Once again Arizona appears to have committed harakiri, falling on its sword in order to save the world from an exercise in human rights. We’re a self-sacrificing state, so we’ve done this twice before.
The first time was in 1987, when Governor Evan Mecham canceled an Executive Order by Bruce Babbitt making Martin Luther King’s birthday a state holiday. All the other states were celebrating this holiday, but I guess Mecham, a former car dealer, was so afraid of the slain Negro civil rights leader’s power that he thought Arizona needed protection from black people who might invade the state if we celebrated that day.
In truth, I just think Mecham thought he could get away with not celebrating the holiday because the state’s population was just 3-4% black. He probably thought “we can’t take a chance of more black people feeling welcome here.” Mecham did declare a vague Civil Rights Day, but he said it was to be celebrated on Sunday. “Why should King have a holiday alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” he said with characteristic brilliance.
That little bit of forward-thinking executive action cost us the chance to host our first Super Bowl in 1993.
The Super Bowl Committee proclaimed very loudly that it would not bring the game to a state that had no respect for more than half the game’s players, who just happened to be black.
It took years of failed citizen initiatives to put our hats back in the ring for the big game, but finally we got the business community on board. Once those community leaders saw what dollars and cents the Super Bowl attracted, they put up the money for a real ballot campaign, and Arizona was able to host its first Super Bowl in 1996.
Ten years later, Arizona was faced with another threat, illegal immigration, and the legislature rose to the occasion, passing
the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (introduced as Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and commonly referred to as Arizona SB 1070) a 2010 legislative Act in the U.S. state of Arizona that was the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration law in the United States when passed.[2] It has received international attention and has spurred considerable controversy.[3][4]
U.S. federal law requires immigrants older than 18 to possess any certificate of alien registration issued to him or her at all times; violation of this requirement is a federal misdemeanor crime.[5] The Arizona act made it also a state misdemeanor for an alien to be in Arizona without carrying the required documents,[6] and required that state law enforcement officers attempt to determine an individual's immigration status during a "lawful stop, detention or arrest" when there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is an illegal immigrant.[7][8]
Thanks Wikipedia..
This law quickly became known as the “show me your papers” law, and was enforced by police who felt it incumbent upon them to pull over any driver who looked like they might be Mexican, assume that the driver was illegal, and ask for papers. Our long-time Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaijo, who famously made prisoners wear pink underwear and live in tents during the hot summers, was the champion of this law.
Several years of cancellations by musicians, conventions, and sports events later, the Justice Department sued Arizona for interfering with the federal responsibility for immigration policy. As I was writing this I remembered how, although the feds can never get their act together to do any of this (are you there, Congress?), they refuse to give up their control.. Here again the feds did not do comprehensive immigration reform, but they again embarrassed Arizona and exposed its racism.
Which brings us to the state’s latest act of stupidity --the Arizona Supreme Court’s vote to uphold an anti-abortion law passed in 1864, before Arizona was even a state or women could vote.
This time the targets are not blacks or Mexicans, but women. But women in Arizona DO vote, and this issue has once-again galvanized a previously silent and mostly obedient constituency and forced it to take action once again to use the ballot against a law that threatens women’s rights to make decisions about their own health and threatens to put doctors who help women get equal rights to health care in prison.
This at a time when doctors are already leaving the profession in droves, nurses are retiring, and the remaining health professionals are still suffering from PTSD over the way COVID patients treated them when they showed up at hospitals demanding care, simultaneously telling the ER staff that COVID didn’t exist.
The good part of this incident is that it is going to force the larger ramifications of the issue out into the open. Abortion is just a shortcut word for a larger issue, which is gender equity.
You know the drill. If a woman doesn’t want to have an abortion, nothing forces her to have one. But if she DOES want one, for reasons that are economic, medical, or personal, why shouldn’t she have one, as a personal choice. If men got pregnant, we’d have solved this years ago
The whole idea of abortion is a red herring, because there is so much we don’t know about life. It’s more question about who has power over women’s health over all.. Women have other special health needs. Those needs should not be concatenated with the issue of women’s reproductive status.
Trust me, there are many women who are either ill-equipped to be mothers, or downright unworthy of motherhood.
It costs about $250,000 to raise a child. I was a foster parent. I’ve seen up close and personal what happens to unwanted children. The birth mother of my foster kids is pro-life, but also pro-drugs and pro-partying and seriously mentally ill. I’ve brought up three of her children, with the concomitant mental health and social issues.
If you are truly pro-life, please contribute $250,000 to every woman whose health care choice you plan to deny. Oh, maybe you’d better add a few more dollars, because parenting classes should also be provided.
Or keep your paws off our bodies. It’s cheaper.
I predict consequences.
What really gets to me is the absence of the responsibility of men to assume their role of fathering a child! They Should they be legally responsible to financially provide for the child until age 18 and the mother!/ or child care. All that I see on tv is old men opinionating about abortion rights or wrongs.