Saturday 6 June 2009

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?

1 comment:

fern hill said...

Powerful post, dBO.

Post a Comment