The Hypocrisy of the "Pro-Life, Anti-Abortion" Movement

White "pro-life" teens harass a Native American military veteran. 

For the record, I am not pro-abortion and think abortions should be medically safe and rare.  However, I also believe that if one is going to oppose abortion in all cases, you need to be consistent and be "pro-life" across the spectrum of ages, races, faiths and economic circumstances.  Sadly, A video of Catholic teenagers wearing MAGA hats at the "March for Life" in Washington, DC, has gone viral and is thankfully helping to focus a spotlight on the hypocrisy of many anti-abortion fanatics. In the video, a group of white youths are harassing a Native American military veteran and demonstrating that far too many lives mean nothing to the anti-abortion crowd.  Indeed, once one has passed out of the birth canal, all concerns of life seemingly nearly vanish.  The same people avidly support the GOP war against programs for the poor, the sick, the homeless and, of course, support Trump's border wall.  If one is non-white, an immigrant, non-Christian, or gay, forget it.  Your life means absolutely nothing to these anti-abortion fanatics who would happily watch you die in the gutter. Their hypocrisy is literally off the charts.  The good news is that the alliance these extremist have struck with Donald Trump (perhaps the most immoral man in America) is making more and more people open their eyes to the ugliness and hypocrisy of so many of these "pro-lifers."   Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post:

A viral video of a group of Kentucky teens in “Make America Great Again” hats taunting a Native American veteran on Friday has heaped fuel on a long-running, intense argument among abortion opponents as to whether the close affiliation of many antiabortion leaders with President Trump since he took office has led to moral decay that harms the movement.

The video, which began to spread Saturday morning, showed a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing the caps, closely surrounding a 64-year-old man who was beating a drum as part of the Indigenous Peoples March happening near the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. 

A few of the young people chanted “Build that wall, build that wall,” the man said, adding that a teen, shown smirking at him in the video, was blocking him from moving.The students in the video had just come from the March for Life, the country’s largest antiabortion rally and march, which happens annually on the Mall, a few blocks east of the Lincoln Memorial.

In a statement Saturday, the Catholic high school and diocese some of the teens belong to issued a statement of apology to the man, Nathan Phillips, and to “Native Americans in general.” . . . . this incident also has tainted the entire witness of the March for Life and express our sincere apologies to all those who attended the March and those who support the pro-life movement.”

The event happened as abortion opponents in recent days debated the March for Life’s decision to feature a greeting from President Trump — this year and last year — as well as one by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Some abortion opponents say the March has become too partisan and too aligned with politically conservative figures, Trump in particular.

Antiabortion leaders' embrace of Trump has alarmed a wide range of Christian abortion opponents. They see Trump’s comments on race and immigration, his lying and crudeness as damaging to the “pro-life” label. Younger religious conservatives continue to place an extremely high priority on decreasing abortions but more and more talk of a “consistent life ethic” that sees issues such as health care, global warming and support for poor pregnant women as among those that should be under the “pro-life” umbrella.

Catholic ethicist and writer Charles Camosy wrote in The Post last month that the antiabortion movement — including the March for Life — is rolling back years of progress by becoming increasingly seen not as a broad-based human rights movement but as a “Republican or conservative constituency,” he wrote. . . . Indeed, the term has become so toxic that the group Students for Life refuses to say ‘pro-life’ when doing its activist work,” Camosy wrote.

The Friday incident happened less than a week after Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the U.S. Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas.”

The Catholic Diocese where the students are from tried to depict the boys behavior as an aberration, but it is not.  The Catholic Church remains vitriolically anti-gay, wants healthcare professionals to have the right to refuse to treat gays, and to block same sex couples from adopting.   Like so many of the anti-abortion advocates, some lives simply do not matter.  Thank you to these boys for making that reality obvious to all.  

The Lie That the GOP/Conservatives Support Family Values

America's last place ranking in maternity leave

One hears constant blather from self-labeled "family values" organizations and, of course, the Republicans about how strongly they support family values.  The claim, like just about everything else the utter, is a lie.  There definition of family values means vilifying gays and single mothers and doing all in their power to eliminate social programs that might actually help support families so that greed driven bigots can keep their money to themselves much like the wealthy condemned by Christ in the Gospels.  Perhaps equally shocking is the fact that 163 other countries have forms of paid maternity leave to support motherhood while the USA has no such program.  The "pro-live" fetus worshipers talk constantly about valuing life, but once children are born, these hypocrites don't give a damn about these newborn and young children.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality.  Here are highlights:

Politicians talk about family values but do almost nothing to help families. They talk about parental responsibility but do almost nothing to help parents. They talk about self-sufficiency but do precious little to make self-sufficiency a reality for those who must struggle hardest to achieve it.

For all these reasons, it was exciting last week to see Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut introduce the FAMILY Act, the acronym standing for their Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act. The bill would provide partial income for up to 12 weeks of leave for new parents and for other family demands, such as care for a sick family member, including a domestic partner.

How far behind the rest of the world is our country on this quintessential family values matter? The Post’s Amy Joyce cited a Harvard University study in 2004 noting that of 168 countries it examined, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave. We weren’t one of the 163. Joyce observed that “the U.S. is on par with places like Papua New Guinea and Swaziland when it comes to paid family leave.”

Premiums would range from about $72 to $227 a year, depending on a person’s income. The maximum benefit is capped at $4,000 a month. They expect the average monthly benefit to be less than half that.

There is nothing revolutionary about this proposal. It builds on the existing (and highly popular) Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires unpaid leave and was enacted two decades ago. It is modest in comparison with leave policies in other well-off countries.

Yet in light of Congress’s dismal record since the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, it would be revolutionary to see any law passed that empowered individuals and families to ease their everyday difficulties.

At a time when the political news is dominated by a debate between do-little conservatism and do-nothing conservatism — which is to say, between a right-tilting Republican establishment and the radical tea party — Gillibrand’s package includes building blocks for a broader counter-vision inspired by the idea of an Empowering Government.  

[S]urely a country that honors the devotion of family members to each other should want to make it at least a little easier for them to do their jobs.

The GOP's War on Maternity Coverage

The Republican Party claims to be pro-life and to support "family values" yet one aspect of its war against the Affordable Health Care Act is the requirement that health care policies include maternity coverage.  To me, it's yet another example of GOP hypocrisy much akin to the rabid "pro-life" crowd that love fetuses until they are born after which they don't give a damn about poor children.  It's one reason I hold these people in open contempt.  They don't practice what they preach and while they claim to be concerned about the unborn, all concern evaporates once children are born.  The same holds true with this opposition to maternity coverage which would help improve the odds that children are born healthy.  Here are highlights from a Washington Post column that looks at this GOP/Christofascist hypocrisy:

If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?

This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.

[C]ritics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms.

Yet the conservatives’ ire over this issue knows no bounds.   “And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care?” wrote Deroy Murdoch on National Review’s Web site , the italics on that impatient “so what” being his. “Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all. . . . And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally?” It’s touching, actually, to see such concern for lesbians in a conservative publication.

On “Fox News Sunday” this month, host Chris Wallace was very worked up as he pressed Zeke Emanuel, a former health-care adviser to President Obama, over how unfair it is that a single woman with a 24-year-old son would be forced to pay for such coverage.

Who knew that supporting motherhood was suddenly controversial?

All of which ought to present members of the right-to-life movement with a challenge. In the name of consistency, they need to break with their conservative allies and insist that maternity coverage be included in all health-care plans. Shouldn’t those who want to prevent abortion be in the forefront of making the case that a woman will be far more likely to choose to have her baby if she knows that both she and her child will get regular medical attention?

For too many politicians on the right, what they say about abortion is at odds with what they say about so many other issues. They speak with great concern and compassion for the unborn, and I respect that.
[C]onservatives would make abortion illegal and leave it at that. Thus we have the spectacle in Texas of right-wing politicians trying to make it as difficult as possible for a woman to obtain an abortion while proudly blocking the state’s participation in the expansion of Medicaid to cover the near-poor. Does it serve the cause of life to keep more than 1.8 million Texans from getting health insurance? 

If health coverage — yes, including maternity care — isn’t a right-to-life issue, I don’t know what is. 

Greed, hypocrisy and indifference towards others - if not open hatred - are key attributes of today's GOP and its supporters among the "godly Christian" folk. 

The Hypocrisy of the "Pro-Life" Crowd

I've often noted the hypocrisy of the pro-life crowd and their puppets in the GOP. Once a fetus is born they cease to give a damn about it and strive to end programs for poor children and their families and fight funding for health care assess for poor children. By the hypocrisy extends in other directions as well as illustrated by the image above. Am I anti-Christianist? You bet. They are a scourge on the nation and humanity.

The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies

Charles Blow has a great op-ed in the New York Times that looks at the hypocrisy of the "family values" Republicans and the Christianist hate merchants to whom the GOP increasingly prostitutes itself. These people claim to "respect life" and worry about the unborn. Yet once children are born - other than denigrating parenting by same sex couples - these children disappear from the radar screen and the GOP/Christianists do all they can to destroy and undermine government social programs that would help provide children with health care, decent nutrition, education and many other forms of support. Indeed, the GOP and its evil allies would just as soon throw children on the trash heap as look at them. HYPOCRITES is one of many negative descriptions that applies to these self-congratulatory modern day Pharisees. Words do not begin to convey the disgust that I feel towards these false Christians who make me want to distance myself from the term Christian. Here are highlights from Blow's excellent column:
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Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.
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Of the 33 countries that the International Monetary Fund describes as “advanced economies,” the United States now has the highest infant mortality rate according to data from the World Bank. It took us decades to arrive at this dubious distinction. In 1960, we were 15th. In 1980, we were 13th. And, in 2000, we were 2nd.
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Part of the reason for our poor ranking is that declines in our rates stalled after premature births — a leading cause of infant mortality as well as long-term developmental disabilities — began to rise in the 1990s.
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[T]he Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress [to reduce infant mortality]. The budget proposes: • $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
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• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
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• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
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This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood. It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
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A 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies estimated that premature births cost the country at least $26 billion a year. At that rate, reducing the number of premature births by just 10 percent would save thousands of babies and $2.6 billion — more than the proposed cuts to the programs listed, programs that also provide a wide variety of other services.
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Think about that the next time you hear Republican representatives tout their “pro-life” bona fides. Think about that the next time someone uses the heinous term “baby killer.”

Operation Rescue Reportedly Needs Money, Close to Shutting Down

According to the wingnut news site CNSNews.com Operation Rescue, founded by pro-life extremist Randall Terry, is close to running out of money and shutting down. Could it just perhaps be because would be donors do not want to be associated with an organization whose founder and former leader has never denounced the murder of abortion providers and who has in fact comp licitly condoned the actions of the murders? The most recent example is the murder of Dr. George Tiller and Terry's extremist remarks at the time. While most folks do not know that Terry and Operation Rescue have parted ways some years back. Like it or not, Randall Terry - who is also an extreme homophobe - continues to be the face associated with Operation Rescue. The other irony is, of course, that due to their opposition to contraception, birth control and sex ed education, groups like Operation Rescue actually cause the number of abortions in the USA to fail to fall to rates similar to those in Europe where there are comprehensive sex education and birth control projects. Here are some story highlights:

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Wichita, Kan. (AP) - Operation Rescue, one of the nation's highest-profile groups in the anti-abortion movement, has told its supporters it is facing a "major financial crisis" and is very close to shutting down unless emergency help arrives soon. The group's president, Troy Newman, blamed the economic downturn for its money woes in a desperate plea e-mailed Monday night to donors. But the Wichita-based organization has also been under attack from both fringe anti-abortion militants and abortion rights supporters since the May 31 shooting death of Dr. George Tiller.

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Tiller's killing has also been a public relations nightmare for the group - despite its public condemnation of the slaying - since the name and phone number of the group's senior policy adviser was found in Roeder's car when he was arrested. A television crew zoomed in on the scrawled note inside the car in images that made their way to the Internet.

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The Internal Revenue Service revoked Operation Rescue's tax-exempt status in 2006 for prohibited political activity during the 2004 election. That means donations to the group are no longer deductible on taxes. Newman has said the IRS revocation did not affect donations. Meanwhile, other groups in the abortion fray have not noticed a similar decline in contributions.

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"They have publicly denounced his murder, yet they move their headquarters to Wichita and spend years harassing and trying to put him out of business," Saporta said. "And people involved with Operation Rescue had also been in communication with Scott Roeder so their hands aren't necessarily 100 percent clean in this scenario." Abortion rights supporters contend some of Operation Rescue's activities contribute to the atmosphere that encourage people like Roeder to take the law into their hands.

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Operation Rescue's fundraising letter hinted at a secret project it hoped to launch in the next 30 days that would be a "new phase in the pro-life fight." But while the group's fundraising efforts are often tied to some new anti-abortion activity, its latest letter had an unprecedented tone of desperation.

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Sometimes people and organizations reap what they sow and Operation Rescue has historically taken extreme positions and engaged in over the top actions that have now apparently come back to haunt it. I will not shed a tear if the organization shuts down.

Wingnut Erruption

From time to time I get some rather nasty e-mails and/or comments from elements of the knuckle dragging, flat earth, Christianist set who in my view have a tenuous grasp on reality in general and who certainly have no concept of what freedom of religion means. They are truly the Christian version of the Taliban and I cannot help but wonder what psychological issues haunt them that they feel so threatened by anything that threatens their fragile house of cards like religious belief constructs. The latest deranged missive comes from a local wingnut who based on his comment - which I rejected out of hand - indeed makes Pat Robertson look relatively sane. Apparently my post about the wrongful firing of a high school teacher in Oklahoma because she showed the Laramie Project got his panties in a total bunch and set him to foaming at the mouth.

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This individual -who claims to be a "reverend" - stated among other things:

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"She needed to be fired. Pushing sex perversion on normal children is child abuse. Matthew Shepard? How many straight children have been molested and murdered by homosexuals? A lot. How many Christians have been assaulted by homosexuals because they didn't like the way they voted? A lot. How many Christian churches have been burned down by homosexuals because you disagree with the Holy Bible? A lot. Whatever you think, you will not be able to change God's Word and will one day have to pay the price for not believing what God has written."

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Funny that I haven't heard of all these crimes allegedly committed by gays. Instead it seems that it's the gays who are being attacked and killed by "godly Christians" like the good reverend. As for child abuse, no good sir, child abuse would be raising children a warped and hate filled religious context like that which you promote. And please spare me your recitals of antiquated, modern knowledge lacking lines from the holiness code of Leviticus from which people like you selectively pick and choose in order to condemn others. The palpable hate that you seem to hold for others be they gays or pro-choice advocates is the antithesis of Christ's gospel message.

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Oh, and as for the prayer you recommend that I recite - I think it would be better utilized if you said it yourself while looking at yourself in a mirror. Were Christ to return today, I suspect that he'd definitely not call himself a Christian if you are the face of what being a Christian means.

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One last question: why were you on a gay blog? Savoring the male beauty photos? It'd be all too typical of a self-hating closet case who projects his self hate onto other gays.