The Hawkeye » chris st.marie

Abortion is a necessary human right

Chris St. Marie — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:03:32 +0000

How can a society reconcile charging someone who kills a pregnant woman with double homicide, and yet permit a woman to have an abortion? The answer is very simple, and also a key to understanding why abortion opponents are incorrect. Women have a choice as to what happens to parts of their own body. A fetus, dependent upon them, attached to their body, is a part of them. This is how the process is morally acceptable, though even if it were morally questionable, banning abortion would do very little to stop it, and likely just end with a large quantity of dead pregnant women who attempted to perform abortions on themselves. It is easy for the primarily religious opponents of women’s rights to justify this, as what they really wish to punish is promiscuity.
The same people who pretend that their reason for being against abortion is the poor little dead babies are the same people who are unwilling to support measures that might decrease the number of abortions while protecting the right. The same people who pretend STDs and pregnancy motivate them are the same who support abstinence-only programs that propagate both. The fear of sex, especially WOMEN choosing to do so, is what motivates people guided by silly and unsupportable religious principles. Sex, in the 21st century, can be almost consequence-free with our current knowledge and contraceptive devices. No matter how much progress frightens people, we cannot allow their terror to deny women basic rights over their own bodies.

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Don’t Talk to Police

Chris St. Marie — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:27:53 +0000

Compliance with our judicial system is important. If you are subpoenaed, it is important to report to the court and answer questions with honesty to preserve a fair and effective legal process. Up until this point, however, no one should ever talk to police or comply in any way as far as their rights extend. And your rights extend very far. The job of a police officer is not to make sure you have a good day. These people are paid to make arrests and obtain convictions. It is absolutely necessary to exercise your right not to make incriminating statements about yourself, and if you absolutely must speak with the police, to do so through a lawyer. Always exercise your right to refuse searches of yourself and your property without a warrant, no matter what tricks a cop may use to make you believe you are not completely within your rights to not speak with them.

Some time ago, I heard a Terrace student recounting a conversation he had with a police officer attempting to obtain some kind of information from him, in which he was warned that his status as a member of the baseball team could be in jeopardy if he did not cooperate. Despite this obviously empty threat, he should have at that point refused to talk to the officer at all without the family lawyer present. There may be situations where it is unavoidable to associate with police, to perhaps report stolen property (the officers who take down this report will likely be no help whatsoever in recovering your property), or if your house is undergoing an armed robbery at that exact second (it is not impossible that the officers who arrive will simply shoot you with the weapons the vast majority of them will never have to draw for any legal purpose). Police are an armed and uniformed gang sponsored by the state. Always remember your rights, never consent to searches, and do your best to not talk to cops.

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Religion is Institutionalized Rape

Chris St. Marie — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 06:56:37 +0000

A common thread among the Abrahamic religions are backwards and laughable treatments of human sexuality. On the surface, it would seem this presents no harm to the public at large if members of the religious community wish to have clumsy and awkward virgin sex on their wedding night, but there is a very real danger in their desire to impose their views of what sexuality should be upon others. In a particularly disastrous case, priestly celibacy has led to a system in which supposedly extra-trustworthy, sex-deprived men are left in positions of power over defenseless children.

Most are aware of the hundreds of millions of dollars the Catholic Church has had to shell out in restitution for “a few bad apples”, but less are aware of how much more they would like to keep it covered up, at the expense of children. The current Pope was in charge of the policy of keeping child-molesting priests from facing criminal prosecution, and in one case, failed to dismiss a priest who had molested over 200 deaf boys. Of course, many Christians will point out that the Pope is not the final authority of Christianity, only the head of a sect. But this problem is not limited to Catholicism. Jesuit religious leaders were found to have sent 28 child-abusing priests to a remote area of Alaska, where they committed over 300 cases of molestation. Even the very prophet Muhammad of the Islamic faith married a six-year-old girl and had sexual intercourse with her when she reached age nine. These people presume to dictate the sexual practices of Americans, pushing the failed policy of abstinence education in schools, denouncing possibly lifesaving contraceptive devices as “sinful” and, of course, keeping homosexuals from marrying when they can’t keep them from having sex with each other. Religious sexual hypocrisy and sexophobia has and will continue to take a terrible toll on our society if we do not take progressive and rational stances on these issues.

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Healthcare is a Moral Imperative

Chris St. Marie — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:56:07 +0000

Some days ago, I overheard a student voice the opinion that Americans should not have to use their hard-earned money to pay for the healthcare of others. While this seems a reasonable sentiment on the surface, it is akin to complaining about having to pay for the fire department services of lazy poor people when their house is burning down.

Health care is not some bourgeoisie amenity providing facelifts for welfare recipients. America is only just now catching up to what many European countries realized decades ago, which is that healthcare is a right that human beings are not obligated to go bankrupt for. What this recent healthcare reform has done benefits everyone. Insurance companies used to be able to drop coverage when patients became sick, including children.

While our current bill may not be perfect or as universal as some other countries, this represents a much-needed step away from the insurance industries ability to kill you or take all of your money. It is no surprise that the countries with the highest standards of medical care, such as Sweden, also offer it universally. While it may be difficult to abandon our inborn American greed and hatred for helping out society at large with “our” hard-earned money, the 21^stcentury demands a different standard of respect for the rights of our fellow human beings.

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The danger of religion to the modern world

Chris St. Marie — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:31:56 +0000

One of the most incredibly dangerous practices a society can tolerate within itself is allowing religion any input or power over the society. This is not a new theory, an untested one, or even truly debatable. In the numerous unfortunate examples we have of religious leaders being allowed legal powers and precedents, an invariable trend is their immediate use of this power towards undeniably harmful acts. When Christians were able to follow up on the Bible’s commandment of “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18), they did so with glee and nothing resembling fair democratic process. This sort of thing doubtlessly would have continued were it not for government intervention. The Spanish Inquisition and its penchant for burning human beings alive lasted over 350 years. This is not simply ancient foreign history, however. Mormons had to have their funds taken and their religion greatly restricted before they ended their polygamous practices, yet breakaway groups mainly centered in Utah still regularly gain notoriety on cable news networks for their polygamy and sexual liaisons with underage girls. They are only able to accomplish this with the help of local law enforcement tolerance.
Even more obvious examples emerge from the Middle East, in which religiously controlled governments have free reign to execute homosexuals and restrict the rights of women to unbelievable degrees. Though our American government is protected somewhat by the principle of separation of church and state, the Christian influence still presents a very real danger.
As history continues to show us, if religions are given power, they will not use that authority to force through bills demanding things such as universal health care, as one would imagine after hearing so much about Christian love and compassion. The moderate Christian majority is instead far more concerned with furthering the bigotry and intolerance against the homosexual minority espoused by their barbaric holy book.
One of the most despicable and sickening aspects of the American social conscience is how denying a harmless minority group fundamental rights such as marriage is seen as an acceptable political position in the 21st century among mainstream politicians and the American majority.
This is not the work solely of home-schooled fundamentalists as might be imagined; this is the average, moderate Christian leading the Crusade-esque fight against basic civil rights, lifesaving medical procedures such as stem cell research, women’s rights over undeveloped life forms dependent upon them, euthanasia, and the teaching of established scientific facts about how our universe and human race came into being. They have no choice, of course, since religions have ever been terrified of science: every fossil we uncover pushes Adam and Eve out of our collective histories and every advance in aeronautics shoves God out of our clouds.
These same people are at the forefront of support for the increasingly genocidal state of Israel, though of course both sides of that conflict have committed innumerable religiously motivated atrocities. Their ideals have no limit to how they will invade and intrude upon the lives of others. Thanks to some kind of perceived magical difference between premarital and postmarital sex, a teenage girl who acts upon healthy and natural urges does so at the risk of being labeled a “slut” or any various other creative and imaginative terms fueled by that classic Christian love and compassion. One needs only to look at the countless abuse scandals and cover-ups by the Catholic clergy to see the true dangers of sexual repression. It is almost unimaginable to think of the easily preventable disease, suffering, and death that will come as a result of the Pope’s recent ban on condoms.
How hard will religion need to fight against reason, rationality, and science before the sight of students praying in a circle around our school’s flagpole becomes unbearably horrifying? How much oppression, harm, and ignorance will the American populace fund and endure before it admits that religion has no place in our modern society? Do not debate the answer long. These people are already destroying the fabric of our society. Give them enough time, and they will destroy us all.

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