Catholic and Enjoying It!
…to rule in favor of Planned Parenthood.
So, to recap: Our abortion regime is 100% the creation of the GOP. The state of California legalized it in 1967, courtesy of Governor Ronald Reagan. When Roe was decided, all the Democratic appointees could have been using the loo and it would have still been made the law of the land thanks to GOP appointees like Harry Blackmun, who wrote it. Prolife conservative suckers dreaming of the Great Rosy Dawn when there will be a GOP supermajority on the Court to finally get rid of Roe forget (or wilfully deny) that they had that in 1992, when the Court was GOP 8-1 with a prolife Democrat.
That court gave us Casey, with the famous “mystery clause” written by Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy. (Kennedy, by the way, appears to have made a sweetheart deal with Trump and appears to have had a hand in picking a successor to help guard his abortion rights legacy. That successor: Brett Kavanaugh, whom prolife Christianists went out of their way to defend by defaming his victim of sexual assault).
After that, the GOP completely owned the White House and Congress for two years during the Bush Administration–and did nothing except the usual piddly participation trophies like the Mexico City policy. They were too busy transforming their prolife base into the world’s biggest cheerleaders for unjust and stupid war and torture. The base of white conservative Christianists, natch, went for it hook, line and sinker. Indeed, the base of super duper prolife Christianists mutated over the next 15 years into the most rabid pro-death killing machine in American politics. Nobody is more skilled at rationalizing assaults on human life than the Cult of Trump. From war to torture to calls for murdering migrants and excuses for torturing their children, from apologetics for the biggest gulag on planet earth to war on every clean air and water regulation to “Catholic defenses of the death penalty”, from doing everything possible to spitefully ramp up climate change to mockery of sexual assault victims to cheering for Nazis, the demented Freak Show of the Cult of Trump has rationalized every sadistic cruelty by fondling a Precious Feet pin and shouting, “But abortion!”
And all the while, Trump and his Cult have re-funded Planned Parenthood eight times since he was inaugurated. Oh, and historically, abortion rates have gone up under GOP administrations, not down.
So today, so far from being some kind of surprise, is utterly predictable. Of *course* Kavanaugh followed the traditional GOP path of pretending to care about abortion and then betraying its prolife constituency. Because they know that prolife Christianists have mutated from being the dumbest suckers in American civil life to being the dumbest sadists, racists, and cruels in American civil life. Trump’s racist, misogynist, and sadistic cruelty is not a bug for them. It’s a feature. They love it. And the unborn and what happens to them is increasingly an afterthought, not a priority. They spend all their energy these days defending, not the unborn, but sadism at the border, the destruction of clean water regulations, sexual assault, Proud Boys, Nazi goons, election fraud, and, above all, their Mob Boss and his cult of personality. They will continue to defend Kavanaugh, overlooking this betrayal, because his appointment was deeply wounding to victims of sexual assault and they *love* that.
Meanwhile, actual Consistent Life Ethics folk will go on saying that the goal is to protect life from conception to natural death and not to use the unborn as human shields for every inhuman cruelty the GOP actually devotes its time and energy to.
To get a man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that is what truly gladdens the heart of Our Father Below. – Uncle Screwtape’s Epitaph for the “Prolife” Christianist Movement
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