(May 1, 2013 – Beverly Hills, CA) HUSTLER Founder and Publisher Larry Flynt has announced his endorsement of Republican candidate Mark Sanford for U.S. Congress. He has also sent a maximum contribution of $2,600 to the Sanford for Congress campaign and extended a personal invitation to Sanford to meet with him and shake his hand.

Sanford, who gained national prominence in 2009 as governor of South Carolina when he abruptly abandoned his duties for a secret rendezvous with his mistress, is currently running against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District seat. The election will take place on May 7.

In a statement released today, Flynt calls Sanford “the sex pioneer of our time.” In Flynt’s eyes “no one has done more to expose the sexual hypocrisy of traditional values in America today. Sanford’s open embrace of his mistress in the name of love, breaking his sacred marriage vows, was an act of bravery that has drawn my support.” Chastising the Republican Party for not backing Sanford following his run-off victory, Flynt declared: “I am willing to step in and stand erect for Mark Sanford.”

Flynt further elaborated: “My endorsement has not been an easy decision for me. Even though Mark Sanford has emerged as the leader against sexual hypocrisy in American politics, he is a liar. He lied to his gubernatorial staff. He lied to his wife. He lied to his children. He lied to the people of South Carolina and to the press. Despite his journey down this Appalachian Trail of deceit, I support him not for his character, but for exposing the hypocrisy of traditional values. The liar has exposed the greater lie.” Flynt also commended Sanford’s supporters for “tossing aside lifelong convictions” and “teaching their children the invaluable lesson that traditional values are nothing more than a scam.”

Watch Larry’s Video on YouTube

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Every time the federal government can’t get its fiscal house in order, we start hearing about entitlement reform. Republicans in particular like to use that word entitlement because it sounds like somebody’s getting benefits they don’t deserve. Nothing makes the hardworking Joe angrier than people who think they’re “entitled” to something.

Don’t believe the bull. Those so-called entitlements include benefits that Americans worked hard for: Medicaid, housing assistance, student grants, food programs, child care, job training, and more. These programs make up the social safety net that keeps the middle-class backbone of our economy strong in tough times.

The only reason politicians on the corporate leash want to slash needed expenditures like these is to protect the huge wealth imbalance that lets the rich get richer while everybody else pays. Instead of extracting the last few cents from the needy, we need to clamp down on greed.

Yes, I’m wealthy, but I remember what it was like to be a regular guy sweating for every dollar. And I know that most people aren’t going to get rich no matter how hard they work. That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t keep up its end of the bargain. A 21st-century nation that lets its citizens slide into poverty and deprives its children of opportunity is taking a backward approach to history.

Don’t buy the right-wing, Tea Party nonsense that “entitlements” are a luxury we can’t afford. They’re a legal right and necessary for a civilized America.

Larry Flynt

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people children to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed.

LESSONS FROM THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

In the beginning was the Word…of one Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the controversial religious denomination commonly known as the Mormon Church. To this day, adherents revere Smith as a prophet who formulated The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ from ancient text inscribed on golden plates.

When 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney avows, “My faith is the faith of my fathers; I will be true to them,” the fathers he invokes are Joseph Smith and Smith’s successors.

In many authoritative biographies—namely those not written with the blessing of the Mormon establishment—Smith comes off as both a goodnatured grifter and a dangerous sociopath. According to ex-Mormon Kay Burningham—author of An American Fraud: One Lawyer’s Case Against Mormonism -the religion “was founded on deception and continues to build upon that deception.” She also asserts that Mormonism’s founders— Joseph Smith Jr. and family—“were opportunists driven to create an organization where they could acquire the social status and financial resources that they lacked.”

The story starts in 1823 when, as Joseph Smith Jr. proclaimed, an angel told him where to find sacred golden plates buried in a hill in upstate New York. However, according to Smith, it wasn’t until 1827 that he was allowed to extract the plates and begin translating what was engraved on them: a chronicle of God’s dealings with the descendants of a lost tribe of Israelites inhabiting the Americas from 2200 B.C. to 421 A.D.

Smith was mighty pleased: He had discovered God’s word, and he would bring the good news to the world. Witnesses say the religious zealot used seer stones to translate what was inscribed on the golden plates. However, skeptics suggest that Smith—a semiliterate farm boy schooled in the soaring language of the Bible—concocted The Book of Mormon out of his own fervid imagination.

This was no small achievement. Smith was a smart guy, and he had a family schooling in the art of cheating the gullible. His father, Joseph Sr., had been repeatedly charged with currency counterfeiting in Vermont in the 1820s. Joseph Jr. himself was hauled into court in the northeastern United States on multiple occasions. He was described in an 1826 New York legal proceeding as “a disorderly person and an impostor.”

According to historian Fawn Brodie, one of his preferred cons involved the help of his brother Hyrum. While visiting a neighboring household, Hyrum would secretly hide a valuable heirloom. When, days later, the victim complained that the prized object was missing, Hyrum came to the rescue. He volunteered his brother Joe Jr. to show up— for a small fee—and put “magic stones” into a hat. Joe would then put the hat over his face and stare into the stone-filled darkness to see where the lost item was—the location of which his faithful brother had already provided.

Smith said his ethical rule was, When the Lord commands, do it. This was convenient, as it was decreed by Joseph Smith that the Lord would only communicate with—you guessed it—Joseph Smith. Early on, he spoke of receiving a divine message about “plural marriage.” The Lord commanded that all Mormon men should take multiple wives and establish the tradition of polygamy. Smith’s wife at the time was skeptical.

The Mormon sect grew throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and so did the controversy. Land theft, bank fraud and cattle rustling were alleged. Historian Will Bagley describes what happened when the Mormons were forced to flee westward and resettle: “After stirring up a religious civil war in Missouri and being exiled to Illinois, Smith founded a kingdom on the Mississippi at Nauvoo, Illinois. Having secured a charter that made him ruler of a city-state and a wealthy land developer, Smith raised a private army, made himself

America’s first lieutenant general since George Washington and began seducing women and barely pubescent girls with an abandon that would make Bill Clinton blush.” Mormon converts began to look askance at sainted Joe, and today their accounts read like those of cult escapees. “When I embraced Mormonism, I conscientiously believed it to be of God,” a disaffected convert wrote in 1831. “I now know Mormonism to be a delusion.”

Mostly what the Mormon Church coveted was the property of converts and their free labor. Joseph Smith’s own personal secretary concluded that Smith and other Mormon leaders were “confirmed infidels who have not the fear of God before their eyes. They lie by revelation, swindle by revelation, cheat and defraud by revelation.”

Jailed on charges of treason, Smith—along with his brother Hyrum—ended up murdered by a lynch mob in Illinois in 1844. It’s not a surprising turn given the level of animosity that Mormons’ criminality had evoked among their preferred targets— the “filthy Gentiles” who disdained the upstart religion.

The Mormons fled still further west, looking for the Holy Land, their Zion, the paradise where they could settle without interference from the Gentiles. They discovered Zion in the sunblasted wilderness of Utah. That’s where the new prophet, Brigham Young, was presiding when 120 men, women and children traveling across Mormon territory by wagon train were slaughtered. This was the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, which historians believe was sparked by an apocalyptic hysteria that the federal government was planning to invade Utah and destroy Young’s people. The apocalypse never came to pass.

By the mid-1850s,W.M.F.Magraw—a personal friend of U.S. President Franklin Pierce—would conclude that civil law in Mormon territory was “overshadowed and neutralized [by an] ecclesiastical organization as despotic, dangerous and damnable as has ever been known to exist in any country…all alike are set upon by the self-constituted theocracy, whose laws, or rather whose conspiracies, are framed in dark corners.”

Years earlier, John Corrill—a onetime prominent Mormon official and a member of the Missouri legislature—authored A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints. Corrill, who was excommunicated in 1839, accused the Mormon leadership of “bad management, selfishness, seeking for riches, honor and dominion, tyrannizing over the people, and striving constantly after power and property.”

Laws undermined by conspiracies and outrageous privilege coupled with unbounded greed and power-maddened mismanagement: This sounds a lot like a description of Corporate America today. Perhaps this explains why our current Mormon Moment is really about the Mormon Church’s engagement and success in the corporatocracy.

In this context, think about Mitt Romney: Here is a man who, while heading the leveraged buyout firm Bain Capital, got rich as an opportunistic “vulture capitalist” by exploiting and plundering companies built on the hard work of others. Romney indeed keeps the faith of his fathers.

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Christopher Ketcham is a New York City-based freelance reporter who has written for Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Salon.com and many other publications and Web sites. He can be reached at CKetcham99@MindSpring.com. More of his work can be found at ChristopherKetcham.com.

By Brad Friedman

The Republican Party is once again pretending that Democrats are committing “voter fraud”—meaning people, perhaps tens of thousands, are voting illegally for Democratic candidates. At the same time, ironically, the GOP’s own nominee for President—Mitt Romney—appears to have committed voter fraud. And he’s not the only high-profile Republican to defraud the very system the GOP claims Democrats are violating. I have evidence of Romney’s real voter-fraud crimes. Republicans, on the other hand, are just making shit up.

Democrats should have seen the “legalization” of voter suppression by the GOP coming long ago. During a 1980 speech to thousands of Baptist preachers in Dallas, right alongside Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement was caught on videotape revealing the entire point of today’s new polling-place photo ID restrictions instituted in state after state by Republicans over the past year.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich admitted to the crowd of supposedly moral, Christian men. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.”

Weyrich, a cofounder of the Moral Majority and neoconservative Heritage Foundation, continued: “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Got that? For Republicans to win elections, they need to reduce voter turnout. And this year, they’ve legalized their plan to do it.

Here’s how: Weyrich also cofounded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This right-wing, billionaire-funded nonprofit brings together corporate lobbyists, advocacy groups and state lawmakers to secretly draft “model legislation” that is then pushed through statehouses around the country. One such model is the vote-suppressing polling-place photo ID restriction bills passed by more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures and signed by GOP governors in the wake of their party’s 2010 “wave election.”

The intent of the new restrictions on voting rights is clear. They are meant to keep African-Americans, Hispanics, urban dwellers, the elderly and students—all constituencies that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, yet who disproportionately lack the type of state-issued photo ID now required under these new laws—from being able to cast their once-legal vote.

Republicans pretend the new laws are meant to curb a Democratic “voter fraud” epidemic, but they’re lying. To date, proponents of the laws have been unable to show any historic examples of polling-place voter impersonation—the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by photo ID requirements.

Advocates of the restrictions point instead to a handful of ACORN’s tens of thousands of low-level registration workers who committed voter-registration fraud. But mandatory photo IDs do nothing to stop that type of fraud. [For more on ACORN, see companion article.] Republicans also point to absentee-ballot fraud. But again, photo IDs do nothing to stop that kind of fraud.

Indiana was the first state in the Union where Republicans successfully instituted photo ID restrictions. During the first election under that new law, legally registered college students, elderly nuns and even World War II veterans were turned away from the polls without being allowed to vote. Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Americans are misinformed enough to support restrictive electoral laws. But that’s likely because they don’t realize some 21 million of their fellow, legally registered voters do not possess the type of ID now mandated under the new restrictions.

Proponents argue: “You need a photo ID to buy cigarettes or alcoholic beverages or to get on an airplane! So why not to vote?!” However, the truth is you don’t need a photo ID to buy cigs or booze. I’ve been doing both for years and can’t remember the last time I was carded. Neither is one needed to board a commercial airplane. Yes, it might make your life a bit easier, but airlines aren’t dumb enough to turn away some 21 million potential customers. They’ve found ways to accommodate those millions who do not have a photo ID.

More to the point, all of those things are privileges—unlike voting, which is a Constitutional right. Republicans, on the other hand, are hoping you’re dumb enough to fall for their anti-American, antidemocratic scam. They also hope you don’t hear about voters like 84-year-old Ruthelle Frank, an elected town official in Brokaw, Wisconsin. She was born at home and therefore never had a birth certificate, which is now required to receive a so-called free voter ID at Wisconsin’s Division of Motor Vehicles. Frank, disabled, has never had a driver’s license. She is listed in the state registry, however, so for $20 (an unconstitutional “poll tax”), she’s been told, she can have a birth certificate issued. That will, in turn, allow her to qualify for a “free” ID.

Sadly, Frank’s name is misspelled in the state registry. So it would take an additional $200 to have that correction made. Thus, for a mere $220, Frank—who voted without problem for 63 years—may receive her “free” ID required by Wisconsin’s new law…assuming she finds someone to drive her to the DMV.

It’s also impossible for Wisconsin resident Bettye Jones, who was born in Tennessee, to get her “free” ID. The 77-year-old African-American recently moved to Wisconsin from Ohio, where she had a valid driver’s license. But Wisconsin officials won’t accept an out-of-state driver’s license for voting, and despite a “thorough search,” Tennessee officials were unable to locate her birth certificate, according to the lawsuit Jones has filed. Without that birth certificate, she cannot vote in Wisconsin. Two court cases have found that the voter-suppression law violates Wisconsin’s constitution. We’ll see if the state’s Republican-majority Supreme Court agrees.

Then there’s Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American in Tennessee. Nothing in her state’s constitution seems to disallow the new GOP law. So Cooper, who says she voted without any problems throughout the Jim Crow era in the South, is now facing one for the first time. Cooper doesn’t drive, but she does have a birth certificate. However, she was denied a “free” ID at the DMV because her itself—who had manufactured fraudulent voter registrations instead of doing the hard work of signing up genuine voters. Nobody ever cast a single vote in any election via an inappropriate registration by an ACORN worker.

In early 2011, Virginia’s Gingrich for President campaign submitted a large number of fraudulent petition signatures in its futile effort to get the candidate on the state’s 2012 Presidential primary ballot. In a statement aired by CNN in December 2011, Gingrich admitted that “1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud.”

Gingrich, whose tally of bogus signatures was far worse than that of the now-defunct ACORN, failed to turn in the “one guy” who he claimed was responsible. An official at the Virginia State Board of Elections told me that, if true, what Gingrich described is “definitely an illegal act.” And earlier this year, an official at the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia confirmed to me “that there is an investigation underway.”

Here’s a quick summary of other recent serious fraud allegations and convictions against high-profile Republicans:

•In February 2012, Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State Charlie White was declared guilty of having registered and voted from a residence where he did not actually live. In a separate civil case, White was ordered removed from office by a circuit court judge, who ruled that the defendant’s fraudulent registration made him ineligible to be on the 2010 ballot. It was the felony convictions, however, that forced White out of office. Other than that, he received a slap on the wrist: one year of home detention.

•In March 2011, then-GOP Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman was also identified as having committed apparent voter fraud. The former governor of Utah remained registered to vote in that state well over a year after he had been appointed U.S. ambassador to China. As the Salt Lake Tribune noted: “Huntsman voted by absentee ballot for last year’s [2010] general election using the state-owned mansion on South Temple as his Utah residence— months after Governor Gary Herbert settled into the historic building and Huntsman purchased a home in Washington, D.C.”

•In February 2012, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana)—who, like Charlie White, hails from the first state in the nation to implement voter-suppressing photo ID laws—was accused by a group of Tea Partiers (who find him too moderate) of having committed voter fraud. It seems Lugar had been registered to vote at the address of the Indianapolis house he reportedly sold decades ago. Lugar hasn’t resided in the Hoosier State since moving to the Washington, D.C., area after first winning a Senate seat in 1976.

•Representative Todd Akin (R-Missouri), who is vying for the U.S. Senate this year, has been voting for years, according to the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, from a house in an electoral district where he does not actually reside. The property, the newspaper found, is vacant and has been long scheduled for suburban redevelopment. Nevertheless, Akin has continued to use it as his voting address for some seven elections, ever since the congressman and his family moved to their new house 18 miles away. BTW: Akin supports polling-place photo IDs for everyone else.

•In a ham-handed attempt to demonstrate that polling-place voter fraud exists in New Hampshire, despite election officials’ assertions to the contrary, GOP propagandist and federally convicted criminal James O’Keefe led a videotaped conspiracy to commit just such a fraud during the Granite State’s “First in the Nation” primary last January. Unamused, a Republican mayor called for O’Keefe and his coconspirators to be “arrested and prosecuted.” New Hampshire’s attorney general is investigating O’Keefe on charges of voter fraud.

•In what appears to have been an attempt at massive election fraud, Charlie Webster—chair of the Maine Republican Party—publicly announced Mitt Romney the winner of the state’s 2012 GOP caucuses (by just 194 votes) before hundreds of voters in two different counties had even convened. Moreover, dozens of towns that had already held caucuses were fraudulently reported by the party as having had no voters at all. Several months earlier, Webster had named hundreds of student voters as having committed fraud when they hadn’t. An investigation by Maine’s Republican secretary of state determined that the students were, in fact, all legal voters. Apparently hoping to dissuade them from voting, he nonetheless sent them threatening letters.

•In a hilarious turn of events, religious supporters of Newt Gingrich charged that religious supporters of then- Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum rigged an informal election during a secret meeting near Austin, Texas, last January. The confab had been called by “religious conservative leaders” to coalesce their support around a single GOP alternative to Mitt Romney.

Other examples of high-profile GOP voter fraud include, among others, the 156-year sentences imposed on eight top election officials in Clay County, Kentucky, who had changed the votes tallied by electronic voting systems; the guilty plea of a registration firm’s owner accused of hoodwinking registered California Democratic voters into switching their allegiance to the GOP in 2008; and neocon superstar Ann Coulter’s alleged multiple cases of demonstrated wrongdoing, including falsifying her address in Florida.

Not a single one of the above instances of election fraud would have been deterred or prevented by the polling-place photo ID restrictions Republicans have instituted, or are attempting to institute, in at least a dozen states across the country prior to the 2012 Presidential election. Meanwhile, the epidemic of election fraud by prominent GOP figures continues unabated.

Apparently Arizona Republican Representative Ben Quayle is a wild and crazy guy. First it was revealed that the son of former Vice President (and dimwit) Dan Quayle once wrote a column for a soft-core porn site. Now the press reports he was involved in the Sea of Galilee skinny dipping incident that has threatened the election prospects of Kansas politician Kevin Yoder. This news couldn’t come at a worse time for Quayle who is battling Representative David Schweikert in a bitter primary battle to be decided this coming Tuesday, August 28. Although Schweikert has served his district well, Quayle decided to challenge him when he was, in effect, redistricted out of a job. To become eligible for the seat Quayle moved into a home owned by his parents.

FOR MORE ON THIS STORY:

www.abc15.com

www.politico.com

seeingredaz.wordpress.com

By Kimberly Cheng

Republican lawmakers and Bible-thumping extremists are championing the Personhood Amendment in more than a dozen states across the nation. By defining that human life begins at conception, the measure essentially grants full legal rights to fertilized eggs. If passed, the Personhood Amendment would not only ban virtually all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, but also oral contraceptives, IUDs and other methods to prevent pregnancy—a devastating blow to the 99% of women in the United States who use some form of birth control. A victory would also prohibit married women from conceiving via in vitro fertilization and outlaw embryonic stem-cell research.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has declared that personhood measures “erode women’s basic rights to privacy and bodily integrity, deny women access to the full spectrum of preventive healthcare and undermine the doctor-patient relationship.” Even a resounding rejection in 2011 by Mississippi voters and a pair of defeats in Colorado haven’t been able to quell the advocates of “life begins at conception,” most notably Colorado-based Personhood USA. Here are at least 15 states where you might see the Personhood Amendment on your ballot this year: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.

Here’s a list of a dozen states where abortion is virtually illegal, thus endangering women’s health and freedom.

Alabama: Although many antichoice organizations and leaders have promised that recriminalizing abortion would not result in the prosecution and imprisonment of women, the claim that human eggs, embryos and fetuses have separate legal rights has provided the basis for the arrest of about 60 women. They’ve been prosecuted under a 2006 state law that was designed to provide special penalties for people who bring children into meth labs.

Idaho: The number of abortion providers fell from seven in 2005 to four in 2011. The first arrest wasn’t a doctor but a mother of three who was charged with “unlawful abortion” for ingesting pills to induce a miscarriage because of the state’s recent ban on post-20-week abortions. The woman believed she was only 14 weeks pregnant.

Iowa: Having accidentally fallen down some stairs, a pregnant woman went to a hospital. After mentioning to a nurse that she had briefly considered abortion early in her pregnancy, the nurse called the cops, claiming the mishap was attempted selfabortion. The accident victim was arrested.

Utah: A 17-year-old—living without electricity or running water in a rural area—was impregnated by an older man who is now facing charges of using her in child pornography. The girl paid another man $150 to beat her in the stomach. It didn’t work, but she was charged with criminal solicitation for murder. (It’s worth noting that at the time, there were only seven abortion providers in the entire state.)

Louisiana: This state has a law allowing abortion clinics to be shut down for any violation of any regulation no matter how minor. Not surprisingly, there are a whole bunch of edicts that apply solely to abortion providers. So far, a clinic in New Orleans has been forced to close.

Kansas: When Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in 2009, a family physician offered to continue performing abortions at his Wichita clinic. She was barraged with threats and harassment. The U.S. Department of Justice tried to get a restraining order on one antichoice extremist who threatened to kill her, but a federal judge denied the request. Kansas now has only one licensed abortion clinic, in Highland Park.

Virginia: This state uses legal harassment to run abortion providers out of business. In addition, antichoice zealots have been trying to interfere with the U.S. Department of Health’s decision to allow abortion clinics to operate. If the antichoice advocates succeed, at least 17 of 22 clinics will have to shut their doors.

Mississippi: This state has only one abortion clinic and Governor Phil Bryant recently signed a bill that would effectively shut it down. Meanwhile, Rennie Gibbs—a 15-year-old who gave birth to a stillborn baby—is now facing the possibility of life in prison. When prosecutors learned of her cocaine habit, they charged Gibbs with the “depravedheart murder” of her child.

Indiana: A woman who was abandoned by her boyfriend had two mental breakdowns then tried to commit suicide while pregnant. She later gave birth to a baby that survived only four days. The mother was charged with murder— an attempt not only to criminalize abortion but also to set the legal groundwork for prosecuting women for murder if they terminate their pregnancies.

Arizona: The ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project has called this state’s antiabortion law the “most extreme bill of its kind.” That’s because it cuts the time period for a legal abortion to 18 weeks since the government considers life to begin from the last day of the woman’s menstrual cycle. Not only does it defy science, but such an early cutoff date precludes the detection of any fetal abnormalities that might suggest an abortion is advisable. The bill also specifies a mandatory ultrasound—requiring insertion of a vaginal probe!—for anyone seeking an abortion. In addition, her doctor is obligated to show the ultrasound to the pregnant woman and provide her with a photo of the unborn baby.

Ohio: Legislation that would ban voluntarily terminating any pregnancy when the fetus has a heartbeat has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, but if the bill becomes law, it could essentially criminalize all abortions in this state. In many pregnancies, there’s a detectable heartbeat before a woman notices that her period is late.

South Dakota: In 2011, Republican Governor Dennis Daugaard signed a law requiring a three-day waiting period as well as consultation with a registered antichoice pregnancy help center before a woman can have an abortion. Since there aren’t any antichoice centers willing to counsel abortion patients, the law in effect bans abortion. Planned Parenthood, which runs the only abortion clinic in the state, has been seeking an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced while its lawsuit is pending.

Meanwhile, nearly 36% of patients at Fargo, North Dakota’s only abortion clinic come from out of state, mostly South Dakota. And to avoid the hassle in Ohio, women have been traveling to clinics in Detroit. When it comes to getting a safe abortion, the name of the game is Musical States.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN POLITICS ENTERS THE WOMB

by Paul Krassner

The Dinosaur Follies—better known as the 2012 Republican Presidential primaries—sucked so badly that the candidates finally turned themselves inside out. Most disgusting was the way they all pandered to their fanatical, antichoice constituents. Ironically, those same puritan politicians supposedly promoting small government also thought it was just fine to force new laws into countless unwilling vaginas.

My Campaign Pandering Award goes to Mitt Romney. He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that deemed abortion a woman’s fundamental right under the Constitution. And yet in 1994, when Romney was running for the U.S. Senate, he came out in favor of choice for women. Freelance journalist Suzan Mazur revealed he’d admitted to Mormon feminist Judith Dushku that “the brethren” in Salt Lake City told him he could take a pro-choice position and that, in fact, he probably had to in order to win an election in a liberal state like Massachusetts.

While Romney now believes that life begins at conception, Rick Santorum believes that life begins at foreplay. He has gone way beyond taking a fanatical stand against a woman’s right to abortion. Santorum is also against contraception even though that would prevent the need for an abortion. And he vows to “ban all pornography”—or as I call it, “masturbation helper”—despite the fact that porn would negate the need for contraception. Basically, Santorum is against pleasure itself, but he is for thought control.

When abortion was illegal in this country, women had no option but to seek out back-alley butchers to perform the procedure. If there was a botched surgery, and the patient had to be hospitalized, the police were called; they wouldn’t allow a doctor to provide a painkiller until the woman divulged the information they sought.

In 1962, a Look magazine article stated, “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ abortionist. All of them are in business strictly for money.” But in my own magazine, the Realist, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist who was known as “The Saint.” Patients from around the country came to his office in Ashland, Pennsylvania. Dr. Spencer had been performing abortions for 40 years, originally charging five dollars and never charging more than a hundred. He rarely used the word pregnant. Rather, he would say,“She was that way, and she came to me for help.” He talked about “the voice of the uterus.”

Lugging my gigantic Webcor tape recorder, I took a five-hour bus trip from New York City to Ashland. It was a small town, and Dr. Spencer’s work was not merely tolerated, but the community also depended on it. The hotel, the restaurant, the dress shop all thrived on the extra business that came from his out-of-town patients.

At his clinic, Dr. Spencer built facilities for African-American patients who weren’t allowed to obtain overnight lodging elsewhere in Ashland. A sign on the ceiling over his operating table said “Keep Calm.” After my interview with Dr. Spencer was published in the Realist, I began to get phone calls from scared, desperate women. They all were in search of a safe abortionist. It was preposterous that they felt compelled to contact the editor of a satirical magazine, but they simply didn’t know where else to turn.

With Dr. Spencer’s permission, I referred them to him. At first, there were only a few calls each week, then several every day. I had never intended to become an underground abortion referral service, but I wasn’t going to stop just because the next issue of the Realist would be containing an interview with somebody else.

A few years later, Pennsylvania state police raided Dr. Spencer’s clinic and arrested him. He remained out of jail only by the grace of politi- cal pressure from those he’d helped. Dr. Spencer was finally forced to retire from his practice, but I continued mine, referring callers to other physicians he’d recommended.

From time to time, I’d be offered money by a woman seeking an abortion, but I never accepted it. And whenever a doctor offered a kickback, I refused. But I’d insist that he give a discount for the same amount to those patients referred by me.

Eventually I was subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities to appear before grand juries investigating abortion providers. On both occasions, I refused to testify, and each time the D.A. tried to frighten me into cooperating with the threat of arrest.

In Liberty, New York, my name had been extorted from an abortion patient by threatening her with arrest. That’s why one morning at around six o’clock, there was a knock on my door. With reluctance, I was soon being driven a hundred miles to Liberty’s district attorney by the subpoena-waving man who’d awakened me. I was delivered to the D.A., who told me that the doctor had confessed everything on tape. He then gave me until two o’clock that afternoon to change my mind about testifying or else the police would come to take me away.

“I’d better call my lawyer,” I said. I went outside to a public phone and called not a lawyer but the doctor. “That never happened,” he said. I returned to the D.A.’s office and told him that my lawyer said to continue being uncooperative. Then I just sat there waiting for the cops. “They’re on their way,” the D.A. kept warning me. But at two o’clock he simply said, “Okay, you can go home now.”

Bronx District Attorney Burton Roberts took a different approach. In September 1969, he told me that his staff had found an abortionist’s financial records that showed all the money I had received. Roberts went on to say that if I cooperated with the grand jury, he’d grant me immunity from prosecution.

The D.A. extended his hand. “That’s not true,” I said, refusing to shake hands with him. If I had ever accepted any money, I’d have no way of knowing that he was bluffing. Roberts was angry, but he finally had to let me go.

On my behalf, attorney Gerald Lefcourt filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of New York State’s abortion law. Lefcourt pointed out that the district attorney had no power to investigate the violation of an unconstitutional law, and therefore he could not force me to testify. In 1970, I became the only plaintiff in the first lawsuit to declare New York State’s abortion laws unconstitutional. “Later, various women’s groups joined the suit,” Lefcourt recalls, “and ultimately the New York legislature repealed the criminal sanctions against abortion prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.”

Dr. Spencer never knew about that. He had died in 1969. An obituary in the New York Times acknowledged the existence of his abortion clinic. The obituary in Ashland’s local paper did not. When I interviewed Dr. Spencer, I asked, “Do you have any idea about how many actual abortions you’ve performed during all these years?”

“To be accurate,” he replied, “it’s 27,006.” The figure, he added, included many women who had been impregnated by police and priests alike.

I never kept records of how many referrals I made, but I’d estimate at least a thousand. At one point I thought the FBI might be listening to my phone calls, and I spoke with a telephone operator to see if there was a way I could find out. She asked me why I thought my line was being tapped, and I said, “Because I refer women to doctors who perform abortions.”

It turned out that the operator was pregnant and didn’t want to be. I was glad to help her out. No wonder my religion is Coincidence.

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Paul Krassner edited his satirical magazine the Realist from 1958 to 2001. When People magazine called him “father of the underground press,” he immediately demanded a paternity test. Krassner, who was a cofounder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) and a fellow traveler of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, has authored several books. Recently, the writers’ organization PEN honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Krassner also publishes the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster available at PaulKrassner.com.