China Aid has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the government of China to release Guiyang pastor Li Guozhi, better known as Yang Hua. The Chinese government has revealed their evil here in their ever-more absurd actions: first fining his church more than $2000 per day for not having the proper permits to expand the church, then arresting him for "obstruction of justice" when he tried to keep government officials from destroying a church-owned hard drive, then moving him to a different detention center for "illegally holding state secrets." If that doesn't sound like the actions of someone acutely aware that they can't win an argument on the merits, then nothing does! Officially atheist and Communist China has formally recognized five separate religious groups, but maintains an iron group over their activities, even going so far as to appoint Catholic bishops in defiance of the Vatican; thus Yang Hua's Living Stone church is, in China, a "black market" church -- or, as we'd call it in America, a church. This is what religious persecution really looks like, in case all the whining of American right-wingers about transgendered folks in "their" bathrooms had confused you.
Meanwhile, the Alabama state legislature has passed two bills, SB 205 and SB 363, that would block women's access to abortions -- SB 205 by forcing clinics within 2,000 feet of a school to close (as if abortion clinics spread abortion cooties to children, I suppose), and SB 363 by outlawing "dismemberment" abortions (known to the medical community as dilation and evacuation abortions) "unless necessary to prevent serious health risk to mother," which means SB 363 wouldn't actually prevent very many D&Es. But don't worry -- SB 205 would make a lot more D&Es necessary in the first place, by closing down more abortion clinics and thus making it harder for women to get to the doctor before the second trimester! I have no animus toward folks who believe abortion is evil, but I have plenty of animus toward the politicians who pander to them, who make no effort to make abortion illegal by amending the U.S. Constitution, or to make abortion far less frequent by supporting widely-available birth control. They merely making women jump through all these hoops to get abortions -- which winds up increasing abortions. Why, it's almost like that's the idea. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley to veto both SB 205 and SB 363, and thus protect women's health.
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