March4Lies Part 2: Faith and truthy-ness

So, this happened on Thursday May 8.

There was a lame attempt by antiChoice Faith Goldy, a StunTV performance-artist-wannabe-Ann-Coulter, to bully members of the Radical Handmaids as well as other proChoice counter-protesters into saying something, anything while the camera was recording that could be edited and spun into a sensationalistic GOTCHA! - à la Ezra Levant school of faux-journalism.

What is it with StunTV media circus performers and their penchant for fake or trumped up news? Their broadcasts are never-ending infomercials, infotainment or simply outrageously skanky and amateurish filler engineered by Levant and his entourage.

Fortunately the media-savvy Julie Lalonde was one of the protesters approached by Goldy.

A pro-life rally in Ottawa Thursday that drew thousands of people to Parliament Hill got wall-to-wall coverage from Sun News Network, but some of the pro-choice activists who staged a counter-demonstration say the conservative news channel’s Faith Goldy crossed the line with her aggressive questioning.

Ottawa-based social justice activist Julie Lalonde said Goldy and a cameraman approached her and other pro-choice demonstrators and began peppering them with questions without introducing themselves or asking what brought them to the annual March for Life event.

“They were super fast, rapid-fire questions and the very first one was something about whether I supported abortion after 32 weeks. No ‘Why are you here today? What’s your group about?’” she wrote in an email to Canada.com. (Full disclosure: Lalonde has previously contributed to our site.)

“She filmed me extensively, even when I asked her to back away and leave us alone. She actually did a close up on me when I told her to leave us alone and said, ‘Or else? If I don’t walk away, what are you going to do?’

“She was clearly trolling and trying to provoke us to build some outrageous footage.”

From here.

She called out the unscrupulous tactic and followed up on Twitter and sent a media advisory to actual professional journalists and legitimate news gathering organizations.

And thus, just like the two FEMEN protesters, Goldy and her agit-prop shenanigans became the subject of other news media coverage of the March4Lies.

Fitting, is it not?

Dead women don't, and can't give life.

What a morbid thought, correct?

In Canada, 26 years ago today the Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler  removed legal obstacles preventing women from accessing abortion - a medical procedure under the purview of professionals who administer the public health care system.

But in Texas where the rights of corporations, guns and fetus are promoted by Bible-thumpers who claim they represent the will of God the Father, the laws of the state can desecrate and violate the rights of ordinary living breathing people.

If there are profits to be made, weapons to be cherished and a zygote, embryo or fetus to be deployed as a weapon in the War On Women, you can bet that rightwing religious fundamentalist Republican legislators will be there to shrieeekingly defend those rights.

This happened.

Marlise, a 33-year old paramedic, got up the night of Nov. 26 to fix a bottle for her toddler son.

Her husband Erick, also a paramedic and a firefighter, woke up and realized she had not returned to bed.

He found Marlise collapsed on the floor, not breathing and with no pulse. It’s believed she suffered a blood clot to the lung that deprived her of oxygen for more than an hour.

Erick frantically performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and called an ambulance. Marlise was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth and connected to a ventilator to artificially simulate breathing.

It was too late. Marlise was gone. According to court filings, doctors knew this within two days, after tests registered a complete absence of brain function. This was not a “coma” or “vegetative state.” It is the legal and medical definition of dead.

Marlise Muñoz was an emergency medical technician, a paramedic familiar with end-of-life issues who had told her husband that she would not want to be kept "alive" by machines.

Her family hired a lawyer; a rational, sane judge heard their arguments and ordered the hospital to stop preserving the decaying body of their beloved in a technologically-assisted embalmed state.  Marlise had been declared medically and legally dead; in trying to protect the rights of the fetus as it believed Texas law instructed it to do, the hospital (or fetushists on staff) turned her into a "cadaverous incubator". More medical information here, from Dr Jen Gunter.

THIS is the nightmare that CPC MPs Vellacott and Woodworth would inflict upon Canadian women and their families.

Knight of Columbus Stephen Woodworth claims how "savage and inhumane it is to have a law on the Canadian books which falsely condemns as non-human people who are human" - quite a whopper of a word-salad obfuscation. Women have tried to instruct this obdurate Vatican Taliban foot-soldier on how women experience pregnancy — wanted or not — but he won't listen.  In his mind, he is a grandiloquent medieval cavalier, "saving" fetus everywhere and forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

"Savage and inhumane" is exactly the treatment that women would suffer if *fetus rights* forced hospitals to use women like meat incubators to placate anti-choice zealots' ideologically-dictated demands.  Would gestating women who smoke, who drink alcohol, who eat the "wrong" food, who are addicted to legal or illegal drugs and who have sex while pregnant, get strapped down and supervised to prevent actions that could imperil their fetus?

Not in my Canada.  

I applaud the recent commentary in the Canadian Medical Association Journal as well as those who are urging Health Canada to approve mifepristone as a physician-facilitated medical abortion. Also known as RU486, it is administered very early in the pregnancy instead of surgery. It induces a miscarriage, similar to spontaneous abortions that occur frequently during the first trimester.

In support of Canadian women's ongoing push-back against the reactionary individuals and groups who would deprive them of basic reproductive rights, I will continue writing and tweeting on these issues.

Whose safety?

A group of students stage an impromptu theatrical intervention, to welcome Con MP Stephen Woodworth (of Motion 312 infamy) to the University of Waterloo.

There are more students protesting his appearance at a *Campus Crusade for Life* club than there are Zygote/Embryo/Fetus zealots present to hear him...

One of the proChoice agitprop performers said to the cops shielding Woodworth from verbal remonstrations and the Vagina-Lady: "Why are you concerned about his safety and not the safety of our uteruses?" 

Here's an overview of DJ! previous posts about Woodworth's Wank.

Grand merci to Canadian Cynic for bringing another Woodworth FAIL to our attention — though I disagree with his comment. Buffoon antics are the perfect way to foil rightwing christian fundamentalist ideology and tactics!

Meanwhile, with M408 the antiChoice forces within Harper's CPC get ready to launch another attack against women's reproductive justice rights and pregnant women's right to choose to carry (or not) their pregnancy to term on March 28 - right in time for Easter! 

Con MP Mark Warawa's Motion 408 is also a thinly disguised attempt to criminalize abortion, women, and the healthcare professionals who provide medical support.

ADDED: According to the Notional Pest, the artist known as Vulveeta is from WLU and he made that nifty outfit.  Those rightwing christianist conservatives like Woodworth just suck all the fun out of fundamentalism.  So dour and sour.

Another "honour" killing ...

Here are the undisputed facts of this killing, on record as the trial unfolds.

A man killed his girlfriend by hitting her head with a hammer at least 11 times, then he took a knife and stabbed pages of religious text into her body.

Court heard last week part of the passage stabbed in her body read “that which is crooked cannot be made straight.” The crown alleges the accused intended to kill her when he began bludgeoning her with a hammer following an argument about marriage and abortion. The victim, who had missed her period twice, told the accused she no longer wanted to get married, couldn’t handle caring for another child and would get an abortion if pregnant. She asked him to move out of her apartment. 

The accused became angry, looked for a weapon, found a hammer, took it back into the bedroom, and he hit her over and over until she stopped screaming, the jury was told. The accused then fled to Montréal with another woman; the police arrested him upon his return two days later. 

The accused confessed that though he did kill her, he had not intended to murder her. 

I believe the reason that the usual islamophobes - Shaidle and her posse - aren't shriEEEking "honour" killing is that the religious text in question is the bible.  Does it seem familiar?

It should be.

In the memorable words of Mark Steyn, "Must be convenient to have a [religious] code that obliges all your pathologies."  

Fundamentalist christianists shriek about "honour" killing which they CONveniently limit to muslims while disregarding the long tradition of Catholic sophistry which has justified centuries of femicide at the hands of men.

Will the christian Sharia anti-Choice supporters of Bill C-484 as well as Motions 312 and 408 defend this anti-abortion killer?  Certainly.  In his bludgeoning frenzy, the only beating heart he stopped was that of Lucita Charles - there was no zygote, embryo or fetus.

Let The Fetus©™ fetishists' pretzel-twisty propaganda begin!

Photo of Lucita Charles and Mataeo from here.

And remember, Mike likes 'em nubile!

[...] Michael Coren managed to, within three-and-a-half minutes, feign passion for women’s rights and follow it up with vicious and slanderous lies against women’s health providers. See for yourself in the September 7 “The Real War on Women.” Coren called Planned Parenthood “a group—remember this—dedicated to making sure that as many babies are aborted as possible.”

For a group so committed to this goal, they sure allocate their funds strangely. Abortions account for only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s total services. Cancer and HIV screenings, contraception, counseling and other services account for the remaining 97 percent.

So according to Sun News, Planned Parenthood, the largest reproductive health services provider in the US, is actually just a bunch of baby abortion fanatics; just look how much of their activity is abortion!

It doesn’t take more than a little research to find out the truth. Doesn’t Sun News have fact checkers? Or is Sun News just lying to its audience, believing they are too stupid to look up the facts for themselves?

Even though Coren apparently has no qualms about malevolently lying about an organization devoted to women’s health, he makes sure to assure us he’s on the side of women’s rights. “I also find it repulsive that after decades of struggle for female equality, there are still many people on the left who speak of women in the plural, and in the collective, as though they have no individual identities or ideas… it’s almost like a slave-master mentality from the 19th century isn’t it?”

From here.

This isn't the first time that religious fundamentalist and christian-Sharia zealot Michael Coren has attacked US Planned Parenthood as well as the international organization. He also parrots the talking points that supporters of M312 have been regurgitating for months.

That particular line of attack on Planned Parenthood in the US is not original to Coren, though it's been debunked.

Instead of posting a clip from StunTV showing Coren's glib prevarications, here's one that deconstructs the willful harm that deliberate lies carried by schlock media inflicts upon its audience.

As for the title of this post, it's a reference to the StunTV Limbaugh wannabe's alleged interest in p0rn0graphy that features *adult* women disguised to resemble pubescent girls.