Re: Pro-lifers Don't Like it? Sioux Us.

1

*obligatory groan for the pun*

horizontal rule
2

Old-style tribal feminists = teh awesome.

horizontal rule
3

If I give $100, can I feel OK about taking the trip to the Black Hills I'd been planning for this summer before the abortion law was passed?

horizontal rule
4

Bless you, my son.

You have my absolution.

horizontal rule
5

I'm gonna split it between the clinic and the reservation. Growing up in SD, it's amazing how little contact I had with Indians--the reservations are so isolated, and so poor, that there's just not a lot of mingling. It's one of the continuing marks of shame that this country carries.

horizontal rule
6

If the reservations can attract well-qualified medical practioners for their clinics, I'm all in favor. We'll see how the SC rules on the SD legislation, but it warms the cinematically trained heart to think that the reservations could become medically enlightened free-zones.

Lots of if-but sentences in the above. I'm sure that the cinematic imagination will solve all. So, let's take Mad Max, add fascistic abortion controls, and we have:

A few committed feminists are running supplies from New York and California into the reservation-clinics across the heartland. They have to outtalk the anti-abortion police every time their trucks are stopped, which for our script would be at most state borders. "I dunno about no abortion, sir, but this here equipment is marked for basic medical purposes, sir." And the trucks make it through, through, through, against a glorious desert sundown, as a beautiful Native American woman convulses with ectopic pregancy pains and a doe-eyed white girl empregnated by her father waits for the medical shipment to reach the reservation...

It's, um, condensed, I'll admit.

horizontal rule
7

Well, the current Sioux City (how ironic) SD clinic, which is the only one in the state, has to fly doctors in from MN, b/c no one in SD wants to deal with being stalked and harassed by their neighbors.

horizontal rule
8

Sioux Falls. Sioux City is in Iowa. Jeez.

horizontal rule
9

Whatever. It's all the midwest anyway, who cares?

(Ducks and runs.)

horizontal rule
10

What a sneaky trick!

horizontal rule
11

Aren't you in the midwest, B? Or am I misremembering?

horizontal rule
12

11 to 9.

horizontal rule
13

11 - yeah, and it sucks, so I don't bother to pay attention to its weird hangups about place names and such like.

horizontal rule
14

Man, the Injuns are so lucky.

Casinos, booze, 'bortions.

They get everything the Right hates...including Injuns!

horizontal rule
15

14 -- and also including poor people!

horizontal rule
16

And wilderness!

horizontal rule
17

What if we promise Republicans that only liberals, poor people, and Injuns will get 'bortions? Then can we have 'em remain safe and legal? Certainly they don't want more lefties, more indigent people, and more restless First Nations...

horizontal rule
18

I know a guy whose parents grew up on a SD reservation (Pine Ridge, I think). He found a terrible statistic. The two US counties with the highest and the lowest life expectancies are both in SD, about 100 miles apart. The lowest was a reservation, and the highest was a generic Midwestern all-white town.

A guy named Janklow has been big in SD politics for decades, and he has two charges on his record for raping Indians. The record on one was sealed because he was a juvenile, and the other case never went to trial because the victim was murdered.

He might be innocent of both, but recently he ran a stop sign and killed someone, and it turned out that he had a long string of egregious traffic violations too. He really sounds like a third-world / Old South kind of local political thug.

horizontal rule
19

Dude, John: I was going for the history-of-rape-and-pillage-for-comedic-effect thing. If you're gonna go and get all "factual" and "actually historical," I'm gonna start feeling guilty and junk. Total buzzkill, man.

horizontal rule
20

Is the term First Nations spreading here from Canada?

horizontal rule
21

20: Canada was indeed the reference there. I was using it somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though.

horizontal rule