GeezerSue

Why would she NOT be a person? Just because she was not wanted?

No, Carlene, the IRS doesn't give a rat's ass about labor or potentiality. You are either a person (born live, at that) or not.

So, in answer to NARAL's ongoing question--"Who decides?"--the answer is that YOU decide...for everyone else? Therein lies the problem. I'm all about your deciding for YOU...but I think the rest of us ought to get the same privilege.

Well, I think it would be ok for the govenrment to step in and make a law to make people learn the difference between a person and a fetus.

This is a recent development, a result of the pandering to the views of the far right and hysterical reaction to horrid crimes. Besides who cares and who benefits--other than the emotionally involved--from such a ruling? First, what's the point? Killing Lacey Peterson wasn't enough? It's somehow worse if we call the fetus a person? Then, if the personhood argument were valid throughout government, the IRS would have to change its definintion of what a person is...and, so far--and as usual--when its money vs. values with the far-right-owned congress, money usually wins...and we are not--according to the IRS, a federal agency whose rules would, in many cases, outrank local laws-- --people, until we are born.

Thank you...a demonstrable lack of logic ALWAYS confuses me...glad you were able to see yours.

But since it isn't YOUR birth control, why is it YOUR concern?

So, it was the abortion that screwed up her life? Not the fact that she was 20-weeks pregnant at age 14? I'm confused.

Oh, yeah...and almost ALL of the anti-choice groups are--when you pin them down--also anti-contraception. It just that most of their blind followers, don't pin them down.

Well, Sweetie, you aren't the ONLY personal witness here. My big, blue sign and I were there, too. Along with a big bunch of gay guys (ACT UP LA) who wouldn't have had sex with a woman if she PAID them, and a bunch of husbands there with their wives...so there goes the rapist theory. (And while I've never been asked to blow up a church, I suspect that a number of "good, God-fearing Christians of the KKK-ilk HAVE been involved in such activities.) Not to mention that your source TOTALLY lacks credibility. If what you are saying is that you were pushed when you placed your body between a fully competent woman and her medical care because YOU assumed she MIGHT be having something done that YOU didn't approve of, then you--and any other self-serving, my-values-determine-what-you-can-do self-righteous pawn of the religion-factories--are really lucky you weren't in MY way. I'll go to my medical care regardless of what anyone else thinks...and anyone who decides to sacrifice their body to stop me may well find their body...you know...sacrificed. But that was THEIR choice. Oh...and anyone who thinks that the only service provided at those clinics is abortion is a moron. And WWJD? He'd provide free medical care to those who needed it and hang out with a hooker, last I heard.

There is NO debate as to whether Revisionist History is rampant among the culties, though. Article Xi MAY not have been included in Arabic, but it WAS in the English, as adopted by Congress.

I just got here and I'm still stuck on the "what's-wrong-with-the-Jim-Bob's" issue. That Wiki article tells us that Mr. Jim-Bob is a follower of Gothard (I love to mispronounce that name), a guy with a store-bought Ph.D. who thinks that all single people should live home with Mommy and Daddy LIKE HE DID, forever, and that owning a Cabbage patch Kid will make your daughter weird, mostly because CPK's have Satanic middle names. (Run-on sentence much?) And then the Jim-Bob's, using books authored by this genius, expose their children to each other and NO ONE ELSE. Is this a recipe for creating normal people? (Uh...no.) The good Reverend Got-hard, used to sell out the tents, but what with the sexual corruption charges he's admitted to...need I continue?...SSDD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gothard

I was at Disneyland many years ago, when some obviously out-of-control mom started POUNDING her son. As I was figuring out what to do, a group of kids...maybe junior high age...started yelling, "Child Abuse! Child Abuse!" and park security (which blends in so well they appear to simply "materialize") was all over the woman who was immediately escorted out of the area. I'd like to think she was arrested on the spot...maybe she would be now...

Indeed. I just wanted to bitch about the airline seat thing. LOL

Discrimination against the obese--or at least a preference for the non-obese--exists, and we're pre-programmed to engage in it. Some of it is part of our genetic makeup (I know, you're going to make me find the references) but most of it is cultural. HOWEVER, all the whining and moaning about "they made me buy two airline seat and that's discrimination" just gets on my last nerve. I have a sister who has a jinormous ass. Last time we checked, she could not close a hospital gown which measured 74" around. She has to choose her restaurants based on which ones have chairs without arms. We all "get" most of that and have had our own troubles fitting in places like that. But she and her husband went on a cruise a while back and they "got away with" buying only two seats on the plane. That ain't right for whoever is stuck in seat three. If, for whatever reason, your ass got too big for you to sit in an airline seat without using up your neighbors' "airspace," you need to buy another ticket or rent a car and drive yourself wherever you're going. When I was concerned that I was too big, we bit the bullet and went in business class. There were times I even went part of the way by train, to avoid the whole airline thing for short hauls on small planes...the train has really big seats. There's a lot of discrimination out there...most of it about stuff over which we have NO control. White people have many better chances at success than people of color do; tall people generally win debates; men have advantages in business that women wouldn't get. Weight is a little bit different. We DO have a chance to change. I wouldn't choose to lose weight so that someone else--about whom I don't give a rat's ass--thinks more positively about me. But the reality is that the assumptions strangers make about me are probably more positive than the assumptions they made when I weighed 113 pounds more than I do now. (Although--and this needs its own thread--there are many obese people who think the world will be perfect as soon as they lose x-pounds...because, they think, the ONE reason they have problems with others is their weight. And then they lose weight and find out that they were harboring a faulty assumption...and some people don't like them for entirely DIFFERENT reasons. LOL) But back to "fat discrimination." This is a "solvable" problem...while some of the OTHER reasons people suffer discrimination are not. IT ISN'T FAIR. IT ISN'T RIGHT. But most of us have the ability to make it go away.

By making her home into a business twenty years ago, she subjected herself to the laws in place at the time and any to come. There is no law about what she can do in or around her home, right? I mean her NEIGHBORS can smoke on their porches or in their living rooms, can't they? The law is not about her home; it's about her business. There are TREMENDOUS tax breaks for home day care providers...and there is a trade-off for being able to deduct parts of your mortgage and property tax and house cleaning and toilet paper and every trip to the grocery store that the rest of us can't take. And the trade-off is that she is subject to business-related laws. If smoking at home is that important to her, she can rent a business place or close down her day care business. BTW, here, she wouldn't be able to smoke within 50 feet of the entrance to a business...whether she owns it or not.

Good law...OLD law here on the left coast. I recently called the corporate office of the Assisted Living where my mom lives because a sfew of the old codgers were gathered on benches at the front doors--the automatic opeining front doors that open ALL the way anytime anyone passes near them inside or out--and GUESS where their smoke was going? They moved the people away from the door. (It isn't a nursing home, they aren't--most of them--at death's door...so they are well enough to perpetrate their suicides away from those who do NOT want to breathe that stuff. They moved the smoking area. My husband works for a municipality. The smokers used to be able to go outside. Now they must be 50' from a door or window. The lady who turned her home into a business made herself subject to those laws...her choice. Sue Formerly Ms. Camels and then Ms. Marlboro...currently not smoking.

Thanks, again, Peeps...

Thanks...and we used to live in Kitzingen...not far from you, I guess. We visited a couple of years ago, but our whole street was gone and new develpoment had taken over.

Thanks, Ladies. Yes, Mr. Sue likes that I feel like I used to feel...except it scares him, too. He keeps waking up thinking he went to bed with someone other than his wife and that he's about to be in BIG trouble. About the weight. My BMI is just under 33. I really am a big-boned girl--size 8 wedding ring right after Basic Training--not a lot of fat at that time in my life, but still BIG. I am currently about 45 pounds over my weight at the end of Basic Training. I'm older and probably a little shorter. Losing 30 more would put me at the middle of the overweight category. I think that's an ideal place for me at this stage of my life. And besides, that sweater is hiding a lot of tummy!! LOL But, thanks for the kind words.

I once tried to do a poll something like this one. Mine was a mess and I finally figured that I'd need three or more. One reason is that the band has few short-term complications. The REAL band problems begin two-and-a-half or three years out. AND, there are more and more banding doctors and patients...so there are more newbies with few problems. So, if 50% of the respondents have been banded less than a year, pretty much half the poll will respond "No Problems." But if you had a pool for people who had been banded three years or more, the stats would probably be quite different. For example, erosion takes a while to happen. A newly banded person with erosion would be rare. OTOH, someone banded three years, with NO problems is also rather rare. On another board where I hang out, MOST of the "senior" banded people have problems--some minor, some minor but recurrent and some major with a few band removals thrown in for good measure. They mostly seem to have adjusted to life with their problems, btw. I could not live with some of those routines, YMMV. (I can't remember to get an unfill before I get on a plane or not eat after 6:00 p.m., or raise the head of my bed, or remember to drink an esophagus-cleansing beverage at a certain time every night, or live totally dependant upon Prilosec and Maalox, and so on. Other people can, but that's just not me.) But, thanks for looking for the numbers. It takes patience to do all that!

Esophageal dilatation (I don't know why they couldn't just say "dilation," but they had to throw in an extra syllable) is, in my experience, pretty much as described above. But, be careful when you "interpret" the words "overeating" or "pouch packing," or the like. It is difficult to blame overeating when not much is bieng eaten and the weight keeps coming off, as it did early on in my case. I wasn't eating more than my doctor recommended or more than I needed to eat to lose weight, I was just eating more than my esophagus could process, once its function was hampered by the presence of the band. And that "more than my esophagus could process" amount might be as little as two spoons of Soup. So, we would go out to an early dinner (we do that on a VERY regular basis because I'm a lazy woman), order off the lunch menu, have two or three spoons of soup, and then decide to "save room" for the fish entree. When it arrived, I'd take one bite and get that deer-in-the-headlights look. More often than not, I was off to the restroom to bring UP what wouldn't go DOWN. Turns out, I wasn't "packing" food into the esophagus as a result of eating more than my stomach could handle...what I was doing was eating food that never made it to my stomach, but bounced around--down the esophagus and then back up--because the band was keeping the esophagus from doing its job. Finally, three weeks before my band was removed, this was captured on video with two MD's witnessing it, but that was LATER.) Then I'd get an unfill. And then a fill. And for two years this went on, until I decided I needed to do SOMETHING. And I had one band doctor who wanted me to join his support group so I could learn how life with the band was supposed to work. (I already knew...just like it HAD worked for me for eight months or so, until the band did its damage.) After over two years of HORRID restrictions--and the weight gain that went with an emptied band and the infamous "soup and ice cream diet"--with the band, I finally decided to have a revision to the Duodenal Switch (aka Biliopancreatic Diversion with Duodenal Switch) because I wanted a stomach, not a "pouch," and I didn't want Dumping Syndrome like some of my girlfriends have, and I wanted to eat a more normal diet. I had that revision surgery a year ago. The surgery--band out and DS performed took less than two hours--and I was in the hospital four days. It took TEN weeks before I lost all of those band-related symptoms, but once I did, my life began. (And during those ten weeks, I lost about 55 pounds, so it wasn't ALL misery.) For some people, the dilated esophagus (picture a funnel, upsidedown) goes away once they learn to eat smaller amounts and to eat slower. For others, it may be a signal that this is not going to be an easy ride. I hope you find the cause of your problem and are able to reverse it. It would not hurt, however, to have a Plan B in the back of your mind, because taking over two years to figure out what to do next was not my most brilliant move. Sue

Gee, Sunta...and I was feeling like some of that love was for me....oh, well.

I was always glad my mom didn't know about St. Scholastica.

Halloween next...all Saints' Day/All Souls Day just in time for when the days started getting shorter? How about Easter...what the hell do they think the bunny and the eggs are all about?