Internal issues

I do not watch television much. Bundesliga highlights on a Saturday evening, "Wer wird Millionär" twice a week, and the odd news bulletin. Otherwise I have the Internet and its total international take on the world. So who needs television anyway?

My wife for one .... When she is at home, it is almost compulsory for her to switch it on, no matter what is on there. Particularly annoying is the imported American junk, dubbed in German but still available with the canned American laughter.

Of interest once in a while, though, is a programme called "Mein neues Leben" ("My new life"), which follows German people who have emigrated elsewhere. Sometimes they have gone somewhere quite fascinating, sometimes places you would never believe (Saudi Arabia????), sometimes somewhere mundane.

I do not follow the programme avidly, but I pick out bits and pieces (always a dangerous approach - it sounds like voting in an election, you take 30% and ignore the rest! Usually to your cost). After all I have moved to five different countries, so in a way I find it relevant. Sort of anyway - no TV cameras followed me around, thankfully!

Last week we had the United States again. I did not pay all that much attention to everything that was going on, but there was a woman who had moved there with her kids (who could not speak a word of English and seemed totally lost), who was setting up a shop selling imported German goods. Husband? Might have been there, I didn't pay enough attention to the programme to confirm one way or the other.

Where in the US? Again, I did not take much notice. I hope that it wasn't Virginia though and she didn't end up getting raped and pregnant as a result.

After hearing what was going on in the Virginia State Assembly during this last week unfortunately, my view of the values held by some Americans these days fell another couple of notches.

There is increasingly a sense coming from there that the old "sex is dirty" thinking is re-emerging with vigour, and if a woman gets pregnant against her will, it is her fault for consenting to the sex in the first place. And if she gets raped, she encouraged it, it was not a brutal act by a depraved violent male ....

Well if it is any consolation, I do not agree with abortion on demand, as was seemingly the case in the UK for a generation (till Blair came along), but was never available on that principle in Germany.

But if a woman has been raped? And gets pregnant? This is not a child conceived in love or joy or happiness or in close bonding! It is the product of brutality and force and hatred. And the child will carry the genes of the criminal perpetrator (yes, I know that is not in Exodus or Leviticus, just a scientific fact!). A monster waiting to emerge - you do not know what you are getting.

There may be a case for encouraging the already brutally traumatised woman into bringing the child into the world and putting it out for adoption. But if she wanted to be rid of it by means of an abortion, could you really blame her?

Well the answer of the Virginia State Assembly seems to run along the lines that such women are not to be believed, if it happened they encouraged it, and she must be subjected to a transvaginal ultrasound probe - whether she likes it or not, and whether her physician thinks it is advisable or not!

Huh????

In 2008 I needed a heart bypass. The doctors considered the case and recommended it. I could, and should (!) still have refused it (by signing a form). If politicians had got involved, it could have been forced upon me - against my will! Well, not in Germany, but you get the picture?

Put something into a woman's vagina against her will? Ignoring anything her physician had to say on the matter?

Apart from rapists who would try and force something into a woman's vagina? The last instance I can quote was a physician of sorts - one Doctor Josef Mengele!

Interesting company that the Virginia State Assembly wants to keep. It is though a sad and unfortunate comment on the direction that Human Rights (upper-case is deliberate here!) are taking in parts of the United States - sadly!