FROM THE CHEAP SEATS – by Robert Ross

Daytona Beach (March 2016) - Florida co-eds on Spring Break prepare for a day of fun at the beach.

The Florida legislature, at the behest of its Taliban (née Republican) majority, has imposed new, draconian restrictions on women seeking to obtain abortions, despite said abortions being completely legal for almost four decades under federal common law. Apparently, the good ol’ boys of the Florida Taliban think women are too uppity and need to be taught a thing or two about who’s boss, specifically who is boss of a woman’s uterus.

Emboldened by their success in the recently adjourned session of the legislature, the Florida Taliban probably have plans for more “lessons” they’d like to “teach” women in the years ahead. The following might be news accounts we can expect at the conclusion of sessions to come:

2011 – After banning abortions and access to any form of birth control, the Florida Legislature voted to exclude from the workplace any woman who was, in the words of the bill’s sponsor, “in a family way.”

2012 – The Florida Legislature today enacted a law that requires all women who have delivered children to remain at home with those children for the first five years of the child’s life. According to Sen. Cletis McCretin, the bill’s sponsor, this ensures that “wimmin will be where they belong, takin’ care of them babies … ‘stead of dumpin’ ‘em off on some furrin’ nursemaid.” He added that men have a right to expect that their offspring will be raised by the mother, and keeping “meddlin’ wimmin” out of the workforce was an added benefit.

2013 – The Florida Legislature wrapped up a busy session, which began by the outlawing of women holding any jobs outside of the home, by revoking the driver’s licenses of women in the state. Rep. Homer Greenteeth, Speaker of the House, pointed out that “If we ain’t allowin’ wimmin to work, whut in tarnation do they need to be drivin’ around and gettin’ in the way of men on the roadways anyhow?” Supporters in both chambers of the legislature celebrated the bill’s passage by staging an impromptu tractor-pull on the capitol grounds, pitting the House Speaker against the Senate President. They then drank 100 kegs of beer and went home to beat their wives.

2014 – After weeks of delicate negotiations, the Florida Senate concurred with a House bill that excluded women from voting. “Since last year, when we stopped ‘em from drivin’, wimmin could only vote by absentee ballots that their husbands or boyfriends filled out for ‘em,” said Senate President Rufus Leaking. “This saves them guys the trouble of ‘persuading’ their wimmin to vote the right way,” he added. The eight women remaining as members of the legislature, now stripped of their right to vote and thus to serve in that body, were forced into the capitol kitchen and made to bake cookies for the men.

2015 – Prodded by exasperated men who still were being charged sporadically with spousal abuse by zealous prosecutors when they beat their wives, the legislature passed a bill that made it legal for men to “discipline” their wives or girlfriends, as long as the device used was made of wood and no larger than one square inch in thickness. As one bill co-sponsor said, “Them wimmin git mighty ornery stayin’ home all the time and lookin’ after the young ‘uns. Sometimes a good beatin’ is the only way a man can get any peace and quiet.”

2016 – Disgusted by women who insisted on wearing shorts or sleeveless blouses that showed off their cuts, bruises and welts from spousal beatings, the Florida Legislature passed a law that required that any woman appearing in public be covered from head-to-toe by “a single garment of opaque fabric, with a small viewing portal that does not permit others to see the person therein,” according to language in the new act.

2017 – Tragedy befell the Florida Legislature today as all members perished in a fire that apparently began in the capitol kitchen. Previous legislation that had lifted requirements for emergency exits in public buildings became the downfall of the doomed legislators, who cried in vain for rescue as the fire raced through the aging structure. Firemen, who were conducting fundraising at nearby interstate exits at the time, arrived too late to save anyone.

A right-wing fantasy?

Almost from the moment of its discovery by European powers, the New World became the catalyst for one of the blackest marks on humanity in the last millennium – the enslavement of Africans to provide cheap labor for exploiting the natural resources of the colonies established in the western hemisphere. The horrors of slavery are so widely acknowledged that few care to parse the more reprehensible aspects of the practice.

Certainly, many are aware of the terrible ordeal that was visited upon the newly enslaved in their passage westward across the Atlantic Ocean, confined for weeks in a space not even as large as a coffin and unable to breathe fresh air or even escape their own wastes. As many as half died during the voyage, a number inflated when the slavers would throw the clearly infirm overboard to drown or be devoured by sharks. The iniquitous alliance of African slave traders, European (particularly English) merchants and colonial planters kept the nefarious practice alive for centuries, until the English Parliament banned the trade in the early 19th century. However, that development led to the expansion of an even greater horror for slaves already in the colonies.

Many slave owners regarded their slaves as livestock and employed typical animal husbandry practices to increase the size of their slave holdings through reproduction. With limitations in the slave trade beginning in the early 19th century, that practice gained a special urgency, as breeding became the only practical way for slave owners to perpetuate their slave workforce.

In this wretched environment, the female slave had no control over her own reproductive process. Whether she liked it or not, she would be impregnated by male slaves selected by the owner in an effort to produce the most viable slave offspring. She then had to bear the heartbreak of having her child taken from her and typically sold to another slave owner who lived well distant, possibly never to see that child again. Most soul-crushing for the mother, however, was the knowledge that her child – the fruit of her womb – had been brought into this world to live a life of bondage and servitude, a fate completely beyond her ability to influence.

My point is that, within the collective horror that was slavery in America and elsewhere in this hemisphere, the degrading use of female slaves as “breeding stock” was an especially loathsome practice. And what made it so loathsome was the way it made women doubly enslaved, first to their captors or owners and then to their larger role in the reproductive process.

The history of humanity is replete with examples of the enslavement of women by stripping them of the ability to be active determinants in the reproductive process. One of the noblest aspirations of our species – motherhood – is besmirched by the specter of being coerced into that role against one’s will.

One would like to believe that, here in the 21st century, such oppressive virtual slavery is a thing of the past, a quaint practice of a less-evolved humanity. After all, the dawn of the 20th century saw an end to the dreaded Comstock era, when women were denied even access to birth control. And the decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973, which deepened the common law validity of a constitutional right to privacy and used that as a basis for affirming the right of women to control their role in the reproductive process even to the point of terminating a pregnancy, provided further distance from the nefarious past when women were forced to bear children against their will.

Sadly, that is not the case. In the past few days, the legislatures of three states have enacted laws intended to diminish the rights of women as set forth in Roe v. Wade: In Florida, the legislature has decreed that all women seeking abortion must have – and pay for – an ultrasound examination of the fetus, even if the physician does not believe the procedure to be medically necessary. Moreover, no health insurance plan may provide coverage for abortions if the provider of that coverage utilizes state or federal tax credits or cost-sharing credits (in other words, everyone, thus depriving many Florida women of coverage they now possess). Oklahoma also now requires an ultrasound prior to any abortion and, additionally, statutorily indemnifies physicians from lawsuits when they withhold information about developmental deformities in a fetus from the mother (so that a woman will be unaware of her child’s hydrocephaly, for example, until that agonizing moment in the delivery room when the birth defect is revealed). Finally, Nebraska has banned abortions outright at 20 weeks gestation, on the presumption that the fetus could feel pain (regardless of viability, the standard set in Roe v. Wade).

Mohandas Gandhi once said that there were two classes of slaves in India – untouchables and women. And the patriarchal culture that prevailed in that country and led him to make that statement is all too prevalent elsewhere in the world. Globally, the systematic oppression of women – from economic inequity to rape as a routine weapon of war, and all conditions in between – begins and ends with the limitations imposed on any woman in the use of her body for procreation.

The dictates of the primitive men in these state legislatures, and their few female colleagues so victimized by patriarchal programming that they gladly support the degradation of their own gender, belies the true nature of human consciousness and evolvement. Their craven actions to force women to be subject to their totalitarian whims is a monstrous affront to every person who treasures the sanctity of individual freedom.

These despicable despots are the modern-day equivalent of the slave-traders of the past, trafficking for their own selfish ends in the misery of others. One can only hope that their reign of terror against half of all humanity, magnified by the complicit actions of so many of their ilk around the world, one day will come to an end.

The Deepwater Horizon burns out of control, just prior to sinking in the Gulf of Mexico (U.S. Coast Guard photo)

I hope those oil-addicted idiots who coined the phrase, “Drill, baby, drill” during the 2008 presidential campaign are paying careful attention to the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico off of the coast of Louisiana. If they had their way – and, in this particular instance, “they” includes President Barack Obama – this horror could just as likely be off the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia or Florida. And for what? So some self-indulgent, cell-phone yapping bozo in a mammoth-sized SUV could continue to afford his or her monthly gasoline bill?

First, and most important, many lives were lost in what potentially could be one of the deadliest oil platform disasters in the U.S. in the last half century. The impact on the families who have lost a father, brother or son cannot be diminished or ameliorated by the larger debate over our relentless pursuit of additional oil resources. The unfortunates who experienced this event firsthand, whether casualty or survivor, found themselves in a hellish nightmare in the dead of night, with scant time to react. No sane person would want to trade places with any of them in that moment of terror. For those who died, or even those who survived but must cope with lasting physical and/or mental disability, the price paid for our energy gluttony was too high.

There has been much handwringing in the international press over the costs – to the travel industry, to interrupted commerce, to the environment – of the volcanic eruption currently underway in Iceland. Yet the volcano is an act of nature, an event over which we have zero control and with which, in the best of circumstances, we can only hope to cope. The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform was manmade folly. The explosion that claimed 29 lives in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia was manmade folly.

What’s worse, our continued commitment to uncovering what vestiges of petroleum, natural gas and coal that remain in the earth’s crust – and our inevitable combustion of those materials – will continue a process of environmental depredation that will dwarf the eruption of that volcano in Iceland. In fact, in the struggle between our planet and humanity, the volcano will serve to counterbalance the effects of our incessant need to consume every last molecule of fuel: The volcanic ash thrust into the upper atmosphere will partially block the sun’s radiation from the surface of the planet and, at least to some degree, reverse the global increases in temperature brought about by our relentless expulsion of exhaust gases into the ether.

So as we view on our televisions the Dantean images emanating from the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps we will contemplate how that conflagration could be magnified – fueled by our profligate disregard for our “fragile island home” – to extinguish all life as we know it. At the very least, for those residents of coastal states (and for those from inland states who are insightful enough to recognize the symbiotic nature of a shared environment), a baleful eye should be cast in the direction of those fools who so callously crowed “Drill, baby, drill” in the last two years. For it is those very same malefactors who are proximally responsible for the deaths on that oil platform and in that West Virginia coal mine and – if they are not stopped – of every living creature on this planet.

Women march in support of the Equal Rights Amendment

Today is International Women’s Day. If you did not notice that fact on your daily calendar, perhaps you are in the United States, where – unlike China, Russia, Armenia, Macedonia, Vietnam and a host of other countries – it is not an official holiday. Apparently, the patriarchally-motivated conventional wisdom in this country is that, if you ignore the contention that half of the people of this planet are, in varying degrees, enslaved by the other half, you have somehow disproved it.

Yet, almost a century after women agreed in Copenhagen to promulgate the idea of an International Women’s Day, the notion of showering gratitude, respect and admiration on the women who are our mothers, sisters and daughters is only marginally advanced in the intervening decades.

Last year I called upon our government to end our national shame as one of the few holdouts by ratifying in the U.S. Senate the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – a document adopted 30 years ago and endorsed by every civilized nation on the planet, except us. One would hope (no irony intended) that, with the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States (and a man who has unabashedly credited his mother and his grandmother with making him the man he is today) and a solid Democratic majority in Congress, ratification by the United States of CEDAW would have been almost a formality in the first few months of the new administrations. Sadly, more than a year has passed since Obama’s inauguration and CEDAW is being afforded the same meaningless lip-service that has insulted every woman on the earth for the last three decades.

Some in the United States decry the plight of women elsewhere in the world as if women in this country are cherished as nowhere else. Yet an active, vocal – and occasionally deadly violent – faction would rob women in this country of control of their very bodies by first, outlawing abortions and second, by limiting or eliminating access to scientifically-based sexuality education and contraception. The deprivation of reproductive choice in women harkens back to the darkest, primitive days of our species when women were enslaved by their role in the reproductive process. And that is exactly what patriarchally-motivated neo-slavers want today.

In the minds of these self-appointed arbiters (and would-be rulers) of feminine propriety and expression, procreation and the attendant duties of caring for children and mates are considered the only appropriate roles for women. That this is true can be seen in the way that women are systematically limited (if not outright excluded) from vital, non-reproductive roles in our society. They continue to be paid a fraction of what their male counterparts are paid in the workplace. And they are woefully underrepresented in leadership roles in the workplace, as they are underrepresented in almost every other institution in America, including government.

More tragically, women are far more subject to violence – especially sexual violence. In our “civilized” country, almost three-out-of-four women have been victimized by some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes. When considered together with the emotional abuse against women that is epidemic in our country, it is perhaps easier to understand why CEDAW languishes in our Senate.

An effort years ago to amend our constitution with the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment,” outlawing any form of discrimination based on gender, went down to defeat. Why, then, should we be surprised that, as a nation, we cannot join almost every other country on this planet in agreeing to end such discrimination.

On this International Women’s Day, let us dedicate ourselves to the absolute truth that the core mission is not equal rights for women, but equality itself. Freeing women from reproductive slavery, educational limitations, workplace discrimination, emotional abuse and physical violence should be the desire of every conscious being. To (slightly) paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: “In giving freedom to (women), we assure freedom for the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.”

Around 9:30 this evening, eastern standard time, it already will be the morning of Dec. 29 in the Xinjiang Province of China. And a British citizen – Akmal Shaikh – will be led outside his prison, forced to kneel on the ground and open his mouth. A bullet will be fired into the base of his neck by his executioner and exit his open mouth, thus preserving his face and the usability of his corneas for transplant.

Mr. Shaikh, of Pakistani descent, was convicted two years ago of drug trafficking in a 30-minute trial and sentenced to death under China’s zero-tolerance policy. He was told of his impending execution only a day before the sentence was scheduled to be carried out.

The British government has been trying diligently to obtain clemency for Shaikh, including a direct appeal by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The human-rights organization Reprieve also has been quite involved in working for the sparing of Shaikh’s life by the Chinese government, maintaining that they have psychological evidence of the mental disability of the condemned man – evidence that apparently was ignored by the Chinese courts. All appeals have fallen on deaf ears in the Chinese government, which asserts that all of the rights of the accused were fully protected.

Despite the involvement of the British government, the European Union and international human rights organizations, there is a very simple reason why China probably will execute Akmal Shaikh at the appointed hour – his body will be stripped of its organs to fuel China’s ghoulish but thriving business in black-market organ transplantation.

China executes more people in a single year than all other countries on this planet combined. While they reportedly carried out 1,700 executions last year, human rights groups place the figure much higher – possibly more than 7,000. And it has become well known that China harvests the organs of executed prisoners, with earliest reports appearing in Western newspapers as far back as 1992.

There is intense cultural resistance to voluntary organ donation upon death by rank-and-file Chinese. Yet, incredibly, there are tens of thousands of transplant operations carried out in China each year and some published wait times for a new organ are stated in weeks or even days – this compared to wait times in the West of months or years. In addition, underground Web sites advertise the availability of human organs for transplant in China, quoting prices in U.S. dollars.

In the case of Mr. Shaikh, the earnest protestations by the Chinese government that they are only doing what they must to reduce crime and that the condemned man’s rights were given due process ring hollow when one considers just how valuable his lifeless corpse will be to China’s organ transplant business, which will find ready recipients for his eyes, skin, lungs, heart, liver and kidneys.

It appears that China deserves little distinction from the atrocities attributed to the Nazis during World War II, as they demonstrate an equivalent and appalling contempt for the value of human life.

Special note: For more information on the ghastly practices of the Chinese government with regard to executed prisoners, read this special report by Human Rights Watch, one of the most dedicated and well-known human rights organizations in the world: ORGAN PROCUREMENT AND JUDICIAL EXECUTION IN CHINA

Epilogue: It is 0600 GMT on 29 Dec. Akmal Shaikh is dead, murdered by a barbarous government that kills people for such “capital” crimes as embezzlement and tax fraud. So if you have any sympathy for their claim that drug smuggling is a serious offense, consider that it would be a bullet in your head for that extra deduction you took on your tax return to which you were not really entitled; it would be your body thrown into a furnace after your organs and skin had been harvested to provide transplants for those who take advantage of China’s plentiful “donor pool.”

In the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency, there was another political entity with even lower approval ratings than his: the United States Congress. Since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the installation of solid Democrat majorities in both chambers, the approval ratings for Congress have continued to languish. This despite the initially stratospheric ratings of the new president.

Unfortunately, the approval ratings for President Obama have begun to slip in recent weeks. The American people apparently feel less optimistic about his effecting the change that was so anticipated with his election. Even more unfortunate is the proximal cause of any delay or diminution of his efforts or intent: the United States Congress.

Our founding fathers crafted a constitutional republic which relied significantly on legislative power for the enactment of laws and the transaction of the people’s business. The executive and judicial branches were seen as having their respective importance, but in addition to serving as a check on the power of the legislative branch.

What our founding fathers did not anticipate is the degree to which the Congress would become a virtual cesspool of unchecked corruption, rendering it, at best, an ineffectual squanderer of the people’s – and nation’s – resources and, at worst, as a suppurating abscess on the buttocks of the body politic, which threatens to destroy the entire organism.

In 1887, Britain’s Lord Acton famously wrote that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Let’s forget for the moment his stark warning about absolute power. Although attempted at various times in our national history – most notably in the last eight years – such a state of total control has never been achieved. Instead, let us deal with the equally sinister admonition about the negative effect of power – to corrupt.

During the earliest days of our republic, those serving in the Congress often found themselves there by fiat populi: The people approached those of high reputation and esteem and encouraged – sometimes demanded – their service on behalf of a willing constituency. This is not to say there was no one for whom political ambition was a principle motivation. However, many begrudgingly accepted the mantle of public service, aspiring to discharge their duty and, as quickly as practicable, return to private life. Few, if any, of the drafters of our constitution could have anticipated how an entire class of self-serving, ethically-challenged malefactors would strive to become the dominant element of our legislative branch of government.

Abraham Lincoln, arguably our greatest president, said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” By the time of the Civil War, the Congress already was well along the road of wretched excess in furtherance of wildly disparate ends on behalf of a heterogeneous population. We might assume, therefore, that Lincoln was alluding to a part of the government that was as vexing for him as secessionist states.

The first article of our constitution, which created the legislative branch and defined its scope and powers, has weathered the intervening years far more poorly than any other part of that hallowed document. To say that curruption and self-interest is rampant in our Congress is to state the obvious. And because the Congress has become a self-perpetuating club of symbiotic ass-coverers, any expectation of ethical self-governance is fatuous. Those occasions when lapses of personal integrity or even outright malfeasance wind their way into the public consciousness are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. How much more despicable behavior might be obscured from the public eye when the Congress self-protectively closes its collective ranks?

There is a solution to this execrable state of affairs, of course – a return to the earliest form of solicitation to public service. In short, if someone wants to become a member of Congress, he or she should be cast aside as one of suspect motives. Instead, the people must once again approach those in their midst who are of the highest reputation and esteem, unassailable in their modeling of integrity and ethics to others, and encourage them to shoulder the burden of public service.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.” Sadly, honesty is in short supply in our nation’s capital. It is incumbent upon each and every one of us to demand that virtue of our elected officials. Otherwise, we are doomed to continue in our national degeneration as a result of a citizenry in servitude to its own elected servants.