Wow, this is just so crazy. South Dakota wants to redefine “homicide” so that murdering an abortion provider is O.K.

The conservatives of this country have just gone completely over the edge. I had no idea that we had so many damn crazy idiots in our entire country, much less being elected officials.

Check this out, from Balloon Juice.

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state’s GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state’s legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person “while resisting an attempt to harm” that person’s unborn child or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman’s father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one.

Jensen did not return calls to his home or his office requesting comment on the bill, which is cosponsored by 22 other state representatives and four state senators.

“The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers,” says Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers. Since 1993, eight doctors have been assassinated at the hands of anti-abortion extremists, and another 17 have been the victims of murder attempts. Some of the perpetrators of those crimes have tried to use the justifiable homicide defense at their trials. “This is not an abstract bill,” Saporta says. The measure could have major implications if a “misguided extremist invokes this ‘self-defense’ statute to justify the murder of a doctor, nurse or volunteer,” the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families warned in a message to supporters last week.

How crazy is that? Legislation has been introduced in one our our 50 states that would essentially allow murder to prevent what is now a legal procedure.

What I find just about as astounding is that the conservative position is that, once a child is born, then the government should provide essentially no help to the parents at all. It doesn’t matter if it might be a low income family that is having trouble paying for food or their heating bills, or maybe they are getting thrown out of their house, or maybe they don’t have enough money for the kid to have lunch at school… The family is ON IT’S OWN! Touch luck, kid. And you will have REAL problems if you were born in the country but your parents are here illegally. You are royally screwed, even though conservatives really were glad you were born.

How can conservatives justify this position? The government can do everything up to condoning murder in order to prevent abortion, because life is so precious and all, and yet, once a child is born, the government should have absolutely nothing to do with any sort of assistance at all?

This is absolutely insane…