She wore a brand New Jersey, if you’re interested. It was a song. Decades ago, that ‘cleverly’ used the name of all of America’s 50 states. It was pathetic. But, as a kid, I learned the names of lots of states that I’d never have otherwise known. Which was pretty much all of them except New York, California and Chicago. Yeah, I know, just emphasising a point.

But of all the states, its always the same ones that cause all the problems. Down in the South East quadrant. Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. And by ‘all the trouble’, I’m going back to pre-civil war times as these were, along with the Carolinas, the tobacco states and consequently the slave states. The Souyath. Deep Souyath. The states where that slavery was so entrenched, so culturally normalised, that 10 generations later, they are still inherently racist, separationist and pretty vile. And they’re the mainstay of the gun lobby.

Mississippi Burning was a true story. The KKK are alive and well ‘down there’. The Scopes trial was in Tennessee in 1925 where a teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary theory. Because nothing must ever contradict the Bible. The book no-one down there ever questions nor asks for any proof.

And now, yesterday in Alabama, they changed the abortion laws. Basically removed them really, in their entirety. A woman won’t be prosecuted for seeking or having an abortion but the person doing it will get up to 99 years in jail. Even in cases of rape or incest.

And that, I feel, (in my wonderfully caricatured, stereotyping imagination) is the problem. That if you terminated all the babies resulting from incest, there’d be a catastrophic decline in population ‘down there’. Because its only some of the Bible that God really meant, not all of it.

The fact is that this vote by the State Senate is a massive challenge to the Supreme Court, which is Federal. And its always a big problem in American legislation, the battle between a state and The States. Local vs Government. And when the ‘local’ in question has no interest in either women’s rights nor the right of any single woman, a bunch of bible-bashing, right-wing Christian, Republican men decided that they, and not the women, should be in total control of any choices those women may have to make about their bodies, their lives and those of any child they may be carrying.

Ironically, their arguments always centre on ‘the number of children lost to abortion’ since the famous ‘Roe vs Wade’ case when abortion was pretty much legalised across America, in 1973. Yet I can’t help but wonder how many people, including the kids, have been killed in gun crimes over the same period. Which they’re not in any way concerned about.

Sickening bunch of inbred tossers. I make no generalisations.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx