A week ago today, Mississippi Republican State Representative Bubba Carpenter addressed his local GOP chapter, in Alcorn County, and told them how proud he was of a new law that "literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi." Carpenter said critics of the law predicted the return of coat hanger abortions. "But hey," he said, "you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we've decided to do."
Tape sleuth James Carter found that clip on the Alcorn County GOP channel, nipped it down to the relevant part, added some tags so people interested in the issue could find it, and put it on his own channel. We blogged that here on Monday, and then it got picked up in a whole lot of places.
Last night James wrote to say that the Alcorn County GOP had lodged a copyright complaint with YouTube. Today, his clip has gone dark. You can still get the original on the Alcorn County GOP's channel, but hey, they disabled embedding of it. And hey, that makes it much harder for bloggers to blog it, because you can't play the clip in your post. Carpenter told the hometown crowd that he was "proud" of the new law, so why wouldn't his party want you to see the trophy ceremony?
For now, we'll just have to run the transcript of Representative Carpenter's remarks, so you can read them:
"We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital...
"It's going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all -- but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to-- Roe vs. Wade. So we've done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.' That's what we've heard over and over and over.
"But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we've decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi."
While you're over there on the Alcorn County GOP channel, check out the promo for their convention. It's fun, and unlike the coat hanger clip, it's still embeddable.