Oklahoma

As we have noted several times in recent weeks, Faith 2 Action's Janet Porter has recently resurfaced in her native Ohio and is leading the effort to pass anti-choice legislation called "The Heartbeat Bill."

As part of this push, Porter has organized effort to send red, heart-shaped balloons to state legislators and today they are going to be delivered:

Thousands of shiny red heart-shaped balloons will be delivered to legislators today thanking (nearly half the House members who are co-sponsors) and encouraging the others to "Have a Heart! Support the Heartbeat Bill!" The Heartbeat Bill, which will be introduced this week, will legally protect all human beings in the state whose heartbeat can be heard.

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Thousands of balloons, sent by residents from all over the state of Ohio and nation, will be delivered today to the 99 state representatives at the Vern Riffe State Office Tower.

"The Heartbeat Bill insures that if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected," states Janet (Folger) Porter, the president of Faith2Action and coordinator of bill-related efforts through www.HeartBeatBill.com. "You can help pass what will be the nation's most protective legislation when you go to www.HeartBeatBill.com," added Porter. "We're not going to wait any longer because the time to protect the babies is now."

Last week Porter and other activists, including Phll Burress of Citizens for Community Values, gathered for a press conference in a room filled with these balloons during which Porter reported that she is already getting calls from legislators in Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, Kansas, and Arizona who are interested in introducing similar bills in their own states:

This is quite a change from Porter's recent activism wtih Cindy Jacobs praying that God will give Christians control over the media and every level of government:

Proposing a law to ban the use of Sharia law in courts, Wyoming State Rep. Gerald Gay said he was mounting a “pre-emptive strike” on judges from employing Islamic legal code in their decisions. Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches reports that while campaigning, Gay made videos shooting balls representing “socialism” and “big government.”

Gay wants to replicate an Oklahoma law that was recently found to be unconstitutional, fearing that Wyoming’s judiciary may become an outpost of Islamic law. Gay says he makes “governmental decisions based on certain tenants [sic] of the Christian faith,” and his desire to maintain his Christian-outlook towards governing “motivated his proposal” to ban Sharia:

"I have quite a bit of extensive personal exposure to sharia, so it's not like I'm dealing with something that's unfamiliar or like somebody else came up with the idea and just came to me and asked for sponsorship," the Wyoming Republican explains. "I'm bringing my own basket of goods to the deal."

While Gay admits his Christian convictions have motivated his proposal, he points out that the spread of radical Islam could bring sharia law to Wyoming courts in cases involving arranged marriages or so-called "honor killings."

"Wyoming's Constitution has Article VII, Aection 22, which says, 'The duty of the legislature is to promote such laws that protect the morality, health and general welfare of the citizens of the state,'" the legislator notes. "By invoking that, I feel very comfortable in making my governmental decisions based on certain tenants of the Christian faith."

The anti-choice movement has consistently attempted to tar reproductive freedoms as anti-black genocide. Most recently, Rick Santorum said that it was “almost remarkable for a black man” like Obama to support abortion rights, and Terry Heck believes that Obama’s pro-choice position made him a “disgrace” to “his ancestors” like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Now, a state legislator in Arizona wants to “criminalize abortions if they’re sought because of race or sex,” reports Cronkite News:

If a state lawmaker has his way, women seeking abortions in Arizona would be required to sign documents saying they’re not terminating a pregnancy because of the fetus’ race or sex.

Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Litchfield Park, is sponsoring two bills that would criminalize abortions if they’re sought because of race or sex. Doctors knowingly performing abortions for those reasons would face Class 3 felony charges.

Michelle Steinberg, an Arizona policy manager for Planned Parenthood, said women should never have to make a case to get an abortion and called the bills demeaning and bizarre.

“This could be a slippery slope in terms of requiring women to disclose why they’re choosing abortion,” she said. “Women should never have to present a case to get an abortion.”

Montenegro didn’t respond to several requests for interviews left with his office and with a spokesman for House Republicans. However, he told Capitol Media Services that abortion clinics are targeting minority areas and that more females are aborted than males.

Steinberg said the fact that minority women seek more abortions stems from other problems.

“This idea that minority women are having abortions at higher rates than white women speaks more to rates of poverty, access to contraception and a lack of sex education,” she said. “This is not racial genocide for God’s sake; this is a real problem that we’re not addressing.”

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U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican representing Arizona’s second district, in 2009 sponsored similar legislation: the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. The bill, which never made it out of committee, would have criminalized abortion because of the “sex, gender, color or race of the child, or the race of a parent.”

Illinois and Pennsylvania have laws prohibiting sex-selection abortions. Several other states, including Georgia, Mississippi, New Jersey, Idaho and Oklahoma have tried to enact legislation that would prevent sex- or race-selection abortions.

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Roy Spece, a lawyer and professor at the University of Arizona’s law and medical schools who co-authored a book on cases of bioethics and the law, said Montenegro’s bills could move Arizona backward.

“We could return to the era when you have hospital committees who would decide why each specific woman’s reason for having an abortion is sufficient,” he said.

In states like Wyoming and South Carolina, numerous state legislators are proposing measures to limit the application of “international” or “religious” laws in the court. An amendment that “forbids courts from considering or using international law” and “Sharia Law” passed easily in 2010, only to be blocked by a federal judge.

Now, it appears South Dakota is jumping on the bandwagon. The Republican-dominated State Legislature is considering House Joint Resolution 1004, which similar to the South Carolina resolution, uses broad language and does not explicitly mention Sharia law:

The judicial power of the state is vested in a unified judicial system consisting of a Supreme Court, circuit courts of general jurisdiction and courts of limited original jurisdiction as established by the Legislature. No such court may apply international law, the law of any foreign nation, or any foreign religious or moral code with the force of law in the adjudication of any case under its jurisdiction.

Twenty-eight members of the State House already signed on as cosponsors, along with five members of the State Senate.

Apparently, Sharia law is such a creeping threat to Wyoming that a Republican state legislator wants to make the “Equality State” consider a constitutional amendment barring judges from considering Islamic and international law. In November, Oklahomans passed a similar amendment, which was later blocked by a federal judge over its suspect constitutional grounds.

“To date, no Wyoming court rulings have been based on Islamic law, or Shariah,” the Billings Gazette reports, “But state Rep. Gerald Gay, R-Casper, said his proposed constitutional amendment, House Joint Resolution 8, is meant as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ to ensure judges don’t rely on Shariah in cases involving, for example, arranged marriages, ‘honor killings’ or usury cases.” Gay needs approval of two-thirds of the legislature and the governor's signature to place the amendment on the 2012 ballot.

According to the 2000 Association of Religion Data Archives, Wyoming’s two Muslim congregations have 263 adherents.

In Washington, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney that he wants to hold hearings on the creeping threat of Sharia law, and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is planning McCarthy-esque hearings on the country’s Muslim community.

While Gay pushes to stop the non-existent use of Islamic law in courts, the Wyoming State House today passed a bill to “direct Wyoming to not recognize marriages or civil unions between same-sex couples performed out of state, including foreign countries.”

It’s never too late (or too early?) to fight the “War on Christmas,” even in January. Five Republican members of the Rhode Island State House have introduced a resolution to protect the name of the Christmas tree by preventing the state from using terms such as “‘holiday tree’ or other non-traditional terms.” The First Amendment Center first reported on the efforts of the five legislators to make sure that Rhode Island’s state employees don’t refer to Christmas trees by any other name. The resolution declares:

RESOLVED, That it is the policy of the state that state officials and departments refer to the tree customarily erected or displayed in celebration of the period from Thanksgiving of each year to January of the following year as a ‘Christmas tree’ and not as a ‘holiday tree’ or other non-traditional terms; and

RESOLVED, Further that the Secretary of State be and he hereby is authorized and directed to send a duly certified copy of this resolution to each state agency and department.

The Right’s anger over the so-called “War on Chrismtas” has died down since December, when Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe boycotted his hometown of Tulsa’s annual parade because it used the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” Liberty Counsel introduced a “Christmas Action Pack,” and the American Family Association went after “Companies Against Christmas” such as NASCAR, Starbucks, and Barnes & Noble. But as the case in Rhode Island suggests, the fight against the “War on Christmas” abides.

Energized by gains made by Republicans not only in congressional elections but also in gubernatorial and legislative races, anti-choice organizations are gearing up plans to push new laws restricting women’s right to choose. Already, anti-choice groups hope for more states to replicate Oklahoma’s new law, which compels women seeking to terminate their pregnancies to watch an ultrasound monitor and have a doctor read a state-specified script about the fetus. Slate’s Emily Bazelon writes that Oklahoma’s law stands “at the top of the heap of paternalism that Justice Anthony Kennedy started climbing two years ago, in his opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart,” which upheld the federal ban on late-term abortion. Kennedy “injected into that case the constitutionally novel idea that because some women come to regret their abortions, the court could substitute its judgment for their doctors’ by sparing them from a procedure that women would reject as too gruesome if they only knew the details.”

Now, anti-choice groups hope to use the 2007 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart to advance more restrictive laws across the country. Robert Barnes of the Washington Post reports that anti-choice legislators in Nebraska, led by Speaker Mike Flood, used “that decision as a road map” to ban abortion after 20 weeks without health exceptions. “The importance of Flood's bill is likely to be felt far beyond Nebraska,” writes Barnes, as “abortion opponents call it model legislation for other states and say it could provide a direct challenge to Supreme Court precedents that restrict government’s ability to prohibit abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb.” Barnes writes:

The importance of Flood's bill is likely to be felt far beyond Nebraska. Abortion opponents call it model legislation for other states and say it could provide a direct challenge to Supreme Court precedents that restrict government’s ability to prohibit abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

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“Many in the pro-life movement have become very pragmatic when it comes to the court: “Can you count to five?’” said Mary Spaulding Balch, director of state legislation for the National Right to Life Committee. “With the Gonzales decision, we were happy to see that we could.”

The justices have not revisited the issue of abortion since, but the decision has emboldened state legislators to pass an increasing number and variety of restrictions in hopes that a changed court will uphold them.

“I believe the decision was like planting a bunch of seeds, and we're just starting to see the shoots popping out of the ground,” said Roger Evans, who is in charge of litigation for Planned Parenthood of America.

The Center for Reproductive Rights concluded that in 2010, state legislatures “considered and enacted some of the most extreme restrictions on abortion in recent memory, as well as passing laws creating dozens of other significant new hurdles.”

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“We can't say with any certainty that this is going to meet constitutional muster,” said Nebraska Right to Life Executive Director Julie Schmit-Albin. “But you know what, from our perspective, if we aren't bucking up against Roe, we're not doing our job.”

Already, legislators in Iowa, Kentucky, and Indiana are marshalling support for legislation which imitates Nebraska’s restrictive new law, and “abortion opponents are pushing lawmakers in Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma to do the same.”

In Alaska, anti-choice groups also pressured the governor to resist a judge’s decision that significantly weakened a parental notification law. A federal judge recently threw out parts of a parental notification law that was approved by voters on the same day of the contentious Miller/Murkowski Republican primary in August. According to the Associated Press, the judge “removed provisions calling for a fine of up to $1,000 and imprisonment of up to five years for people who knowingly violate the law” and also made notification easier to obtain and “ struck a section allowing physicians to be liable for damages.”

Jim Minnery of the far-right Alaska Family Council condemned the decision, saying, “We totally opposed his decision to neuter or take the teeth from the law by eliminating all the legal civil penalties for violating the law.” Now, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell filed a motion to reconsider in order to defend a law he claims “reflects the will of the people.”

The “War on Christmas” has come to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and US Senator Jim Inhofe isn’t happy. Inhofe, the former mayor of Tulsa, participated in the city’s parade every year but is so outraged that the city dropped the word “Christmas” from its name that he has decided to boycott the ceremonies:

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Tuesday that he won't participate in Tulsa's Holiday Parade of Lights until organizers put "Christ" back in the event's title.

"Last year, the forces of political correctness removed the word 'Christmas' and replaced it with 'Holiday' instead," the Oklahoma Republican said. "I am deeply saddened and disappointed by this change."

Inhofe, who was Tulsa's mayor from 1978 to 1984, said he had participated in the parade annually, riding a horse as his children and grandchildren watched.

"I did not do so last year because I'm not going to ride in a Christmas parade that doesn't recognize Christmas," he said. "I am hopeful that the good people of Tulsa and the city's leadership will demand a correction to this shameful attempt to take Christ, the true reason for our celebration, out of the parade's title. Until the parade is again named the Christmas Parade of Lights, I will not participate."

Inhofe’s involvement in the annual “War on Christmas” demagoguery should not be a surprise, as he is one of the Senate’s most prominent culture warriors and even said that he tries to use his status as a Senator to convert people to Christianity.

Have you ever thought "gee, I sure wish I could buy some mail-order meat from Pat Boone and have some of the proceeds go to support the Religious Right"?

Well, you are in luck:

Iconic 1950s clean-cut crooner Pat Boone has partnered with an Oklahoma businessman to launch a mail-order steak business that will benefit conservative Christian causes.

Pat Boone All-American Meats will compete with Omaha Steaks and expects to appeal to Christian, conservative women over age 55.

Half of Boone's royalties will go to nonprofit organizations -- including Mercy Corps, the hunger relief program Boone and Christian community members started in his home. The business also will partner with other groups, including Focus on the Family and the Parents Television Council. About 5 percent of sales will go combat world hunger.

Pat Boone All-American Meats: A Taste Of What Makes Us Great.