Kansas Crimson

jfish26 wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2024 1:43 pm

Shirley wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2024 1:28 pm I'm old enough to remember when it was considered absurd that Christo-Fascists wanted to pretend that a fetus is a person.

It’s sure a good thing for us, then, that the 14th Amendment doesn’t in fact seem to have any legal effect at the moment.

Some prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators are advocating for ending no-fault divorce, laws that exist in all 50 US states and allow a person to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.

The socially conservative, and often religious, rightwing opponents of such divorce laws are arguing that the practice deprives people – mostly men – of due process and hurt families, and by extension, society. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or increasing restrictions on no-fault marriage laws.

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an earlier era when women were often trapped in abusive marriages.

“No-fault divorce is critical to the ability, particularly the ability of women, to be able to exercise autonomy in their own relationships, in their own lives,” said Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law in St Louis, who has a specialty in policies concerning gender, sexuality and sexual violence.

Before 1969, when then California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, approved the country’s first no-fault divorce law, women, who are more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner, were often forced to stay in marriages. If they could not prove that their husband had been abusive or persuade him to grant a divorce, they would not be able to take any assets from the marriage or remarry, according to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

States around America gradually followed suit and passed similar laws allowing unilateral divorce until 2010, when New York became the last state to approve the practice.

Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.

Without such laws, “it’s hard to prove anything in court relating to a family because you don’t have any witnesses”, said Kimberly Wehle, professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “It’s very difficult to get evidence to show abuse of children. How do you do it? Do you put your kids on the stand?”

Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as the Republican senator JD Vance of Ohio have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.

The divorce rate in the United States increased significantly from 1960, when it was 9.2 per 1,000 married women, to 22.6 in 1980. But by 2022, the rate had fallen to 14.5.

On the increase in divorces, Vance said in 2021: “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

Beverly Willett, a writer and attorney, argues that unilateral no-fault divorce is also unconstitutional because it violates a person’s 14th amendment right to due process.

The defendant “has absolutely no recourse to say, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t want to be divorced, and I don’t think that there are grounds for divorce. I would like to be heard. I would like to call witnesses,’” said Willett, who experienced a divorce she didn’t want because she thought her marriage could be saved. “I believed in my vows” and “didn’t want to give up”.

But Willett’s argument relies on the idea that “women are either property or that somehow men’s liberty is restrained by not allowing them to stay in a marriage with someone who does not want to be married”, said Wehle, who also wrote about it in the Atlantic. “I disagree with the idea that women are somehow property interests of their husbands. That is an arcane relic of law that has no place in modern society.”

Willett responded to Wehle’s critique by writing that “nobody has suggested a return to antiquated laws of the 18th and 19th century. Considerable reform that protects women and ensures their equality in family court has been enacted since then.”

On the argument that no-fault divorce reduces domestic violence, Willett points to data that most domestic violence occurs between unmarried couples and says regardless, with “any contract, any lawsuit, you still have to follow the constitution”.

But without such laws, victims of domestic violence would then have to navigate a court system that can be time-consuming, “very adversarial and very costly” because the plaintiff often must then pay for child care and transportation, said Marium Durrani, vice-president of policy for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

“Any sort of additional barrier that we add to the ease of legal proceeding is, frankly, a nightmare and an enormous burden for survivors,” said Durrani. “I’m not trying to be an alarmist, but it can increase death [if] a survivor of domestic violence has to prove that they are being abused in a divorce proceeding.”

Still, Lieberman does not think Republicans will succeed in their efforts to make it more difficult for people to get divorced.

“I do believe that that train has left the station. I mean, we have had no-fault divorce now for 50 years,” Lieberman said. But “I didn’t think the supreme court would overturn Roe v Wade, which we had for 50 years, so I suppose we will see.”

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 2:49 pm sounds like a war on men to me.

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:04 pm most people are against student loan forgiveness. demonrats and republicans.

thats why old uncle ain't done $#!t besides talk about it. cause he knows its a loser.

Texas has sued the Biden administration to try to block a federal rule that shields the medical records of women from criminal investigations if they cross state lines to seek abortion where it is legal.

The lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seeks to overturn a regulation that was finalized in April. In the suit filed Wednesday in Lubbock, Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the federal government of attempting to “undermine" the state’s law enforcement capabilities. It appears to be the first legal challenge from a state with an abortion ban that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the nationwide right to abortion.

The rule essentially prohibits state or local officials from gathering medical records related to reproductive health care for a civil, criminal or administrative investigation from providers or health insurers in a state where abortion remains legal. It is intended to protect women who live in states where abortion is illegal.

In a statement, HHS declined comment on the lawsuit but said the rule “stands on its own.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration remains committed to protecting reproductive health privacy and ensuring that no woman’s medical records are used against her, her doctor, or her loved one simply because she got the lawful reproductive care she needed,” the agency said.

Texas' abortion ban, like those in other states, exempts women who seek abortions from criminal charges. The ban provides for enforcement either through a private civil action, or under the state’s criminal statutes, punishable by up to life in prison, for anyone held responsible for helping a woman obtain one.

It’s not clear whether public officials have sought patient medical records related to abortion. But the state has sought records related to gender-affirming care, demanding them from at least two out-of-state health centers last year. Like many Republican-controlled states, Texas bans gender-affirming care for minors.

At least 22 Democratic-controlled states have laws or executive orders that seek to protect medical providers or patients who participate in abortion from investigations by law enforcement in states with bans.

The federal regulation in question is an update to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which prohibits medical providers and health insurers from divulging medical information about patients. Typically, however, law enforcement can access those records for investigations.

A group of Republican attorneys general, all from states with strict abortion laws, had urged Health and Human Services to ditch the rule when a draft was released last year. In a 2023 letter to HHS, the group said the regulation would unlawfully interfere with states' authority to enforce laws.

“With this rule, the Biden Administration makes a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’s laws by undermining state law enforcement investigations that implicate medical procedures,” Paxton said in a news release.

An unprecedented number of abortion initiatives are on state ballots this November, nearly all seeking to protect reproductive rights, but opponents are trying to defeat them even before the start of voting through legal challenges, administrative maneuvers and, critics say, outright intimidation.

In Missouri, the Republican secretary of state pulled an abortion rights measure from the November ballot until the state’s highest court ordered him to include it.

In Florida, the governor’s election police arrived at voters’ front doors to question them about signing a petition for an abortion referendum — encounters that one man said “left me shaken.”

And in Arizona, the state’s Supreme Court allowed government pamphlets on the proposed constitutional amendment there to describe a fetus as an “unborn human being.”

In part, the intensity reflects what’s at stake: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, every ballot measure put before voters has been approved, including in red states like Ohio. Those seeking to restrict abortion access have failed, even in conservative Kansas.

“A lot of abortion opponents don’t think they would win a fair vote, so they’re not trying to. They’re trying to find other ways,” Ziegler said, including capitalizing on “election-law technicalities to keep these proposals from going before voters.”

Challenges escalated this summer after the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the secretary of state’s rejection of one ballot initiative because proponents had not followed rules related to paid canvassers.

The arguments in Missouri as well as Nebraska, where that state’s top court must rule by Friday, centered primarily on whether the ballot proposals’ wording is too vague and whether they addressed only a single issue as required.

“You’re seeing a period of experimentation because antiabortion groups haven’t found a winning recipe,” Ziegler added.

japhy wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2024 5:38 pm Ha! Fuck you Jay Ashcroft!

An unprecedented number of abortion initiatives are on state ballots this November, nearly all seeking to protect reproductive rights, but opponents are trying to defeat them even before the start of voting through legal challenges, administrative maneuvers and, critics say, outright intimidation.

In Missouri, the Republican secretary of state pulled an abortion rights measure from the November ballot until the state’s highest court ordered him to include it.

In Florida, the governor’s election police arrived at voters’ front doors to question them about signing a petition for an abortion referendum — encounters that one man said “left me shaken.”

And in Arizona, the state’s Supreme Court allowed government pamphlets on the proposed constitutional amendment there to describe a fetus as an “unborn human being.”

In part, the intensity reflects what’s at stake: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, every ballot measure put before voters has been approved, including in red states like Ohio. Those seeking to restrict abortion access have failed, even in conservative Kansas.

“A lot of abortion opponents don’t think they would win a fair vote, so they’re not trying to. They’re trying to find other ways,” Ziegler said, including capitalizing on “election-law technicalities to keep these proposals from going before voters.”

Challenges escalated this summer after the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the secretary of state’s rejection of one ballot initiative because proponents had not followed rules related to paid canvassers.

The arguments in Missouri as well as Nebraska, where that state’s top court must rule by Friday, centered primarily on whether the ballot proposals’ wording is too vague and whether they addressed only a single issue as required.

“You’re seeing a period of experimentation because antiabortion groups haven’t found a winning recipe,” Ziegler added.

In other words letting the people of the States decide isn't working out. But seriously don't believe that stuff in Project 2025 about a national ban distract you.

We want the States to decide, everyone wanted this, all of the legal scholars wanted this.

Unless the people don't decide the way we want them to decide.

And THEN, there is Project 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkQXK0kRd0

In a newly unearthed video from 2022, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) scoffs at the idea that young women should have access to birth control and, repeatedly waving his hand near his groin, says they just need to “get this under control.”

During a January 2022 appearance at Hilltop Baptist Church in Thomasville, North Carolina, Robinson ― who is now the GOP nominee for governor ― also took aim at programs that provide sexual education and birth control to young women.

The North Carolina Republican has a long history of making sexist, homophobic and otherwise offensive remarks, in addition to peddling wild conspiracy theories. He has built his image in the mold of former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Robinson’s campaign in March.

“Particularly we love to tell our young women that. We want to empower you,” he said mockingly in his 2022 remarks. “We want to help you to build up your mind so you can be empowered.”

Robinson proposed what he called “a novel idea” to the audience.

“Why don’t you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here,” he said, moving his hand in circles around his stomach and crotch. “Get this under control.”

“See, because this region right here, that’s the only region on your body that can make life and take life,” he continued. “If there’s anything we need to be telling our young people, it’s they need to be responsible with their reproductive systems. That means you don’t lay down and act like you’re making a baby til you’re ready to have a baby.”

Robinson then dismissed people who educate young women about sex and birth control.

“All this giving out of birth control and advising people how,” he said. “Here’s how you don’t have a baby: You don’t have what you do to make a baby until you’re ready to have that baby.”

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2024 10:16 am sigh…

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/19/georgi ... he-victim/