Abortion Capital of Bible Belt? Tennessee Vote Tests That Idea

[cbayer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/us/abortion-capital-of-bible-belt-tennessee-vote-tests-that-idea.html?_r=0

By RICHARD FAUSSETOCT. 24, 2014



Anti-abortion demonstrators outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Memphis, one of two abortion clinics in the city. Credit Brandon Dill for The New York Times

MEMPHIS — The online video features idyllic snatches of Tennessee daily life: guitar players, old barns, church socials — and the official Tennessee welcome sign, glimpsed through the window of a car passing over the state line.

But then there is a strategically placed, and purely fictional, detail: The welcome sign announces Tennessee as “Your Abortion Destination.”

The video was designed by abortion opponents here who believe that Tennessee has for too long been a Bible Belt outlier due to a State Supreme Court decision in 2000 that ruled that the state’s constitutional guarantee of a right to privacy includes the right to an abortion. Over the years, the ruling has served as a partial bulwark against the wave of abortion restrictions that have swept other conservatives states.

Now, anti-abortion forces are trying to change that at the ballot box by passing Amendment 1, which states that nothing in the Tennessee Constitution “secures or protects” a right to abortion.

more at link

[shenmue]

1. Why is a child holding a sign that says "I Am a Man"?

Third sign from left. Look closely. That's a kid holding it up.

[cbayer]

2. I think, but am not positive, that it has a "hu" before the word man

and that the image at the bottom is a fetus.

At any rate, that is the only thing I can imagine.

[shenmue]

3. Aha

Thank you.

[cbayer]

4. I searched to see if I could find something else about it, but

I came up with nothing.

[pinto]

5. It does. I've seen them outside the planned parenthood clinic near my house.

There's some undercurrent to the sign, but I don't quite get it. Fetuses that one day develop and come to term may be men?

(I have to remember not to walk the route by PP on a Thursday - that's sidewalk poster day).

[cbayer]

6. What seems really odd is that "I Am a Man" was a theme during the AA civil rights movement.

They seem to be playing off of that, but I really don't get their point in that respect.

[pinto]

7. Yeah, I remember that well.

There is some there, there (to warp Stein's famous comment).

[Jim__]

8. You're right. Specifically, the Memphis sanitation workers' strike of 1968.

From wikipedia

[center][/center]

Strikers carried I Am A Man! posters.

I Am a Man - Diorama of Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike - National Civil Rights Museum - Downtown Memphis - Tennessee - USA

[cbayer]

9. What a great image that is.

I really wonder if these anti-choice protestors even know about this and, if they do, what they were thinking.

[Jim__]

10. I'm pretty sure they would know about it.

The demonstration pictured in the OP is taking place in Memphis, and the poster is in a museum that is in Memphis. My guess is that they are trying to connect the anti-abortion movement to the civil rights movement of the 60s.

In Colorado this year we have a - somewhat disguised - personhood statute on the ballot - again.