By Special Guest, Brooke Boucher, southcoast247.com correspondent Social Commentary 108
April 23, 2006
As you may already know I, Brooke Boucher, am taking over Craig Cares this week. I have always wanted to take over Craig’s column. Not because he’s bad at what he does - he’s actually rather good at doing what he does - but because I want the freedom to touch upon anything I want. With my column I have some guidelines. Craig has had the good fortune to have a free for all for some time, now it’s my turn. Welcome to Brooke Cares.
This week I have been glued to the TV. Who wouldn’t be, right? You have the tragedy at Virginia Tech; the weird voice mail message Alec Baldwin sent to his young daughter calling her, amongst other things, a pig; the five to four vote of the Supreme Court to uphold a law to ban partial birth abortions. With all this, and much more, floating around in the news world I am torn what to write about. So I will just touch on them all.
First things first, what happened at Virginia Tech is a terrible, terrible tragedy, but even more tragically you can’t get away from it on the news. Granted, I know that Americans like to know as much as possible about any given calamity so they can begin healing and moving on. I think that is healthy and normal. What I don’t find normal is the inordinate amount of time the news devotes to the tragedy daily. It is good to know the facts, but to keep bringing it up day after day after day is like kicking a dead dog. We know what happened, we all feel awful, and we now need to move on and work on a plan to safeguard our schools. Talking about how messed up the kid was, or releasing statements from his poor family isn’t, and shouldn’t be, part of that plan. We have to move on.
Next up, Alec Baldwin! Now I dig Alec Baldwin. He’s one of, if not the only, perpetually employed Baldwin. He’s on “30 Rock”, which is a good show, and for most of his career he has had my vote. After hearing his leaked voice message… not so much. I get that the guy is going through a messy divorce and doesn’t see his daughter enough. However, saying that an 11 year old is a “selfish thoughtless little pig,” is a tad bit much for me. The two sides of this argument are obvious. Either you think he should be stripped of his parenting rights, which I don’t agree with, or you think he was being a hot head who said things he really didn’t mean. My guess is that this celeb wishes he could take back his cruel words, but he can’t and now the whole world knows how vicious he can be. My punishment would simply be to apologize to his little girl, realize that verbal abuse can be traumatizing, and to deal with the negative publicity he is now receiving.
Last, but by no means least, the five to four vote from the Supreme Court to uphold a law to ban partial birth abortions. If any of you read my column, you can guess how I am going to feel about this. I call bullshit! The only reason partial birth abortion is being banned is so that there can be a precedent for reversing Roe vs. Wade down the line. Now some of you are Googling partial birth abortions to see what it is. Well as you may have just seen, it’s a later term abortion that has always been controversial due to the fact that the fetus has had a chance to form almost fully. This is most often done when a woman’s life is in danger because of her pregnancy. It is almost never done because someone decides they don’t want to be knocked up anymore, so at six months they have a partial birth abortion. The truth is I don’t like the idea of partial birth abortion. Yeah you got me, I admitted it. However, I understand that to embrace the idea that women have the right to choose, I have to include partial birth abortion. So while it might give me the chills to see how it is done, and I hope that I will never have to have anything like it done to me, I respect that it should be legal even if I never exercise that right. It should be legal because if it isn’t it will be a slippery slope for women. Other rights that define our sexual autonomy will begin to disappear. Eventually our bodies will be governed by the government rather than ourselves. I am not ready for that. So I am going to keep fighting, and I urge others to do the same.
That’s it faithful readers. That is Brooke Cares. I hope you had as much fun reading as I did writing.
As you may already know I, Brooke Boucher, am taking over Craig Cares this week. I have always wanted to take over Craig’s column. Not because he’s bad at what he does - he’s actually rather good at doing what he does - but because I want the freedom to touch upon anything I want. With my column I have some guidelines. Craig has had the good fortune to have a free for all for some time, now it’s my turn. Welcome to Brooke Cares.
