Reports indicate that this week, the Republican-controlled Missouri legislature will try to override Democratic governor Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill requiring a 72-hour waiting period for women wanting an abortion. In a Sunday post, Daily Kos blogger Hunter implicitly asked a question about the measure (if it’s enacted, will Missouri in 2014 become a lot more like Afghanistan in early 2001?) and then answered it (yes).
Hunter borrowed a term from his boss, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas, to describe social conservatives including the Missouri legislators who back the bill. “The American Taliban demands a tribute from all women under their domain,” he thundered. “Nothing more, and nothing less. You are required to consider the tenets of their religion for three days, and it will be considered a crime against the state if you do not.”
From Hunter’s post (bolding added):
…There's no pretense of a medical reason for [the 72-hour requirement]: it is, indisputably, a religious law. We are not supposed to do that sort of thing in America—religious law is very bad, when practiced by the zealots of other countries—but we do, and we do it very often, and it's Christians and Republicans doing it every time and condemning the rest of us for having a problem with it...
…American Taliban is exactly what we should call it. The same insistence that the rights of women are second to the religious beliefs of menfolk they have never met, whether it be their legislators or the people who have hired them to work at the hobby shop. The same condemnations of art and science that contradicts the Chosen Truths. The same conviction that the other religions of the world are creeping into the woodwork, and will overtake us all if we do not adhere rigorously to the correct religion. Yes, yes, while providers of abortion are constant and explicit targets of violent religious zealots operating with the oft-winking assistance of the political arm of the movement, we should be very glad the zealots are not generally killing great swaths of other Americans with similar zeal, at least not on a regular basis, but those that consider our home-grown religious zealots to be of any higher caliber than the other ones might ponder on how great that gap would truly be, if the zealots ever found themselves in positions of similar power…
…Three days may sound like a mere inconvenience, but it is coupled with a series of previously passed and equally spuriously premised laws that have left only one abortion-providing medical clinic in the entire state…
As with all similar anti-abortion restrictions, the resulting problems are easily worked around if you are wealthy enough or sufficiently careered…but are intended to be very difficult to work around if you are a woman who must work for a living, or for whom travel to the one specific clinic in all of Missouri that can serve you would be difficult...
As for why there is no exception for rape or incest victims, the lawmakers are blunt. It is because of Religious Conviction, and nothing more…
…[T]he American Taliban demands a tribute from all women under their domain. Nothing more, and nothing less. You are required to consider the tenets of their religion for three days, and it will be considered a crime against the state if you do not.
