, and highlighted a study by Florida’s health department that purported to show elevated health risks for young men who took mRNA vaccines but that was widely criticized by scientists.“These Covid restrictions and mandates were not about your health,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It was about them controlling your behavior.”The DeSantis campaign has leaned heavily into criticizing how Mr. Trump handled the pandemic, seeing widespread anger among Republicans over vaccines, masking, school closures and social-distancing measures as an opportunity to peel voters away from the former president.The crowd responded approvingly to Mr. DeSantis’s eight-minute tirade against what he called “the medical swamp.”Mark Pearson, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview this month that he had seen the governor grow more confident as a retail politician.In May, Mr. Pearson said, he told Mr. DeSantis that he needed to engage directly with New Hampshire voters.“I told him, ‘Here’s what I suggest you do: You walk the rope line, you drop into the diners, you go to the small venues,’” he recounted. “‘But it better be real, Ron, because we can smell a phony from a mile away, because we’ve been doing this for a hundred years.’” More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      After Roe’s overturn, Republicans target trans rights using extremist rhetoric

      by

      Americans are “frustrated and anxious”, lamented former vice-president Mike Pence. The country is “in a precarious position” assessed North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson. And Glenn Jacobs, a former professional wrestling star and current mayor of Knox county, Tennessee, declared that “these are hard times”.What could be the cause of such hardship? To the Republican presidential candidates who spoke in Washington DC on Friday at a major gathering of the religious right, the culprit was American society’s acceptance of transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community.The language and imagery is extreme and full of conspiracy theories.“We are facing the greatest challenge this country has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime,” the Missouri senator Josh Hawley said to the crowd of hundreds gathered for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Policy Conference.He described the challenge as “a new Marxism that is rising in this country”, one that tells Americans, among other things: “That there’s no such thing as male and female, that there are not two genders. There’s 2,000 genders and it tells our children that the way God made them is wrong.“These new Marxists want to give America a new religion. They want to impose on us the religion of woke. It is the religion of transgenderism, critical race theory and open borders multiculturalism, and they are shoving it down our throats,” Hawley said.Held in the hotel where Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt, the audience of hundreds seated in its ballroom heard from several major Republican presidential candidates, including, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott, and the ex-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.Their appearances came at an inflection point for cultural conservatives. A year ago, they had seen their long-held dream of overturning Roe v Wade become reality when the supreme court struck down the precedent after 49 years, allowing states to ban abortion. But in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights, the movement recently appeared to be on the back foot, with congressional Republicans in 2022 helping to pass a law that protected same-sex marriage nationwide, building on the supreme court’s establishment of the right in 2015.In response, groups opposed to rights for the gay, lesbian and transgender communities have orchestrated a well-funded backlash to the expansion of rights – one that is being fostered by extremists, has seen the erosion of gay rights in many states across the US and includes a growing threat of violence.“God hates pride. He hates pride in January, February, March, April, May and in the month of June,” conservative preacher John Amanchukwu proclaimed early in the event, in a reference to the LGBTQ+ Pride month that drew laughs and cheers from the crowd in Washington.The fallout has hit the trans community in America particularly hard. This year so far, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) says that 15 bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth have been passed into law, as have seven bills allowing or requiring the misgendering of transgender students, along with a handful of other measures targeting drag performances or school curriculum. All told, more anti-gay bills have been introduced in statehouses in 2023 than in the past five years, according to HRC.“The purpose of these laws is to facilitate a rise in political extremism by alienating and isolating LGBTQ+ Americans, and the impact of these laws is alarming,” said Kelley Robinson, president of HRC, in a recent statement, calling it a “state of emergency”.“In every county you represent, in every county your colleagues represent, you will find parents and children, teachers and nurses, community leaders and small business owners who are afraid that the rise in legislative assaults and political extremism has put a target on their backs.”Earlier this month, the pollster Gallup reported a drop in public support for same-sex relations, driven mostly by Republicans. The issue’s approval now stands at 64%, compared with 71% last year, with only 41% of Republicans approving – a decline of 15 percentage points from last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, rights groups Glaad and the Anti-Defamation League found that at least 356 incidences of hate directed at LGBTQ+ Americans occurred between June 2022 and the past April, including a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that left five people dead.At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference, speaker after speaker made clear their resolve to continue the campaign against trans Americans.“We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18,” said Pence.As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a campaign against what he calls “woke ideology”, including a bill he signed earlier this year that bans gender-affirming care for minors, restricts its access for adults and allows the state to temporarily remove trans children from their parents.Polls show DeSantis in a distant second place to Donald Trump, who has maintained his lead in the Republican primary field by offering voters a familiar mix of conspiracies, charisma and promises to continue the policies he pursued during his first term as president.DeSantis stayed away from attacking the Republican frontrunner in his speech, instead promising the Faith & Freedom Coalition audience that as president, he would implement his policies in Florida across the United States.“We will fight the woke in the schools, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of government. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs,” DeSantis said. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We can’t rest or relent’: Pence reiterates support of staunch abortion restrictions

      by

      Despite their unpopularity with the American public, former Republican vice-president and 2024 White House hopeful Mike Pence doubled down Sunday on his hard-line support of staunch abortion restrictions, saying: “We just can’t rest or relent until we restore the sanctity of life.”Pence – in an interview on Fox News Sunday – made clear that he viewed bringing the elimination of abortion “to the center of American law” as both essential and “a winning issue” for the Republican party trying to wrest back control of the Oval Office.“I’m pro-life, and I don’t apologize for it,” Pence boasted to host Shannon Bream, even though polling shows most Americans favor keeping the termination of pregnancies legal in most cases.The Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that the US supreme court handed down one year ago Saturday in effect left it up to states to decide whether abortion should be legal within their boundaries. Many states have taken steps to severely limit access to abortion, setting off a seismic shift in how doctors are training to provide reproductive care to how far patients in need of attention must travel.Pence on Sunday hailed the Dobbs decision as “a historic victory” which sent the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling establishing federal abortion rights “to the ash heap of history”. But he also suggested it didn’t go far enough and reiterated a call he had publicly made days earlier for his fellow Republicans to rally behind setting “a minimum standard” and implementing a nationwide ban on abortions beyond 15 weeks.The former US congressman, Indiana governor, and vice-president to Donald Trump argued that failing to do so would leave the nation more closely aligned with “western countries in Europe” on the topic of abortion than with North Korea, China and Iran. “I fully support that,” said Pence, a professed evangelical.Pence’s beliefs on abortion put him at stark odds with Trump, who has signaled that he regards a national abortion ban as a vote-loser which he is unlikely to support.Many of the other declared candidates for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic presidential incumbent Joe Biden’s re-election campaign have been less frank about their positions on abortion.Notably, Florida governor Ron DeSantis – the closest challenger to the frontrunner Trump – signed a six-week ban in his state, which pundits predict could be a problem for him in a general showdown with Biden.Biden’s administration has taken steps to widen access to abortion, and promises to defend such procedures helped Democrats keep a majority in the Senate as well as lose fewer House seats than projected during last year’s midterms.Pence on Sunday also evaded answering whether he would consider pardoning Trump if he won the 2024 presidency and his ex-boss was convicted of criminal charges pending against him.“I don’t know why the other people running for president in the Republican primary assume that the president will be found guilty,” Pence said when asked if he would pardon Trump.Trump is facing federal charges that he improperly stored government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he and Pence were defeated by the Biden-Kamala Harris ticket in 2020.Separately, he is also facing state charges in New York over hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels after a sexual encounter that she has described having with Trump. Presidential pardons would not apply to state charges.The ex-president has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.Trump’s presidency ended with his supporters attacking the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 and demanding – among other things – Pence’s execution by hanging. At the time of the attack, the pro-mob Trump incorrectly maintained that Pence could have used his ceremonial role at a joint session of Congress certifying the results of the 2020 election to single-handedly undermine Biden’s victory. More