I’m proud to be an adopted son of Oklahoma, today.  Glad to be invited among those who pray, those who keep reality firmly in view, those who admit no exceptions to the dignity of humanity, those who take costly stands in difficult times; to live in a place where steps can be taken, and improved on, to right the wrongs that blight our society.  To make us a little less like the evils we alternately reprehend and patronize in “others” kept safely at bay by TV screens, book covers, and oceans.  

To free ourselves from “subtle conspiracies of worldliness” a little at a time.  Even if the steps are small.

Happy, that is, to read this story:

Oklahoma has become the second state to ban a common second-trimester abortion procedure that critics describe as dismembering a fetus.

Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed the legislation Monday after it was overwhelmingly approved by the House and Senate. The abortion measure prohibits doctors from using forceps, clamps, scissors or similar instruments on a live fetus to remove it from the womb in pieces. Such instruments are used in dilation and evacuation procedures performed in the second trimester.

The bill would ban the procedure except when necessary to save a woman’s life. Critics say the procedure is often the safest to terminate pregnancies during the second trimester.

(source: Oklahoma governor signs measure banning abortion procedure | News OK)

Sure, neither AP nor News OK can quite handle the amount of torque required to treat such an obvious and wholesome (and still wholly inadequate) limitation on the brutal and gruesome slaughter of innocents–note that “critics” are cited twice, with opposite valences, without clear referents, and yet in both cases the drift of the sentence is that actually dismembering babies old enough to have members to be torn apart and crushed is somehow less serious and more justifiable than one would think, given untutored access to reality.  Reality, however, shines through; it is just impossible to talk about this kind of homicide without accidentally calling it, well, homicide that cannot possibly be considered accidental, unpremeditated, or justified by guilt (certainly not from the perspective of those who make money, often ruthlessly exploiting desperate and conflicted mothers, by performing such procedures).

It’s really not propaganda, folks to call tearing the members off a living baby “dismemberment”; the Supreme Court justice who wrote the following is no right-wing stooge:

The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb [sic]. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.

(source: Democrats Are the Real Abortion Extremists)

If we don’t have the basic decency and courage to make murder illegal, then we can at least make obviously brutal murder illegal.  It’s a start.

More, Oklahoma!  More!