Idiot Mississippi Senator Ain't Gonna Have Y'all Rustlin' Up No 'Human-Animal Chimeras!'
All fun and games until Cindy Hyde-Smith tries to pronounce that word out loud.
Yesterday, we told you that Republican senators might very well block Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth’s bill to protect IVF, even though many of them are currently jumping up and down swearing to Jesus that they aren’t going to steal your IVF. Because why would you need to protect IVF? It’s not like Republicans are coming for your IVF, ha ha just kidding, yes they are.
Well, they done blocked it!
As is usually the case with Duckworth’s bill, it was absolute idiot Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith who did the deed. "The bill before us today is a vast overreach that is full of poison pills that go way too far," said Hyde-Smith. Whatever, batshit lady.
What kinds of poison pills? Uh, we don’t know, but here’s Hyde-Smith saying the bill will legalize the creation of “human-animal chimeras,” and oh my God you have to hear how she pronounces “chimeras,” it’s amazing.
That is just breathtaking.
In her speech announcing why she wouldn’t protect IVF from Christian fascists, Hyde-Smith said Duckworth’s bill would do other bad things, but we are sorry, you lose the argument when you say it’s going to legalize “human-animal chimeras” and you pronounce it like that. (“Chim-chimera, chim-chimera, chim-chim cheree,” says Dok in the chatcave, LIKE A DICK.)
It would legalize human cloning. It would legalize commercial surrogacy, including for young girls without parental involvement. It would legalize gene edited designer babies and lift the federal ban on the creation of three parent embryos.
Sure thing, dipshit.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren steered the conversation back to reality:
"This has always been about conservative politicians controlling women's bodies," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Wednesday. "This has been Donald Trump and the Republicans’ plan all along, and the opposition to Sen. Duckworth’s proposal today shows that Republicans are doubling down against reproductive freedom. They are coming for medication abortion, they are coming for birth control, and they are even coming for prenatal care. Make no mistake.”
They absolutely are, and do not let them lie about it. Indeed, the Supreme Court is just about to hear arguments from clownshow doctors and dentists from the religious right about why the FDA approval for the incredibly safe abortion drug mifepristone should be banned. Is that safe in front of this illegitimate partisan hack Court? (By the way, you should know that they’re currently studying the use of mifepristone as an incredibly safe once-a-week birth control pill, without all the side effects many of the current methods have. It’s a big fucking deal.)
As the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied and fascist, its most extremist, most universally loathed members have progressively gained power. And for a while now they’ve been pushing and sometimes passing these “personhood” bills, which are a true poison pill in the abortion rights fight. After all, if embryos are people, it gets a lot easier to arrest pregnant people and their doctors for all kinds of things that might happen during a pregnancy. Learn about it. Learn about pregnancy criminalization.
None of this has anything to do with unborn babies, and fuck anyone who says it does. Just like Senator Warren said, this is about conservatives controlling people’s bodies. (We say “people” in this context because firstly, it’s not only those who identify as women who can get pregnant, OH AND ALSO because this is the same overall fight as the religious right crusade against LGBTQ+ people, which is about … conservatives controlling people’s bodies!)
Greg Sargent reported yesterday that Democrats fully plan to hang this around Republicans’ necks, especially on the state level, which is where the most awful decisions around these issues come down, especially considering how, as Sargent points out, 28 state legislatures are currently controlled by increasingly extremist MAGA Americans.
And that’s a good strategy. The panic coming from Donald Trump right now over this, and from many Republicans, is exactly what they deserve to feel, because they fucking created it, and no matter how much they like to lie about it, their theocratic fascists absolutely are coming for your body.
In an excellent op-ed, Linda Greenhouse argues today (gift link) that we should thank the Alabama Supreme Court, because “It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling.” Yes, even more than Dobbs. She writes:
Abortion is generally portrayed as a woman’s issue; an unwanted or even dangerous pregnancy is her problem. Infertility, by contrast, is seen as a couple’s problem. That means there is a man involved (even if, for lesbian couples, for example, or for single women, that man is only a sperm donor). And when men have a problem, we know the world is going to snap to attention.
Rhetoric about the “sanctity of unborn life,” in the words of Alabama’s constitution, has for too long been cost-free, a politician’s cheap thrill. Now we see that, taken to extremes in the hands of the ideologues our current political culture nurtures, it has a price, one that society now seems reluctant to pay. For that realization, we can, as I said earlier, thank the Alabama Supreme Court.
Bless their hearts, they done fucked up.
[NBC News / Mediaite / New York Times]
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I am a person with a GED and fist full of community college credits. I had to look up the pronunciation AND the definition of chimera. How did a woman with a whole ass bachelor's degree not do the same before making a complete ass of herself in public? This further confirms my opinion that being educated and being smart are sometimes two very different things.
Read a comment that abortion restrictions hit more lower income people, as higher income brackets can travel out of state if they have to for a one-day procedure.
IVF restrictions hit more higher income people, as even they can't continually travel out of state indefinitely. As a result, Republicans may get more flak on this that they would actually listen to.
Not sure if that's true, but it FEELS true?