It's a sad day when the only way common sense and a rejection of legislation based on religious extremism can prevail in the halls of state government in Richmond is when the national mockery of Virginia politicians becomes so bad that those with any sense of pride - and ambitions for higher office - are shamed into backing down. Yet without the parody from Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show, women in Virginia might have been subjected to forced sexual penetration by Virginia Governor Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell and the Virginia GOP puppets of the Christianists at The Family Foundation. One can only hope that the withering mockery continues until the so-called "personhood" bill gets scuttled. Attention to the anti-gay adoption measure not yet signed by Taliban Bob would be most appreciated as well. Salon looks at what happened in Richmond this week. Here are some highlights:
Something incredible just happened. Faced with a growing national outcry against a bill forcing an ultrasound before an abortion — which activists and legislators had been comparing to rape — Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell backed off from his earlier support. “Mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state,” he said in a statement today. “No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.”
To be clear, the forced ultrasound battle isn’t wholly won — McDonnell’s statement only went as far as “asking the General Assembly to state in this legislation that only a transabdominal, or external, ultrasound will be required to satisfy the requirements to determine gestational age.”
[T]o understand what’s at stake here, you have to understand that until recently, forced ultrasound bills weren’t even that controversial, let alone radioactive, as today shows that they are for McDonnell, a Mitt Romney surrogate and vice-presidential hopeful. . . . . we can thank an extraordinary convergence of pop culture outrage and reproductive rights activists around the words “transvaginal” and “rape” for it.
Amy Poehler returned to “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update to use “transvaginal” as a punch line and snarl, “Don’t tell me what to do!” Last night, Jon Stewart turned “transvaginal ultrasound” into a song for a “Punanny State” segment. On “The View,” Joy Behar called the law “so frickin’ intrusive to a woman’s body” and compared it to the Taliban.
Said Meghan McCain to Rachel Maddow last night, “I’m pro-life but I’m not pro-vaginal probing,” adding, ”It scares me that a woman can be vaginally probed without her consent.” She said apolitical friends had been texting her asking what was going on with the law.
It helped that Virginia is a swing state convenient to D.C. media, and that conservatives had been so openly callous about the humiliating intentions behind the law, with more than one freely conceding that if a woman had opened her legs once, why should she care if the state gets into her vaginal canal for no medical reason?
“There’s just this confluence of factors where people are beginning to wake up to what’s going on. Part of it is that people are aware that it’s not just a culture war — it’s a war on women, evidence, health, and science.”
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