Rob Rogers for April 11, 2024

Arizona is Arizona. They have never left the “wild” west

Arizona is a desert.

This what they want

Hopefully bites them in the A$$ in the election

Maybe he’s just trying to give her a vasectomy…?

AZ is a bigger battleground state than before. They need more blue.

Ladies, remember to vote in Roevember, I’ll be right there with you.

It’s fun watching Kari Lake trying to dance her way around and out of this one.

Women’s Rights and Civil Rights…it’s not your father’s Arizona anymore.

“ On February 24, 1863, during the Civil War, Congress passed the “Arizona Organic Act”, which split off the western portion of the 12-year-old New Mexico Territory, establishing the new Arizona Territory, where it abolished slavery.”

Arizona became the 48th state in 1912.

I’m seeing “yee-haw” in several comics / comments. Is that the standard phrase in AZ? (Like “you betcha” in MN).

That rope is symbolic of the collective noose for Arizona Republicans this November.

How does a law stay in effect before they were a state?

Let’s be real. In 1864, all operations were dangerous, and the men wanted to protect women. In 1973, as Harry Blackmun put it, abortions are now safer than pregnancy. The states don’t regulate pregnancy, so the the states should not regulate abortions during the first trimester, may during the second trimester, and outlaw abortion during the third. It was a compromise. Women didn’t get the full right to vote nationally until 1920, although Wyoming was first in 1890. These prostrifers should worry about maternal health and helping children by backing doctors who know much more than polticians.

Same thing happened in Wisconsin. The repugs reinstated a law from 150 years ago.

You would think that when a territory becomes a state the laws would be written anew…. and that laws made before that would not be honored.

Should we go back to the 1800’s with all medical care? Dump antibiotics and vaccines and sterile operating rooms? And if we die, well, that must be God’s will.

I guess more doctors will be on the move.

Nothing has changed in 160 years?

A law made before a state was a state, is not a state right, it’s something that should have been thrown into the trash bin of history. Arizona’s supreme court has shown just how morally corrupt their right wing nut judges are.

Got to be something in the water that has turned rational minds back a hundred plus years. Digging that law out of the dust bin must have revealed the ones making slavery legal. Expect those to surface next.

Does this mean slavery is legal in Arizona?

If you vote for a Handmaid’s Tale type state, you get a Handmaid’s Tale state.

Hey lady, grab that rope and tie up his you know what. There’s your reproductive rights.

The GQP cult loves the 1800’s. Where white men ruled and that was that. They long for their good old days.

Vote out unenlightened backwards republicans, they hate democracy and they want to take away your rights.

The abortion issue isn’t even about abortion. The real point is that if they can take away a right that has been in place for over fifty years, what rights are they coming after next?

Conservatives are the ones who want to dictate total control over private relationships (dictate who you can or can’t marry or even what behavior is allowed behind closed doors), private medical choices (reproductive choices such as abortion, IVF or contraception, medical or recreational marijuana, end of life choices, stem cell therapies, gender-identity care), tell us what books we or our children can have access to, or try to force PRIVATE religion into PUBLIC policy and religious rituals into public meetings or subsidize it with special tax advantages (socialized religion).

The April 9 “Letter from an American” by Heather Cox Richardson explains about that 1864 law:

The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864.

In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.

And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.

In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” —Bertrand Russell, English mathematician, philosopher, and peace activist

Nor was the concept of democracy even vaguely alluded to. Instead what we have is endless paeans to patriarchal autocracy. The other day I ran across an apologium from an evangelical organization claiming it was all for “biblical and democratic principles”. And my reaction was “please pick one”.

Because the fact of the matter is that they are totally at odds with one another. The Bible is all into royalty (king of kings), nobility (The LORD), social dominance (wives, submit to your husbands; children, honor your parents; slaves, obey your masters), and conformity (render unto Caesar). It claims to share with democracy such virtues as appreciation for truth (despite being a gargantuan collection of lies and eye-rollingly impossible fairy tales) and justice (including insisting upon death by stoning for everything from apostasy and heresy to sassy children and non-virgin brides).

It’s never been clear to me whether the people claiming that they subscribe equally to both sets of standards are lying, being hypocritical, or simply oblivious to the inconsistencies. I suspect that most of them fall into the latter camp, but that cognitive dissonance hasn’t yet set in. But even if it did when they were confronted with the blatant contradictions, I’ll bet that they’d suggest that some sort of compromise would be possible, which 99 times out of 100 would turn out to be whatever the Bible said. After all, The Holy Word Of God Almighty Himself couldn’t possibly be mistaken, could it?

We’ve only awakened the dragon and filled it with terrible resolve-Admiral Yamamoto Oh He!!- General Custer