Where's Offred when you need her?

Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant "by means other than sexual intercourse."

According to a draft of the recommended change in state law, every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through assisted reproduction therapy such as in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, and egg donation, must first file for a "petition for parentage" in their local county probate court.

Only women who are married will be considered for the "gestational certificate" that must be presented to any doctor who facilitates the pregnancy. Further, the "gestational certificate" will only be given to married couples that successfully complete the same screening process currently required by law of adoptive parents.

As it the draft of the new law reads now, an intended parent "who knowingly or willingly participates in an artificial reproduction procedure" without court approval, "commits unauthorized reproduction, a Class B misdemeanor." The criminal charges will be the same for physicians who commit "unauthorized practice of artificial reproduction."{...}

And no, this is not a hoax. It beggars belief, I know, but you can read the draft legislation here.

"Petition for Parentage"? "Gestational Certificate"? "Unauthorized reproduction"? Unauthorized practice of artificial reproduction"? Pardon my French but what the fucking fuck? This is the language of science fiction, my friends, not the language one would expect to find in proposed legislation in a state in the United States of America.

The more I think about this, the madder I get. How dare they? HOW DARE THEY? If this law were passed, in the state of Indiana, you wouldn't be able to have in-vitro if you were a single woman. Yet, if you were a single woman and had a one night stand and became pregnant as a result that, apparently, would be fine. But nevermind the discrimination against single parents, let's talk about what married couples would have to go through, because they would have access to fertility treatments, but they'd nonetheless have to apply for "parentage" and would then have to be screened for parental worthiness.

And all of this is only because these people's reproductive systems are faulty or are lacking one of the necessary ingredients. If you're a fertile myrtle, well, you're in the clear and no one can tell you what to do when it comes to your reproductive system. Including having an abortion! Good on you for having working plumbing!

The author of the legislation claims this about settling the legal issues of who has parental rights when extraordinary types of infertility treatment are used. That, I believe, is a blind. This is about legislating morality. The author of the legislation flat-out admitted she believes marriage is a prerequisite for parenthood. What she didn't say, however, is that she believes in that so much she would create criminal consequences for those who disagreed with her.

One can only hope that this piece of flaming excrement dies a quick and horribly painful death when Indiana's next legislative session begins.

{Hat Tip: Jeff G.}

UPDATE 10/6: It's been dropped because "The issue has become more complex than anticipated and will be withdrawn from consideration by the Health Finance Commission." One could have wished that it had been dropped because "it was a bit of draconian bullshit," but one can't have everything, can one?

Posted by: Kathy at 09:31 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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So, this is the press release I mentioned in this post from yesterday. I decided to give them the free pr anyway. "What the hay," I said to myself, as I good naturedly shrugged my shoulders. "I'm going to be nice and maybe I'll get a free mug or something out of the deal."

Ninth Circle of Hell, MN – The Krinkie for Congress Campaign released its third quarter fundraising numbers today showing its direct marketing campaign hit up at least 1000 individuals who had neither Caller ID or sufficient enough wit to say, "Hola? No habla Ingles," when they answered the phone. The campaign also reported that they had "bou-cou bucks" stashed in a grocery bag in the campaign office. They will use this cash to buy their way into the House of Representatives so they "can smush the little people." Any remaining funds have been earmarked to pay for a truckload of ice cream sandwiches to be delivered to the campaign office on election night, as a "thank you for all your hard work, now eat yourselves into Type II Diabetes because you're not going to Dee Cee" present. The campaign organization and fundraising successes are clear signs of the snail's pace momentum of the campaign as the Republican Party’s most unknown candidate in the race, but hey, when you're running against Michele Bachmann, well, you know, you don't really have to do much to get your name in the paper, ya dig? You'll always get a mention as her primary opponent, if nothing else, because that chick gets press ya dig? Hence, really there's no need for us to be calling attention to ourselves and our fundraising habits in this shameless way, but hey, we're actually shameless so why the heck shouldn't we?

“Whether it is the level of support the campaign has received among Phil’s fellow Republican activists, or the successes this campaign has had attracting financial support, it demonstrates he’s the most unknown, candidate,” said campaign Finance Director Linda Runbeck, who is also the head of our Lackey Department and an email spammer of some note. “To be able to garner this level of support in just seven short months is a testament to the level of cluelessness that our supporters have demonstrated on the whole. More importantly, it is a testament to their confidence that Phil will bring our shared vision of serious pork for the I-94 corridor in Maple Grove, a serious intent for keeping those darned Mexicans in Mexico, and making sure plenty of time is wasted on fruitless amendments to the Constitution defining marriage as "a union between a man and a woman." Because, like the Barenaked Ladies, "we're all about values."

Please contact our campaign office if you'd like to interview our candidate or, better yet, his staffers. We can make our candidate (or ourselves) available for any sort of PR grubbing event you have in mind. We're not picky. Really, we're not.

*take the jump more...

Posted by: Kathy at 02:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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As is usual on Tuesdays, it's Cotillion Time.

Twirl on over to The Gray Tie for the best and brightest of the XX-chromosomed bloggers.

UPDATE: Beth's done a Cotillion Harriet Miers Roundup. Go and be enlightened, my devoted Cake Eater Readers.

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And the answer to that question is NicoShot:

A German company has come up with a novel way of beating bans on smoking in pubs - put the nicotine in the beer.

A new beer, known as NicoShot, is undergoing testing in Germany with hopes it can be moved toward approval in the next few months.

Each beer contains three milligrams of nicotine and a 6.3% alcohol reading.

Its German maker, Nautilus, claims the beer is designed to help smokers quit the habit rather than make the drink addictive.

"While NicoShot can lessen cravings, it is not a 'cure' for smoking," Nautilus said.

"But it can help you make changes in your lifestyle without having to walk out of the bar for a quick smoke to deal with sudden withdrawal symptoms.

"Over time, when you are more comfortable being a non-smoker, the use of nicotine beer can be reduced and then stopped."

What I want to know is this: will QuitPlan start sending this stuff out in lieu of patches? Because it serves, essentially, the same function as the patch, only it has the added benefit of helping you to get blitzed in the meanwhile. That should help with the nic fits, shouldn't it?

Furthermore, as a taxpaying citizen of the State of Minnesota, I demand that the State Legislature enact a law---maybe Pawlenty can do it if he's not too busy having to pay off Big Tobacco for lying about the "health impact fee"---that dictates all bars in the affected smoking ban area shoud be required by law to keep this stuff on tap to supply the smokers who would normally have to go out into the deep freeze that is Minnesota to smoke. It's the humane thing to do---and the State should have to pay for it, too. They'll pay for patches: they should have to pay for NicoShot too. Since bars and restaurants are the logical outlet for this product, it seems only fair that they should have to compensate bar owners for the expense of such an alternative to smoking.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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So, a while back I posted this.

I just recieved an email from a campaign in the Cake Eater inbox.

I ask you, my devoted Cake Eater Readers, should I mock them mercilessly for filling my box up with unwanted spam? Or should I be nice and let them slide with a warning as it's been a while since I posted that?

Posted by: Kathy at 02:53 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 I did my best to save them from your ridicule once before. And today I'm not all that thrilled with them myself. I say mock.

Posted by: Doug at October 03, 2005 05:15 PM (7P5xE)

2 i second the mock motion -- let 'em have it!

Posted by: amelie at October 03, 2005 10:10 PM (J0CVQ)

3 If you don't, I'll mock you on my site as a big softie. Grow a backbone already!

Posted by: Kevin at October 03, 2005 10:43 PM (Nmxi6)

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God help us, the social conservatives are cheesed over the nomination of Harriet Miers. There are some good roundups of blogosphere opinions here, here, and here.

I have a few points to make, but I can't be bothered with the fuss of putting them in essay format, so I shall enumerate them and you, my devoted Cake Eater Readers, can be relieved that, for once, I tried to be a champion of brevity.

1. I find it interesting that Miers nomination is being seen, mainly, as a betrayal of social conservatives in favor of cronyism, rather than what it actually is: a bone thrown to the moderates and swing voters. This is GDub setting up the party for the 2008 Presidential Elections by giving the moderates a reason to stick around after all the homage he's paid to the social conservative agenda.

And all of this is only dependent upon finding out that Miers is not, indeed, a far-right candidate. Which, I hasten to add, we don't know. One check written to Lloyd Bentsen's campaign does not a NARAL member make.

2. It could, perhaps, be a good thing to have a Supreme Court Justice who's never been a judge before.

Given the fabulous ruling we had with Kelo this summer, do you think that, perhaps, someone other than a legal scholar who's done nothing but clerked, written opinions on this that or the other and has pretty much done everything the way they were supposed to could read the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and decide that property rights are inviolable? Or do you really need a legal pedigree a mile long to decide such things?

3. So what if she's almost sixty. Who cares? I hesitate to point this out, but conservatives near and far bluntly rejected any criticism that Justice Roberts was too young to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. They claimed he should be judged on his ability to judge issues fairly with respect to the Constitution; that the age and experience card held no value as far as they were concerned.. Why, now that the shoe is on the other foot, is it not about abilities but rather about the tyranny of a life-time appointment and the threat that that lifetime might be too short?

In short, everyone is caterwauling over nothing right now. Just like with John Roberts we know squat about this nominee. But we'll find out more about her when she goes up for confirmation hearings, won't we? Which is how the system is supposed to work. Remember?

Honestly, I can't figure out if the caterwaulers are cheesed that Bush nominated a supposed moderate conservative or if it's because he's not playing the game the way they think he should.

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We have another one to add to the "Achingly Stupid Names of Celebrities' Children" file.

Nicolas Cage---who married a woman half his age last year---is a proud papa again. His wife gave birth to a baby boy and they named him....

{insert drumroll here}

Kal-el Coppola Cage.

Kal-el, for those of you who might not follow the comic book world, is Superman's real name. Poor kid.

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I don't belive John Lloyd covers any new ground in this piece from this weekend's Financial Times, but it bears repeating...just because:

{...}Its basis is the belief that a state requires security and retains interests and that any effort to impose a different politics on states of whose politics one disapproves is, as Henry Kissinger put it, international relations as social work.

This belief has found increasingly powerful challengers in the past two decades. They included such diverse elements as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), especially Amnesty (based in the UK), Human Rights Watch (US) and Medecins sans Frontieres (France); the liberation theology movement within Catholicism, most powerful in South America; Soviet-era dissidence in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself; the anti-apartheid struggle incarnated in the figure of Nelson Mandela; and a strong, if disguised, trend among journalists to act as the canaries-in-the-mine for oppression.

{...}It is a sad spectacle. Liberals and leftists who spent decades demanding that something must be done to end all sorts of repressions and foreign horrors, and denouncing theirs and other governments for refusing to end them, now denounce the British and US governments for having removed one of the great monsters of the late 20th century because blood was shed (and is still being shed) in the course of it. This isnÂ’t debate about the manner of waging war: it is a smug, I-told-you-so (or I didnÂ’t tell you but I am now) blast against apparent failure - usually oblivious to the consequences of that failure, especially on the ideals and practice that liberals and leftists claim to have espoused.

That the invasion of Iraq, as well as occasioning a long-running terrorist war, should, as the American scholar Thomas Cushman recently pointed out, also have “liberated a people from an oppressive, long-standing tyranny; destroyed an outlaw state that was a threat to the peace and security of the Middle East and the larger global arena in which terrorists operated, sponsored materially and ideologically by Iraq; brought the dictator Saddam Hussein to justice for his genocides [of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, as Human Rights Watch documented] and crimes against humanity; prevented the possibility of another genocide... restored sovereignty to the Iraqi people; laid the foundation for the possibility of Iraq becoming a liberal republic”, has no place in the charge sheets that liberals and leftists bring to bear against Bush and Blair.{...}

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Fausta went to see Condi speak at Princeton---and she reported on it.

Which is more than the New York Times or even the New Jersey Star Ledger could be bothered to do.

Go and read.

Posted by: Kathy at 10:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Miss Manners lists out her top five novels in today's Opinion Journal.

One opinion of hers might ring a bell with longtime devoted Cake Eater Readers:

1. "Emma" by Jane Austen (1816).

Before the injunctions "Be yourself" and "Express yourself" inspired so much bad behavior and art, sophisticated novelists were examining the social selves we invent, as indeed we must to face the world. Little Miss Do-Gooder, the unlikely heroine of this novel, exhibits the philanthropist's fatal flaw of acting on theory rather than on observation. Most impressively, that sly Miss Austen manages to engage our sympathies for a Georgian version of Paris Hilton whose motto is Everyone Wants to Be Me. The faults of Elizabeth Bennet of "Pride and Prejudice" and Marianne Dashwood of "Sense and Sensibility" are merely taking laudable traits--self-respect and romantic passion, respectively--to excess. But Emma Woodhouse is a rich, spoiled young busybody who imagines that everyone aspires to her lifestyle and that she is conferring the greatest of favors by bossing others around. So why do we ache to see her happily married to that nice, innocent gentleman?

Which leads to a very important question for you, my devoted Cake Eater Readers: were Robbo and Miss Manners separated at birth? Both are witty fussbudgets who, it seems, have a penchant for that notorious Austen twit, Emma Woodhouse. I think the case is made, my devoted Cake Eater Readers, but I shall let you be the judge.

UPDATE: Now, with links!

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