The 2010 Rightblogger War on Christmas Special -- Featuring Abortion Gift Certificates!

Merry War on Christmas! This conflict has been dragging on for years, which is not entirely a bad thing, as it has produced a thriving War on Christmas industry, which our economy desperately needs.

The opportunities for outrage this year are slim, but where there's a rightblogger, there's a way, whether via imaginary banning of the colors red and green or via Planned Parenthood gift certificates. Cover the children's ears and continue!

Canonsburg, Pennsylvania recently decided to move its traditional creche from civic to private property because someone complained. The creche was relocated four doors away. This seems only a small inconvenience; "Pa. residents to celebrate despite creche removal," reported the Lebanon Daily News.

Well, Pa. residents may be celebrating, but South Capitol Street was not. "Can't have the little liberal darling being offended," they said. "Have to ruin it for everyone else..." Radio host Dennis Miller got in on it after a caller told him the creche had been "taken down": "We can have one loser whining about the Magi visiting the kid... I say you hold a candlelight vigil outside that one person who's whined's house... make his life look as silly as he's made this one. All you losers out there..." etc.

A local radio station identified the complainant as one Megan Hartley, and Chicks on the Right reacted in Christian fashion: "Sorry about that whole not-getting-asked-to-the-prom-in-high-school thing. But it seems as though you're channeling your bitterness well." A commenter helpfully published Hartley's address and linked back to Free Republic, where posters offered their assessments of "little miss nuts" ("Getting bad vibes just reading about this freak and they got way worse upon seeing her evil face." "I bet this one is a cutter... I am wondering if she has an eating disorder too," etc). Jesus would be proud!

But they don't even need an actual outrage to be outraged.

?Last month there was a rumor -- or, as Fox Nation would have it, news -- that Heathrow Elementary School in Florida has banned the Christmas colors red and green from its classrooms.

County officials shot that story down, but who cares? Fox updated, but as we wrote this, Gateway Pundit ("Florida School Bans Christmas... And Christmas Colors") hadn't. Neither had Blue Collar Philosophy ("since Liberalism is a religion and those who believe in it cannot tolerate the one religion that exposes it, namely, Christianity"), nor Weasel Zippers ("it's come to this"), nor this guy, nor this one, etc.

Full Metal Patriot did update: "After receiving a predictable backlash from angry parents, the Seminole County Public Schools district has issued the following retraction correction... This may have been a case of the school and district doing an abrupt about-face or it may have been an individual teacher taking her authority a bit too far." Or it may have been bullshit, a possibility Full Metal Patriot did not consider.

For wider distribution, there was outrage at a show at Washington's National Portrait Gallery with lots of gay art, including a David Wojnarowicz video that included an image of ants crawling on Jesus. It wasn't a Christmas show, exactly, but it will still be running at Christmas, so Republican legislators John Boehner and Eric Cantor demanded (and got) the Wojnarowicz video pulled.

Pat Buchanan sputtered about "the kind of pictures that used to be on French postcards," though regrettably he did not link to any antique postcards of ants on Jesus. "... if there are no common standards of decency, there is no moral community, and where there is no moral community, there is no country." Others wondered why the smarty-pants Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992) didn't make fun of Mohammed instead, which would be a better way to celebrate the birth of Our Lord.

This sort of thing got some folks in a bitter mood: Jimmy Z posted a song on YouTube called "Santa is a Republican" ("His suit and hat are Red/He listens to Rush Limbaugh in his sled"). The lyrics promise that Democrats won't get any presents this year because they made Santa "drink green tea and eat granola bread" and Obama taxed him, despite lack of jurisdiction. Santa in this reading runs "a small business," and is an avid follower of U.S. politics who has Tim Kaine on his dartboard. He also "loves to feast on game he kills hunting with his gun."

"I don't give a rat's butt if you are not a Christian and don't celebrate or support Christmas," said radio host Steve Bussey. "The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are and do." His headline: "It's CHRISTmas - now sit down & shut the hell up!"

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Before Roe v. Wade: Fighting Over Abortion in Albany

?Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
March 25, 1971, Vol. XVI, No. 12

A holy war in Albany for the 'Right to Life'
By Robin Reisig

The New York State legislature is probably going to practice medicine again this spring. Abortion medicine.

Catholics opposed to killing "the baby cradled in his mother's womb," some establishment doctors complaining of "hazardous" operations, and feminists complaining that the law is too restrictive are all putting pressure on lawmakers to change the abortion law. The approximately 30 proposed abortion laws brewed up by the medicine men in Albany range from bills that would allow no abortions except to save the mother's life to crackpot bills that would add weird restrictions to the law to bills that would remove all restrictions on abortions.

A bill which would restrict abortions to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, instead of 24 weeks as the present law allows, is given a good chance of passing by most observers. So is a "conscience clause" which would state that no hospital or medical person could be forced to perform an abortion. (This unnecessary clause could lead to legal sanction of the policies of hospitals like St. Vincent's which, despite their government funding as community hospitals, refuse to give aid on birth control.)

Several residency requirement bills, bills that would restrict abortions to hospitals, and a 12-week limitation on abortions have also been introduced. So have bills removing all restrictions on when, where, and by whom abortions may be performed.

Zany, restrictive amendments that stand little or no chance of passing have also been introduced. These include a bill that would prohibit a woman from receiving Medicaid for an abortion; a bill that would prohibit a mother from receiving an extra personal income tax exemption if an aborted fetus lived; and a bill forbidding an abortion on a woman whose husband ha told the doctor that he didn't want the abortion.

Medical reasons are advanced for most of these restrictive bills, but opponents feel the real impetus moving most of the legislators involved is not doctors but the Catholic church. Only one assemblyman was knocked off by Catholic groups in the November election because of his vote on abortion. ("Abort Balletta," bumper stickers said. The voters did.) Assemblywoman Constance Cook has shown that others apparently lost votes because they voted against abortion reforms. Yet a few legislators who were hounded because of their votes for abortion reform and received smaller margins than usual in November rushed to get back into the good graces of the church by supporting restrictions to the law. They have at least the tacit blessing of the church, which admits it hopes to restrict the number of abortions by adding restrictions to the law. Or, as Monsignor Thomas McGovern, spokesman for the archdiocese of New York, put it, "Anything less than abortion on demand is better than nothing."

...Elsewhere around the nation, abortion laws are tumbling, but those who know that God is on their side -- the Right to Life Committees an Friends of the Fetus, the Voices of the Unborn and the wooden-cross-wielding Sons of Thunder -- have not given up their holy war and have even won some victories.

In Orange County, California, compliant voter registrars showed up at 14 Catholic churches one Sunday last fall to give voters a chance to switch their registrations. During mass, priests exhorted voters to turn Republican in order to protest the adoption of an "abortion on demand" plank at the state Democratic convention.

"Kill referendum 20, not me," blared billboards in the state of Washington last fall. The billboards showed a fetus cradled in a bloody hand. Voters, revolted, voted in a reform law.

In Iowa last month, the hard-sell tactics of the church were more effective. A reform bill, endorsed by both political parties and the governor, was killed in the house after Right to Life groups sent busloads of blind and crippled children up to the legislature and (according to a letter the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws received from a prominent clergyman) priests passed out anti-abortion petitions during mass and said parishioners couldn't leave the sanctuary until they signed.

Defiance of the law is growing. One year ago the New York Telephone Company practiced law by refusing to list the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion in the telephone book. Now clergy consultation services are listed in 24 states. Only two clergymen have been arrested for counseling abortions: the last arrest was one and a half years ago. Neither clergyman was prosecuted.

What will become of all the turmoil in Albany on the abortion issue? Senate Majority Leader Earl Brydges has said he wants the law made more restrictive, and Brydges usually gets what he wants. On the other hand, Assembly Speaker Perry Duryea has indicated that he doesn't want to be wrung through the abortion debate again. "The goddamned debate," "the most traumatic experience I've ever had in Albany," other legislators called it. "With people talking of little babies in trash cans, it's got to reach you, no matter how intellectual and sophisticated you think you are," said one senator. "No one wants to go through that again, with Republicans cursing Republicans..."

Many observers feel it will take a Supreme Court decision to resolve the abortion issue entirely, and to enforce the oft-repeated words of Florynce Kennedy: "The legislature should get its hairy fist out of women's private matters."

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.]

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Pre - Roe v. Wade, abortion NYC always difficult in 1970

Clip job: an extract every day of the voice archives.
October 15, 1970, vol. XV, no. 42

The new law on abortion: back to the Quacks
Robin Curtis

If you need an abortion after next Monday, when new code for New York City abortion health becomes law, you will find leads you into danger "illegal".On the other hand, these new rogue can better serve you and charge you less than some doctors establishment who fought for repeal of abortion, but now are scraping the results. If you go to a hospital in the city, the chances are you may be delayed or refused even if you have no cash to hand more difficult process.

"This is my support," said the Rev. Howard Judson Memorial Church, Moody "that for claims of health and hospitals Corporation, through a game of illusion, that the facilities of the city are working beautifully, and it encourages the Commission of the Health Act guidelines for"."Last Wednesday the Reverend Moody, speaking on behalf of the clergy and dispose of lawyers for the performance of abortions at the hospital, says massive city hospital system and charged, chess"it appears to be a conspiracy to control and limit the number of abortions under the new law."""In the days when abortion was illegal," he observed, "the first anxiety terrible face of a woman was where she would a..Its goal was shrouded in secrecy and she had to obtain advice for days and weeks and leads where abortion could be fait today in the city of New York system, it is not différente.Une woman can spend days and weeks rushed to a hospital in the hospital before she found a willingness and ability to help.He did y no worthy of the name competent reference system.

With false promises that abortions can easily be made up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, that they would be easily accessible to the poor, and that they would be readily available "in demand", new Act of compassion may even cause suffering as the old Act répressive.Pour dangles new Act false before women hope which, ultimately, can be said, as was a 19-year-old Queens girl firstly to wait several weeks for his abortion, nomination while the hospital was too busy to abandon him after all, and that, as it was now (thanks to the pending) spent 17 weeks of pregnancy, clearing, last official system of the city, resort House could not accept his.

That Moody called the "game of illusion" or confusion, or simply of duplicity, permeates every rosy system city whose attitude seems sometimes to some women report: allow bleed.

"There was a problem in July, but this is simply not now,' Mr. Edwin f. Daily, Director of the Health Ministry for abortion services clearing house said the week dernière.Pourtant, for example, September 27, a woman in her 11th week of pregnancy, a week and a half since the point cut-off for the genus simpler and safer to abortion, received an appointment by the hospital in King County for December 4.".

Municipal hospital officials say they have a "manageable" (with a drop in the rate of 70 per week) "stabilized" 2400.Pourtant, waiting list if municipal hospitals than 600 abortions abortions per week, how can a waiting list for fourfold size be called "manageable"?

The Board of Health announced on 17 September that the new law restricting abortions to hospitals and clinics very heavily equipped with will take effect October 19 and he said that hospitals could manage the charge.Pourtant following day three municipal hospitals closed operations on abortion; one of the hospitals and broken some 130 nominations for abortions and in at least one case would ' tell a woman she would not be interrupted until she had waited from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in his hospital room without even be served a meal...

[Every morning of the week, we post an excerpt from another voice, ranging from our oldest archive .lt order our page of archive employment clip see extracts to 1956].

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