 Hi my name is Sandy Baird and I'm here with What's Going On which is a discussion about current events which are broiling our country, our state and our world and I'm here with Pete Garitano who has, has agreed to comment on these events with me today and that's and so I'm hope that this will be shown later so that everybody will get a chance to see this show. Today we're going to start with an article that I read in the New York Times over the weekend which made the point, an interesting point of that in the current political climate there appears to be a war against women and girls which is going on on both the left and the right especially that has become obvious with the overturn of Roe B. Wade and other issues which are linked to gender issues which are also occurring mainly from the left. So we'll start with the attack on women and girls from the right and that is with the overturn of Roe B. Wade. Not certain that Pete and I see it in the same way but anyway we'll start there right so what do you think? How do you analyze the overturning of Roe B. Wade? Well I'm not an attorney or a constitutional expert and I know, I know the reasons that were stated and there's disagreement on that. Certainly you disagree with the reasons. I personally don't think it's going to be a big issue because I think most people had already picked their side before this happened and most states that had picked their side the people either unhappy or happy with it the majority of the people just like any issue I don't agree with it because I've always been pro-choice but I really think what's happening yeah certainly you will look at it as an attack on women's rights I agree with that but the Democrats I think are trying to use it the best they can because right now the cards are stacked against them because almost all their other policies have been a disaster and cause you know the last two years let's just say starting with Biden and a lot of people are ready to jump ship jump parties because of that so this is their one thing I think that they in the last two years feel like they can ruffle some feathers of the basically the fencers I mean we know it all always comes down to the people who would change not the ones that have always voted Democrat always voted Republican they're most likely but then there's like the five or ten percent in the middle that swing the elections depending on what the hot topics are right now so the abortion thing is a hot topic with the liberals the left and the Democrats but I but it's how much mileage they can get out of it is gonna be the big thing and you know I mean personally I think what's happening to the Supreme Court justices is not helping the case you know because it's making it's making the left look like what they always accused the right of doing like extreme violence and all this stuff and and so you know if I was if I was in charge which I never will have the Democratic Party I would say hey cool it I would too and I'm not in charge either stuff because yeah the window-blasting and the confronting and restaurants of the Supreme Court justices is not helping your case to make your side look civil and sane well there's also an attack on the court itself but let me talk a little bit about what I think happened with the overturn of row and that is that it was based on to me an improper legal theory now there's nothing you can do about it nothing I caution some of my friends this morning this struggle is over it now this issue returns to the state and we have to make each and every state safe for women and girls however I also do believe that because of the political agenda of the court that's why it was overturned because I think they overturned it based on really shaky grounds and this is why because what it does is disempower women and girls it takes away their right to make important medical decisions in their own conscience with a dot with a doctor or without a doctor it takes away in other words the same rights that a male would have a male has the decision-making power doesn't a male to go to a doctor and make choices in the best interest of his health correct even if it involved the vasectomy even if it involves some kind of anything to do with their reproductive life they have the ability to make that choice in the privacy of their doctor's office with a doctor right and the government has no real right to interfere with that choice correct and it doesn't go to the legislature it is a male's human right to make his own medical decisions in his own interest so when this rose first argued about it was argued on the basis of the 14th amendment which gave all persons born in the United States the equal protection of the law and also guarantees of due process so it guaranteed to women due process and also to their rights as a born person to be protected by the U.S. Constitution all of a sudden this disempowerment says that a woman cannot make those choices if abortion is recommended by her doctor or in her own conscience she can't make that choice anymore if she lives in certain states because abortion now has been criminalized and so a woman just can't make those choices about a termination of a pregnancy in those case in those states right so it's denying her that human right now the opposition would argue that so what is now going to be decided on in each and every state legislatures okay my argument is legislatures have no business deciding on the human rights of persons no business they cannot decide for instance that your speech is so dangerous that you can't have the rights to free speech because that is an inalienable right just as women have in my view the inalienable right to make important medical decisions in their own conscience and with their own doctor now that's why i think their reasoning was wrong i also think it was totally political we knew when trump was elected that this was going to happen correct that was we knew it he said it and so that's what happened i believe it's because in that race hillary clinton was not a particularly strong candidate so i believe that's why trump got elected elections have consequences he got the judges he wanted and it's a done deal except on a local level now we have to fight if we're interested in women's rights and by the way this emphasis on abortion rights i think was wrong from the start these are the rights of women and girls to make their own medical decisions so emphasizing that it's only about abortion it isn't it's about their rights to make important medical decisions which have been evaporated and that's why it disempowers women at a very vulnerable time it says to a woman who is pregnant maybe newly pregnant well you can't you have to carry this child to term regardless of the condition of the fetus regardless of the of her own health condition period there are cases i'm not certain how accurate of ten-year-old girls being pregnant against their will where are they going to go if they live in certain states which abandon abortion right okay so um and there have been cases like that in other countries there was one reported also in this country but i don't know if it's accurate i just heard that it might not be accurate so you brought up the opposition i'm gonna i'm gonna play the opposition for a while even though that's not my and i think it's you had previously said the problem was the argument was always the wrong argument and you said it shouldn't have been the abortion argument right the argument has really always been you're killing a life yeah okay okay so that's the argument you you say that they should have avoided it was just should have been about women's rights exactly and the other argument was when which also became a an area of contention with the the right is that is that the heartbeat rule which i believe is 12 weeks now i don't think so i think it's earlier than that and now it's i think it's 12 and 24 but anyway there's the heartbeat rule and then there's the viable fetus rule meaning that that if a creamy was born they could survive and that's about the six month rule i believe so it's like the three months six months yeah it's like three six and nine yeah and veron already had one of the most liberal laws in the country one of only i think six no it did not have any laws about it no no no right now if you look at what the states allowed uh-huh vermont was one of the few states that allowed it to to term most of the states either have the 12 week or the 24 week but you're mistaken about that what do you mean i'm sorry the vermont supreme court does not make at this point before i think there's a legislative attempt to change it this before that vermont made no decision about that it was simply a medical decision abortion and what's i'm saying there is no no no there was nothing there and so it remained a private decision between a woman and her doctor if it was a late term abortion if it was that it was still a decision a medical decision between a woman and her doctor and many doctors would say no i can't do that that's the way it was and even you know what you're ignoring also pete is that sometimes late term abortions have to happen medically i'm not ignoring it i'm just telling you but you are you're saying that i'm telling the view of the right the view of the right have the right to go to a doctor about it what about late term abortion i'm just saying the view of the right wing yes people right right i understand some of them some of them would have been okay with the 12 week or but but a lot of people said they got too extreme by by not having any rules we agree that there should be no rules because it's a woman's choice no it's not a sometimes it's a medical necessity but put it that way it's right and now we have a bill we should talk about this so you don't get too far off track that is being presented before the voters this fall to make a constitutional amendment for a woman's right to reproductive liberty liberty it's just yeah liberty no liberty and so where do you stand on this because i have i have opinions about this also my position is that um women i don't think it even should be in public policy remember that this is my i agree we do there okay it's not a question of a constitutional amendment abortion should be decriminalized once you put it in the and by the way the only criminal sanction on abortion was against a doctor okay a doctor could be penalized even sent to jail if he or she performed an abortion if a woman did it herself there was no crime so there's no homicide involved in the way it used to be okay now it's in public policy correct now everybody has a chance to vote on this okay so it says i believe reproductive liberty and and people are going to be as it's called prop five and it's going to be part of the now the public debate which i think is a really big mistake because i think it it probably includes abortion but it also includes this i think i don't know for sure because the language is so vague correct language is very vague we don't do we have it it says it says children yeah i know i have it on my phone it says women and children okay so obviously we talked about it's possible for a 10 or 12 year old girl to be pregnant that she should be allowed to do what she wants with that pregnancy do what is necessary in her own best interest yeah okay but the way the language is written there's other possibilities because it says reproductive liberty so does that mean a 12 year old girl could say i want to sterilize myself take my uterus out that's the question i would have about this bill i know and i don't i mean the language is so vague right i read a boston globe article there's this is not the only state which is doing this by the way other states are doing it so i read a boston globe article that really kind of shed some light on at least the interpretation in other states and other people are arguing that reproductive liberty and there's also a second part i believe for a person to pursue the course of their own life a person right so does that mean that they can consent to even this what's called gender affirming surgery does that mean that they can consent to hormone treatment or when they're when they're 12 yeah so so you think you said in the vermont bill it says a pretty mean it's not just women i thought it was pretty much women would like women's no it's persons i thought it said women's reproductive freedom it doesn't it says reproductive liberty in the first place and then i believe it goes on to say maybe you could look it up it goes on to say that a person has the right to and should include men and women in that point well no so my big problem with the bill is we just went through two years of covid i know and and and i i like the idea for people to have my body my choice but it should be a blanket thing no i think it made a made a big mistake and i think that that this is a situation where i you know i would agree with the other side of spectrum that yeah well wait a minute so a woman has a person has the right to do what they want with their reproductive body but i have to but other parts of my body i don't have any rights over that's what it's saying only my reproductive parts it says it says if i if i um we really should have it i wish we had it i believe what i saw was reproductive liberty right thing and then there was a second part to it that said persons have the right to determine the course of their own lives without interference from the state essentially enough that's gonna include okay first of all okay but it's first of all you're right yeah i think that there has been a fatal contradiction in this whole argument from day one one the the i think that the more left that's what i'm trying to say the left has argued mainly uh it's this is also a partisan argument pretty much between the democrats and the republicans so the democrats um and the whatever we call the left in this country have argued for really i think wrongly for abortion rights i always think they should have argued for women's rights and girls' rights to determine the course of their pregnancies in fact it shouldn't be women in plural a pregnant woman a pregnant girl should be allowed to make that would solve the problem that i have with it yes yes and it doesn't mean it's an end it is not a group thing it's a it's a decision made by an individual woman or girl with her doctor and it shouldn't even be in public policy all right but they put it into public policy well it's being it's being touted in the amongst the all the backers of it that this is the only way vermonters will be able to ensure rights to abortion right and there are other ways right right and so it'll probably pass because vermont well well because of this but i think that we were talking about there's huge questions about the language and what it really means you know i mean right i mean would you want your 12 year old child to go like go into a doctor and say you know i really don't or or well that's what the globe pointed out could that's the left's problem okay you're saying that's the left's problem they're going to maybe be four part of this and maybe they are in favor of a young person uh underage going to a doctor and getting hormone treatment maybe they are without parental consent maybe they are but certainly the right is not interested in that well no we know in vermont there's there's been a bill introduced um they changed the numbers now i think 659 by seven or eight women that are in the house that they want to have um children able to do this without parental do what hormone treatment or not surgery but hormone treatments or puberty blockers it says without parental consent and it has no age limits so theoretically you could be eight so you know there's no i mean right now i mean i've read a lot about this kind of the typical guideline is 12 and 16 for those two things but it's been done earlier all you have to do is get a waiver sign which i uvm has a waiver pretty pretty much every hospital doing that at uvm uh supposedly they are with if if you get a waiver but you have to get parental consent and have a signature and the waivers are pretty extensive i mean i have a couple from a couple different hospitals not just in vermont not just in vermont they're they're i mean one's from california one's from an organ hospital and it's pretty extensive and it tells you in pretty plain language but the question is does a child understand this does a does a child understand that it might be permanent well now it says right here permanent and all these waivers these changes might be permanent and these changes will be permanent and so i mean it states very clearly this one's from uh the los angeles children's hospital um it says loss of fertility right here you know side effects um you know other things like your voice is going to get deep or anything you know stuff like that so they have separate so they have separate um waivers for testosterone and for estrogen that that usually state the possible and the and the you know this is going to you know permanent and non-permanent and also almost all of them say that we have no idea of there's no i there's no good data on the long-term side effects the long-term so you do this when you're 12 you really nobody really knows what's going to be because they're having it hasn't been enough yeah there's not enough there's not been enough and and there's a huge spike in this right now so this is like said this is one of the issues which could it be linked though in prop five well yeah we don't know right that's the thing and the interesting thing to me is that this is also partisan because we you and i have seen um analyses of this from republicans i that have analyzed and they say it could include both right right okay so if it includes abortion and includes uh this gender affirming care for children right i mean that's to me if this okay so if this is defeated one way or another it's really a lose lose situation right because then it's going to be perceived by the republicans as having lost everything the rights of women and girls and also exactly so in other words if this passes in vermont and well this is by the way by the way it's not a bill this is an amendment to the vermont constitution if it goes into the vermont constitution well what do you think i think it's worse okay well a lot of people might but i've heard i mean i've read that this still won't matter if if the let's say a republican becomes president and overwhelmingly the house and senator our republican they could pass a law federal law saying that this doesn't matter our constitution is that true no because remember that how i mean you know that's what some lady told me that i was having having an email okay somebody who is in favor of this okay listen we all know one thing don't we that laws where are they tested in the supreme court okay so if this law if okay so for instance vermont has now codified the language of roe into our law not talking about the constitution okay so guess what somebody comes along and and says um and somehow gets the standing enough to sue about that arguing that it's now unconstitutional right well then it's overturned again right right okay so so onto the we got 10 minutes onto the the problem the problem the left has with the reason the new york times article yeah we think that that that that that the left is also destroying women's rights and children's rights the same that the right is with the anti-abortion yes okay and the reason the left is doing it is really this issue of removing things like women motherhood from our language yeah that you can't you can't have these things even in your language which to me i'm not a woman i was watching insulting to me you know i think you should be proud of motherhood and be probably proud of being a woman and for for the reasons that you know it's it's an amazing thing so to have to have somebody say well we can't say this in the national education the NEA is well let's talk about that okay there were two there are three things that happened this week that i took uh note of one was um the NEA the national education association which is proposing changes in language right it hasn't done it yet has it and one of the ways it was doing that is to replace the word mother with birthing person i think right and chest feeding right so what does that do to okay so that was one of one thing that happened then another thing that happened was that a young woman here and we have a copy of the press release put out a fundraiser for planned parenthood and and the um trevor trevor foundation and use the word people with uteruses and the third thing that i saw was amy goodman today amy goodman is on public access every morning and she's i would i would consider her a leftist right sure and she used the word pregnant person also right it's the elimination of gender of sex terms right it's right right i mean i want to say gender because the argument on the left is that gender is a social construct right so i'm talking about biology right so it's removing biological terms correct well it's really moving by and mainly women it's disempowering women more than anything else because they are the producers of life i mean they're the ones that have to have this ability the ones that do the hard job they do the one they do the heavy lifting yeah and and they say well we we don't want to call you as if there's some other and this is the argument certainly of the rate is this is ridiculous because you can't have a uterus unless you are a woman you can't actually be give birth unless you are a woman and so why are you relating this why are you calling it a birthing this a birthing person it's just a woman it's a mother you know so it's so this language this little language thing that one side says why are you getting all tweaked about and the other side is says because it's nuts is a big issue right now well no i wouldn't even say nuts because that's too vague i think it eliminates women and girls from language it's damaging right to ten thousand years but there's a lot of people who do not agree with us i don't exactly because there's enough i guess males who are entering into no what way what way is that males who are entering women's spaces i guess and and think or have or think they are becoming women maybe they say they are women that are saying that we have to now use the word person rather than woman and girls correct right is that it that's it but i mean then the other part of the argument which i think the right is going to win is the whole idea that a man who just thinks he's a woman can go into a prison go into a women's prison and you have data on that it's working out really poorly which is not a big surprise women have gotten pregnant that's true in california california or again new jersey women have gotten pregnant because they put men in there who still were biological men but just you know and the whole sports thing that's and that's horrible for women and women's sports there's no men who are going to transition to a woman and then travel for a woman's sports team it's just not going to happen no the other way around there's no woman who's transitioning it would be the worst out there you know i think you said it would be a woman transitioning to a man and going into right exactly then that wouldn't happen doesn't happen right it's not ever going to happen right i had a transgender brother so so right now the republicans in this in this issue have i think unfortunately for the left some really important strengths in this and that meaning that the majority of people don't agree with some of this i think the majority of people in the on this issue think everybody should be treated equally nobody should be discriminated against you shouldn't bully people blah blah blah but then it's in certain things even with that is this but we've gone too far here you know well i think that you're touching on such intimate subjects that um i think there if if i don't know how clear the republicans are on any of these issues no but it's the same i mean there's democrats that don't like but they the republicans i know and a lot of democrats don't like it either but the but the republicans are clearly what they would call anti-abortion right okay so they're gonna vote no on this and some and they're also gonna vote no maybe on some of this transgender i would think they're pretty clearly against um the uh what was called um affirmation gender affirming medical care yeah so what's gonna happen to okay so i happen to think and i've had big arguments with my democratic friends that this is going to be a very big issue in the fall i don't know that it hasn't doesn't seem to be at this but i think it will be well if well certainly the sides if they're smart it would be right but right but certainly roe is already going to be a big issue correct i think it's going to be almost gone by then why would you because i i say i mean the beginning well i know you disagree the statement i mean the beginning is pretty much every state that already was against it nobody in their state's minds change that much i mean yeah the minority the minority in mississippi are mad about this the minority in vermont are are um are mad about this because they they they wanted there to being that you know no there are what i'm saying you know what i'm saying yeah right in the states where you know that they're happy with the decision and unhappy with the decision the people that are unhappy in one state or the minority way and like in our state if you were if you were um if you're mad about vermont's laws you know what what is it like it it's like 80 percent in vermont believe that women should have the right to it's pretty high yeah i know yeah yeah so it's not going to matter in vermont it's not going to matter in mississippi that's my point in individual states there's there's very few states there's probably some on the fence just like with every issue but most states have already you can once again divide them the south blah blah you know northeast california they're all you know they're already they've already taken sides on this for the last 30 years it's it's an issue yeah but i don't think it's as toxic but it's going to be in every legislature like it is here what's already passed through some of the legislatures i know but it but i'm telling you south dakota and any places right a couple but not all of them not here so i think it's i think it's i do think that you're underestimating the the those issues but maybe the economy maybe you're right everybody yes everybody is going to be number one and and oh yeah you think so you think that those parents who are going to school boards are just thinking about the economy no no no but i'm just saying i think that's going to be the the death null if there is yeah i do the democratic party because it's so bad right now what if it gets better it can't why not because i i just don't think it can because everything that's happening supply chain problems gas problems they're they're not going to be cured instantly because we keep the people in charge keep doing shooting themselves in the foot all right we'll see okay all right anything in anyway so getting back to this new york times article i was really uh my mind opened up about that because what really is happening is that women and girls are being erased they're being disempowered and they're being disappeared from both the right and the left and i think i think if we're for instance in women's sports what the heck that to me that's that's the one that's that's the most toxic really it to anybody that has a child that's competing in you know some 30-year-old skateboarder just beat a 14-year-old girl in new york city in some kind of is that right money because he said he felt like a girl but and because he was still a he was still he you know any well all right i as i said i had a toxic one for me i just want to mention one thing about my own brother who was transgendered and um but he was a tennis fan and he said watching female and male tennis he would he would say males are just so much stronger at you know at this there's no there's no dispute about that even though that woman when the bobby rings well billy jean king beat the hell out of bobby rings like 60 years old that's a great movie battle of the sexes did you ever see it yeah yeah it's a great movie i think i saw on the plane it was one of the ones that were okay all right so i think we're out for a month or so so we'll see how things have changed in a month yeah right okay thank you