Boner Candidate #1: I’M A DR. AND I KNOW THAT WOMEN ARE NOTHING MORE THAN EGG DONORS AND INCUBATORS
A proposed Alabama constitutional amendment would legally define a fetus as a person from the moment of fertilization, effectively banning abortion in the state. The House Health Committee on Wednesday debated but did not vote on the amendment. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Ed Henry, R-Decatur, is similar to ballot measures voted down in Mississippi, Colorado and North Dakota in recent years. “To me, science makes it clear that [life] begins at fertilization,” Henry said. Brock Boone, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, called the bill an “attack on women.” Boone said the amendment would ban abortion in cases of rape and incest, and could render some forms of birth control the “legal equivalent of homicide.” Jim Belyeu, an OB/GYN who spoke in support of the bill, called a fetus “totally separate” from the mother. “The mother only contributes the egg and the incubator,” Belyeu said. Two Democrats on the committee, Rep. John Knight and Rep. Peblin Warren, said they hoped supporters would show equal concern for other programs that help children.
Boner Candidate #2: AREN’T THE CORPSES SUPPOSED TO BE LABELED?
Annie Pearl Little, 82, died on Christmas Day. On the day of her funeral at McCall’s Bronxwood Funeral Home in the Bronx, the manager there called her only son, Donald Little. “You need to come in early,” Mr. Little said he was told by the manager, Patricia Myers. He did as instructed, and he said Ms. Myers informed him: “You’re going to have to have a closed casket. We cremated the wrong body. Your mother got cremated.” “She said, ‘The other lady looked like your mother,’” Mr. Little said. On Dec. 29, a funeral was held for the other woman, Val-Jean McDonald, 81, at Union Baptist Church in Harlem. Some 200 relatives and friends attended and faced the body in an open coffin. But it was not Ms. McDonald — it was Ms. Little, wearing Ms. McDonald’s clothes and jewelry in a coffin bearing Ms. McDonald’s name. The McDonald family — Ms. McDonald had eight sons — shared their story and described how they rationalized what they believed to be a change in their mother’s appearance in an article in The New York Times on Tuesday. They prayed over and eulogized the wrong woman, and then attended her cremation the next day at Woodlawn Cemetery. The family, after being told by the funeral home of the mix-up, then held a private viewing and cremation with the proper body. But one mystery lingered: Who was the woman everyone had mistaken for Val-Jean McDonald? The mystery was resolved when Mr. Little and his lawyer, Robert Di Gianni, contacted The Times after the article appeared.
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Boner Candidate #3: WITH ONE SNEAKY MOVE WE CAN KEEP THE POOR AND THE TRANSGENDERED DOWN
North Carolina legislators, in a whirlwind special session on Wednesday, passed a wide-ranging bill barring transgender people from bathrooms and locker rooms that do not match the gender on their birth certificates. Republicans unanimously supported the bill, while in the Senate, Democrats walked out in protest. “This is a direct affront to equality, civil rights and local autonomy,” the Senate Democratic leader, Dan Blue, said in a statement. North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, a Republican, signed the bill late Wednesday night. The session, which was abruptly convened by Republican lawmakers on Tuesday, came in response to an antidiscrimination ordinance approved by the state’s largest city, Charlotte, last month. That ordinance provided protections based on sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity, including letting transgender people use the public bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, not gender at birth. The state bill, put together so quickly that many lawmakers had not seen it before it was introduced Wednesday morning, specifically bars people in North Carolina from using bathrooms that do not match their birth gender, and goes further to prohibit municipalities from creating their own antidiscrimination policies. Instead, it creates a statewide antidiscrimination policy — one that does not mention gay and transgender people. The bill also prohibits local governments from raising minimum wage levels above the state level — something a number of cities in other states have done.
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