Monday 23 September 2024
‘ANTIFA-STYLE’ HARASSMENT: Pro-Abortion Activists Were ‘Verbally Abusive,’ ‘Physically Threatening’ to Pro-Lifers
South Dakota pro-lifers say they experienced physical threats, verbal abuse, doxing, and stalking from a pro-abortion group collecting signatures for its radical referendum ballot measure.
Dakotans for Health “used antifa-style actions, lies, and abuse to illegally get Amendment G on the ballot,” according to Chris David, a South Dakota resident and volunteer with the pro-life organization Life Defense Fund.
State constitutional Amendment G, or the Right to Abortion Initiative, allows abortion right up until birth for nearly any reason that a doctor thinks is a “health” risk to the mother.
Because the amendment overrides existing state laws, opponents say it would remove parental consent requirements for a minor to get an abortion and would force doctors and nurses to perform abortions without exemptions from conscience protections.
South-Dakota-Abortion-Rights-Amendment-G-2024Download
To get the amendment on the ballot, Dakotans for Health gathered 55,000 signatures, many of which Life Defense Fund contends are likely invalid.
The petition circulators were “verbally abusive and even physically threatening,” David said in a statement to Life Defense Fund that was shared with The Daily Signal.
“Circulators doxed us online with lies and vulgarities, asking their followers to identify us, asking where we worked, and who family members were by name, including asking for my children’s names,” David said. Doxing refers to publicly identifying or publishing private information about someone against their will.
The pro-life volunteer claimed he saw Dakotans for Health lying to voters to get petition signatures while he volunteered with Life Defense Fund urging people not to sign the petition.
“They purposefully misled South Dakotans, downright lied to petition signers to get signatures, and they broke election law doing it,” David contended.
Life Defense Fund is suing Dakotans for Health, claiming it deceived voters about what the amendment does, allowing signatures of people who aren’t registered to vote, and failing to pass out petition-circulator handouts, which are required in South Dakota to explain what people are signing.
“Dakotans for Health did their very best to keep potential signers of the petition from knowing exactly what it was about,” Life Defense Fund attorney Sara Frankenstein told The Daily Signal.
Dakotans for Health denied Life Defense Fund’s claims.
“This is utter nonsense and an obvious attempt to distract from their failed campaign to stop the people of South Dakota from even having a vote on their radical abortion ban—one that forces victims of rape and incest, even children, to carry to term,” the organization told The Daily Signal. “Our petitioners are thoroughly trained and dedicated to ensuring that South Dakotans have accurate information about Amendment G, which simply restores the reproductive rights women had for 50 years under Roe v. Wade.”
An anonymous South Dakota Democrat said Dakotans for Health petition circulators used that claim to deceive her about the scope of the amendment.
“I was approached to sign this petition outside of work,” the unidentified woman said in a statement to Life Defense Fund that was shared with The Daily Signal. “It was conveyed to be as a ‘pro-Roe v Wade petition’ to reinstate the original Roe v Wade abortion conditions. Had I known that this petition was for the purpose of allowing full-term abortions, I never would have signed.”
“The means with which the petitioners got signatures is nothing short of a gross misrepresentation of information,” the registered Democrat continued.
Life Defense Fund’s case against Dakotans for Health claims that it violated a number of election laws. The circuit court has not yet set a date for the trial, though a signed order from a judge said the trial would begin the week of Sept. 23.
If Life Defense Fund wins the case, the amendment would be disqualified from the ballot and invalidated, and Dakotans for Health would not be allowed to serve as a ballot committee again.
Mary, another Life Defense Fund volunteer who asked to keep her last name private, said in an affidavit shared with The Daily Signal that Dakotans for Health circulators prevented her from talking to voters about the extreme nature of the abortion amendment.
“During those days, I was physically blocked from sharing my handout, stepped on, sworn at, mocked, and called names,” Mary said. “One of my first days out, the petition circulators called the police on me because I pulled out my cellphone to record, and [they] told lies about me.”
Mary said she never saw a petitioner give a circulator handout to a signer.
Last October, Mary said, an abortion petition circulator stepped in front of her and blocked her attempt to share information with a woman considering signing the pro-abortion petition.
Another petitioner then told the woman the amendment would just restore pre-Roe v. Wade abortion law, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2022.
“Restore just how it was before,” the circulator stated, according to Mary. “It’s the original Roe v. Wade, and that’s the language we want in the amendment.”
When Mary corrected the woman that the amendment would provide for abortion for all nine months of pregnancy, the circulator told the woman interested in signing that was a lie. After that, a male petitioner followed Mary home in her car, switching lanes whenever she did, until she was able to lose him in a school zone. Marry reported the incident to the police.
Police told her she could file charges if it happened a second time.
“I just hope that voters read the entirety of the initiated measure and think carefully before they vote,” Life Defense Fund’s Frankenstein said. “But better yet, I hope the court disqualifies the measure because cheating should not be allowed to get you on the ballot when we have election laws that should have meaning that should be enforced.”
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Reasons Young Women Embrace the Left Don’t Reflect Well on These Women
Last week, The New York Times featured an article headlined “How the Last Eight Years Made Young Women More Liberal.”
According to every poll, since 2016 there has been an unprecedented political/social gender gap between young American women and men.
Here is how the Times reported it:
In 2001, young men and women had similar political ideologies. … Then, around 2016, something shifted, a new analysis shows. Women ages 18 to 29 became significantly more liberal than the previous generation of young women. Today, around 40% identify as liberal, compared with just 19% who say they’re conservative. The views of young men—who are more likely to be conservative than liberal — have changed little. …
Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40% of young men. Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29% of young women.
And why did this massive leftward shift of young women occur?
[Because] the race became in part a referendum on gender—[Hillary] Clinton running to be the first female president, Mr. Trump calling her a ‘nasty woman’ and bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape. … Seeing someone like yourself in office can spur political involvement, political scientists have found, especially for young women.
If these reasons for young women moving to the left beginning in 2016 are correct (abortion is not mentioned; this was six years before Roe v. Wade was overturned), America has a generation of many unimpressive young women.
Let’s analyze the three big reasons:
1. “Seeing someone like yourself”—meaning women seeing a woman running for president and then seeing her defeated.
It is hard to imagine a more primitive reason to support a candidate for president (or any other office) than the importance of their looking like oneself. Yet this is one of the most frequently offered left-wing arguments for the need to elect more women and blacks.
To begin with, it is simply dishonest. Does any woman on the left prefer a woman with conservative views to man with left-wing views? Does any black person on the left prefer a black with conservative views to a white with left-wing views?
So, then, if values and positions are far more important to women and blacks than whether a person is a man or woman, a white or a black, what does it all mean?
It means nothing. All it means is that emotions dictate left-wing women’s and left-wing blacks’ votes. It means that the left-wing argument for having people in political—or corporate board or any other— positions who “look like America” is pure emotion.
Is “looking like America” important in sports? Do white fans care whether the players on their favorite basketball or football team look like them?
Have we seen any diminution in fan support for the NFL, given that more than half of NFL players are black and only a quarter are white? Have we seen any diminution in fan support of NBA teams given that three-quarters of NBA players are black, and only 17% are white?
Is it important in movies? Are blacks more likely to watch a film with a black lead actor, or whites more likely to watch a film with a white lead actor? Or do both groups want to see stars—whether it’s a white Tom Hanks or a black Denzel Washington? In fact, according to YouGov, three of the five “most popular all-time actors/actresses” are black: Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Denzel Washington. Do whites care?
Is it important in medicine? How many patients needing surgery ask for a surgeon of their own sex or race?
There is one other fact of life worth noting. Having more of your own group—blacks or women—in politically powerful positions has no positive effect whatsoever on your group. None of the black governors, senators, representatives, or mayors have done anything that has specifically benefited black Americans.
And the same holds for women in power with regard to helping women. Meanwhile, Asian Americans have become the most successful ethnic group in America with virtually no Asian Americans in positions of power.
2. Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.”
That this is one of the three major reasons for the 2016 left-wing shift of young American women is truly pathetic. It is further proof of the title of a column I wrote two years ago, “Feminism Has Weakened Women.”
One suspects that women of my mother’s—pre-feminism—generation would have been able to handle a male politician calling a female opponent a “nasty woman” far better than the current generation of young women, the products of three generations of feminism. They were also less traumatized by men’s boorish sexist comments.
There’s a wild inconsistency here as well: The whole point of feminism, according to feminists, is to have society treat men and women as equals, and equally. Yet feminists simultaneously insist that men treat women with a dose of chivalry or they’re “sexist.”
That same year, 2016, Trump called Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., “Little Marco.” Did any short men become leftists as a result? Apparently, short men are considerably stronger than feminized women. For that matter, who isn’t?
3. Trump “bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”
The third reason given for young women’s embracing leftism in 2016 was a recording made in 2005 that came out in 2016. In a private conversation with “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush, Trump said: “When you’re a star … you can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—y. You can do anything.”
Those comments were made 11 years earlier and in a private conversation with one person. Trump did not say them publicly.
Here is a moral rule of life: You cannot judge a person by comments made in private. We are to judge people by comments made in public, and by actions, whether done in private or public. Virtually every person has said awful things in private. It doesn’t matter. One purpose of private conversations is to let off steam.
It is a testament to the lack of wisdom of our age that we think we can know people—let alone judge them—by what they say in private.
And it is a testament to the lack of wisdom among a majority of America’s young women that these three foolish reasons propelled them to vote for the ideology that is destroying our country.
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Senate Democrats Want Women to Enter the Draft, but Republican Representatives Are Fighting Back
Senate Democrats are attempting to require women to register for the draft. But a group of Republican lawmakers are aiming to stop them.
Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Mary Miller, R-Ill., led a group of 22 Republican lawmakers in opposition to efforts that would force women to register for Selective Service.
The group wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday.
They wrote, “Forcing young women to register for the Selective Service is an affront to our nation’s values and does not enhance military readiness – the only metric by which Congress should measure an [National Defense Authorization Act]. This is yet another blatant attempt to advance a divisive agenda that seeks to eliminate all distinctions between males and females.”
The lawmakers addressed the effect this change to Selective Service would have on American families.
“Under no circumstances should the House of Representatives greenlight a future that cripples the American family by sending mothers and daughters to the frontlines – drafted to be combat replacements for casualties on the battlefield – while fathers and sons stay home,” the Republican lawmakers said. “A country that pursues radical social ideology over basic principles will not remain a strong, resilient nation.”
The group called on Johnson to oppose the provision.
“This radical proposal has been defeated in the past and must be defeated once again,” the Republican lawmakers said.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jack Reed, D-R.I., defended the Selective Service proposal.
“Women are doing a remarkable job in our forces today, and if we were in a situation requiring a draft, I think we would need all able-bodied citizens 18 and above,” Reed told The Hill.
The National Defense Authorization Act approves funding and delegates resources for the U.S. military and other critical defense priorities every year. On June 13, The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 22-3 to advance the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2025 to the Senate floor.
Although this Act is critical in equipping U.S. servicemembers, the group of Republican lawmakers said it does not agree with the provision that would require women to register for Selective Service.
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How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia:
I had my first glimpse of King Charles back in 1970, when he, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne came to Botany Bay in Sydney to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia.
Along with 100,000 onlookers, including me as a child of seven, the Royals watched a re-enactment of Cook’s arrival, which even included a token challenge by a couple of Aboriginal warriors. It was a very happy day, bursting with national pride.
This was the tour during which the tradition of the royal ‘walkabout’ was born when Daily Mail reporter, Vincent Mulchrone, used the word to describe how the Queen and Philip interacted casually with crowds.
I revisited Botany Bay earlier this year, and it is now overgrown and neglected. The 250th anniversary passed in 2020 with barely any public acknowledgment. Any mentions of it were mostly hostile and shame-faced.
Cook’s landing place is a sad symbol of how Australia has changed so totally, in not so many years, from a nation proud and comfortable with its history since the British arrived, to one taught to be ashamed of that past and to see only the darkness in it.
Although royal walkabouts began on that tour, it is no surprise that, in 2024, Buckingham Palace dropped the term for next month’s royal visit to Australia and replaced it with the anodyne ‘opportunity to meet the public’. Apparently, the King does not want to offend Aboriginal Australians who, we are told, associate the word ‘walkabout’ with personal journeys of grief or self-discovery.
The Palace wouldn’t have changed its language nor agreed to the strongly Indigenous-slanted Australian itinerary of King Charles and Queen Camilla, without the approval of our left-wing prime minister Anthony Albanese.
He is the ultra-woke leader of the Australian Labor Party who, last year, held a disastrous referendum over a change to the Australian constitution which would have given a greater political voice to Aboriginal Australians. The proposal was crushingly defeated by voters.
You might imagine Down Under as a sunny larrikin paradise of Foster’s, Sheilas and Bruces, a land untouched by the wokery and cancel culture infecting the UK.
Far from it.
Since the turn of this century, Australia’s political and social elites have endeavoured to import ‘progressive values’, bound up in all manner of nanny state rules.
By far the most pernicious wokery relates to our history and Australia’s indigenous peoples. I say ‘peoples’ deliberately, as it’s now politically incorrect to talk of Aboriginal Australians as one group.
As some consider the term ‘Aboriginal’ to be a label invented by colonisers, we are now instructed to use the appropriated Canadian label, ‘First Nations’.
Of course, the struggles of indigenous people deserve recognition and Australia’s treatment of its original inhabitants since settlers first arrived in 1788 has been far from perfect. And the culture and heritage of Aboriginal people, who make up just 3 per cent of the population, enriches our country.
But increasingly, Australians can no longer speak about their cities without referring to their Aboriginal origins.
We are reminded constantly that Australia’s original settlement, Sydney, is on ‘Gadigal’ country, Melbourne on ‘Kulin’ country, and so on. There’s also a push to give major cities and towns dual names – my city of Melbourne apparently is called Narrm, and Brisbane is Meanjin – and there’s a raging debate over what Aboriginal name Sydney should be given.
In an Australian newspaper, an Aboriginal person when named, is also labelled by their ancestral tribal affiliations, such as a ‘proud Gadigal-Wiradjuri-Yorta Yorta person’. (The ‘proud’ is always in there perfunctorily, as the word is taken to symbolise the person’s not being ashamed of their ancestry in an Anglo-centric world.)
The woke obeisance goes further than that, though. There’s now an obsession with making ‘acknowledgements of country’ in just about any public sphere.
Fans of cult Aussie comedy series Colin From Accounts –whose second series has just landed in the UK – will have noticed the ludicrous announcement at the start of each episode: ‘Binge [the Australian streaming service] acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this programme was produced.’
This is standard practice here for corporate meetings, announcements on planes landing in Australia, or even coach drivers picking up tourists.
They go like this: ‘We meet on the lands of the (tribal group) people, and acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.’ The more zealous add the lands were ‘never ceded’. Even government offices and commercial businesses plaster the words prominently on their doors and walls to demonstrate how with-it and woke they are.
It’s reached the point of such tokenistic absurdity that an online parent-teacher meeting of my child’s primary school, called to discuss school uniforms and books, was prefaced by the headmistress with a mandatory acknowledgment of country.
This homage is now mandatory at school assemblies, often in a mystic recitation, inculcating our youngest Australians into the new received wisdom about oppressed Aboriginal people and the evils of European settlement.
A mini-industry has sprung up in which Aboriginal people perform ‘traditional smoking ceremonies’ before government, sporting and corporate events, to ‘cleanse’ the meeting spaces of evil spirits with smoke, music and chanting.
Of course, the acknowledgments and these ‘ceremonies’ merely give the – mainly white – audiences the opportunity to engage in ritual self-flagellation.
National pride is disparaged. Thanks to Prime Minister Albanese’s useful idiots, Australia Day on January 26 is targeted by hardliners, who noisily protest, vandalise Captain Cook’s statues, calling it ‘Invasion Day’.
Originally a celebration of the day the Union Flag was first raised in Australia in 1788, now it is an annual excuse for the media to be convulsed with debate all January over whether we should abolish it.
Then there’s our beautiful Australian flag. It’s no longer acceptable to fly it alone. It always has to be alongside the flags of the Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders – Australia’s other main indigenous group.
You’ll never see a Left-wing politician like Albanese without at least those three flags behind him, usually with the Aboriginal flag most prominent.
Far-Left Green leader, Adam Bandt, was once so angry to be seen with the Australian flag at a press conference that he flung it in horror from his podium. And our national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, routinely plays Aboriginal music like the didgeridoo – treating it as equal to the works of Beethoven and Mozart. The didgeridoo has its place, but I fear this ‘celebration’ of Aboriginal culture often looks patronising.
The same is true of our national sporting strips, like the rugby Wallabies and Olympic team kits, which feature obligatory Aboriginal-style patterns in their otherwise traditional designs. Why? Because it’s expected.
Australia’s wokeness is demonstrated well beyond Indigenous causes.
For one, our elites have fully embraced the trans agenda. And thanks to a Federal Court of Australia ruling, the Tickle v Giggle – a name as absurd as its implications are serious – biological sex is now considered in law to be ‘changeable’, whatever you decide it is on any given day.
In my state of Victoria, as in most others, if a child wants to transition they can be prescribed puberty blockers by a doctor, and their school will treat them as their preferred gender without the need for Mum or Dad to be alerted.
Even Britain’s sobering Cass report, which showed in devastating detail how ‘gender re-affirming’ treatments can do much more harm than good to young people, has not stopped the march of trans and gender-fluid ideology in Australian schools, institutions and even the media.
Drag queens read LGBT stories to children in public libraries. Pre-school children are introduced to woke concepts of gender from age three, and such teaching goes on through their school lives. To query this is to risk being labelled homophobic, transphobic and bigoted. Parents who do, or question other woke shibboleths, can even be banned from teacher-parent meetings, or supervised in them as if they’re social deviants.
Australia is one of the biggest nanny states in the world, utterly tied up in rules and regulations designed to protect us from ourselves. We’re particularly good at banning things: last week, the government, backed by the conservative Liberal opposition, announced that it will ban underage children’s access to social media.
Before that, they put a ban on e-cigarettes and vapes being sold anywhere but in pharmacies.
Well-meaning, maybe, but these bans are unenforceable or have worse consequences: the vape ban has led to a thriving criminal black market.
And who can forget the pandemic? Melbourne was, notoriously, the world’s most locked-down city. With varying degrees of willingness, most of us here submitted to curfews, mask and vaccine mandates, and a harrowing loss of liberty. We meekly carried out the orders of political and medical authority figures, even though they rarely had a clue what they were doing.
When protests did occur, they were ruthlessly suppressed by the police – unless for Black Lives Matter. We might largely have kept back Covid, but the legacy of social damage is irreparable.
Let’s be honest. In the past 20 years, particularly since the conservative John Howard lost office as Prime Minister in 2007, Australia has surrendered to the Left’s culture war, more so even than Britain.
The easygoing Australia of 1970 I remember fondly has long gone. In 2024 Australia, it’s common sense that has gone walkabout.
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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