Tonight I grabbed the newest issue of Folio Weekly and came across an article written by Julie Delegal so, instead of packing for this weekend's Florida Young Democrats convention, I decided to blog.
I thought Delegal's article on HB 1143 was right on and thought I would share some of it (I can't seem to find it online so I'm typing this from the May 11-17th issue of Folio Weekly).
"Crist has hundreds of thousands of reasons to veto HB 1143: hundreds of thousands of walking, breathing adult female Floridians whose party affiliations don't enter into the calculus of their private reproductive decisions. Retired columnist Ellen Goodman has written that one in three American women, between the ages of 18 and 40, have made the difficult decision to have an abortion. I'll venture to say that they didn't pull out their voter registration cards to do so, but they may need to pull them out at the polls this fall to keep their private reproductive decisions private."
"It's as if patients would have 160, mostly male, Florida lawmakers right there with them in their doctor's office, not only in the examination rooms, but in the accounting departments, too: HB 1143, if signed, would forbid companies that receive tax credits from offering employee health insurance plans that include abortion coverage."
"And if we open the door on OB/GYN visits, parity would demand we create a Viagra bill. If passed and signed by the Governor, the Viagra bill would require any man seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction to view (and pay for!) a video that follows a young sperm cell on its journey to babyhood. Conservatives love to blame the "breakdown of the traditional family" as the root of all societal evils, excepting those evils brought on by having to pay taxes, of course. But over the past few generations, we've witnessed the meteoric rise of the single-parent family. And notably, by and large, we're not talking about single father households. Women are already quite aware of the consequences of bringing children into the world, which is why they don't need to view (and pay for!) state-mandated ultrasounds to help them make their private decisions."
"But my Viagra bill would also include a stipulation analogous to the Stupak amendment to the national health care plan. Under Stupak, women who want abortion coverage as part of their medical insurance, whether subsidized by the federal government or not, must write an additional check for a separate abortion-coverage policy. Similarly, with my Viagra bill, those gentlemen who want to ensure continued function in their root delivery systems would simply write a check for the "Viagra rider." Sure, their employers would not about it. Privacy, schmivacy."
"But much like the oil spurting uncontrollably from beneath the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, political pandering on reproductive issues has irretrievably polluted our process, and threatens to creep its slime more broadly, more insidiously and more damagingly than ever before....If we're going to have sensible leadership in the U.S. Senate, and if we want to keep the insidious spread of right-wing pandering out of the Governor's mansion, we'd better get cracking."
All that said, there is almost nothing that can get me to vote for Crist in November. I have emailed and called his office quite a few times regarding the bill but, at this point, what he does is totally unpredictable.
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