Personhood USA is a Christian extremist, right wing, anti-choice organization that is not only trying to reverse the Supreme Court's Roe V. Wade decision reinforcing a woman's right to decide what goes on with her own body, but they are actually trying to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut - the 1965 Supreme Court decision affirming our right to birth control and family planning.
Sure, sure, they sound like cranks to most sane people, but keep in mind that in the past year, many states have seen unprecedented rollbacks of reproductive rights as Republicans took control of many state legislatures and governor's mansions.
Also keep in mind that Personhood UAS has petitions going in all 50 states, including Maryland, for a ballot intitiative for legislation to define the "preborn" as people. Not only would such legislation outlaw reproductive rights, it would criminalize birth control.
From their Maryland petition (it's especailly awesome how they manage to work in the persecution of Jews, indigenous peoples, and slaves):
Dear Maryland Lawmaker:
Every year that goes by, over one million children in the womb are brutally murdered through abortion.
The key to unraveling this tragedy is a simple one and it has been known since before Roe v. Wade.
It is Personhood.
During oral argument of Roe, Chief Justice Warren Burger explained to pro-abortion attorney Sarah Weddington that by declaring “by statute that a fetus is a person for all constitutional purposes” a state could outlaw abortion.
By stripping personhood from the unborn, their right to life was revoked. By returning personhood to the weak and the powerless, we can restore their dignity and right to life as human beings. It really is that simple.
African slaves were denied their personhood and were therefore treated as property, bought, sold, and bred as animals. Jews were not considered full persons, so their property could be confiscated and their people eliminated. When Spanish conquistadors colonized America, many wealthy landowners fought to convince the Spanish crown that non-Christian “indians” were not legal persons and could therefore be enslaved.
Personhood is the key to all human rights.
That is why at the heart of the Roe v. Wade opinion is the following heartless pronouncement, written by Justice Blackmun, “the word ‘person’ ... does not include the unborn.”
Not once, since 1973, has the Supreme Court been challenged to reconsider Blackmun’s terrible words.
With federal and judicial tyranny at its apex, we the undersigned request that our Maryland legislators stand up for life in a bold and principled way.
We, the undersigned urge you to support a personhood measure that recognizes that the preborn child is a person with the unalienable right to life.
We, the undersigned expect you to stand up for the values of the people of Maryland by no longer cowering to a federal and judicial tyranny that mandates the destruction of our morals, our families, and our posterity.
We, the undersigned will hold you accountable for your action or inaction in bringing about and supporting a personhood measure, and we will vote accordingly.
So keep in mind, Maryland, they're out there.
They're active.
And they want to tell you what you can and can't do reproductively.
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Thank you for posting this! People on the east coast like to believe that these kinds of ballot initiatives only affect some poor souls in far away lands like... the Dakotas or Idaho. They don't. From these personhood bills, to zoning restrictions on PP clinics, to dispicable billboards in inner city neighborhoods, there's a (no-longer) stealth campaign to eliminate the reproductive rights that took us centuries to win.
Posted by: Claudia | June 09, 2011 at 12:27 PM