I Don’t Know How the Internet Works

Squarespace lets me see incoming referrals.  So, if you link to me and someone clicks it, I see that they came to me through you.  I get a shit ton of referrals from scam sites.

What’s the point of this?  I’ve checked out a couple of them, just to see and it doesn’t seem that I’m actually being linked to.  I get probably fifty to a hundred a day and they usually come in at two or three different times per day so that I can easily tell that they’re fake.

Someone explain to me, what good does that do them?  I only clicked back through to investigate for this blog post, otherwise, I just ignore them.  Other than betting on the off-chance that I’ll click through, is there some other purpose served by linking to me? 

My Days are Filled with Bloggers

I forgot to tell you the weirdest coolest thing of my weekend.  So, I’m sitting there at Ombi Bar* talking about how I’d spent lunch with the Nashville bloggers when the woman across the table from me is all like "What?!  There are Nashville blogger get-togethers?  How do you find out about them?"  and I told her all about WKRN and Nashville is Talking and all y’all and she just sat there dumbfounded, like if a person had put up a little house in a field north of Franklin 20 years ago and awoke to discover she was surrounded by suburbs.

So, to Colleen, I say "Welcome to the Nashville blogosphere, even though you were already here.  I hope you like barbecue, because that’s the best perk we’ve got."

Then Sunday I went over to Brittney and Kevin’s to watch "Wet Hot American Summer," which was delightfully silly.

Though Brittney assured me her dogs were terrible beasts who couldn’t behave, I found them to be sweet.  They will, however, never be allowed to hang out with Mrs. Wigglebottom, as the last thing I need is for her to learn how to balance herself on the back of the couch.

Also, they fed me the best pizza and we had a good yak and then I came home and had to spend ten minutes waiting for Mrs. W to finish sniffing all of the places on me that Brittney’s dogs had spent all evening sniffing on me.  I felt a little like a fire hydrant, without the being peed on part. 

 

 

 

 

*Which I’ll not pass judgment on in public except to say that, if folks are going to pay that much for cheese, you damn well better supply them with enough crackers to eat it with. 

Talk about Anchor Babies!

Here’s something to mull over.  Say anti-abortion folks succeed in having legal personhood extended to all forms of pre-born human life.  Right now, you become a U.S. citizen if you’re born in the United States.  But if we’re going to extend personhood and legal protections to pre-born folks, isn’t one implication of that, if you have constitutional protections from the moment you’re conceived, that you are a U.S. citizen from the moment you’re conceived?

The larger implication being that, then, if you can show that your parents were here around the time you were conceived, even if they went back to their homeland to have you, could you claim U.S. citizenship?

God, that would be rich.

I Appeal to You Anti-Abortion Folks

Dear Anti-Abortion Folks,

I know many of you are probably thinking, after reading my last entry, “Why should I care if Rep. Campfield wants to issue death certificates to aborted fetuses?  Those are lives and anything that will make those women realize that they’re killing a human being is fine with me.  Plus, I’m never going to have an abortion, so I don’t care.”

Listen, I know we fundamentally disagree.  You believe that life, and therefore personhood, begins at conception.  I believe, at conception, we see the stirrings of life and that, throughout a woman’s pregnancy, over time, a person is brought into being.  Yes, I believe there is another life in a pregnant woman’s uterus, but, until it emerges alive into the world, it’s not a person, just the potential for one.

And I know those positions seem so diametrically opposed and that, often, my side seems so heartless and cruel, that you doubt we could have any common ground.

I ask you to consider this.  It is constitutionally impossible for the Tennessee State Legislature to declare some occupants of women’s uteruses people and not others.  They cannot, under the equal protection clause, say that these beings are people, but these beings in the exact same circumstances are not.  If you are a legal person from the moment you stir to life as two cells joined into one, you’re a legal person.  Campfield cannot declare only medically aborted fetuses people.

Consider that.

Now, we both know that this is an effort to chip away at abortion rights.  If you anti-abortion folks can get the law to recognize all forms of human life as legal people, you can, presumably, outlaw abortion because it would then be murder.

But consider this.  If the deliberate ending of a pregnancy through abortion becomes murder, all endings of pregnancies will be open for legal scrutiny.  Not just “will be” but will have to be.  If I’m driving a car and I deliberately run you over, I can be charged with murder; but if I’m just driving along and I drop my cell phone and I reach down to pick it up and I hit you and accidentally kill you; I can still be charged with a crime.

Here’s what I’m asking you to consider.  Almost all of us will miscarry at some point in our lives.  Most often, it happens so early in a pregnancy that we don’t even know we’re pregnant.  But, sadly, it happens all too frequently to women who desperately want children.

I think we can both agree that losing a wanted pregnancy is a terrible tragedy.

Are you okay with opening up these terrible personal tragedies to police scrutiny?

If a fetus is a person, a legal person with a right to life, how can that NOT happen?  The police will have to investigate every miscarriage to see if it was just “natural,” whatever that means, or if the woman did something, even inadvertently, that caused it.

And women, who even inadvertently, cause the death of another person go to prison.

Do you see what I’m saying?  You cannot have it both ways.  You cannot say “that is a person you are murdering and you therefore should be punished under the same laws as anyone else who is committing a murder” to a woman who chooses to have an abortion and not say “that is a person you accidentally killed and though its very tragic that you didn’t mean to kill that person, under the law, you’re still responsible for that person’s death and so you must also go to prison.”

It either is a person all the time or it isn’t.  You can’t establish personhood of a fetus based only on the behavior of the mother, where, if she wants to have an abortion, it’s a person, but if she wants to carry the pregnancy to term, but is incapable of it, it’s just an understandable tragedy.

I believe that Rep. Campfield doesn’t really care about the implications of his legislation, as long as it, in some way, punishes women for having abortions (and lets be honest, that’s what this is about–making sure that women who want to have abortions are “properly” stigmatized).

But I’m asking you to consider, truly consider, in your heart what the implications of establishing legal personhood for all forms of pre-birth human life are.  And ask yourself if you’re really okay with the police investigating all miscarriages and with women who desperately wanted that pregnancy going to prison because it ended.

Because I don’t see how it can be any other way.  The U.S. Constitution says, that a state cannot “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” And so, if you establish personhood (which issuing death certificates is the point of) of aborted fetuses, you have to treat all fetuses as persons and give all of them equal protection of the laws.

So, I ask you, even if you’re anti-abortion, please, for the sake of all women who miscarry, oppose this legislation.

Love,

Aunt B.

Stace, Shall I Send My Used Tampons to You or to the Medical Examiner?

Dear Stace,

Do you mind if I call you Stace?  It’s just usually the men that are interested in what’s going on in my cooter either get called some kind of cute name or "Doctor" or, if I’m lucky, "Doctor [Cute Name]" and I kind of like it that way.  So, Stace it is.

Stace, thanks to Egalia, I’ve learned that you want to issue death certificates for aborted fetuses.  While I think she makes a "legitimate" point for a pinko commie hippie liberal man-hating feminist who wants to overthrow the government and install Nancy Pelosi as president for life* when she points out that you’d be issuing death certificates for "people" who don’t have birth certificates, I think she’s neglected to ask you the most important question.

Stace, if life begins at conception, why do you only want to issue death certificates for fetuses that are medically aborted?  Aren’t miscarried fetuses also dead?  If a fertilized egg is a person, if it fails to make it from conception to birth alive for any reason, shouldn’t it get a death certificate?  If a person comes into being in my reproductive tract and that person fails to implant itself on my uterus and is, instead, flushed out of my body with my menstrual blood, isn’t that person just as dead as the person you want to issue a death certificate for, who was aborted?

Well, isn’t it?

And, if it is just as dead, why aren’t you issuing death certificates for those blastocysts?

True, doctors estimate that between half and three-quarters of fertilized eggs, excuse me, people… between half and three quarters of people fail to implant in the uterus and are routinely lost without the uterus-carrier’s knowledge and so figuring out if a death has occurred is tricky.

But, since recognizing people’s deaths is so important to you, I’m sure you won’t mind helping the medical examiner examine every fertile woman’s menstrual blood.  After all, along with the blood and the endometrial chunks, there could be a dead person who needs a death certificate.  Surely, we owe it to humanity to make sure that no remains of dead people are just flushed down the toilet or taken out in the trash without some recognition by the state of what’s been lost.

And so, I eagerly await word from you.  Shall I send my used tampons directly to you at your home or would you prefer them sent to you care of the state capitol, and if so, do you need them in any particular special container?  If you do find a person among the tampons and pads, will you be burying it or cremating it?  And will I be responsible for any of those costs? 

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Aunt B.

 

 

*Not all of these things are true.  I was just on a role roll**.

**A day will come when I learn to spell and on that day, I imagine, I’ll become invincible.