US Abortion Laws

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Shabu
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US Abortion Laws

Post by Shabu »

Yet another State in America banning abortions.

I'm far from an expert on the subject but I'm a little surprised that we're here in the year 2022 and large sections of America seems to be getting more Talibany.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.co ... 8680419922
Last edited by -DL- on Wed Apr 06, 2022 7:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Abortion

Post by Morocco Mole »

Supreme Court mate. Thanks to Trump 6 v 3 in favour of ‘Originalists’. That’s what Trump and his backers were working on while we were all distracted, by his absurd public antics. This is the tip of the ‘existential threat’ iceberg the US is facing that I’ve mentioned a few times up here.

Some deets from my go-to blogger:
Heather Cox Richardson wrote: December 10, 2021 (Friday)

Today, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the Supreme Court undermined the federal protection of civil rights that has shaped our world since the 1950s.

The case asked whether opponents of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called Heartbeat Bill, could bring a federal case to block the law, which gets around normal challenges by putting private individuals, rather than the state itself, in charge of enforcing it. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said they could sue, but it limited that ability so severely that the law itself will remain largely intact.

The state law, which went into effect on September 1, prohibits abortion after six weeks of a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. And yet, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court affirmed that women have the constitutional right to abortion without undue restrictions, primarily in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

This case is about far more than abortion. It is about the federal protection of civil rights in the face of discriminatory state laws. That federal protection has been the key factor in advancing equal rights in America since the 1950s.

When the Framers wrote the Constitution in 1787, shortly after the American Revolution against a king colonists had come to believe was a tyrant, many leading Americans were still worried about concentrating too much power in the hands of a chief executive and a central government. In order to convince people to ratify the Constitution, leaders called for explicit limits to what the new national government could do to citizens. In 1791 the nation added ten amendments to the Constitution to protect individual freedom and rights, including, for example, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to a speedy trial, and so on. These ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights.

The limits in them applied to the federal government alone.

States could still enact fiercely repressive laws, including, before the Civil War, laws throwing Indigenous Americans off their lands, denying rights to women (including access to their children in the rare instance of divorce), and enslaving Black Americans. In the wake of the war, legislatures in former Confederate states tried to reassert white control through “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people.

Congressmen recognized the need to use the power of the federal government to override state laws in order to protect equality. In 1866, it passed and sent off to the states for ratification another amendment to the Constitution: the Fourteenth.

The Fourteenth Amendment states that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”

Congress intended for the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that Black Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures wanted to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery. The states ratified it and it became part of the Constitution in 1868.

In 1870, as white supremacists organized as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized their Black neighbors, Congress passed a law establishing the Department of Justice, which promptly set out to prosecute Klan members, eventually driving the organization underground.

But federal protection of civil rights was both limited and short lived. State legislatures kept or passed wide-ranging discriminatory laws, against Black Americans, for sure, and also against other minorities—Asian immigrants were explicitly prohibited from owning land, for example—and all women. By the early twentieth century, there were state laws against mixed-race marriages, against contraception, against integrated schools and housing, against abortion.

World War II changed the equation. Lawmakers had both to adjust to the demands of the minorities and women who had fought in the war and had kept the factories and fields operating, and to counter communists’ charges that American “democracy” sure didn’t look as equal as communism. To address discriminatory state laws, they turned to the federal government.

After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren and Chief Justice Warren Burger (both appointed by Republicans), the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. In 1965, they protected the right of married couples to use contraception. In 1967, they legalized interracial marriage. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.

Justices in the Warren and Burger courts protected these civil rights by arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment required the Bill of Rights to apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: it said that states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.

But opponents of the new decisions insisted that the court was engaging in “judicial activism,” taking away from voters the right to make their own decisions about how society should work. They said that justices were “legislating from the bench.” They insisted that the Constitution is limited by the views of its Framers and that the government can do nothing that is not explicitly written in that 1787 document. They wanted to replace the court’s interpretation of the Constitution with a view that preserved its “original” intent.

The 1987 fight over President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court, originalist Robert Bork, was the first salvo in the attempt to roll back the court’s expansion of civil rights. Bork was extreme for his day—famously saying that the Constitution did not protect the right for married people to use birth control, for example—and six Republicans joined the Democrats to oppose him. But the swing toward originalism was underway.

Now, finally, thanks to the three Supreme Court justices nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed thanks to then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s breaking of the filibuster, the Republicans have cemented an originalist view of the Constitution on the Supreme Court. Their doctrine will send authority for civil rights back to the states to wither or thrive as different legislatures see fit.

In Texas the legislature has taken away from its citizens a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has declined to assert federal power to stop it.

In a partial dissent from today’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” and quoted an 1809 decision that said, “f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” Roberts warned his colleagues that “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system…is at stake.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunter. Texas has launched “a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” she said, one that “echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto' or 'nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”

Under this old system, what civil rights will be off-limits?

The court’s “choice to shrink from Texas’ challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions,” Sotomayor wrote. “I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.”
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Re: Abortion

Post by Tenbury »

Shabu wrote: Wed Apr 06, 2022 12:10 am

I'm far from an expert on the subject but I'm a little surprised that we're here in the year 2022 and large sections of America seems to be getting more Talibany.
Stupidity doesn't seem to recognise national boundaries. An unfortunate brush with a group of born again Christians several years ago showed me that, by and large, fundamentalism is just the outward expression of basic insecurities, hence all this wrapping in the flag nonsense. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but social media has just given a worldwide audience for the odd looking person you once hurried past as they ranted on street corners whilst holding some old book in one hand.
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Re: Abortion

Post by Morocco Mole »

The utter insanity of S.B. 8 broken down….
Heather Cox Richardson wrote: TX is a vigilante state.

September 1, 2021 (Wednesday)

Last night at midnight, a new law went into effect in Texas. House Bill 1927 permits people to carry handguns without a permit, unless they have been convicted of a felony or domestic violence. This measure was not popular in the state. Fifty-nine percent of Texans—including law enforcement officers—opposed it. But 56% of Republicans supported it. “I don’t know what it’s a solution to,” James McLaughlin, executive director of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, said to Heidi Pérez-Moreno of the Texas Tribune when Republican governor Greg Abbott signed the bill in mid-August. “I don’t know what the problem was to start with.”

Texas Gun Rights executive director Chris McNutt had a different view. He said in a statement: “Texas is finally a pro-gun state despite years of foot-dragging, roadblocks, and excuses from the spineless political class.”

The bill had failed in 2019 after McNutt showed up at the home of the Texas House Speaker, Republican Dennis Bonnen, to demand its passage. Bonnen said McNutt’s “overzealous” visit exhibited “insanity.” "Threats and intimidation will never advance your issue. Their issue is dead," he told McNutt. McNutt told the Dallas Morning News: "If politicians like Speaker Dennis Bonnen think they can show up at the doorsteps of Second Amendment supporters and make promises to earn votes in the election season, they shouldn't be surprised when we show up in their neighborhoods to insist they simply keep their promises in the legislative session.”

That was not the only bill that went into effect at midnight last night in Texas. In May, Governor Abbott signed the strongest anti-abortion law in the country, Senate Bill 8, which went into effect on September 1. It bans abortion after 6 weeks—when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant—thus automatically stopping about 85% of abortions in Texas. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Opponents of the bill had asked the Supreme Court to stop the law from taking effect. It declined to do so.

The law avoided the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion before fetal viability at about 22 to 24 weeks by leaving the enforcement of the law not up to the state, but rather up to private citizens. This was deliberate. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explained in an article in Slate: “Typically, when a state restricts abortion, providers file a lawsuit in federal court against the state officials responsible for enforcing the new law. Here, however, there are no such officials: The law is enforced by individual anti-abortion activists.” With this law, there’s no one to stop from enforcing it.

S.B. 8 puts ordinary people in charge of law enforcement. Anyone—at all—can sue any individual who “aids or abets,” or even intends to abet, an abortion in Texas after six weeks. Women seeking abortion themselves are exempt, but anyone who advises them (including a spouse), gives them a ride, provides counseling, staffs a clinic, and so on, can be sued by any random stranger. If the plaintiff wins, they pocket $10,000 plus court costs, and the clinic that provided the procedure is closed down. If the defendant doesn’t defend themselves, the court must find them guilty. And if the defendant wins, they get…nothing. Not even attorney’s fees.

So, nuisance lawsuits will ruin abortion providers, along with anyone accused of aiding and abetting—or intending to abet—an abortion. And the enforcers will be ordinary citizens.

Texas has also just passed new voting restrictions that allow partisan poll watchers to have “free movement” in polling places, enabling them to intimidate voters. Texas governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign that bill in the next few days.

Taken together with the vigilantism running wild in school board meetings and attacks on election officials, the Texas legislation is a top red flag in the red flag factory. The Republican Party is empowering vigilantes to enforce their beliefs against their neighbors.

The law, which should keep us all on a level playing field, has been abandoned by our Supreme Court. Last night, it refused to stop the new Texas abortion law from going into effect, and tonight, just before midnight, by a 5–4 vote, it issued an opinion refusing to block the law. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent read: “The court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

Texas’s law flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents, she points out, but the Supreme Court has looked the other way. ”The State’s gambit worked,” Sotomayor wrote. She continued: “This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a state can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry."

The Supreme Court has essentially blessed the efforts of Texas legislators to prevent the enforcement of federal law by using citizen vigilantes to get their way. The court decided the case on its increasingly active “shadow docket,” a series of cases decided without full briefings or oral argument, often in the dead of night, without signed opinions. In the past, such emergency decisions were rare and used to issue uncontroversial decisions or address irreparable immediate harm (like the death penalty). Since the beginning of the Trump administration, they have come to make up the majority of the court’s business.

Since 2017, the court has used the shadow docket to advance right-wing goals. It has handed down brief, unsigned decisions after a party asks for emergency relief from a lower court order, siding first with Trump, and now with state Republicans, at a high rate. As University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck noted: “In less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).” In comparison, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications—averaging one every other Term.”

So, operating without open arguments or opinions, the Supreme Court has shown that it will not enforce federal law, leaving state legislatures to do as they will. This, after all, was the whole point of the “originalism” that Republicans embraced under President Ronald Reagan. Originalists wanted to erase the legal justification of the post–World War II years that used the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. It was that concept that protected civil rights for people of color and for women, by using the federal government to prohibit states from enforcing discriminatory laws.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have sought to hamstring federal power and return power to the states, which have neither the power nor the inclination to regulate businesses effectively, and which can discriminate against minorities and get away with it, so long as the federal government doesn’t enforce equal protection.

Today’s events make that a reality.

Worse, though, the mechanisms of the Texas law officially turn a discriminatory law over to state-level vigilantes to enforce. The wedge to establish this mechanism is abortion, but the door is now open for extremist state legislatures to turn to private citizens to enforce any law that takes away an individual’s legal right…like, say, the right to vote. And in Texas, now, a vigilante doesn't even have to have a permit to carry the gun that will back up his threats.

During Reconstruction, vigilantes also carried guns. They enforced state customs that reestablished white supremacy after the federal government had tried to defend equality before the law. It took only a decade for former Confederates who had tried to destroy the government to strip voting rights, and civil rights, from the southern Black men who had defended the United States government during the Civil War. For the next eighty years, the South was a one-party state where enforcement of the laws depended on your skin color, your gender, and whom you knew.

Opponents have compared those who backed the Texas anti-abortion law to the Taliban, the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan whose harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia law strips women of virtually all rights. But the impulse behind the Texas law, the drive to replace the federal protection of civil rights with state vigilantes enforcing their will, is homegrown. It is a reflection of the position that Republicans would like women to have in our society, for sure, but it is also written in the laughing faces of Mississippi law enforcement officers Lawrence Rainey and Cecil Ray Price in 1967, certain even as they were arraigned for the 1964 murders of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Henry Schwerner, that the system was so rigged in their favor that they would literally get away with murder.

When they were killed, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were trying to register Black people to vote.
Last edited by Morocco Mole on Wed May 04, 2022 8:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Abortion

Post by Morocco Mole »

A pregnant rape-victim can now be ‘citizen arrested’ at gun point by the man that raped her if she seeks an abortion…..
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Re: Abortion

Post by Clacton-ammer »

Home of the free and brave and the utterly stupid (at times).

Womans body, her choice. Hopefully if in a partnership it is a discussion/joint decision, but it still really comes back to her choice.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Bend it like Repka »

The US just keeps on giving. Funnily enough as Shabu mentioned, when I read this news story I just thought "Taliban".
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by RichieRiv »

Its puritanical.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by sendô »

The so called land-of-the-free, where you don't even have freedom of autonomy over your own body.

It is taliban-esque. It's the state exercising control over women's bodies, and thus over women themselves. So much of the USA is like a third world country, it's shocking.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Danny's Dyer Acting »

The fact that these people are trying to remove women's access to safe abortions is one thing. The way they are doing it is just as disgusting.

Too scared to fight for their beliefs properly they are just giving citizens (including the family of rapists) the opportunity to go bounty hunting for any woman who doesn't want to live out their Gilead style fantasy.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Shabu »

sendô wrote: Wed Apr 06, 2022 10:22 am The so called land-of-the-free, where you don't even have freedom of autonomy over your own body.

It is taliban-esque. It's the state exercising control over women's bodies, and thus over women themselves. So much of the USA is like a third world country, it's shocking.
And yet that's not how many people think.

They really do believe in American Supremacy (read that also as White) & think the rest of the world is a dangerous, backward, sh!thole - Western Europe included.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Arnold Layne »

What happens over there comes here eventually,there’s already been anti-abortion marches recently.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Morocco Mole »

Unlikely. UK is far more secularized than the US
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by DaveWHU1964 »

Morocco Mole wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 2:15 pm Unlikely. UK is far more secularized than the US
Our saving grace.

I have certain beliefs but that's all they are as they don't amount to 'faith' and I'll never be a church goer. Even so at times I vaguely mourn the demise of religion within this country and have respect for many of its adherents. Not the pomp and the preaching but the way it could act as a focal point for communities and a decent template for the way people should generally treat each other. It serves/ served a purpose. Yeah, yeah, I know all the downsides and aren't looking back on a more religious Britain with rosy specs but its demise has lost us some things.

Despite all that, seeing what is happening in the US I'm glad that most of us aren't into religion because if we were then a proportion of us would be susceptible to this religious inspired dogmatic, authoritarian, mind-set that we see in the States.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by RichieRiv »

DaveWHU1964 wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 3:02 pm Our saving grace.

I have certain beliefs but that's all they are as they don't amount to 'faith' and I'll never be a church goer. Even so at times I vaguely mourn the demise of religion within this country and have respect for many of its adherents. Not the pomp and the preaching but the way it could act as a focal point for communities and a decent template for the way people should generally treat each other. It serves/ served a purpose. Yeah, yeah, I know all the downsides and aren't looking back on a more religious Britain with rosy specs but its demise has lost us some things.

Despite all that, seeing what is happening in the US I'm glad that most of us aren't into religion because if we were then a proportion of us would be susceptible to this religious inspired dogmatic, authoritarian, mind-set that we see in the States.
I agree. My theory is that social media, celebrity, atheism, football, environmentalism and even politics are surrogates for religion and their popularity is inversely proportional to the decline in organised religion. Personally I think humans need to follow something or someone, but in the case of religion existence has never been proven.

I work for a predominantly Indian firm where the majority are practicing hindus. Only one takes it too far by injecting god into every professional situation. It gets too much but for the rest, religion is a personal thing and no one is trying to concert you. That's how it should be.

But with this? I just don't see it as anyones business what a woman does with their body. Christ sake an abortion isn't like going Tescos.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Hummer_I_mean_Hammer »

Just mental. Keep thinking that the yanks seemed to start going downhill after Bandaid, does that line up with Regan? I can't recall as I had no interest in politics
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Shabu »

The Christian religion here is so warped. It's such a big business - and tax free - that more and more shysters are taking advantage of them.

But the same politicians that are pro life are also the ones that want no benefits for poorer people who they're forcing to have babies they can't afford.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by DaveWHU1964 »

RichieRiv wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:22 pm My theory is that social media, celebrity, atheism, football, environmentalism and even politics are surrogates for religion and their popularity is inversely proportional to the decline in organised religion. Personally I think humans need to follow something or someone, but in the case of religion existence has never been proven.
I make you right. Your last line is interesting though - because I don't think it doesn't just apply to religion. For example I have a belief that a nice, lovely version of socialism would be better for the majority of people in this country than what we have. It's just a belief though it's not faith as I fully accept that I may not be right. I doubt that you believe that socialism is the way forward :) - you have your own beliefs, which again can't be proven one way or another.

That also applies to science. Now to be clear, for me scientists are best placed to talk about their subjects of expertise rather than you and me but that doesn't make them infallible - just more knowledgeable in their fields of expertise than laymen like us. But scientific understanding changes with time and I often think that if we've come a long way in the last say, 1,000 years, how much further will we go in the next 1,000 (if we haven't killed the mullered by then) - will they look on our times as being as primitive as we look on say, the times of the Norman conquest?

What I'm trying to say is that very little in life is certain and immoveable. Where things become dangerous is when people with beliefs turn them into certain facts in their own minds - women don't have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, there is definitely a God and woe betide anyone who criticises him or says he might be a she, covid is fake and only sheeple believe in it, Brooking wouldn't have made it in today's game, etc, etc, etc.

God, if he/ she exists, please protect us from those who are certain.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by RichieRiv »

DaveWHU1964 wrote: Fri Apr 08, 2022 12:10 pm I make you right. Your last line is interesting though - because I don't think it doesn't just apply to religion. For example I have a belief that a nice, lovely version of socialism would be better for the majority of people in this country than what we have. It's just a belief though it's not faith as I fully accept that I may not be right. I doubt that you believe that socialism is the way forward :) - you have your own beliefs, which again can't be proven one way or another.
I suppose I view faith and belief as to the same thing, although having just looked it up, my belief would be incorrect - confused?!

But you make a good point. A perfect socialist model has never been proven because things like communism got in the way, however, that doesn't stop you from believing in it, just because it's never happened.

Regarding my opinions, I think you would be surprised. My mum has always said you can be a socialist with a small s, but I prefer Michael Caine's outlook - both a Right-Wing Socialist and a Left-Wing Capitalist. I believe in universal healthcare, free at source, but I don't believe it is run efficiently and it should first look to how it spends the money it has got before asking for more. I believe in the benefits to help those who need them. I don't however believe it should be a lifestyle choice and an alternative to work. I believe in social housing, but I also believe that if you have lived somewhere for a period of time, you have the right to buy. I believe in the free market, but I also think that if the free market cannot keep itself in order, it should be regulated. I think companies should have the right to dispose of staff that are not performing with little friction, however, I also believe employees deserve protection from unscrupulous employers. I do not believe that national infrastructure or utilities should be private i.e. trains, energy etc however I do not think that should be quasi-governmental and inefficient.

Basically, I want my cake and eat it.
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Re: US Abortion Laws

Post by Shabu »

Blimey that was two well thought out and intelligent responses :newthumb:
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