Thursday, September 11, 2014

Meanwhile, in the state of Missouri, contraception and abortions are bad, guns good


This post puts together three stories I read about Missouri yesterday.  The first is about a legal case where Paul and Theresa Wieland don't want contraceptive coverage to be available for their daughters who are covered in the parents' group health insurance policy.  The daughters are twenty, nineteen and thirteen The couple's lawyer argues that 

“The employees are to Hobby Lobby what the daughters are to Paul and Teresa Wieland,” Timothy Belz, an attorney from the conservative Thomas More Society, who represents the Wielands, told a panel of three federal judges on the appeals court in St. Louis on Monday. A district court had dismissed the case, saying the Wielands lacked standing to sue.
 Whatever the legal merits of that case might be, the idea that parents and employers should have the right to determine whether their adult children or employees, respectively, are allowed to use contraceptives and that both of these are about religious freedom strikes me as stupid.  It's not religious freedom for the adult children or the employees.  But I guess it would be viewed as nothing but religious freedom in a feudal society.

Missouri legislature has been busy creating laws which keep women safe!  In the first such law:

 Missouri women seeking abortions will face one of the nation's most stringent waiting periods, after state lawmakers overrode the governor's veto to enact a 72-hour delay that includes no exception for cases of rape or incest.
Supporters of the law call it a reflection period.  In case a woman was impulse-buying an abortion and needed time to reflect on that.

Another new law is also about the safety of women and other people in Missouri! It's a new gun law which makes it easier for people to have guns on them:

 Missouri lawmakers expanded the potential for teachers to bring guns to schools and for residents to openly carry firearms, in a vote Thursday that capped a two-year effort by the Republican-led Legislature to expand gun rights over the objection of the Democratic governor.
The new law will allow specially trained school employees to carry concealed guns on campuses. It also allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly, even in cities or towns with bans against the open carrying of firearms. The age to obtain a concealed weapons permit also will drop from 21 to 19.
These three stories are not about the same issues.  But they all reflect the political power distribution in the state of Missouri:  Who has the right to self-defense, who has the right to decide who has the right to self-defense and which types of self-defense (or even aggression) are supported by the powers that be.