Gabriela Flores sat in a South Carolina jail for four months - just for having an abortion. Last fall, the 22-year-old immigrant farm worker and mother of three from Pelion, South Carolina, became pregnant and took misoprostol, a medicine that is used in RU-486, to terminate her pregnancy. Flores' sister sent her the Cytotec tablets from Mexico. Flores is charged with violating a state ban on "illegal" abortions -- a law that is supposed to protect women from back-alley abortionists, not to send them to jail for having one. If convicted, Flores could face prison time and a costly fine. [...] The Flores case sharply reflects the racism, sexism and anti-immigrant fervor that South Carolina officials are known for. In 2001, South Carolina convicted a 24-year-old African-American woman, Regina McKnight, with homicide after her baby was stillborn - blaming her drug use for the death. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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