Please stay on topic. Please don't be asses.
If she ever submits herself to questioning by someone who isn't a potted plant, he or she should ask her about this in very specific terms.
She'd just lie about it anyway. That's what mavericks do...
I wish I had talent I would make a video with a bunch of Iraqi war dead children and call it Republican Late Term abortions....
lying conservative white trash cunt. am i close?
If she ever submits herself to questioning by someone who isn't a potted plant, he or she should ask her about this in very specific terms.
Which is why it won't happen.
The Sarah Palin for VP campaign promises to be the most faith based solicitation in history. She is actively hiding not just her record but also her views while asking for votes.
That rules out Katie (Potted Plant) Couric, then?
Given Biden's role in VAWA and his vote to ban states from charging for rape kits in exchange for VAWA funds, that sets up something for the VP debate.
Alaska's the rape capital of the US, with Native American women the most likely to be affected. But because Palin buys the 'emergency contraception = abortion' pseudoscience makes her an extremist.
"Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said in an e-mail that the governor "does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test.""
Someone needs to ask her, face to face, why in that case she tolerated her police chief charging for them when she fired or tried to get fired pretty much anyone else who disagreed with her. The look on her face should be quite amusing.
Question: Do you believe that birth control is murder?
...nervous pause, anxious expression, hint of anger, thoughts of violence involving shotgun or large SUV...
Answer: In what way, Charleeee? But do you know that I can see Russia from my house?
(And yes, I am making fun of gun-loving Christianist morons with retarded-sounding provincial accents who don't know jackshit about the world beyond Target. So sue me. Oh yeah, that's right, wingnuts hate trial lawyers. Bite me, morons.)
type 4--don't be a dick. No need to offend half the population to target one heinous representative of it.
LEAVE SARAH PALIN ALOOOONE!!!!!
This virtually defines ideological extremism. An abstract "principle" carried to it's illogical conclusion becomes more important than the suffering of people or the law. Cheney is said to be very "principled" and uncompromising in this sense. Cold, cruel, and inhuman. Sickening. Don't count on the Charlie Gibsons getting to the truth of this.
what a combination; an ayn rand christianist.
what a combination; an ayn rand christianist.
hilldick
What, A = A because God said so?
The rape kits that Sarah Palin had a direct role in forcing women to pay for contained emergency contraception.
I thought this, too, until a rape policy expert I know informed me otherwise: Rape kits are for evidence collection and don't necessarily contain EC. Further complicating the matter, it's often the case that whether or not a victim receives EC (or if not, has EC discussed with her) depends primarily on the individual worker who cares for her, no matter what the law is.
It may be that Palin approved this policy because of the EC issue, but we don't have the evidence yet.
Having myself had the benefit of the emergency contraception included in a rape kit, I'd like to punch her hard enough to break her lovely nose, in honor of the victims she deprived of it.
I'm a forensic DNA analyst- i.e. the direct consumer of rape-kit evidence. Mithras is correct. These are EVIDENCE-COLLECTION kits. (In fact their more formal name is "sexual assault evidence kits".) They do not contain supplies of any sort for treating the victim.
Wasilla's former policy is the most outrageous, sick and obscene thing I've ever heard of. There is no possible excuse, rational or irrational, for such idiocy. I would like to see 527 ads (527s because the Obama campaign should keep the focus on McCain) hammering this. And please DON'T blunt the impact of this by getting it tangled up with also-serious but unrelated issues like contraception.
I think the major points here are:
1. It is unconscionable that any rape victim anywhere is required to pay for the collection of evidence. No municipality should have such a policy, and Sarah Palin was wrong to approve it in Wasilla.
2. No rape victim should have to risk becoming pregnant from her attacker. Emergency contraception prevents pregnancy, it doesn't end one, as some people wrongly believe. EC should be made available for rape victims in emergency rooms, for free if insurance doesn't cover it 100%.
3. Rape crisis centers all over the country are underfunded and overburdened, and Congress should take action to ensure adequate funding for trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners. This is the minimum we can do to give rape victims the medical care they need and law enforcement the evidence required to catch their attackers.
Googling around, it looks like a few rape kits contain EC, while others don't. My supposition is that EC should be prescribed based on a doctor's opinion about the woman's health (can her body take the chemicals, since women have died from EC) and therefore, most often would be separate from a rape kit.
My cynical view is that since the state of Alaska has the highest per capita incidence of forced rape, by declining to provide a rape kit free to those who need it, one lowers the stats/reportage of the crime, which Palin would be glad to take credit for.
Palin doesn't make victims of theft pay for their finger print kits, but does make the victims of sexual assault pay for their kits, thus, sexual assault victims must pay for access to justice.
When is the video of Sarah McPalin speaking in tongues and writhing on the floor going to come out or did the Republicans get em all. I know those nutcases, she had to have done it you can't play there without the bling you just wouldn't fit in.
Rape is a good way for men to express anger against women and to control them.
Denying the women access to justice after the rape is a good way for society to show women their place, their true status.
Palin wants to deny women access to free rape kits so they won't report crimes or go to emergency rooms after a rape, which is a good way for her to show, on behalf of her ideology, that she thinks rape should much more normalized in society because women need to be controlled. If pressed, she would probably admit that she thinks women are responsible when they are raped.
That's all.
Well, there is ONE way to test if this is her true belief. If she were repeatedly raped until she became impregnated then we would see if she is willing to undergo what she would impose on others...nah, wouldn't work. That would be like saying that people willing to start a war would send their own family into harms way with all the other service members or innocent civilians who get caught in the cross fire.
The problem with the "She did it because she's a crazy fundie who thought EC was abortion" theory is that Plan B and RU-486 were not approved for use in this country until 1999 and 2000, respectively (Google it; many cites on those dates). So they could not have been available, period, even by prescription, much less so common that they were standard in a rape kit, in the mid-90s when Palin first became mayor and the policy was instituted (or continued?). There was no EC available to be included in a rape kit in 1996, so how could she have a religious objection to drugs that weren't on the market?
I don't know why it's so hard to believe that she could just be cold, money-grubbing, indifferent, lazy or clueless, rather than that she has to have some ideological reason for her actions. To my mind, it's way worse if she DIDN'T make the policy because of some religious belief. I certainly wouldn't push that explanation; it would just win her brownie points with the base and even with people who aren't rabidly anti-abortion but not passionately committed to choice, who could admire her for standing by a "moral principle" but wouldn't be able to defend her just being a cold-hearted b****.
Besides, she's not shy about her abortion views; she readily answered that she'd have her daughter continue a pregnancy that was the result of rape and she'd make no exceptions for incest either. I don't see her not seizing a chance to make herself the darling of the anti-abortion right by proudly owning up to refusing to fund a kit that included pills that caused abortion (in her mind). The fact that she offered no explanation seems to me to argue against her having an ideological reason. And the first thing out of the police chief's mouth is complaints about money. If they'd taken this stand ideologically, in a small conservative town like Wasilla, I think they'd have admitted it proudly, not griped about money.
I should clarify that she wasn't shy about her abortion views in Wasilla and in Alaska. She's not so forthcoming now that she has to reach a wider electorate.
hey, kovie!
lighten up, francis.
val; dont you know it is usually the womans fault if she is raped? She will know better in the future to ; wear revealing clothes, forget to deadbolt her door, go out at night, etc.
That 'ul larn 'em.
val: RU-486 is not an issue here, and conflating it with Plan B just feeds wingnuts.
Plan B is just one type of EC. Wikipedia has the timeline on the regulation in the US.
The official statement's emphasis on the 'evidence-gathering test' is a clear bit of parsing, with an unstated implication for anything that wasn't about gathering evidence but instead addressed the consequences of rape.
Let's assume that Palin is what she appears, a willfully underinformed careerist who believes a lot of propaganda, including her own. What are the odds that she received a mailout or email from the forced-childbirth brigade saying 'rape kits = abortion', and took it as gospel.
The wing nuts have been trying to 'exempt' pharmacists -who have Xtian beliefs- from dispensing emergency contraceptives or the morning after pill.
They think is an egg is fertilized and any drug interferes with implantation in the womb (as EC and birth control pills sometimes do by changing the lining of the womb) it is a form of abortion.
First they go after EC or morning after pills, next they will go after birth control pills.
Interesting that Ireland, a Catholic country, approved the morning after pill years before the US .......
I'm not finding any evidence that there was widespread, routine use of emergency contraception in sexual assault cases, certainly not routinely available in a standard rape kit, much before Plan B. Off-label use of oral contraceptives for that purpose wasn't a widespread practice because doctors were nervous about liability, according to the California Planned Parenthood site. And looking at the Wiki footnotes, it seems that the only non-PlanB drug listed, DES, had a rather checkered history for that purpose.
There's nothing I'm seeing that indicates any kind of routine use of EC before Plan B, and no indication that standard rape kits were unavailable WITHOUT such drugs, especially the kinds of kits that a small town in Alaska would have purchased. Remember, the town had been paying for these kits for a few years before she even became mayor. I'm seeing lots of sites that list the contents of a rape kit that make no mention of EC. These are generally for forensic purposes, certainly would have been in the mid- to late 1990s. I just don't think the timing works. Alaska certainly wouldn't be on the cutting edge of anything like this. Some individual doctors in Alaska might have been offering this treatment in a hospital, but I seriously doubt it was "standard."
Why is it so hard to believe she's just cold, indifferent or a cheapskate? Or that she just didn't take sexual assault seriously? Or that she had an attitude about it similar to what someone else said upthread (rape victims asking for it) or believed that women routinely lied about it or some other backward notion that had nothing to do with abortion? Just because she is a wacko fundie doesn't mean everything she did fell under that rubric. I just think she'd have been proud to take a stand against "abortion" if that indeed was her view of EC. She wouldn't have had her police chief whine about costs to the newspaper. She'd have won brownie points for standing up for a moral principle. She looks much worse to have charged for the kits just because she'd rather spend the money on other stuff (like, say, a $24,000 SUV or a multimillion-dollar stadium).
val: I agree with you that you can just class it as Not Caring.
The standard line about rape in Alaska from people who don't care much about rape -- from random sweeps of discussions on this -- is to treat it as an issue within the Native American community, and since teh white wimmins aren't getting raped as much, it's not as big a priority.
Hey type 4!
Don't employ the misogynistic epithet that you blithely used and maybe I'll "lighten up".
Oh, and stop employing this invariably lame non sequitor to "defend" your use of such language in the context of the subject at hand. Or do you consider rape to be something that one can "lighten up" or make jokes about? If so, then maybe you need to do some "heavying up".
So no, I don't think I'll lighten up, not about THIS topic, thank you.
You really need to stop getting your tips on social ettiquette from Mr. Assboil.
Hi folks:
As the aforementioned "rape policy expert," I just want to clarify/reiterate a few points:
1. Emergency contraception has NOTHING TO DO with whether a rape kit is completed. A victim of sexual assault may have forensic evidence collected WITHOUT any access to medication to prevent pregnancy, treat/prevent sexually transmitted infections, etc.
2. There are NO rape kits that "contain" EC. As Steve LaBonne (above) mentions, rape kits deal SOLELY with collection of forensic evidence.
State law--and in the absence of state law, hospital policy--governs whether victims have access to EC as **part of** the post-rape exam protocol. For state laws regarding EC for rape victims, see the National Conference of State Legislatures:
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/hea...ealth/
ecleg.htm
3. Off-label use of birth control pills for emergency contraception has been common for decades. It was called the "Yuzpe regimen" and was widely used for more than 20 years. (In fact, when I was doing ER accompaniment for rape victims in the early 1990s the hospital routinely used high doses of birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.) The problem was that victims were required to take several pills over several days, and the nausea which accompanied that hormonal "shock" was often quite severe. Plan B is an easier 2 pill dose and mitigates some of those unpleasant aftereffects. Both birth control pills and Plan B are widely regarded by all credible scientists as safe for use; women "dying" from EC is about as likely as anyone dying from any over the counter medication--there is always a risk, but it is incredibly small.
4. Whatever Governor Palin did or did not do as a mayor or governor, it is clear that she did not advance victim's needs or interests. Contrast that to Senator Biden, whose sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act was absolutely the most important source of funding and support for victim advocates as well as law enforcement (including training & support for police and prosecutors on issues of sexual & domestic violence) EVER at the federal level. There's really no comparison.
don't be a dick. No need to offend half the population to target one heinous representative of it.
Kovie | 09.18.08 - 5:22 am | #
don't be a what?
Are you really saying that someone who uses a term for genitalia as an insult is a "dick"?
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