The Cluth Theory of Humanity- If it can't shoot a free throw, it's not a human being
This should be the definitive standard of what defines a human being...it's simple and foolproof, which is more than can be said for the Alabama Supreme Court
Hundreds of wise men cannot make the world a heaven, but one idiot is enough to turn it into a hell.
Raheel Farooq
The Moronarchy is upon us. Welcome to the Dumbocalypse. The Dumbageddon Conspiracy has finally paid off. Freedumb and Dumbocracy have reached their logical conclusion. How did we get here? We can thank the Dunning-Kruger effect, the most powerful and disturbing force in the world today ... the force of human stupidity, the greatest destroyer and wrecker there has ever been. Come and explore the bizarre world of idiots, of the Confederacy of Dunces, of the Dunciad.
Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President
Like many Americans, I was dumbfounded at the news that embryos are now considered to be human beings in Alabama. Granted, we’re talking about Alabama [insert cousin-fucking joke here if you must], which doesn’t have a reputation for being the most intellectually- and/or morally-rigorous or sensible state.
Still, the circumstances leading to this ridiculous decision is just off-the-charts stupid. I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before thoughts of having sex with one’s cousin will be defined as a human being in the Yellowhammer State? Are we sliding down sort of slippery slope here? I’m not an attorney, but I can connect the dots, read the tea leaves, and put two and two together (and throw in a few other cheap metaphors if circumstances require) and not come up with five.
This is seriously messed up, y’all. It’s like the Christofascist mullahs on the Alabama Supreme Court have decided to drag medical science back to the 1700s. What’s next; will they be determining if a woman is a witch by tying a boulder around her waist and throwing her into a pond? (If the poor woman drowns, she’s not a witch…for all the good it does her.)
Between 2013 and 2016, three sets of parents in Alabama underwent in vitro fertilization treatments, hoping it would lead to the birth of a child. While some embryos were then implanted into the patients’ bodies (and led to successful births), others were placed in a “cryogenic nursery” at the Center for Reproductive Medicine, remaining frozen until further notice.
In 2020, a patient at the hospital slipped into the fertility clinic via an “unsecured doorway” and got access to the freezer. He removed the embryos—and then, likely due to their ice-cold temperature, dropped them. The embryos were destroyed.
The three sets of parents eventually sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the group overseeing it, the Mobile Infirmary Association. They said that the hospital’s negligence led to the destruction of their embryos in violation of Alabama’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.”
To put that another way: They sued the hospital for killing their babies, arguing that life begins at conception, not birth.
So a power outage that knocks a freezer in a fertility lab off line and results in the thawing of thousands of frozen embryos can be defined as “genocide?” How far can the logic behind this decision be extended?
Of course, this being Alabama, the case eventually turned on what the definition of a “minor child” is. To you and me, a “minor child” might mean a boy who has a tree house or a girl who plays with dolls. Ah, but the Alabama Supreme Court determined it was necessary to insert their version of “nuance” where none had previously existed or was necessary.
The hospital asked the courts to reject the lawsuits because embryos aren’t people, and the law only applied to people. Indeed, that’s what Circuit Court Judge Jill Parrish Phillips said in her decision in April of 2022. She wrote that a frozen embryo wasn’t a “minor child.”
The plaintiffs appealed the decision, and the Alabama Supreme Court has now reversed the ruling, insisting on a 7-2 vote that embryos are indeed minor children—that “unborn children” fall under the definition of “minor child”—and that, therefore, the families have every right to sue the clinic.
Just as disturbing as the decision itself is how much theology is baked into the all-Republican Court’s decision. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker couldn’t stop bringing religion into the picture when explaining the “sanctity of unborn life.”
Ah, yes, the “sanctity of unborn life,” that wonderful place where batshit-crazy Christians and, in some cases, almost-as-batshit-crazy militant pro-choice advocates believe they have the one, true, and ONLY answer.
If we put all of those words- “sanctity,” “unborn,” and “life,” up for debate, what we’d end up with is a no-holds-barred, scorched-Earth, to-the-last-person battle for the supremacy of each side’s definition. Blood will flow, ink will be spilled, and pixels will be sacrificed…to settle precisely nothing.
Even if “sanctity of unborn life” went to the Intergalactic Supreme Court, one side would refuse to accept the Court’s decision…and the battle would continue. Anti-choicers would be fighting for “the unborn,” while pro-choicers would be go into battle for a woman’s right to control her own body.
Nobody wins, everybody loses, and in the ends the rising body count means only that there will eventually be plenty of Lakers tickets available for everyone.
In an unprecedented step and Bible-heavy opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine that even one-celled fertilized eggs are legally people. Don’t call them eggs any more, that’s insulting! The proper terms are embryonic children and extrauterine children. And a fertility clinic nitrogen tank is now to be known as a “cryogenic nursery.”
Yes, it’s batshit. Alabama already bans abortion, at any point, even in cases of rape or incest, so this was the logical next step to protect the state’s right to do whatever the hell it wants to girls and women.
Not to be outdone, lawyers with Liberty Counsel in Florida immediately filed a supplemental authority brief based on this ruling. You see, Florida’s state senate is on its way to passing SB 476, which would also establish “fetal personhood” in civil liability cases, defining “unborn child” as “a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” (Florida already has a six-week abortion ban.)
In other words, hey y’all! Alabama did it! That means it’s good and proper lawmakin’.
Well, it’s lawmakin’. The accuracy of the “good and proper” label is above my paygrade, but even with my limited knowledge and my history degree, I have questions.
Like, f’rinstance, is the thief who dropped the jar with the frozen embryos in them now guilty of genocide? Does he get his own Nuremberg trial? Or does he get shipped off to the Hague to be tried a lá former Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševič?
This is what’s know colloquially as The Law of Unintended Consequences. Sometimes, when courts or legislatures make law, they think they understand all of the possible iterations and potential outcomes. They game out the mostly likely potential scenarios and plan accordingly. Sometimes, though, no matter how well-intentioned the people behind a law might be, something happens that seems counterintuitive or just plain “WTF??”
Take “Three Strikes” laws, for example. Republican politicians love them because they think they makes them look tough on crime. But what happens when that third offense involves a Black man in a small Southern town picking up a $5 bill off a sidewalk, only to then be accused of stealing it?
An all-White jury hears the case, convicts him, and, because it’s the poor sod’s third strike, he’s sentenced to life in prison with no parole…or whatever the third strike punishment is.
Does the punishment fit the crime? Of course not. Is it proportionate to his criminal record? That seems unlikely. And yet, off he goes to the state penitentiary, never to be heard from again.
Of course, a wealthier White man convicted under the same circumstances would probably never see the inside of the state pen. In fact, he probably never would’ve been charged with a crime in the first place.
So what is the Alabama Supreme Court and it’s dissolution of the wall separating Church and State trying to accomplish (besides giving me a headache from reading this gibberish?)?
If you’re thinking the above sounds more like an Evangelical Christian tract than a decision emanating from a state Supreme Court…well, y’all can get in line behind me.
Matters such as these are supposed to be decided on matters of legal precedent, not Biblical verses, and yet…
the ruling will have some pressing implications for IVF clinics in the state, because any contract that would involve destroying fertilized eggs is seemingly now the same thing as a contract for murder, so just as invalid….
But this dipped-Baptist court could not be bothered with mulling the potential implications!
Evangelizing is very important to certain Christian sects, you know.
And it’s not just kooky Florida and ‘Bama, either. Post-Dobbs, 11 states have “fetal personhood” language in their laws, and fine states like South Carolina and Oklahoma are already been using their personhood definitions to do things like jail women for endangerment for drug use during pregnancy, or as in the since-dropped case from Ohio, charge a woman who had a miscarriage with “abuse of a corpse.”
Republicans who have succeeded in bans in their states are now all about expanding them, dialing the time frame back from 15 weeks to six, or to when you first lock eyes at a bar, as New Hampshire Republicans hoped to do.
Scary? Dystopian? Dehumanizing? why yes, yes it is.
So, I’m here to introduce an über-simple and virtually foolproof way to define the term “human being.” I humbly call it the “Cluth Theory of Humanity,” and I designed it to be two things:
deceptively simple, and
able to withstand the ridiculousness of religious (read: Christofascist) tests that, in effect, disenfranchise the bulk of a state’s residents.
The Cluth Theory of Life is…
If it can’t shoot a free throw, it’s not a human being.
Before y’all get your panties in a wad, you’ll note that my theory says only that, in order to be considered a human being, one must be able to SHOOT a free throw. The theory says nothing about making said free throw, nor does it specify the manner in which it was taken.
This is, of course, to account for disabilities and other maladies that may impact a person’s ability. Shooting a free throw is an individual act, ergo, the method in which said free throw is attempted must be left up to the individual. No limitations or strictures can be placed on the method one chooses to attempt a free throw. If one needs assistance, that should be granted.
Whatever method one chooses, if that person attempts a free throw, that ends the debate. It should be assumed that the person attempting it is a human being. If it rolls off the end of their nose, it’s an attempt. End of story.
(Ed. note: To my detractors, yes, I am well, aware that the above theory is borderline ridiculous and decidedly imperfect. Seriously, though, is it any more ridiculous and imperfect that what Christofascists on the Alabama Supreme Court have foisted upon Alabama’s women of child-bearing age? I think not.)
It’s certainly a helluva lot better than this lunacy:
Nothing says “rule of law” like citing a personal myth no one’s allowed to question as justification for an extremist interpretation of a law. That Christian privilege went underreported in stories about the ruling, even though, if a non-Christian used similar “logic,” it would be the sole focus of the story.
It’s telling that Parker uses “We” as synonymous with “The People of Alabama,” as if an Alabama law passed by conservative zealots truly represents everyone rather than a select group of fundamentalists, as if there’s nothing he can do to stop it, as if everyone belongs to the same faith… that also happens to be his own. (Last year, Parker welcomed Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht to the state with what amounted to a sermon celebrating Jesus.)
This is the same “pro-life” Supreme Court, by the way, that recently allowed a man to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental method that had never before been tried on humans. (Parker dissented in that particular case but six of his colleagues were fine with it.) The execution was widely seen as a disaster.
The effect of this ruling also can’t be overstated.
If the five main fertility clinics in Alabama can now be sued over embryos that aren’t implanted, for whatever reason, you can bet they’ll shut down altogether, depriving otherwise infertile couples from having a baby at all. That’s partly because, to save time and money, fertility clinics create multiple embryos in case an implanted one fails or the couple chooses to have more children in the future.
I’m not here to ridicule Christians. I am here to roast those hyper-religious fascists who forget…
the separation of Church and State,
the reality that America is NOT a Christian nation, but rather a secular nation in which one is free to be a Christian if that is the path one chooses,
their responsibility to interpret THE LAW and not Scripture,
and their responsibility to interpret the law in light of the fact that not all residents of the Yellowhammer State are screaming ninnies and fire-and-brimstone Evangelical Christians who still think the Bible is the inerrant and verbatim Word of God.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (AmeriKKKa, 2013), only 12% of Americans said in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was morally wrong. Now the belief that IVF is immoral has become the bedrock of the law in Alabama, and other states may be heading in that direction. The well-known Christofascist cabal of Right-wing nutjobs, Liberty Counsel, has issued a challenge to Floriduh to make their anti-abortion laws just as extreme as Alabama’s.
And maybe add a guillotine, yeah? Greetings from Gilead….
In 2022, Dusty Deevers, a pastor and now a state senator in Oklahoma, preached a sermon in which he condemned IVF, railed against the procedure, and claimed that embryos “were incarcerated in frozen prisons.” He referred to them as “cryo-orphans” and urged those present to love their “embryonic neighbors.”
Holy heart failure, Batman….
Deevers has also argued that parents using IVF were “waging an assault against God.” Or perhaps they were simply using the methods provided to them by the science God had revealed to the scientists and doctors treating them?
Then again, Deevers wants to drag America back to the 1600s….
Can any of the embryos Deevers was ranting about make a free throw? No.
Problem solved. STFU. Go back to the bubonic plague-infested hovel from whence you slithered.
Christianity isn’t the problem here, folks. It’s the people using it for their own sick and twisted ends who are fucking things up.
WOTTABUNCHAFUKKINMAROONS….
UPDATE: The fertility clinic at the University of Alabama-Birmingham has announced that it has stopped offering IVF procedures in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court decision.
Other fertility clinics in Alabama are weighing whether to follow suit as they consider their potential for legal exposure in light of the decision and what it may mean for their work.
By a 7-2 margin, Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker and the Court are imposing their religious beliefs on the child-bearing-age women of Alabama.
And a convincing argument can be made that embryos have more rights than women in the Yellowhammer State.
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The idea that an insensate blob of parasitic protoplasm with no more agency than a hair follicle is a baby is as stupid as one can get. Since something in the neighborhood of 50% of all such blobs never implant in the placenta, does that mean we start arresting every woman who takes a pee? ('cause that's where that 50% go.)
The story is told of Diogenes (who deliberately lived in a barrel, often wandered the streets of Athens naked, and publicly masturbated), in response to the philosophers definition of a human being as a "featherless biped", would go through the streets with a plucked chicken shouting, "Behold! A man!"