Onward Christian . . bus drivers?

Don’t laugh, they’re dead serious about this lawsuit. They are striking a real blow for ‘religious freedom.’ From their perspective, a Christian bus jockey reserves the right to refuse service to anyone they figure out is about to receive an abortion courtesy of their driving.

What? Yeah:

Bus driver claims abortion views led to his firing
By Steven Kreytak | Friday, July 16, 2010, 10:20 AM

A former bus driver has sued the Capital Area Rural Transportation System, charging that the nine-county transit service discriminated against him based on his religion when he was fired for refusing to drive a woman to a Planned Parenthood clinic in January.

Edwin Graning, who was hired as a driver on April 1, 2009, was “concerned that he might be transporting a client to undergo an abortion” when he was assigned to transport two women to Planned Parenthood, according to his lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Austin.

Graning is seeking re-instatement, back pay and undisclosed damages for pain, suffering and emotion distress. He is represented by lawyers from the American Center for Law & Justice, founded by evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson.

He was hired to drive people on the bus. When he refused to do it, he got fired. So he’s suing because he should have the right to quit his job but keep getting paid because he’s a Christian. Don’t know, maybe the issues escape me.

Graning had asked his wife to call the facility; she heard a recording directing callers to call 911 in case of abortion complications. “I said, dear God in heaven, this woman’s gonna have an abortion,” he said.

So he refused to drive the bus there.

His supervisor, who is not named, responded by saying “Then you are resigning,” the suit said.

Graning denied he was resigning and was later told to drive his bus back to the yard and he was fired, the lawsuit said.

So he ain’t exactly Dr. King. He’s not willing to accept the responsibilities and consequences of his actions — ‘yes I’m refusing to do my job because of my beliefs, and don’t you dare touch me.’

Therein lies the rub. Graning is another victim of Robertson and other high-profile pastors who have been pushing the flock to throw tantrums. They’re convincing normal folks to turn into big-headed, pig-headed Christianists who should press Americans to do their will.

Why — even though the Constitution clearly supports personal freedom and abhors the abuses of power that come with religious extremism? Because it’s your Constitutional right, people! You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want because it’s your religion. This is the sort of behavior the Founding Fathers, wholly conservative Men of Jesus, would have demanded of them if only they were still around, sure.

When they spoke of freedom, they really meant Christian freedom. When they spoke of rights, they meant Christian rights. And if, legally, some liberal opens up the interpretation to outsiders, just know that the Founding Fathers were all conservative evangelicals and *wink-wink* I don’t need to say another word, do I?

This is the utterly laughable fantasy that’s been leveled like a double-barrel shotgun at ordinary folks like Ed Graning. He’s fallen for it completely.

“I’m not out for revenge or anything like that,” said Graning, who said he felt obligated to stand up for his beliefs.

“I pastored years ago, and I’ve done a lot of things – and normally I wouldn’t have made any issue out of this – but you know, I’m really getting tired of Christians getting kicked around,” he told LSN. “I mean, we see other things as going on in this country, and somebody somewhere along the line is just got to quit bending the knee to Baal and letting this government run over us.”

So, to be clear: applying for, getting and carrying out the responsibilities of the government job of bus driver, a job Ed got without telling his superiors that certain situations would force him to refuse service to riders as a matter of religious belief, is “letting the government run over” him. Never mind that very few people go to Planned Parenthood on any given day to get an abortion, and he certainly had no clue why the woman went there, Ed’s “getting tired of Christians getting kicked around.”

Rational thought, logic, science and technology, modern philosophy, the legacies of the Age of Enlightenment — these things are not essential. Not universal, not cultural, not American, any more than your haircut is. They are the private beliefs of the secular humanists who hold too much sway in the public domain. It’s time for Christians’ private beliefs, Christianity, to eject that pop culturalism and to hold unilateral power.

Freedom, you say? Freedom isn’t some government stab at public transportation. Real freedom is about the practice of closely-held religious beliefs. A government serious about operating in a free society wouldn’t provide buses for the profane to trample those sacred tenets. Get it?

Maybe Charles Manson should have done the same thing, auctioned off a few pieces of jailbird art. Maybe drawn a ‘David and Goliath’ scene, where Goliath’s head is inscribed with the name ‘LaBianca’. Maybe Mark Chapman, too, with Goliath then ‘Lennon.’ Why shouldn’t they make money for their own legal defenses? By selling penitentiary art to their fawning admirers that brags about the killings?

Online auction to raise funds in Scott Roeder case

An Army of God manual. A prison cookbook compiled by a woman doing time for abortion clinic bombings and arsons. An autographed bullhorn.

These are among the items that abortion foes plan to auction on eBay and other Web sites in a fundraiser for Scott Roeder, the Kansas City man charged with killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller.

“This is unique,” said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who will sign the bullhorn. “Nobody’s ever done this before. The goal is that everybody makes money for Scott Roeder’s defense.”…

Among items that will go on the auction block, Dinwiddie said, are three drawings she received in the mail Wednesday from Roeder. Two drawings were done by another inmate at his direction, but Roeder autographed all of them.

“They’re wonderful pencil art drawings,” she said. “They were done in jail.”

One is a sketch of David and Goliath.

“It has David with a slingshot in one hand and the head of Goliath in his other hand and the name ‘Tiller’ on Goliath’s forehead,” she said. “On the corpse on the ground, it says ‘child-murdering industry.’ ”

Leach said he was continuing to collect items.

His own donation: An Army of God manual, an underground publication for anti-abortion militants that describes dozens of ways to shut down clinics, including bombing. Leach published a reprint of the manual in 1996 in his magazine, Prayer and Action News.

“I plan to cover up the offending eight pages of bomb recipes and instead insert a note saying that in order to avoid legal problems, we advise our bomb-loving friends to seek their bomb recipes in a U.S. Army Manual, which is approved by the Justice Department,” Leach said. “I will also enclose my April 1996 issue, which contains bomb-making excerpts from a declassified U.S. Army Manual widely available in Army surplus stores.”

Another item to be auctioned, Leach said, is a collection of recipes compiled in prison by Shelley Shannon, the Oregon woman who shot and wounded Tiller in 1993 and was later convicted in a series of abortion clinic arsons and bombings.

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UPDATE: eBay stopped the auction.

Not a Death Panel, a Death Mandate
by Terry Jeffrey

If you are someone who believes killing unborn children is a right that should be legally protected…

…as if this guy were acting legally? Well, except for shooting his girlfriend in the head?

…and made available to all pregnant women, and that the government should eventually take over the U.S. health care system, then you must believe that the government should get into the business of killing unborn babies.

What the Hell?

And if you believe that, then you believe that the law must compel certain government officials to cooperate in the killing of innocents.

In a government-run or government-funded health care system that guarantees access to abortion, there must be people in government responsible for making sure unborn babies get killed…

No, idiot, the ‘public option’ doesn’t fund abortions. Period.

This is a classic case of being completely blinded by the passion for a single political issue. By the time they’re done, the ‘Suzy Bs’ come closer to making the case for legalized abortions to save women from harm. Very poorly thought out and badly argued…

Man Kills Pregnant Woman After She Refuses to Have an Abortion
by LifeForAll on Tue 29 Sep 2009 10:34 AM EDT

In an instant, one man took two lives. The heartbreaking story out of Tennessee confirms what we know and the abortion industry refuses to admit: abortion does NOT help women.

Okay, let’s back this up. The woman was eight months pregnant, so there wasn’t going to be any abortion. That’s why he was charged with a second murder, the baby:

“School teacher Tonya Johnson was eight months pregnant. From the looks of it, her boyfriend Tarence Nelson didn’t want to have the baby. Deputies in Shelby County, Tennessee say the couple was arguing over whether she should get an abortion. But Nelson made the final call when police say he shot both mother and unborn child.”

Now just how is abortion’s legality relevant to this tragic story?

The problem with legalized abortion is that it creates a culture in which life’s value is only in its utility and life itself is completely dispensible [sic]. Today, a woman can dispose of her unborn child in an instant. Sadly, what this man did is not too different.

Can any of you get this argument? It seems like complete nonsense. Life either has value ‘only in its utility’, or ‘life itself is completely dispensible’. One or the other, you can’t have it both ways (unless you weirdly assign value to things in order to throw them away). Our culture de-values unborn babies’ lives, but the mother didn’t because she wanted the baby, but then the father didn’t want the baby, and what again does this have to do with legal abortions?

But abortion also devalues the woman.

Take for example, the countless women who are coerced into getting abortions by their boyfriends or husbands. Serrin Foster, of Feminists for Life, notes, “Domestic violence against single pregnant women at the hands of a boyfriend is being reported with greater frequency. Coercion crosses all socio-economic classes.”

How about that, did you get that? Abortion causes domestic violence. The legal opportunity for an abortion creates violence out of nothing, really? When it was illegal, pregnant girlfriends never got hurt, or beaten up, or killed. And better yet: women who they themselves did not want the baby never got hurt, or beaten up, or killed. And never killed themselves. Or died from back-room abortions. Or badly complicated childbirths. Or post-partum depression.

Abortion does not empower women. Rather it provides an escape route of sorts for men who do not want to take responsibility for a child. Those men who see abortion as a way-out will try to obtain it at any cost.

These are very weird arguments: abortion doesn’t empower women, hey everybody let’s talk about men. Actually, the way men are described here sounds like they’re the ones who feel powerless. As in ‘who allowed these damn women to have minds of their own?’

The abortion industry argues that if abortion was illegal, women would die. Wake-up everyone. Abortion is legal and women are being killed NOW.

Do the folks over at SBA List even bother to come up with a coherent group of talking points for their people? These arguments are terrible, completely from the far side of planet pro-life.

Incidentally, this is a picture of the guy, Tarence Nelson, from his MySpace page. I’m sure if abortions were illegal, he wouldn’t have had any reason to shoot his girlfriend.

So…if we perform heart transplants in the public square, will we hear the angels sing of the evils of atherosclerosis? Or the glory of Lipitor? Or, perhaps the joy of retaining an original-parts scalpel-wise-chaste heart in your horny chest? Confusing. I’m a little unclear on the ‘public gory-gut-spewing and surgical-blood-letting inspiring-the-blessed-angels-to-sing’ miraculous phenomenon.

I have a feeling the strange Lila Rose, here, would surprise us all and not then lobby for the sorts of public executions Fox would probably jizz over. That would be uncivil, I imagine, revenge being a deeply personal matter between you and the condemned.

…everybody now, watch, and sing a conception song: “HARK THE HERALD ANGELS SII-IINGGG….

…GLORY TOOO..THE NEWBORN KINNGGGG……”

…can we lighten the baritones?…k thx….

These comments on the Illinois ruling putting on hold the Blagojevich rule are sounding awfully fishy to me. Are the pro-lifers saying that pharmacists are also charged with making health-care decisions for people? I can understand that they might be looking for perhaps dangerous prescription drug interactions, but that’s not what’s being said here:

Judge puts hold on morning after pill rule

(KFVS) – Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich in 2005 issued a rule prohibiting pharmacies from turning away women seeking emergency contraception, sometimes called the morning-after pill.

The final decision on this issue will now rest in the hands of the Illinois Supreme Court.

I don’t yet see how this is a Constitutional issue. Don’t get me wrong, maybe I could find a way, but I’m not in the mood for the calisthenics.

Yes, there are hospitals that would work this way, but the real battle is in their and all the other street-corner pharmacies. That’s where the ‘abortion participant’ battle is really going on.

Look, every time I potentially interviewed for another lab research job (molecular biology, my thing), I always let them know that I would not kill rats and mice. I won’t be a part of it, and those jobs that required it thanked me and moved on. No biggie.

Pharmacies that are totally against handing out birth control or morning-after pills should banner it clearly so that women don’t mistakenly walk in on the wrong place. That would also make it clear that like-minded workers will be welcome there. Is that such a radical thing to expect?

What’s clear of the politics of the right on this issue is that they want to be able to shock and upset people with their personal beliefs being revealed in professional places at the last second. They want to humiliate people with a ‘I’m just a medical professional sworn to protect life’ veneer. Gotta admit, it’s an effective strategy.

But it’s petty, and it’s unprofessional.

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Update: Post updated with recent articles and commentary over at Oxdown Gazette.