Burmashave and Abortion Rants
Yesterday I hit up Main Street with seven other people and participated in a demonstration for the "Vote No on 6" campaign.
For anyone not familiar with idiotic South Dakota politics, our state legislature decided to outlaw abortion, with the only exception being the life of the mother. No health of the mother, no rape, no incest. A referendum quickly passed, and now Referred Law 6 is the only South Dakotan campaign issue that matters.
So, anyway, we held up "Vote No on 6," "Fight Ignorance: Vote Pro-Choice," and "Honk if You're Voting Against Referred Law 6" signs and danced around. It was pretty fun; we got lots of honks, lots of support from passersby, newspaper coverage, and only two hecklers (one whose entire point was based around religion and one who claimed that lots of her friends wished they could have babies...to which our reply was, "Well, there are already plenty of kids who need to be adopted"). We also got a couple of people with broken horns who leaned out the windows and cheered, and one guy who feverishly rang the bell on his bicycle.
Afterwards, we all got coffee/tea/hot chocolate at the coffee shop, and it was a lot of fun. We debated how it feels to offend people, and concluded that though it's not something we would choose, it's our responsibility to defend ourselves from having people legislate moral questions (as opposed to things that have a viable, measurable, proven social harms--or at least things that the MAJORITY of people agree should be illegal--which isn't the case with abortion, even in SoDak, at least according to the preliminary poll numbers).
I, however, decided that I was just going to go with the new offensive thing, and my new mantra is "Fuck the rainforest."
For anyone not familiar with idiotic South Dakota politics, our state legislature decided to outlaw abortion, with the only exception being the life of the mother. No health of the mother, no rape, no incest. A referendum quickly passed, and now Referred Law 6 is the only South Dakotan campaign issue that matters.
So, anyway, we held up "Vote No on 6," "Fight Ignorance: Vote Pro-Choice," and "Honk if You're Voting Against Referred Law 6" signs and danced around. It was pretty fun; we got lots of honks, lots of support from passersby, newspaper coverage, and only two hecklers (one whose entire point was based around religion and one who claimed that lots of her friends wished they could have babies...to which our reply was, "Well, there are already plenty of kids who need to be adopted"). We also got a couple of people with broken horns who leaned out the windows and cheered, and one guy who feverishly rang the bell on his bicycle.
Afterwards, we all got coffee/tea/hot chocolate at the coffee shop, and it was a lot of fun. We debated how it feels to offend people, and concluded that though it's not something we would choose, it's our responsibility to defend ourselves from having people legislate moral questions (as opposed to things that have a viable, measurable, proven social harms--or at least things that the MAJORITY of people agree should be illegal--which isn't the case with abortion, even in SoDak, at least according to the preliminary poll numbers).
I, however, decided that I was just going to go with the new offensive thing, and my new mantra is "Fuck the rainforest."
posted by Allison at
1:23 PM
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