If you denounce the Affordable Care Act because it’s “the biggest expansion of abortion and abortion funding since Roe v. Wade” or because it requires that “Americans buy health insurance plans that pay for contraceptives and abortion” or “because it makes American taxpayers complicit in the deaths of countless unborn children,” this doesn’t make you pro-life.
Opposing an imaginary “expansion of abortion” that exists only in your own fevered brain is not the same as opposing abortion. It does nothing to oppose abortion. And if you really cared about opposing abortion, you would regard such irrelevant, fictional fantasies as a distraction.
But if you prefer those fantasies — if you’d rather play-act at opposing an imaginary threat — then it’s not credible for you to claim you’re anti-abortion or “pro-life” or whatever it is you’re trying to pose as.
You’re just a liar. A fantasist.
And your primary goal is indignation — the momentary rush of endorphins that comes from imagining that you are uniquely righteous in contrast with the wicked others.
Your lies prove that this is what you are. You no longer care whether or not something is true. All you care about is whether or not something feels good to pretend.
The tell — the giveaway that reveals that this is all that you really care about — is that the truth doesn’t make you happy. You’re just Bad Jackie.
When you find out that the problem you claim to be upset about isn’t actually a problem, you’re not relieved to hear it. Instead, you get even angrier. That’s because your grievance has no substance other than to be a grievance — and anyone who points out that you need not be upset about this is ruining the self-righteous fun.
You claim to be angry at the ACA’s “expansion of abortion.” You claim that this grieves you, breaks your heart, tears at your soul, and fills you with a righteous anger that cannot rest until this injustice is corrected.
Hey — good news! The ACA does not expand abortion or fund abortion or do any of those things you just said were grievous, heart-breaking, etc. You don’t have to be upset! You don’t have to worry about this!
Aren’t you happy to hear that? Aren’t you relieved to learn that the evil Satanic baby-killers are not actually killing babies?
But no, you’re not happy to hear that. You refuse to take yes for an answer. And you do not regard it as good news to learn that the thing you were denouncing isn’t a problem after all.
Instead, you’re livid. You’re enraged. How dare anyone show us that the world is not as grievous, heart-breaking and unjust as we wanted it to be? Give us back our Satanic baby-killers!
That’s the tell. That’s the proof. That is why you cannot be believed.
Perhaps you’re just cynical hucksters out to make a buck. Maybe you’re just the hired servants of some plutocratic powers looking to distract voters. Or maybe you’re the victims of your own deceptions, people who have been bearing false witness for so long that you’ve begun to believe your own lies.
Whichever of those it is, your habitual lies have proved that you don’t actually care about what it is you claim to care about.
You have proved that you’re not anti-abortion. You’re just addicted to indignation and you’ll keep telling whatever lies you have to tell, spinning whatever fantasies you have to spin, to get your next fix of that drug.
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