S. Dakota Slaps Up Its Women
Another state you should never visit passes an appalling abortion ban, because they hate you

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, March 3, 2006

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/03/03/notes030306.DTL&nl=fix

Attention all funky sexy single intelligent women of South Dakota (assuming there are any left):

It is time. Pack it up. Strip the bed, box up the cat, load the U-Haul, call your hip friends over in Minneapolis, move out West, or East, or anywhere with a mind-set not stuck like a bloody nail in the moral coffin of 1845. Let this be your clarion call. Get the hell out, right now.

Here is why: Your state hates you. Your state, apparently run by pallid sexless demagogic men who think they know something of God and morality but know only ignominy and the smell of sulfur and death in their nightmares, thinks you are irresponsible dumb-ass meat, unable to handle your own decisions, your own body, your sex. Your state's leaders and your Republican governor, Mike Rounds, wish to treat you like meaningless, voiceless chattel. Get out now. You already know why.

For everyone else reading this, here is the nauseating news: South Dakota, in case you missed it amid the reports of increasingly violent civil war in Iraq, the Dubai ports fiasco and Bush's record-low approval ratings across the board, has just passed a sweeping anti-abortion measure that completely bans the procedure in almost all cases -- including rape, including incest, including if you were, for some ungodly reason, accidentally knocked up by South Dakota neocon anti-choicers like Republican and bill sponsor Rep. Roger W. Hunt, these baggy slabs of pallid manhood who wouldn't know true female sexual pleasure from a hole in a mattress. Or is that being too kind?

And why? Why have these lawmakers rammed this law down South Dakota women's throats and why is it so likely that Gov. Rounds will sign it into law, when the state is already one of the most bitterly restrictive, the most difficult in the nation in which to get an abortion?

Why, for the sole purpose of having the invidious law challenged all the way to the newly realigned, neocon-approved, anti-woman Supreme Court, where the backers of the hateful law hope to finally claim the Big Prize, the great gold ring of self-righteous sex-hating fundie Christians everywhere: challenging Roe v. Wade, maybe even (gasp) overturning the single most female-empowering law in the last 50 years. Wouldn't that be swell?

Here's a fascinating aspect: Most women are stunned by this news. Most women not living in one of the few remaining prehistoric red states cannot believe their ears, eyes, souls. I've told a number of my youngish female friends of this hideous development and they all respond the same way: stunned silence, then "You can't be serious," then this ashen "Oh my God" feeling of utter horror, followed by, "Does anyone else know this? Why isn't this making bigger headlines? Where the hell is Oprah?" Etc.

See, modern women under 40, they simply don't accept it. They have no conception of a world in which they don't have complete control over their flesh, their reproductive rights, their sexuality. For most women of this generation, reproductive choice is simply a fundamental, incontrovertible human right, obvious and ironclad and indisputable, and so to hear that it's being deeply threatened in this back-ass BushCo world is so foreign, so surreal, it induces an immediate cringing recoil, like watching Tom Cruise stick his tongue in Katie Holmes' face, like watching flies feed, like seeing Dick Cheney naked. It simply does not compute.

No matter. South Dakota's leaders, much like those in Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi -- who've all introduced similar hateful, anti-choice measures -- don't care about women. They don't care about rights. But they care a great deal about power, about self-righteous ideology, about the ever-present egomaniacal male need to control, dominate, imprison that which it cannot understand. They care about suppression.

Here's another sordid detail: South Dakota passed its new ban without a referendum. Translation: The frigid neocons who wrote the law didn't actually have the nerve to allow South Dakota's own citizens to vote on it, because they knew the odds were too great that a majority of the state wouldn't accept it. See, even in a conservative red state the people know when a law has gone too far.

And then, the kicker: The stage is now set for a major legal battle over the new draconian law, a battle which will cost millions. The neocons say they've already received a bizarre pledge of a million bucks from some anonymous woman-hating Christian rightist to help defray the legal costs. But it won't be nearly enough. Who gets to pay for the rest? South Dakota taxpayers, most of whom probably didn't want the damnable law in the first place. Ah, neocon politics. You're soaking in it.

Now, the good news. Most legal experts, even those from Christian "pro-family" anti-choice groups, are already saying the law has little chance of posing a serious challenge to Roe v. Wade. It's simply too draconian, too vile, too flagrantly unconstitutional. But then again, with Alito and Roberts on the bench, you just never know. Nastier things have happened. Just check the wiretap on your e-mail.

These are the things you need to know. We are at that point. We are right now at the apex of some great and dirty battle, some ugly siege, the nation so overrun by the Christian right that they finally get to make some sort of grand and desperate statement, a vicious volley of stabs to the heart of progress and sexual rights, before being run out of Congress this fall and Bush becomes a lame duck and the nation slowly wakes up from this catatonic Republican-bled haze.

The South Dakota lawmakers know. They've said as much, that this is the right time to attack, the opportunity possibly fleeting, the national gag reflex induced by these neocons not yet at full force. "I think the stars are aligned," said Matthew Michels, South Dakota House Speaker and Republican, referring to the appointments of Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court. "Simply put, now is the time."

Sure their odds may be long, but their hearts are black with passionate intensity.

Of course, with any luck, with any sort of divine feminine intervention, with any sort of national common sense, this sickening attack on female choice will quickly go the way of "intelligent design," of the Terry Schiavo zombies, of the WMD zealots. It will dissolve and implode like the nasty moral insult it so very is. We can only hope. And of course, vote, in November.

Until then, it would behoove the final dozen or so sexually attuned, lusciously feminine women in South Dakota -- not to mention every teenage girl within a 1,000-mile radius -- to pack their bags and book their tickets outta town before they lock the gates and start the fires. I hear Canada is lovely this time of year. What are you waiting for?

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Sunny Weather Creeps Me Out
Unseasonably warm, blissful days were once cause for naked rejoicing. Now they scream, 'Global warming!'

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/03/01/notes030106.DTL&nl=fix

Just a week ago today, before the cold rains swept back in, it was 74 degrees in San Francisco and clear and sunny and gorgeous as a giant diamond licked by nubile virgin cheerleaders high on rum and lip balm and pink-bunny vibrators.

It was refreshing as a banana split in hell, cloudless as a forest nymph's dream of spring. It was so warm and perfect for a normally chilly February it made you look around the city and sigh in a swooning, maybe-the-world-isn't-as-miserable-as-I-thought kind of stunned bliss even as you scanned past the weather section and saw that places like Michigan and Chicago and New York were still digging out from blizzards and ice storms and subzero I-can't-feel-my-eyeballs frigidity, even as you realized this burst wouldn't last and we would soon be returning to biting fog-blasted rain any day now.

For this time of year in San Francisco, blasts of weird summerlike weather are probably completely normal. February invariably means sporadic rain, long spurts of frigid cold beaming down from ever-melting Alaska, alongside nice puffy tufts of warm sun of sufficient perfection to make you think about car washes and sex in the park and how you need to get some new T-shirts for summer.

But then again, not quite. Something is amiss. Something about this blazing loveliness feels just a little bit off, a little bit wrong, something nagging and squirming just under the skin of this sunny daydream bliss, and if you're paying any sort of attention to the world these days you can't help but hear, as you bask in the warm sun-kissed goodness, an uneasy and nervous voice stabbing into your sun-dappled brain: Isn't it just a little too warm? Too sunny? Can this be right?

And finally: Is this winter heat just another little sign of impending doom, a hint of far, far worse things to come, of heat waves and storms and direness and death? Is it all, in short, just a deceptively lovely result of the looming wrath of global warming?

You know it's true. It doesn't take many weirdly balmy winter days or freakishly violent storms or photos of Katrina's fury to know that something's more than a little amiss. You don't need to hear the fact repeated that there were so many hurricanes in 2005 they ran out of names, or that people were wearing shorts in 65 degree weather in Chicago in January to know that something deeply unsettling is afoot in Mother Nature's kitchen.

Sure enough, five minutes of research on Google reveals more data about calamitous shifts in climate than you can possibly absorb over your morning coffee without suffering a mad desire to strangle BushCo for shunning the Kyoto Treaty like a goddamn child shuns humanitarian broccoli.

Two clicks in and you can find out that the world's polar ice caps are melting twice as fast as scientists thought just a few years ago. You learn that, in the past 30 years, nearly half a million miles of sea ice have melted -- an unprecedented pace indeed. You discover that 2005 was the hottest year on record, and that by 2030, Glacier National Park in northern Montana will be entirely devoid of glaciers.

You also find a plethora of maps of the world, each with little symbols stuck all over them like God's own chicken pox, indicating a whole bitch's brew of environmental nasties: record droughts, epic floods, dire storms of all shapes and sizes, unusual animal migrations, ecosystem breakdowns, unprecedented heat waves, malaria outbreaks in regions previously immune. There are disappearing lakes, coral reefs bleaching (from algae die-offs), massive snowfalls and huge fires.

And that's just the warm-up. So to speak.

Of course, Bush and his handful of screw-the-planet cronies would have you believe it's all normal, just part of the timeless system of global weather change happening since the last ice age, with man merely serving as an insignificant speck in the great sandbox of time and they're ain't a gul-dang thing we can do about all these storms and disasters so shut up and sit tight and let's go drill us some more oil wells and ease more laws restricting industrial polluters and pray for apocalypse.

Of course, roughly 14,377 other world-class scientists from all over the globe look at Bush like he's something they just coughed up after a long flu. The Bush administration, most everyone knows, is single-handedly doing more to accelerate global warming and the subsequent meltdown of the planet than the Four Horsemen could whip up in a wet dream.

Wait, that's not quite true. Actually, some scientists are a bit divided over the actual causes of global warming. Surely, few deny the climate is changing. Rare is the addled perspective that claims everything's fine and it will all work itself out and not to worry and by the way here's some SPF 100 and some duct tape for the next hurricane. Oh wait, that's exactly what Bush is saying. But besides him.

There is little doubt that climate change is happening, fast and dramatic and dangerous. The big question is why, and whether mankind is much of a factor, and whether there's anything we can do to slow or prevent it.

Which is exactly the point where your common sense joins hands with your intuition which then French kisses your intellect and you say, Oh my God are you serious, 7 billion methane-blasting carbon-monoxide-spitting pollution-happy bipeds stomping around the planet for a thousand years and hammering the environment and sucking down natural resources the way a Republican senator sucks down a Zoloft-Tanqueray lunch, and we haven't had a lick of effect? Please.

Yes, one or two scientists say ice-core samples from 10,000 years ago show evidence of abrupt climate change, too, and therefore the current drama isn't that unusual. But most others say that doesn't matter, we're actively triggering and amplifying this one, we aren't doing squat to slow it. And when it comes to greenhouse gases, the United States is the nastiest polluter of all.

As always, it is, ultimately, our choice: Our nation, our government can choose to let it happen, to let the storms and economic upheavals come on more violently than ever, or we can take some goddamn responsibility for a change, be good tenants of the planet and not trash the place and walk away and let God look at us in abject disgust. And from the looks of things now, we've made our choice.

Meanwhile, here we are. The world's weather patterns are changing faster and more ominously than at any time in our species' existence. Meanwhile, the facts proving global warming is happening pile up faster than can be measured, and the evidence proving that we are, in effect, digging our own grave by doing nothing about it makes a mockery of our supposed love of life.

Meanwhile, the unusual February sunshine blazed on, making you smile, warming your face and toasting your fingertips, even as it chilled you down to your very bones.

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

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