Afternoon Roundup: Minnesota State Rep. Caught With Gun Outside Planned Parenthood, Republican Lawmakers Say No to Women Vets?

Republican House leadership feels the need to meet with violent, anti-choice "activist" Randall Terry while a Republican state representative in Minnesota is caught with a gun outside a Planned Parenthood.

Republican House leadership feels the need to meet with violent, anti-choice “activist” Randall Terry while a Republican state representative in Minnesota is caught with a gun outside a Planned Parenthood…

  • Speaker John Boehner “takes a meeting” with raging anti-choice, former Operation Rescue leader Randall “Dr. George Tiller who was brutally gunned down in his church reaped what he sowed” Terry. What could they possibly have on their agenda to discuss?
  • The anti-choice group Americans United for Life is lobbying against Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich) for chairman of the Energy and Commerce Commission, according to Politico today. They say he’s not really “pro-life” – exactly how anti-choice/pro-life does a lawmaker need to be to head up the Energy and Commerce Commission, is what I want to know.
  • Vanessa Grigoriadis argues, in a New York Magazine article on the birth control pill, that access to oral contraceptives is actually responsible for women delaying childbirth “until it’s too late.” There will be responses to this over-general and non-scientific assumption, I’m sure. 
  • Minnesota state representative Tom Hackbarth (R) was found with a gun in a Planned Parenthood parking lot, says Ms. Magazine’s Feminist Daily Wire. Though he said he was meeting a woman he met on-line, police took his revolver citing “stalking-like” behavior and “harrassment.” If a pro-choice legislator had been found in the parking lot of a crisis pregnancy center with a gun, what might anti-choice advocates make of this? I hope those Planned Parenthood employees feel safe tonight. 
  • From the Daily Women’s Health Policy Report comes this absurdity: Anti-choice legislators in the House say they’ll vote  against HR 5953, a “Women Veterans Bill of Rights,” because they are afraid it may open the door to abortion access for our female service members.Republican lawmakers oppose the “Bill of Rights” which would be posted in health facilities run by the Department of Veteran Affairs based on the fear that it may lead to a legal mandate for abortion coverage and a push to ensure abortion providers for female veterans as well. The bill won’t be voted until at least tomorrow. It’s almost too bizarre to contemplate and yet it’s utterly reprehensible from a thinking person’s perspective.