Compare and contrast: reason and zealotry.

It's not every day that you get a chance to observe up close the clumsy cogs of the fundamentalist religious zealot "thinking" grind and slip.

This offers an excellent opportunity to do so.

Blob Blogging Wingnut attempts to deconstruct and refute Jacob M. Appel's arguments. It would be comical, were it not more of the same-old same-old witless wombie zombie dissembling. Appel writes about Stephanie Gray - yes, that Canadian fetus fetishizing propaganda queen who claimed there there was an "open season on prolifers" shortly after an Operation Rescue acolyte publicly executed Dr Tiller in his church.

The reality is that few (if any) sane people, however strong their views regarding the morality of abortion, sincerely believe that abortion clinics are like death camps. They just say they are, because it's easier - and far more dramatic - than explaining what they really mean. I have witnessed surgical terminations. I have also seen the mounds of human hair and baby shoes at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Most strikingly, I have heard first-hand horror narratives of deportation and starvation from elderly survivors, stories that my own relatives never survived to share. Any reasonable person who has any knowledge of the Nazi death machine should find the comparison of Planned Parenthood to Auschwitz-Birkenau an unacceptable affront to common decency. This is not to say that the legacy of the Holocaust needs to be preserved as "unique": To my thinking, those who try to finesse the argument that the slaughter of Europe's Jews was somehow morally distinct from the Cambodian or Armenian genocides, for example, have lost the forest for the trees. But that does not mean that any perceived moral wrong can reasonably be described in such terms. ...

I do not mean to suggest that abortion opponents have no legal right to use such incendiary analogies. But if these activists want to be taken seriously, and if they wish for a meaningful place in the public discourse, then they should eschew them. Ms. Gray has questioned why many reproductive rights supporters refuse to debate her. I assure her that it is not because we fear her ideas or public engagement -- but because some forms of argument are too repugnant to be indulged. Nobody questions Gray's entitlement to believe that abortion should be illegal or to further her case in the marketplace of ideas. As far as I'm concerned, she can believe that the earth is flat and roam the streets preaching platygaeanism. The hallmark of an enlightened society, after all, is agreeing to disagree.

Go read all of Appel's thoughtful, lucid, fact-based and empathetic opinion piece. It helped flush from my brain the ludicrous twists and snarls SHE posted.

Spin Never Sleeps

JJ at unrepentant old hippie did a superb job of taking a couple of Stephanie Gray’s points, smacking the hypocrisy around and kicking it to the curb. But there is more, much more to Gray’s depraved, dissembling pronouncements.

As I wrote here, given the essentialist, women-despising ideology at the core of their abortion-criminalizing premise, zygote zealots try to elevate their discourse by using two tactics over and over.

1) They claim that abortion is the same, if not WORSE! than the Nazi-enforced Holocaust against European Jews, homosexuals, Roma and other target populations.

2) They say that their campaign to criminalize health care practitioners who terminate pregnancies and women who seek their services is the same, if not BETTER! than the US civil rights movement.

From Stephanie Gray's screed:

With Cosh's rhetoric, I am reminded of the clergymen who were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s controversial approach. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King responded by saying, "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? ...We must come to see that ... it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber."

This is rank opportunism and a putrid distortion of MLK's inspiring words. As I noted two years ago:

... those who would enforce compulsory pregnancy divert criticism away from their goal of controlling women’s reproductive capacity, by proclaiming they are as pure in their thoughts and actions as those white folks who championed civil rights. Fetus fetishizers are draping themselves in the flag of the modern martyr and demanding the same respect as white civil rights workers who were excoriated for the assistance they gave to Martin Luther King and to the descendants of enslaved Black people. Quite the sleight of hand, is it not? Those who supported the civil rights movement did not set off bombs nor assassinate anyone.

If you have a strong stomach, take a look at the KKK website and observe how the language of 'white racialism' ressembles the language of anti-abortion websites.

"Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber." The logical and correct analogy here, given the escalation in violent strategies and discourse used by a significant number of individuals in abortion-criminalizing organizations that are similar to that used by individuals and organizations opposed to civil rights, would be that “Abortion criminalizers are the 21st century’s Jim Crow segregationists”.

Edited to add: With regard to point 1), here's more from the Pro-Choice Action Network regarding Stephanie Gray's claims about what she calls "open season on pro-lifers". Open season = 3 pro-choice activists allegedly vandalized a G.A.P. display ... got hyperbole?