Michigan women will face new obstacles to legal abortion after Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law wide-ranging restrictions in the last hours of that state’s legislative session Friday.

Under the new law, private medical offices where abortions are performed will be required to be licensed as surgical facilities; women seeking an abortion must first meet with a health-care professional to ensure they aren’t being coerced into the procedure; health-care providers can refuse service if their conscience so dictates; and new regulations will be imposed on how fetal remains are disposed.

Snyder surprised many by vetoing related legislation that would only allow insurance coverage of abortions through rider policies that companies could deny. A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman called this a “victory” amidst the package of new restrictions.

“Those three issues were our top issues: conscience, insurance, and regulation and reform,” Ed Rivet, a spokesman for Michigan Right to Life, told the Detroit Free-Press. “That we’re doing them all simultaneously is pretty remarkable.”

Critics, though, call the bill confusing, contradictory, and over-broad. Policy watchdog RH Reality Check deemed it “one of the most extreme pieces of anti-choice legislation in the country.”

“It is a sad day for Michigan women,” said State Senator Rebekah Warren. “They will pay for this legislation with their dignity, health, and ultimately some even with their lives.” Warren was Michigan’s affiliate NARAL director for seven years before being elected to office…

I’m sure that some will applaud Governor Snyder for having sufficient nerd spine to stand up to the extremists of his party, and veto their legislation which would have prevented private insurance companies from covering abortion procedures in the state of Michigan. I, however, won’t be joining them. While it’s true that things could have been even worse, that does not make the 5711 omnibus, which he signed into law this afternoon, any less vile. It will take some time to see how things work out, but, as we discussed a few days ago, this legislative end-run around Roe v. Wade could very well mean that the entire state of Michigan will have only one independent, non-hopsital facility which can legally perform abortions. (Presently, there are 32.) This, I think most of you would agree, is absolutely unconscionable.

In addition to meaning a rise in risky DIY abortions, and ensuring that hundreds of unwanted children are born to unprepared mothers against their will, this will almost surely bring more violence to Ann Arbor, where, assuming some compromise isn’t struck in Lansing, the state’s only remaining abortion facility will be located. (Planned Parenthood presently operates four facilities in the state, but only the Ann Arbor facility meets all the unnecessarily stringent criteria spelled out in 5711. The other three facilities would require “waivers,” and it’s not yet known if these will be extended.) Snyder, by signing this today, has essentially made Ann Arbor ground zero in the war on women’s rights in this state, and I hope he’s ready to face the consequences, both electorally and ethically. Not only will this make him virtually unelectable in Michigan, in my opinion, but it will bring every insane anti-choice zealot in our state to the Planned Parenthood location on Packard. I hope this is just another instance of me worrying for nothing, but I can’t help but think that bad things will happen as an increasing number of delusional individuals begin making their way to Ann Arbor, in hopes of shutting down this facility, and thereby effectively ending abortion in Michigan.

It may be too early to start thinking about this, but I think we may want to begin planning a series of fundraisers so that the good people of Planned Parenthood can afford to put systems in place to ensure their safety.

Also, I hope that the Governor knows that this will only hasten the out-migration of educated young workers from Michigan, ensuring our standing as a third-tier state… What young, college-educated woman would choose to make her home in a state that has essentially said that women can’t be trusted to make her own decisions concerning her reproductive health? As much as it pains me to say it, unless we make a great deal of progress over the coming years, I’ll likely encourage my daughter to leave and make a life for herself elsewhere.

[note: My last article on this subject, which goes into quite a bit more detail, and incorporates an interview that I did with a representative of Planned Parenthood, can be found here.]

The corporate media is pushing a narrative, says Jones, about Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin. They want to say that we’ve been beaten, and that we’re demoralized. It takes a lot more than being outspent 8-to-1, though, to demoralize us, he says. Progressives have died for the cause before. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents went up against billy clubs and dogs before. They fought for the 40 hour work week, safer working conditions, and civil rights. They put their lives on the line. And we won’t give up because 13 billionaires poured money into Wisconsin. We’ve seen worse.

“What happened in Wisconsin is awful,” he says, “but it actually teaches us something. In this movement, we sometimes have to learn the hard lesson at the right time. What we learned in Wisconsin is very simple. When we do our minimum, as a national movement… I’m not talking about the local forces, who fought beautifully… No, the local forces fought beautifully. The local forces fought well. The local forces stood up. The local forces created a miracle. They turned a national breakdown into a potential national breakthrough… on their own. The labor forces… and lets not forget the African American and Latino communities, especially in Milwaukee, exceeded every expectation. The local forces stood up. They did the maximum. But they fought alone. Let’s be honest here. We’re all friends here. Where were the national Democrats? And where were a lot of us? There’s something wrong with a movement when we spend more time and energy mourning the loss, than we spend time and energy securing the win. We have to take accountability as a national movement. When we do our minimum, and the other side does their maximum, we lose. Is that simple enough? You don’t have to have an advanced degree in politics to understand this. They outspent us 8-to-1. You essentially had the local labor movement fighting 13 billionaires… 12 of whom don’t even live in Wisconsin. Understand this. If we don’t like the way we felt when we woke up in June, having observed but not fought… There were some exceptions, but the civil rights establishment never showed up in large numbers… There were exceptions, but the environmental movement never showed up in large numbers… There were exceptions, but the women’s movement, the national Democrats… None of us showed up in large numbers. We saw it. We observed it. We munched the popcorn. But we didn’t jump into the screen.”

“We have a quandary,” says the former White House Green Energy Czar. We know we’re supposed to be fired up, but wer’re mad. We like the President, but we’re not in love with him like he used to be. Yes, he stands up for Trayvon Martin, and for gay marriage, but we don’t love him the way that we did. According to Jones, we’re “caught between Barack and a hard place.” And, because of that, we don’t know how to get fired up again. We know that just supporting Obama won’t get us the change that we want. And some of us want to teach him a lesson. Jones says he knows that some of us think that Romney and Obama are essentially the same. But, he says, we need to think about what the right has done in the state houses they’ve recently taken over. “If the Tea Party is allowed to score a trifecta,” he says, the consequences would be unthinkable. “Their ideas are already corrupting the Supreme Court. You see that with Scalia’s antics. They already have half of the Congress. If they get the rest of it, and the White House… If the Tea Party governs America… If, this time next year, you are living under a government run by the Tea Party, let me suggest to you that they might use power a little bit differently than we did. When they get power, they use it to decimate us. The last election was a hope election. This one may be a fear election. They’re scared of us – we should be terrified of them. When they get power, they use it to decimate us. Look at what they did in the state houses. They didn’t run on destroying the unions, but the minute they got in they didn’t say, ‘Well, perhaps we should make some adjustments to labor law… let’s have a committee.’ No, they decapitated our unions… And they say that they’re not just going to make some adjustments to the EPA, but eliminate it. Do you think they’re joking? The EPA has probably saved more American lives in the last 30 years than the Department of Defense… If they have a trifecta, they will use it to decimate us. It will be no holds barred.”

He notes that, when we have power, as we did in 2008, after winning the House, Senate and White House, we decided it was time to be bipartisan. We haven’t historically, according to Jones, known how to use power. If they win, however, all the crazy stuff they say, they will do, he warns. And, worse yet, a victory will be a reward for their despicable behavior these past four years. Over the past four years, he argues, the Republicans have betrayed the American people. They’re letting people die because they don’t want to give Obama anything that can be considered a victory, he says. They want to win the Presidency, and they don’t care how much suffering it takes for them to demonstrate how bad of a President Obama is. That’s their character, says Jones. They won’t even pass their own bills right now, if they think it will help America. They want more carnage. And we cannot reward that kind of behavior, regardless of what we think about Obama.

We have to be smart, he says. We have to support Obama, but we also have to hold his feet to the fire. “We have to be as sophisticated at the machine we’re fighting.” It’s going to be hard, but we have to be twice as passionate as we were in 2008. We have to do two difficult things. We have to reelect the President, and we have to hold him accountable. You need two things to get real change, he says. You have to have a President willing to move, and you have to have a movement that’s willing to move him. We haven’t had both at the same time. Under Bush we had a movement, but he was unwilling to move. And, under Obama, until the Occupy movement came along, we weren’t pushing him. It was the Tea Party that was in the streets. We let them have almost three years. Thankfully, Occupy Wall Street came along and started changing that dynamic.

We have to win two main battles. We have to stop the Tea Party in November, and we have to win the budget battle in December. That, he reminds us, is when the Bush tax cuts expire. That’s also when the Pell grant money runs out for poor kids seeking to go to college. All of the cans that we’ve been kicking down the road need to be addressed in December, and that’s when we’ll have our opportunity for change, assuming we’ve been able to keep Obama in the White House. Regular Americans, he says, have paid our share. It’s time for the rich to pay their share. No more “ham and egg” justice. Asking a chicken for an egg and a pig for his leg, he says, is not equivalent, and we need to keep pretending that it is.

And, he says, we have no excuse this time around. It’s not like when we elected Bush. This time, we know for certain what their wrecking ball agenda is. They paint it red, white and blue, but we know what it is. They want to smash unions, eliminate public education, and roll back clear air and clean water legislation. And they have it in their sights. And, what’s more, they’ve shown a “brutal willingness” to destroy what our communities need to survive. At this point, Jones shares Grover Norquist’s comment about how he wants to shirk government down to the size that he can, “drown it in a bathtub.” We know it all now, and we have no excuse, according to Jones…

That’s right – he attributes the Separation of Church and State not to Thomas Jefferson, but to Adolph Hitler. Here, for those of you unwilling to watch the video, for fear that it might cause you to vomit, is a bit of the transcript, by way of Below the Beltway:

“Do you know, where does this phrase ’separation of church and state’ come from?” Urquhart asked at a campaign event last April. “It was not in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists… The exact phrase ’separation of Church and State’ came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they’re Nazis.”

That’s right – if you believe in the Separation of Church and State, you’re a Nazi… And this man might very well find himself in Congress.

I would have thought that the right would stop once Jefferson had been erased from American history. But, I guess that wasn’t enough. They have to go one step further, and attribute his beliefs to the Nazis.

Could it be that maybe the threat of burning a few hundred Qurans caused the Park51 developers to reconsider? Do we have Jones to thank for defusing what could easily have become a violent situation in New York?

Probably not… According to a statement made tonight by Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of the Islamic center in question, they have no intention of moving it… So, either Jones is more fucking crazy than I thought, or someone’s lying. If I were a betting man, I’d say that Jones made it up, in hopes of saving face with his new legion of xenophobic fanboys, who have their hearts set on seeing Qurans go up in flames. (My guess is that the Feds got involved and scared the ever loving shit out of Jones, threatening him with prison time for financial improprieties and other questionable dealings by his church.)

Anyway, I’d been struggling with what to write about this standoff in Florida, as, not too long ago, I criticized the protesters in New York who were dead set against the idea of a mosque a few short blocks from where the 9/11 attacks occurred. Most of the folks interviewed at the protest, if you’ll recall, conceded the fact that the Muslim owners of the site had the right to do build whatever they liked, but reasoned that an Islamic center shouldn’t be built there out of deference to the dead and their families. (Ignoring the fact that over 60 innocent Muslims died in the World Trade Center that day.) If I remember correctly, I argued that the Constitution trumped claims of insensitivity. So, when thinking about this Florida preacher and his plans to burn the Quran, I found it difficult to come out and say that, while he could legally burn the books, I’d encourage him to be sensitive. So, I’ve been sitting here, struggling with how I could say what I wanted to say without looking like a hypocrite.

The bottom line, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that Jones has the right to burn whatever books he likes, as distasteful as we might find that, just as the Muslim group in New York has every right to build a mosque at 51 Park. Sometimes, I guess, living in a democracy isn’t pretty.

With that said, though, if Jones does follow through with his bonfire on Saturday, I’d encourage everyone in the area to attend with their Bibles, making it clear to the preacher that, if he puts match to paper, more than just Qurans are going to burn… And, assuming it did play out like that, with people tossing in their Bibles, what if the conflagration never stopped? What if, the more people thought about what was happening, the more they felt compelled to send their holy books to Florida to be incinerated? What if the blaze lasted for years, turning all of Florida into one giant, smoldering heap of religious ash? What if Terry Jones unintentionally ushers in a new post-religious age of reason?

Or, better yet, what if we all shave our facial hair and set fire to it in protest to Jones, who, in spite of being a fucking nut, has a it’s been called off” >sweet ass mustache? Maybe that’s better than burning books.

I’d like to say more, but I’m needed elsewhere. There are, after all, other injustices that require my sweaty, red-faced outrage.

• Question the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government

• Cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state

• Present Republican political philosophies and figures in a more positive light, including Joe McCarthy

• Stress the superiority of American capitalism while eliminating the word “capitalism” from the text

• Refer to the United States form of government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic republic”

• Give Confederate president Jefferson Davis equal footing with Abraham Lincoln

• Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state”)

And, as the folks at the Raw Story point out, given the size of the Texas market, these changes will likely ripple through a great many states… Here’s a clip:

…For the next ten years, millions of students in Texas and across the country will read history textbooks suggesting that the actions of witch-hunt instigator Joseph McCarthy were justified. They will read about religious icon John Calvin instead of Thomas Jefferson. They will read a description of the US government that includes the words “constitutional republic” but not the word “democratic.”

These are just a few of the changes an ultra right-wing Texas Education Board has tentatively approved for the state’s history curriculum. There is one more stage for approval, but the board voted yes to the changes in a 10-5 vote. That’s 10 Republicans voting yes and 5 Democrats voting no, making the chances for reevaluation almost negligible.

Once fully approved, it will be a decade before the board reviews the curriculum again.

“I am very distressed,” said Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, who sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to mention that Tejanos were among the fallen heroes of the Alamo.

Most of the board’s members make no secret of their intent to instill their own religious and political ideologies into public schools, and the consequences of their activism have far-reaching consequences.

Texas buys so many of the country’s textbooks that publishers tailor their books to match its standards as closely as possible. As a Washington Monthly article stated, “When it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas, rarely stays in Texas.”

In other words, students in Rhode Island and Texas could be reading about the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers at the same time. But they won’t be reading about the rationale for a separation of church and state. That’s gone, too…

And that, my friends, is how the great American experiment comes to an end.

…The film centers on the character of Lucas, a skinny kid with glasses and a shock of unruly hair and a gift for trying to talk himself into situations where he doesn’t belong. Lucas is played by Corey Haim, who was Sally Field’s son in “Murphy’s Romance,” and he does not give one of those cute little boy performances that get on your nerves. He creates one of the most three-dimensional, complicated, interesting characters of any age in any recent movie. If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good…

Here, if you haven’t seen Lucas, is a quick, four-second clip:

And I don’t mean to indict Haim’s parents when I say this – for all I know, they might be very nice people – but, in my opinion, if you really love your child, you don’t put them into an industry with a well-earned reputation for ruining lives and cutting them short… Those looking for more information on the entertainment industry and what it does to kids, check out the non-profit organization A Minor Consideration.

…The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society. As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next”….

There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms. Many of the founders, especially the Southerners, were rebelling simultaneously against state-church oppression and English rule. The Connecticut Baptists saw Jefferson — an anti-Federalist who was bitterly opposed to the idea of establishment churches — as a friend. “Our constitution of government,” they wrote, “is not specific” with regard to a guarantee of religious freedoms that would protect them. Might the president offer some thoughts that, “like the radiant beams of the sun,” would shed light on the intent of the framers? In his reply, Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

This little episode, culminating in the famous “wall of separation” metaphor, highlights a number of points about teaching religion in American history. For one, it suggests — as the Christian activists maintain — how thoroughly the colonies were shot through with religion and how basic religion was to the cause of the revolutionaries. The period in the early- to mid-1700s, called the Great Awakening, in which populist evangelical preachers challenged the major denominations, is considered a spark for the Revolution. And if religion influenced democracy then, in the Second Great Awakening, decades later, the democratic fervor of the Revolution spread through the two mainline denominations and resulted in a massive growth of the sort of populist churches that typify American Christianity to this day.

Christian activists argue that American-history textbooks basically ignore religion — to the point that they distort history outright — and mainline religious historians tend to agree with them on this. “In American history, religion is all over the place, and wherever it appears, you should tell the story and do it appropriately,” says Martin Marty, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, past president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History and perhaps the unofficial dean of American religious historians. “The goal should be natural inclusion. You couldn’t tell the story of the Pilgrims or the Puritans or the Dutch in New York without religion.” Though conservatives would argue otherwise, James Kracht said the absence of religion is not part of a secularist agenda: “I don’t think religion has been purposely taken out of U.S. history, but I do think textbook companies have been cautious in discussing religious beliefs and possibly getting in trouble with some groups.”

Some conservatives claim that earlier generations of textbooks were frank in promoting America as a Christian nation. It might be more accurate to say that textbooks of previous eras portrayed leaders as generally noble, with strong personal narratives, undergirded by faith and patriotism. As Frances FitzGerald showed in her groundbreaking 1979 book “America Revised,” if there is one thing to be said about American-history textbooks through the ages it is that the narrative of the past is consistently reshaped by present-day forces. Maybe the most striking thing about current history textbooks is that they have lost a controlling narrative. America is no longer portrayed as one thing, one people, but rather a hodgepodge of issues and minorities, forces and struggles. If it were possible to cast the concerns of the Christian conservatives into secular terms, it might be said that they find this lack of a through line and purpose to be disturbing and dangerous. Many others do as well, of course. But the Christians have an answer.

Their answer is rather specific. Merely weaving important religious trends and events into the narrative of American history is not what the Christian bloc on the Texas board has pushed for in revising its guidelines. Many of the points that have been incorporated into the guidelines or that have been advanced by board members and their expert advisers slant toward portraying America as having a divinely preordained mission. In the guidelines — which will be subjected to further amendments in March and then in May — eighth-grade history students are asked to “analyze the importance of the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and the Virginia House of Burgesses to the growth of representative government.” Such early colonial texts have long been included in survey courses, but why focus on these in particular? The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut declare that the state was founded “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” The language in the Mayflower Compact — a document that McLeroy and several others involved in the Texas process are especially fond of — describes the Pilgrims’ journey as being “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” and thus instills the idea that America was founded as a project for the spread of Christianity. In a book she wrote two years ago, Cynthia Dunbar, a board member, could not have been more explicit about this being the reason for the Mayflower Compact’s inclusion in textbooks; she quoted the document and then said, “This is undeniably our past, and it clearly delineates us as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian”…

If the fight between the “Christian nation” advocates and mainstream thinkers could be focused onto a single element, it would be the “wall of separation” phrase. Christian thinkers like to point out that it does not appear in the Constitution, nor in any other legal document — letters that presidents write to their supporters are not legal decrees. Besides which, after the phrase left Jefferson’s pen it more or less disappeared for a century and a half — until Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court dug it out of history’s dustbin in 1947. It then slowly worked its way into the American lexicon and American life, helping to subtly mold the way we think about religion in society. To conservative Christians, there is no separation of church and state, and there never was. The concept, they say, is a modern secular fiction. There is no legal justification, therefore, for disallowing crucifixes in government buildings or school prayer.

David Barton reads the “church and state” letter to mean that Jefferson “believed, along with the other founders, that the First Amendment had been enacted only to prevent the federal establishment of a national denomination.” Barton goes on to claim, “ ‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant.” That is to say, the founders were all Christians who conceived of a nation of Christians, and the purpose of the First Amendment was merely to ensure that no single Christian denomination be elevated to the role of state church.

Mainstream scholars disagree, sometimes vehemently. Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and writer of the documentary “Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham,” told me: “David Barton has been out there spreading this lie, frankly, that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation. He’s been very effective. But the logic is utterly screwy. He says the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ is not in the Constitution. He’s right about that. But to make that argument work you would have to argue that the phrase is not an accurate summation of the First Amendment. And Thomas Jefferson, who penned it, thought it was.” (David Barton declined to be interviewed for this article.) In his testimony in Austin, Steven Green was challenged by a board member with the fact that the phrase does not appear in the Constitution. In response, Green pointed out that many constitutional concepts — like judicial review and separation of powers — are not found verbatim in the Constitution….

In fact, the founders were rooted in Christianity — they were inheritors of the entire European Christian tradition — and at the same time they were steeped in an Enlightenment rationalism that was, if not opposed to religion, determined to establish separate spheres for faith and reason. “I don’t think the founders would have said they were applying Christian principles to government,” says Richard Brookhiser, the conservative columnist and author of books on Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, ‘We put our faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” Martin Marty says: “They had to invent a new, broad way. Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people”…

So, what do you think?

I’ve said it before, but, by the time this runs it course, I predict we’ll see the right burning witches in this country… Just wait and see.

According to Roeder’s wife, “First it was taxes — he stopped paying. Then he turned to the church and got involved in anti-abortion.” At the root of it, according to her, was his need to find “a scapegoat.”

O’Reilly, as one might expect, spent his day backpeddling like a mother fucker and trodding out one paid FOX News lackey after another in order to help cover his ass.

One wonders what might be next, as more and more disenfranchised men like Roeder stumble into the welcoming arms of FOX News and fundamentalist religion.

And, one wonders if this is what it was like in Germany, right before the Holocaust, as frightened men, desperate to find meaning in their lives, started searching around for scapegoats.

“I don’t know anyone who goes to church in Ypsilanti. Do you go to church in Ypsilanti? Where? Why?”

This friend and his family live here in Ypsi, but attend a church elsewhere, and now they’re looking for a place closer to home, in the community.

As some of you may recall, I myself have looked in the past. A few years ago, I visited a post-denominational mega-church in Plymouth and a Unitarian church in Ann Arbor. I admittedly wasn’t expecting to find a good fit at the mega-church, but I thought that maybe I’d feel at home with the Unitarians. As it turned out, while I liked the Unitarians quite a bit, I didn’t find a good fit there either. I’d planned to visit the Quakers, and a few other denominations in the area, but I slowly started to lose my motivation. It wasn’t that I stopped being interested in finding a community of faith of which I could be a part. I just gave up on the idea that I might find a perfect fit here in the area, where choices are somewhat limited… Anyway, now it’s probably time for me to start thinking about it again as well. So, if you have suggestions, please leave a comment.