Let’s Give it Up (Get it Up?) for Fairfax Senator Janet Howell

It’s hard, so to speak, not to be juvenile when talking about certain members of the Virginia General Assembly.

Making its way thorugh the General Assembly is a bill that would require an ultrasound be performed before a woman has an abortion.

But far be it from left-leaning Fairfax Senator Janet Howell to think that actually treating an invasive medical procedure like an invasive medical procedure is acceptable was a reasonable proposition.

Knowing she couldn’t defeat the bill on its merit, Howell tried to derail it by inserting (pardon the pun) an amendment that would also require men seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction to undergo a rectal exam and a heart stress test.

Howell said this was in the name of “gender equity.”

Perhaps Howell missed sex-ed class the day they passed out the condoms, but how the heck does this relate? Most men seeking ED treatment are not of an age where the fathering of a child is actually an issue, so to speak.

If Howell wanted actually gender equity, she’d insert (sorry, again) an amendment to allow the father to say “Please don’t kill my baby!”

Perhaps Howell thought her amendment was a funny way of neutering, so to speak, the bill.

I don’t know what color the sky is in her planet, but here in the Commonwealth I don’t really see anything funny about 50 million dead babies since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Thankfully, Howell’s amendment was voted down. The legislation may or may not come to full term, so to speak.

But our legislative process deserves better than what Janet “Because I Said So” Howell brings to the table.

All we can say is Dammit Janet!

See also:

Bearing Drift: Janet Howell Wants Government In Your Butt

Virginia Right: Senator Janet Howell ‘Rectal Avenger’

I’m Finally “Out of Oz”

This weekend I finished “Out of Oz,” by Gregory Maguire which was released on November 1, 2011. This was the long awaited final volume in the Wicked Years.

Long before the Broadway smash hit “Wicked” made every little girl (and more than a few little boys) long to be “Popular,” Maguire wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. And long before that, as a child, I read every one of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.

Maquire’s take is a bit different, and I liked it. His view of Oz is filled with political intrigue and scandal, family drama and of course, the civil rights of talking animals.

In “Out of Oz” Dorothy comes back. She a few years older, but it’s several years later in Oz. Funny how time never seems to work quite the same way in alternate realities. But Dorothy is not the main character. Nor are the other familiar faces of the Cowardly Lion (a.k.a. Brrr) and Glinda the Good Witch. Rather we meet “Rain,” a misfit orphan in the house of Glinda. It’s not until later that we begin to realize that Rain is the grandaughter of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.

I’ll leave it there other than to say that Maquire is a masterful writer. He brings Oz to life in a new way, a new dimension.

The only question now is, what do I read next?