And so it begins...

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/24/dakota.abortion.ap/index.html

The attacks on a woman's right to choose what she does with her own body have started already shortly after Alito took the bench on the Supreme Court. I fear that the so-called "pro-life" movement is now rounding up their forces to try and once again take down Roe v. Wade, and thereby eliminating a woman's right to choose and make her own decisions about healthcare. It actually infuriates me. South Dakota, in their ever present wisdom has voted through a ban on abortion in their State. Lawmakers ran it through, and the governor said that he is inclined to sign it when it plops down on his desk. What are these people thinking? Home of the free indeed. In the law that these dumb asses have written, they allow for NO abortions whatsoever, none. Not even if a woman is raped. Not even if a woman is a victim of domestic abuse. Not even if a woman is a victim of incest. Nothing, they allow nothing. And I know that right now, George W. Bush is sitting behind his desk (well, he's actually probably not in the office it being a Saturday and all) with his hands behind his head, and he's smiling. There is no way that this can get passed through, and there is no way that this isn't going to be litigated against, and there is no way that this should happen. It kind of makes me sick. Also, I would like to point out that SD is a State that indeed does carry the death penalty, and does currently have 4 people serving death sentences in their jails. As the Governor of the State of SD has pointed out, he is pro-life, and believes that they should do everything they can to save lives, then I ask; why does South Dakota still have a death penalty if they're so pro-life? As a society, we seem to be moving backwards instead of forward. I say this because look at the big push, from the Right of course, to have a "moral" and a "just" society. Look at the freedoms that they want to roll back. Look at how they attack science as a course of nature. Look at how they attack education and being educated as being "bad", even though most of them are holders of prestigious degrees from Ivy League schools in the US.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about. The on-going and ever evolving (pun intended) war against evolution being taught in science classes around the country to kids in public schools. Parents and some school officials come out and say that indeed, evolution is just a "theory" (about as much of a theory as Pythagorean's theory, which we all know works) and that there are indeed "alternative" theories and juxtapositions about how we came to be on this Earth. When they say that, it means ID or intelligent design, which as most of us know, is a thinly veiled screen for creationism, or the story of Genesis from the Bible. They want to teach religion as science. The funny thing about ID, is that there is no scientific basis behind it, none. There are no facts about it, just the fact that the people who promote it say that nature is too complex for a higher being to not have a hand in creating it, and that evolution doesn't explain it at all. Well, maybe evolution doesn't explain everything because let's face it, the world is pretty big, and there are a lot of things in it, and well, you can't have possibly studied everything, and determined where everything came from. Essentially, these folks are saying, yeah, we believe these Bible stories and take them as fact, and we don't want our kids taught evolution, because that is contrary to our religious beliefs. Now we're looking at devolving our school systems to the point where we're teaching 1930's education to the kids of the nation again. And then we look around and wonder why we don't have much of a high tech industry anymore, and why our kids are lagging behind other nations in engineering and sciences, it's because of bullshit like this that goes on, oh, and things like No Child Left Behind, which bases how much money your school gets on how well the students do on standardized testing. So now we have instead of teachers being allowed to actually teach, and maybe educate students, we leave them to teach them how to take a test so that the school can survive. Teaching to tests does nothing to actually make students think, and to give them critical thinking skills that you need in life. It's more like, this is what you need to do, now do it. They're not allowed to question things. To start discussions. To think for themselves.

Also, the right will tell you about how their opponents are "East coast elitist liberals" while they are salt of the Earth type of people, and that they have degrees from these fancy schools, and that being too educated is bad. Here is my theory behind that. They appeal to the lowest common denominator because they can, and the people with less education, and with less critical thinking skills will support whatever rhetoric that they throw out there, which is why I think now we're turning out a nation of students who don't have such skills. Students who don't question things, and just accept what they're being told. And hence why the right doesn't support people getting higher educations, they want to keep them down and supplicant to their rhetoric and or power, and or what they tell them. And scarily enough, it's working, or it seems to be. When did being smart become the boogeyman anyway? When did becoming educated become a no-no? It's pure lunacy! And then like I said above, the people telling folks this hold degrees from Harvard, from Yale, from other prestigious Ivy League schools around the country, and or other prestigious institutions of higher learning, yet they don't want you to follow the same path, because hey, you might come up with an opinion that's different than their's, and that would just be bad.

Anyway, it's time to throw on the spandex, and head out to ride the bike, and to try and start getting into some sort fitness before the year 2006 is over.