This morning's Washington Post contains a refreshing surprise--an op-ed by Rachel Maddow. In her usual style, Maddow takes a meat cleaver to the personhood movement.
Maddow couldn't help but notice that all four remaining Repub presidential candidates support legally defining a zygote as a person--even though it would likely have the effect of outlawing hormonal forms of birth control as well. For those who don't know, similar efforts got smacked down in Colorado (twice) and Mississippi.
After Mississippi rejected “personhood” and its threat to contraception, after Colorado rejected it twice, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul attended (Paul by satellite) a Personhood USA candidates forum in South Carolina. All signed a pledge to pursue “personhood” at the federal level. Mitt Romney did not attend the event, but when asked on Fox News before the Mississippi vote last year whether he would have supported such a measure as Massachusetts governor, he replied, “Absolutely.”
Never mind that the two attempts in Colorado lost each time by 40 points. The 2010 measure
lost big in every county. Even in hyperfundie El Paso County (Colorado Springs), it lost by 18 points. And never mind that Mississippi, one of the most (if not the most) conservative states in the nation, defeated a personhood amendment by 18 points. And never mind that even some anti-abortion activists think the personhood movement might actually end up cementing
Roe v. Wade.
Maddow also thinks that the personhood crowd may have cost the Repubs a Senate seat back in 2010. Ken Buck strongly supported the personhood amendment--and Colorado women voted against him by 17 points, enough of a margin to hand Michael Bennet a full term.
To Maddow's mind, the apparent Republican embrace of the personhood movement casts the recent uproar over Obama's insistence that birth control be a required benefit of health insurance in a completely different light. To her mind, the Repubs aren't just going after Roe. They're going after Griswold v. Connecticut. It's something that I, a formerly staunchly anti-abortion Dem, realized last year.