Related Links

The biggest stretch of all time?

Glitter bombing Jeff Fortenberry

Vandalism on the Mississippi abortion clinic

Phil Robertson’s fantasies

Phil Robertson says that liberals and women who have abortions are worse than Hitler

Phil Robertson’s advice to gay men

Mike Huckabee: As wrong as a man can be while still standing

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, a representative of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum will talk about sex-selective abortion bans. Anti-choicers feel victimized by glitter bombs and Phil Robertson shares his gross rape fantasies with America.

If you ever wonder if some anti-choicers spend every waking moment obsessing over how much they hate the fact that women have reproductive choices, this story out of New Hampshire confirms it. A fourth-grade class went to the legislature and introduced a bill that would make the Red Tail Hawk the state raptor. Cute, right? But not to Rep. Warren Groen.

• Groen *

So yeah, we’re at the point where a bunch of 9-year-olds can’t even talk about the state bird without some hateful, obsessive anti-feminist trying to make it about how evil it is that women have rights.

***************

Tragedy struck recently in anti-choice circles as anti-choice legislators and activists find themselves very inconvenienced. The first victim of this horror show of mild inconvenience is Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), who was victimized by having, wait for it, some glitter get all over his office.

• glitter 1 *

It was horrible, you all. Glitter on the floor, on the desk, in their clothes. Cleaning it up probably took minutes, perhaps an hour, depending on how good the vacuum was. And they weren’t the only victims. Life News was also glitter bombed, which meant minutes of inconvenience and hours spent fund-raising over what huge victims they are because, y’all, cleaning glitter up is hard. No matter how hard you clean, I swear to god for months afterwards, small bits of glitter keep turning up, sticking to your clothes. Can you imagine the hell?

I mean, it’s not easy like being forced to carry a baby for nine months against your will is. Mandatory childbirth is nothing compared to that. Next thing you know, pro-choicers are going to require anti-choicers to wait 24 hours before they can clean glitter up in their offices. Or require some kind of invasive pelvic exam before you’re allowed to clean up the glitter. Or worse, what if pro-choicers won’t let you clean up the glitter until you have to listen to a condescending script about how great the sparkle is and how glitter-free offices lead to breast cancer and suicide. You should be forced to explain how you’re really, really sure you don’t want glitter in your office before you snuck out the sparkle.

Okay, I can’t in good conscience endorse this tactic, as funny as it is to watch a bunch of people who would literally force childbirth on you whine about how hard it is to clean up glitter. If nothing else, don’t do it because they fundraise on it, reaching out to their equally humorless supporters with a victim complex. But man, not only is the whining about this really tasteless in light of what they want to force on women, but it’s also tasteless when you consider that anti-choicers actually threaten and terrorize abortion providers all the time. So while anti-choicers are cleaning up glitter, this is what abortion providers are putting up with.

• glitter 2 *

On its surface, it’s similar, though it’s worth noting that the hassle this vandalism creates is exponentially worse than having to clean up glitter: The damage is going to be very expensive to fix. Nor can this be written off as a harmless prank, as this was a clear intention to do real harm, not just to give someone a hard time for an hour. But that’s without looking at the context. In context, this is much more than vandalism. This is an attack on the security system of an abortion clinic. Abortion clinics don’t have security systems because they’re worried about theft or glitter bombs. They have them because they fear violence. Anti-choice terrorists have murdered doctors and bombed clinics, with real bombs, not glitter bombs. They often try to destroy some aspect of the business so that they can’t provide care to women, which is clearly what the vandal was doing here. They cause real death and destruction. This act is threatening, for real threatening, not we’re going to pretend we were threatened to fundraise threatening.

And it’s not just because of the activities of criminal terrorists.

• glitter 3 *

In other words, the official, public face of the anti-choice movement has the same goals as the terrorist arm: To bully, badger, annoy, scare, or do whatever they can to shut clinics down. In contrast, while pro-choicers don’t love anti-choicers, we do not and have not taken measures to try to stop them from speaking their mind. We don’t try to censor them. We don’t try to pass a bunch of B.S. regulations to put them out of business. We don’t make public statements about how we’re going to end them. We don’t try to force anyone to get an abortion the way they try to force you not to get an abortion. We argue. We try to persuade. At most, some pro-choicers have argued that crisis pregnancy centers should be required to disclose what they are, but we don’t vandalize them or try to shut them down. With the anti-choice movement, from top to bottom, they are trying to force, through terrorism and legal action. And while you really shouldn’t be glitter bombing people, it’s safe to say that even that is not an attempt to force or bully anyone, but just a prank, however ill-conceived. That is a difference that matters and don’t let any whining about glitter bombs distract from this basic point. Only one side looks to force, whether through terrorist action or through the law.

***************

Interview

***************

Phil Robertson from that supposedly family values reality show Duck Dynasty made a bunch of headlines last year when he did an interview with GQ where he said nasty things about gay people and Black people, though for some reason, the stuff he said about gay people got more headlines. He got a bunch of positive conservative media attention and even some “free speech” awards from groups that confused having someone criticize you with government censorship. Well, their big hero is back in the headlines again, and once again it’s because he is putting his sadistic sexual fantasies and weird bigotries out there and calling it religion. He gave a speech at the Vero Beach Prayer Breakfast that people apparently thought was hilarious, because his fans confuse saying things loudly with humor. After going on a rant about how you don’t need health care, something I guarantee he has, because you’re going to die one day anyway, he then moves on to this:

• Robertson 1 *

The vividness of his fantasy of punishing people with rape and murder for not believing in his God is what really just blew people away, I think. But this sort of thinking is actually standard operating procedure with the Christian right. Wishing for all these lurid punishments to happen to women and gay people for having sex is a huge thing on the Christian right. This is more severe in tone but isn’t really that different, for instance, than the crisis pregnancy centers telling you that you’re going to get breast cancer and commit suicide if you have an abortion. Or abstinence-only programs that tell kids they’ll never be loved if they have premarital sex or that they’ll die horribly of cancer. It’s really best understood as a sadistic fantasy, even when it’s disguised as a warning.

Indeed, while his fantasy that atheists are punished by murder and rape, which he seems to imagine mostly as a property crime against your father or husband, Robertson’s speech was downright wide-ranging in its hate against women and gay men, as well.

• Robertson 2 *

It’s interesting playing these two clips together. I often point out how degrading it is to actual human beings who have suffered at the actual hands of actual murderers to say that they had no more value than an embryo. But you really begin to see how devalued actual human life is to radical “pro-lifers” here. So devalued that he can’t help but fantasize about the torture and murder of people just because they don’t believe in his God. So devalued that Robertson, like so many anti-choicers, routinely equates the death of actual human beings with names and hopes and dreams and feelings with the death of an embryo, which has none of that. It’s not that people like Roberston are actually confused about this, either, which is why miscarriage is never compared to losing a born child in an accident. It’s because fundamentalists like this want to elevate differing with them on their religious dogma to a capital crime. Whenever anyone asks me why I won’t call anti-choicers “pro-life,” this is why. How can they be, when they treat life like it has less value than forcing other people to conform to your religious dogma?

And make no mistake, this is all about conformity, making everyone live and act exactly the same, no matter how it makes them feel.

• Robertson 3 *

Everyone needs to be married, as soon as possible, in heterosexual marriages. Why? Not for their own good, for sure. After all, he wants not only for gay men to forsake any hope of happiness, but to marry themselves off to straight women, making sure their wives never get a chance at a loving marriage. It’s super obvious that the reason is just because difference, any difference, upsets him. He’s confused a childish desire to make everyone act and look exactly the same with morality. If it was just him, it would be no big deal, but he’s speaking to a crowd and tends to get treated like a national hero by the religious right.

***************

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, how many ways can one man be wrong edition. And that man is Mike Huckabee, claiming that the contraception mandate is the sort of thing that the American revolution was fought over. After claiming that there should be no limit on religious belief, Huckabee said this:

• Huckabee *

So first of all, the argument is that there should be no limit on religious belief, which means apparently that you should be allowed to deny other people health care based on your religion. Of course, having your boss tell you what kind of birth control you can use is severely limiting of your own personal religious freedom, so it’s clear that Huckabee only supports the religious rights of conservative Christians. This is a system where, if my belief conflicts with a conservative Christian’s, then his belief wins, even if it’s my personal health care that we’re discussing. I don’t get religious freedom, not if someone else is dictating what health care I can get based on his religion. Then he suggests that the American revolution was a revolt of religious people against a secular society. This is completely backwards. It was an anti-colonial revolution of people who wanted self-government and they specifically wrote a constitution that forbade the kind of imposition of religious dogma on the unwilling that Huckabee is promoting here. The man can’t open his mouth without lying, can he?