FYI, I set up a log in to the Times site for people reading this blog, since I link to their articles pretty regularly. That login is: username=yesitreallyis password=myblog. If at some point this fails, I think that bugmenot.com is still up and running.
Also, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the entire lawyerly contingent over at the Times, here is the full text of the editorial I linked in my previous post:
February 28, 2005
EDITORIAL What's Secretly Wrong With Kansas
n a shocking abuse of office, the attorney general of Kansas is conducting a stealth campaign to violate the privacy of about 90 women who obtained late-term abortions, offering the flimsy claim that he's looking for evidence of crime.
Protected by a sweeping gag order from a local judge, Attorney General Phill Kline has been demanding the women's records from two clinics that have been unable to even warn clients that their intimate histories are being sought. When the inquiry finally came to light through a court brief, Mr. Kline maintained that he needed all the women's records - including their identities, sexual histories, clinical profiles and birth control methods - to prosecute statutory rape and other suspected sexual crimes.
Kansans deserve a full explanation of this gross intrusion into medical confidences that are supposed to be carefully protected by law. But Mr. Kline, a fervid anti-abortion campaigner throughout his career as a Republican politician, would not answer reporters' questions about his investigation. "Clinics should not act to protect the secrecy of the predator," he insisted in a statement, offering a blanket smear in lieu of a proper explanation.
Mr. Kline's campaign echoes a similar salvo last year by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Federal judges eventually cited privacy laws to stop his attempt to forage through hundreds of records at a half-dozen hospitals. Two years ago, Mr. Kline called on health-care providers to report underage sexual activity, but a federal judge ruled him out of line. Mr. Kline deserves another rebuff, beginning with the suspension of the gag order.
The targeted clinics say they have observed state requirements to report possible crimes. They have filed an appeal to the State Supreme Court, complaining that Mr. Kline is conducting a fishing expedition, not a case-specific inquiry. The clinics have suggested a compromise - that the identities of the women be blacked out with the option for more information from any whose records might yield evidence of crimes like statutory rape.
It's not at all clear how that crime is linked in particular to late-term abortions, which just happen to be the current target of Republican anti-abortion activists across the country. Late-term abortions - beyond 22 weeks of gestation - are illegal in Kansas, except when they are done to protect a woman's health. But Mr. Kline offers no evidence to suggest he has any legal ground to justify pawing through the confidential records of the 90 women he has targeted for his mission of harassment. As for predatory abuse of girls under the age of sexual consent, they could have obtained abortions earlier than 22 weeks.
There is no disputing that Mr. Kline has the duty and power to uphold the law. No one wishes child abusers to walk free. But Mr. Kline also has privacy laws to uphold. His demand for the clinics' records is not only insupportable legally; it smacks of an ideological dragnet.
5 comments:
Well I understand why this pisses you off, but it is all part of the same thing I have been trying to get you to understand for months.
The asshat AG is just trying to serve the greater good, as he sees it, just as you have preposed doing in the past, it's just you do not agree with his idea of greater good.
Either you own your life and it's products, or you do not, period.
Since you are in favor of taking portions of the lives of others for your greater good ideas, then you should expect that others will intrude on areas that you hold dear.
Put more simply, if you will not allow me to control my property, why do you think that you should be allowed to control yours?
This is the reason why I am a absolutist on personal freedoms, because you either own your life or someone else does. There is no middle ground with it.
Peace
Dear Stupid,
There are no limits on my use of my property.
The example you mentioned would be an intrusion on your right. My rights end where yours start, and yours end where mine start. It is really that simple.
Now you do not have the right to choose what music I listen too, that is none of your freaking business as is who I do or do not sleep with, how I spend or do not spend my money...
As for middle ground, where is the middle ground on Abortion? How about War? Your sexuality?
You want to meet in the middle on everything?
Either you control your property, or someone else decides what to do with it for you. There is not middle ground on that.
So where is your elusive "middle ground" now?
Mainstream political thought wants no middle ground, they want control.
People's interests only clash when there is no solid line of property rights.
You said; " People shoot each other trying to figure out where the line is, every day. This is why we have government", but doesn't government shoot most of those people?
Finding the line is not rocket science, it is very simple. Where the problem arises is when someone doesn't like the idea that they have no rights to another persons property.
If I respect your rights, and you to respect mine, why would either of us want to shoot anyone? We wouldn't until someone breaks that mutual restraint, then all bets are off, so to speak.
And when it is government that breaks this trust we have a real problem, because government will do as it pleases, creating the laws it needs to do as it wants to do.
LOTE, we've talked about this before, and you know that I think your philosophy will work only in the case of the individual, but cannot be the basis of a functional society.
For people to live together there has to be a systemized way for their rights to not just meet but overlap. I think that there are many ways to achive this, but the one we have chosen is elected government, and quite often it works just fine. Sometimes it doesn't and if I were a genuis I'd have a solution to that.
Stupid Country, you took the words right out of my mouth here: "I don't get your point at all about controlling your property. What do you mean?" Obviously, we can look up "property" in Webster's, but what LOTE means by it has remained elusive in all our conversations.
All that being said, I think that the rational for the Kansas AG's actions here has little to do with what he imagines to be his rights or the rights of the women and girls involved. Rather it has everything to do with his cynical political assessment of Kansas voters. And perhaps the climate of misogyny fostered by his party and his church.
thanks! (sorry for the late response)
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