The North Carolina legislature is advancing a package of stringent abortion restrictions that appeared in the Senate this week without any public notice. The anti-abortion measures popped up on Tuesday night, tacked onto a controversial measure to ban Sharia law, and caught women’s health advocates completely off-guard.
House Bill 695, which would prohibit the recognition of Sharia law in family courts — an increasingly popular conservative tactic that essentially serves to demonize the Islamic faith — was slated for consideration in a Senate committee on Tuesday. As soon as that committee convened, it quickly approved several abortion-related amendments to the legislation. HB 695 now combines several different anti-abortion measures that were in different stages in the legislature into one omnibus measure.
The new amendments would prevent insurance plans on Obamacare’s health marketplaces from covering abortion services, ban “sex-selective” abortions, impose unnecessary restrictions on doctors administering the abortion pill to women, and require the state’s abortion clinics to adhere to complicated new regulations that would likely force most of them to close.
As the News Observer reports, several supporters of the bill — like lobbyists and representatives from the N.C. Values Coalition, the N.C. Family Policy Council, and N.C. Right to Life — were present during the committee meeting when the new amendments were proposed. But the pro-choice lobbyists in opposition to the measure “were not told it was being debated.” A few hours after the committee agreed to tack on the amendments, Senate Republicans decided to bring HB 695 to a floor vote.
Women’s health advocates, who had no idea these measure would be taken up on Tuesday, denounced the last-minute legislative move. They pointed out that state lawmakers are attempting to avoid massive outcry by quietly sneaking through unpopular abortion restrictions right before a holiday weekend.
Now that the abortion amendments are folded into an entirely unrelated measure on Islamic law, some Republican lawmakers are already claiming that “a vote against the abortion restriction bill is vote for Sharia law.”
Even if North Carolina Republicans may have hoped to avoid mass protests against HB 695, activists in the state are already loudly voicing their disapproval with the GOP-controlled legislature. Over the past several weeks, thousands of people have been participating in a series of “Moral Monday” protests to stand up against ongoing conservative attacks on the poor, minorities, women, and the environment.
An Evangelical Christian pollster finds that atheists commit less crimes, divorce less, and are better educated than their fellow Christians. “It is obvious that you do not have to believe in a higher power in order to live a moral and successful life. Quite the opposite,” the Knoxville News‘ Al Westerfield writes of the study, adding that “the groups with the highest crime rate, the poorest marriages and the lowest education continually strive to force their beliefs on the nonreligious. And the politicians pander to them. Why else would they pass laws to put religion in the schools and on courthouse facades? And then they wonder why the godless could possibly be upset.”
“According to a Barna Research Group report, fundamentalist Christians have the highest divorce rate, followed by Jews and Baptists,” Westerfield writes:
The godless are tied with Catholics and Lutherans for the lowest divorce rate. It seems that some groups that claim to follow the Bible most strictly are not putting their money where their mouths are. The godless who are thought to be without morals seem to take their vows more seriously.
Some groups seem to like their flocks ignorant so that pastors’ interpretations of God’s edicts are not questioned. Other groups prize scholarship and achieve more in their lives here on Earth.
In fact, a review of worldwide studies found that criminality and religion go hand in hand. The countries with the most religious people have the highest crime rates, highest sexually transmitted diseases and the highest teen pregnancy rates.
This is also true in the United States. The more religious a state’s population, the higher the crime, STD and teen pregnancy rates.
