Showing posts with label March for Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label March for Life. Show all posts

Thursday, January 23, 2020

The abomination of Trumpolation


It has been many years since I've wanted a goddamned thing to do with the professionalized, politicized "pro-life" movement. Why? Because it's God-damned.

That sad fact becomes clearer by the day, if not by the minute.

Any organization that isn't wouldn't mock the Almighty by saying, with apparently straight faces -- both of them -- that Donald John Trump was "a voice for the unborn and continuously working to build a culture of life." That is a whopper of Trumpian proportions, at least.

Trumpian, hell. Orwellian.

Having Trump speak at an alleged March for Life is like having the ghost of Joseph Goebbels keynote an Anti-Defamation League convention. This most vile and dangerous of American presidents is building some kind of culture, alt-right all right, and it is anything but a "culture of life."

A CULTURE OF LIFE does not see ripping children from their parents at the border, then placing them in squalid and overcrowded Border Patrol stations as a feature and not a bug.

A culture of life's stance on the treatment of women does not include "grab 'em by the pussy."

A culture of life does not celebrate war crimes, it does not threaten war crimes, and it does not tolerate peacetime assassinations of foreign leaders.

A culture of life seeks to ease the struggles of the poor -- it does not cut their SNAP benefits.

A culture of life takes a dim view -- a really dim view -- of referring to women as "dogs."

A culture of life does not claim there's "some very fine people" among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

A culture of life does not celebrate someone who's told 16,241 public lies in his first three years in office.

A culture of life is not racist.

A culture of life is not anti-Semitic.

I could go on, but it's late and I'm tired.

WHEN I SAW the March of Life's tweet, the first thing -- literally -- that came to mind was "abomination of desolation." That's Bible speak, roughly describing something horrific and defiling. Apocalyptic, even. Think of erecting pagan monuments on the ruins of the temple in Jerusalem, as the Romans did.

Think of building an altar to Satan in a Catholic church.

Think of having Donald John Trump speak at a March for Life.

I'm thinking of the Archdiocese of Omaha sending busloads of teenagers to the March for Life -- and all of its hyperpoliticized Trumpdolatry -- like lambs to the spiritual and ideological slaughter. One of three things is likely to happen to each poor soul, and none is good:

* The kid might die of irony overload right on the spot.

* The kid might become a MAGA enthusiast, endangering his or her immortal soul and causing much harm to others somewhere down the road.

* The kid might be unusually perceptive, see this for the evil, blasphemous bullshit that it really is, take note of who and what brought him or her into this moral clusterfuck . . . and be lost to the Church (or Christianity, period) forever.

What an amazing witness for Christ. America -- and the church -- will have much to suffer because of such sulfurous subversion from the depths of hell.

I'm also imagining Jesus on one of those buses full of Nebraska teens as it crosses the Potomac River. It is written, "As he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it."

Friday, January 27, 2017

The alternative facts of (pro-) life


Some folks find it "very, very encouraging" that the Trump Administration "has given the pro-life movement more support at the March For Life than any other administration in history."

I guess you could fairly say that if the "alternative" definition of "more support . . . than any other administration in history" happens to be "blowing smoke up willful dupes' asses at a rate 'unpresidented' in modern political history."

No, I am not happy at all that the Trump Administration is so openly “supportive” of the March for Life . . . or of the pro-life movement, such as it is today.

And when I speak of the “pro-life movement,” what I mean is the old, institutional and political primarily pro-birth movement, which has shown precious little interest in continuing its support of human life once the child emerges from the womb. That “pro-life” movement has sullied itself by becoming a de facto arm of the Republican Party and spending too much of its time and resources in support of politicians who have done precious little to actually stop abortion in this country.

What those lawmakers have done, however, is push manifestly anti-life positions like repeated cuts to social services, as well as reductions to welfare and food stamps. The old “pro-life” movement has sold its soul to a party that backs the death penalty and gave us “enhanced interrogation” — the “alternate fact” designation for torture, which happens to run just as afoul of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. criminal law as it does Christian teaching — and an insanely foolhardy, unjust war in Iraq.

The old “pro-life” movement has sold its soul to Donald J. Trump, who got elected in no small part by scapegoating Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing the American press and otherwise summoning the blackest instincts of the human psyche and spirit.


IT HAS SOLD its soul to the man who vows to give us The Wallthe big, beautiful wall on the Mexican border — which now, we learn, is to be built at American-taxpayer expense and will be defeated as easily as digging a tunnel or hopping on an airplane and overstaying one’s tourist visa.
It has sold its soul to the president who intends to publish a list of crimes committed by immigrants in “sanctuary cities,” a move taken directly from the Nazi playbook in Germany.  Look up The Criminal Jew on Google.

It has sold its soul to — endorsed and campaigned for — the candidate who now, as president of the United States, is ending the refugee-resettlement program and banning all Muslim immigration from countries “linked to terrorism.” Thumb through your Bible (Old Testament and New) to see what the deity of our “Christian nation” has to say about that.

And it has sold its soul to a candidate who campaigned through the Big Lie and now is governing by the Big Lie, which now has been rechristened as “alternative facts.” Joseph Goebbels would be so proud — the March for Life organizers invited Kellyanne Conway, who invented the term “alternative facts” to alternative-fact marchers to death today.
 
“Pro-lifers” today are hailing their impending political victories at the hands of our new, all-GOP political order. If any victories are ever realized here, which I rather doubt, I fear they will be wholly Pyrrhic ones, because when this unstable, budding fascist of a president is done bringing this country to ruin, tyranny or both, “God’s name will be reviled among the Gentiles” because of the sycophancy of these “Good Christian People,” as a liberal, gay high-school classmate derisively refers to right-of-hedonist followers of Jesus Christ.
And those of us Christians who fought this present darkness are going to get it just as good and hard as those who sold out their faith and their cause to a short-fingered vulgarian.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Oh, for God's sake!

Thank you, March for Life people, for making my point for me.

If you want to know why -- despite being dedicated to sticking up for the most vulnerable and powerless humans that ever were or ever will be -- the pro-life movement has accomplished squat over the past 35 years, you need read no further than this from the
Catholic News Service:
Among the speakers on the stage, Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., headed a long string of politicians who took to the microphone to make sure participants saw the fight against abortion in political terms. He warned that "America's liberal elites" were "empathy-deficient" when it comes to the unborn, turning around a phrase about Americans made by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in remarks on the presidential campaign trail a few days earlier.

A brief roar of agreement greeted a warning by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., that electing Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., or Obama as president would mean nominees for federal judgeships would be less pro-life than those nominated under President George W. Bush, so "we need to elect a pro-life president."

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, himself a candidate for president, downplayed those ambitions to emphasize his experience as an obstetrician, helping bring 4,000 babies into the world. Dozens of "Ron Paul for President" banners held high above the crowd made a point of his political ambitions for him.

In his remarks recorded at a White House breakfast earlier that morning and replayed at the rally, Bush lauded those who work for "a culture of life where a woman with an unplanned pregnancy knows there are caring people who will support her; where a
pregnant teen can carry her child and complete her education; where the dignity of both the mother and child is honored and cherished."
IF I WERE Chris Smith, I'd be worried less about the "empathy" deficiency of "America's liberal elites" and worried more about the dumbass sufficiency of America's right-to-life elites.

(And, as a Catholic, I'd worry about the utter Pravdaesque "report no evil" incompetence of the Catholic News Service -- but that's a matter for another post someday.)

See, here's what the irony-insensitive CNS report failed to tell you. And, sadly, what CNS failed to tell you is pretty much all the context you need to know why the pro-life movement, as it's presently constituted, is a doomed proposition.

Let's start with Sen. David Vitter, R.-La.

Sen. Vitter, you see, likes nookie. And, during his political career -- both back in the Bayou State and in Washington -- he has liked nookie so much he's been willing to pay top dollar for it.

From women not Mrs. Vitter.

That is called soliciting prostitution, making Vitter a "john," even though his name is David. This activity is quite illegal in 49 of the 50 states. That's why it was so big a deal when Vitter's number turned up in the phone records of the "D.C. Madam."

And it's why it was such a big deal when the working girl who "loved" him back in New Orleans started blabbing to Penthouse publisher Larry Flynt. Some folks back in Louisiana thought Vitter ought to resign his seat or be kicked out of the U.S. Senate for having engaged in criminal acts.

Those people, however, were prudes. Not like the March for Life organizers.

Then there is the slight problem of Vitter being the Southern regional chair for the Rudy Giuliani campaign while spouting lines like "we need to elect a pro-life president."

You'd think most folks, after hearing such from a backer of the pro-choice Giuliani, would figure their intelligence had just been insulted. And, in fact, most would. They probably would become angry and start booing and throwing things.

But this was a crowd of pro-life activists and their politicized leaders. And David Vitter -- veteran politician and connoisseur of the world's oldest profession that he is -- can read an audience.

HAVING FIGURED OUT there's not fun in holding the moral high ground if you can't cede it, the March for Life organizers then invited Rep. Ron Paul to the microphone.

The long-shot GOP presidential candidate has had his public-relations problems of late, after it came out that a newsletter written in his name had for years contained the worst kind of race-baiting, paranoid, whack-job claptrap.

Paul, however, didn't want to talk about politics (I wonder why). He wanted to talk about the 4,000 babies he brought into the world as an obstetrician.

"Dozens of 'Ron Paul for President' banners held high above the crowd made a point of his political ambitions for him," as the CNS story put it. Yep, there's nothing quite like throwing away moral superiority to scream to the world "I'm a Racist Conspiracy Nut for Life!"

FINALLY, we come to the prerecorded address by President George W. Bush.

Nothing says "I support the vulnerable" like "pro-life" marchers standing there, listening to supportive bromides from a man who lied his nation into a disastrous, unjustified and unjust war in Iraq . . . that is, when he wasn't subverting the United States government to justify, then carry out, the torture of "illegal enemy combatants" in violation of both U.S. and international law.

One march.

Three strikes.

And America's unborn babies are s*** out of luck.


HAT TIP: Your Right Hand Thief.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Thanks for coming. We don't care. Next.


If you want to know how irrelevant America's right-to-life movement has become, all you have to do is turn to Page A-3 of today's Washington Post.

That's where Washington's newspaper of record
put the story telling how:

Tens of thousands of abortion opponents took to the cold, gray streets of Washington yesterday, buoyed by a recent report that the number of abortions in the United States had hit the lowest level in years and vowing to continue the fight.

IT'S NO BIG SIGN of how far pro-lifers have fallen that the Post put the story about tens of thousands of people in a protest march through its own town on an inside page -- it's done that for years. What should have the marchers -- and their leaders -- worried is that the reporter didn't bother to quote one pro-choice leader refuting anything anyone on the pro-life side said.

When no one takes you seriously enough to go to the trouble to refute what you say, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Or engage in a withering reappraisal of what the hell you're doing.

The newspaper said pro-lifers were buoyed by the news that abortions were at a 32-year low. Two questions about that: First, is it so and, second,
did the pro-life movement have anything to do with it?

Again,
from the Washington Post:
At the same time, the long decline in the number of abortion providers appears to be stabilizing, partly a result of the availability of the French abortion pill RU-486, the report found, because some physicians who do not perform surgical abortions provide it to their patients.

The report did not identify reasons for the drop in abortions, but the researchers said it could be caused by a combination of factors.

"It could be more women using contraception and not having as many unintended pregnancies. It could be more restrictions on abortions making it more difficult for women to obtain abortion services. It could be a combination of these and other dynamics," said Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research organization, which published the report in the March issue of the journal
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Whatever the reasons, the trend was welcomed by abortion opponents and abortion rights advocates.

"This study shows that prevention works, and that's what we provide in our health centers every day," said Cecile Richard of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "At the end of the day, Americans of all stripes believe that we need to do more to prevent unintended pregnancy and make health care affordable and accessible."
I TEND TO THINK the drop, instead of having much to do with the efforts of the overly politicized pro-life movement, probably has more to do with naturally changing attitudes by members of a couple of generations who know they could have suffered the same fate as 25 percent of their contemporaries. As well, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that more than a few of the "missing" abortions never went missing at all.

Those probably went "Plan B" instead -- fertilized eggs that never implanted, thanks to the "morning-after pill." Still an abortion, but never will show up in any statistic as one.

So what do we make of a movement so spectacularly unsuccessful that it's ecstatic over abortions falling from 1.6 million a year in 1976 to 1.2 million a year in 2005? Even at the "low" rate, give Americans five years and they've done to their own children in utero what Adolf Hitler did to the Jews ex utero.

That ain't success.

Given that pro-lifers have sold their souls to the Republican Party for a bag full of empty promises about fixing all kinds of social ills -- most especially abortion -- and still have ended up with a couple of Holocausts a decade for three-and-a-half decades now (not to mention the "right" to kill babies at any point of their nine-month sojourn in Mama's womb), you have to wonder why pro-life Americans aren't ready to tar and feather whomever came up with that bright idea.

HERE'S THE THING. Pro-lifers put all their eggs in Republican politicians' basket, giving them every incentive to string folks along with pretty rhetoric and no incentive to actually do anything about abortion, thus eliminating a bloc of "automatic" votes.

Meanwhile, the culture -- where fads become trends, and trends become entrenched behaviors, and entrenched behaviors remake entire societies -- careens along, unmolested by church, activist and politician alike.

It's ironic that the Roe v. Wade anniversary (and the March for Life) always fall close to the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Pro-lifers like to fancy themselves as being in the mold of the civil-rights movement, employing tactics much like those of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

But there are three things King managed to do that the pro-life movement never even thought about. He captured a nation's imagination. He never descended into a shouting match with his opponents. And he transformed the culture of a nation.

Where is the great rhetoric of the pro-life movement? Where is its great art? Its transcendent music? Where?

There is some pretty good music related to the pro-life cause but, alas, it never made it out of the "Christian ghetto."

MARTIN LUTHER KING, on the other hand, marched out of America's black ghettos and into the conscience of a nation. Since 1973, we pro-lifers have marched . . . and we've sat in . . . and we've protested . . . and we've politicked . . . and we've prayed . . . yet what does America see amid all this?

And there lies the problem.

America, in the 35 years since Roe, has seen not Martin Luther King marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge but instead has seen Carrie Nation busting up a saloon. America knows all about what we're against, but little of what we're for.

Hell, we know all about what we're against . . . but do we really know what we're for? Or what America might look like if we achieved it.

The Carrie Nation approach to drinking ultimately may have gained us Prohibition for a season. But now we have Double Drunk Tuesdays and college administrators across the land wringing their hands about students' wild binges -- and the consequences that follow.

Do I wish abortion were illegal, just like every other form of homicide? Absolutely.

But what's more important for the cause of life? That we pass a law (which isn't going to happen anytime soon), or that we -- somehow, someway -- persuade women, their partners, their parents and their doctors that killing is evil, no matter whether or not it's legal.

Prohibiting iniquity doesn't equal success, even though codifying the sentiment would be instructive. Success, instead, lies in fostering virtue.

And victory lies in showing a nation that loving -- not killing -- is the best way to solve even the toughest problems.