Justice for the menstrual murderers!

To: Rep. John Merrill (R-Tuscaloosa)

cc: Letters to the Editor, Tuscaloosa News

Dear Representative Merrill,

Congratulations, sir! Thank you for standing up for the rights of unborn Americans everywhere. Or at least in Alabama.

Trying to amend both the legal code and the Constitution of the Great State of Alabama to define the word "person" as: "any human being from the moment of fertilization or the functional equivalent thereof" is a bold move, and would certainly make abortion illegal immediately.

I would like to point out a few difficulties that you'll be facing on the long road ahead of you, though. For one thing, the Census is certainly going to be more difficult, as all of the formerly-ignored blastocyst-Americans will need to be counted as well. And if we just rely on self-reporting, we will already be under-counting a huge number of Alabama citizens, as women aren't always immediately aware that they are pregnant.

So you'll need to think about that. Fortunately, you have just under a decade to consider the problem.

Furthermore, you will have to develop a completely new arm of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, to investigate all of the millions of new charges of murder that will have to be filed every year. After all, having declared them to be persons, they have rights, and their deaths must be investigated, right? And the mothers must at least be charged with manslaughter; that's the law.

I suppose that a mandatory pregnancy test for every post-pubescent woman is a possibility, but those tests are not extremely reliable, and a positive result would have to be verified. And all this takes us awfully close to the area of government-sponsored healthcare, which must be destroyed - after all, we know that Jesus would support allowing the poor to die in the streets if they couldn't afford a doctor.

You did take into account the fact that two-thirds of all fertilized eggs fail to implant in the mother's womb, right? And if you allow this newly-legalized human life to be simply flushed away, you are just as guilty as the murderous woman who refused to allow the child berth in her womb!

That is really a tricky question when you think about it. If life does begin at conception, wouldn't Heaven be filled wall-to-wall with little floating fetuses? But then again, since they were never baptized and never accepted Jesus into their unformed hearts, they would have gone straight to Hell, where their little unborn souls could simply be used as fuel for the furnaces. This would be very efficient, and exactly the way that a loving God would have designed the system.

I suppose that it's possible that you were unaware of this dirty little secret of human pregnancy. After all, Alabama's educational system does rank about forty-fifth among the fifty states, and as a graduate of the University of Alabama, this does place you at a disadvantage.

But I'm sure that you aren't adding billions of dollars to the Alabama deficit simply because you're stubbornly, pig-ignorantly arrogant, but simply because you love Alabama so much.

Thank you for your time,
A Concerned Citizen
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Update: So, it seems that Rep. Merrill, in the true spirit of Republican governance, doesn't really want to talk to people who aren't donating money to him.

Despite what it says on his webpage, the email address john@tuscaloosagop.org gets rejected immediately. Now, if you look into it a little, the link on his webpage actually opens up an email to ohn@tuscaloosagop.org (no "j"). And that email address actually makes it into the Tuscaloosa GOP servers before being rejected as nonexistent.

I suppose I could have printed it out and mailed it. After all, he provides both his work address and his office at the Statehouse (and his home address, for the love of Bacchus!) on his webpage. But that would take, you know, time and money and stuff. Instead, I sent it to every Democratic member of the Health Committee, who are currently considering both of Merrill's bills.

Easier that way.

Mutant ninja drivers

That guy in front of you, the one who can't stay in his lane, who takes 20 seconds to respond to the light changing to green, who needs four lanes to make a turn, who slows down for green lights and sails through the red -- who amongst us hasn't made rude anatomical and ancestral references? Perhaps we should be more tolerant.

Steven Cramer, a neurology professor at the University of California Irvine, has published a study in Cerebral Cortex that indicates the presence of a gene variation in about 30% of the population that makes them not only bad drivers, but drivers that don't learn from their mistakes. I've read many studies showing that nearly all accidents are caused by a small percentage of drivers and that that group is not distinguished by high speed driving. They're just bad drivers and maybe we now have some idea why. As to whether this genetic marker occurs more frequently in some population segments? Why yes, I do have a ten foot pole, but it's on my boat and I'm not going there, thank you.

I don't want to put too much faith in one study, but I do like studies that confirm my prejudices and maybe the next time some idiot looks me in the eyes and pulls out onto the highway 5 feet in front of me or stops on the entrance ramp or cruises through the red making a right turn, I'll roll down the window and shout "You miserable, brain-derived neurotrophic factor deprived mutant!" instead of the usual.