Another ideology battle on tap? Hey, it’s Florida

I have yet to see the final tab for Florida’s fight against same-sex marriage, but you can be sure the legal fees will be enormous.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was in court every other day it seemed, trying to overturn the ruling of any judge who rightly said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

Last I heard, Bondi is not trying to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that finally legalized gay marriage, but I wouldn’t be shocked if she tries to find a court in Switzerland or some place like that to hear her case.

Whatever the bill is, it’s not the first time Bondi and Gov. Rick Scott have spent a lot of your money tilting at windmills by fighting legal battles that appealed to the right wing base, but were guaranteed losers.

The Miami Herald reported last month, in fact, that Scott’s attempt to make welfare recipients and some state employees take drug tests — with no suspicion of any wrongdoing — cost taxpayers about $1.5 million in legal fees.

You can be sure the legal meter is running as the state now tries to make sure women have to wait an extra 24 hours before having an abortion — a medical procedure which is very legal the last time I checked.

A new state law requiring the 24-hour waiting period — and two visits to an abortion provider — was wisely blocked by a Tallahassee judge last week, the day before it was to go into effect. The ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights had sued to stop the law from hampering Florida women.

But before you could say “hey, some sanity in Florida finally,” Bondi was back in action, appealing the decision, and automatically putting the waiting period that Scott signed into law back into effect for the time being.

You can thus expect this issue to bounce back and forth in court (a judge already has decided the abortion waiting period won’t be enforced while the state appeals), as Bondi and friends try to put a state-sanctioned roadblock into a woman’s right to have control over her own body.

This whole thing bothers me, in much the way the same-sex marriage fight bothered me. Why are the right wingers and the religious zealots always so obsessed with barging in when nobody is bothering them?

If you don’t want to have a same-sex marriage, don’t. But you have no right to tell other people, who aren’t doing anything but showing their love to each other, they can’t marry.

Same with abortion. If you don’t believe in it, don’t do it. But you and your religious beliefs shouldn’t be able to stop a woman who thinks abortion is the right decision for her. How is she bothering you? She isn’t.

I wouldn’t expect Bondi and Scott and the anti-abortion folks to understand that a woman who is having an abortion has already agonized and thought about it plenty and doesn’t need somebody she doesn’t even know making the decision more difficult. Bondi and the others don’t care.

I wouldn’t expect Bondi and the pro-lifers to know that it is difficult for women in rural areas, where they may not be an abortion provider for many miles, to make two trips before getting the state’s permission to have an abortion. They don’t care.

I wouldn’t expect Bondi and the pro-lifers to give women credit for knowing what’s best for their personal situation, without having the extra stress of the state being involved. They don’t care.

But taxpayers should care. And people who think women are smart enough to make their own decisions about their own bodies should care.

But that doesn’t matter much in Florida these days, does it?

Gary Stein can be reached at gstein@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4616 or on Twitter @SSEditorial.