{"id":22414,"date":"2014-05-29T20:05:37","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T00:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=22414"},"modified":"2014-05-29T20:05:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T00:05:37","slug":"anti-abortion-activist-says-obamas-presidential-library-will-be-just-like-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/05\/29\/anti-abortion-activist-says-obamas-presidential-library-will-be-just-like-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-abortion activist says Obama’s presidential library will be just like Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Michael Bresciani is not a major influential voice within the teavangelical right, let alone within America as a whole. But this back-bench blogger for The Christian Post<\/em> recently stumbled onto a statement that I think explains far more than he intended about the imaginary world inhabited by folks like him and the millions of other angry white evangelicals he\u2019s trying to reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cMichael Bresciani Says the \u2018Ghosts of Millions of Aborted Children\u2019 Will Haunt Obama\u2019s Presidential Library<\/a>,\u201d Brian Tashman reports for Right Wing Watch. Tashman supplies a helping of Breciani\u2019s own words, to give you a taste of the guy\u2019s rhetorical style and the nuanced clarity of his thinking:<\/p>\n

While Vlad was a murderer in real life who impaled his enemies on stakes, he became a legend after death. Millions have been thrilled by the stories of Count Dracula made popular by novelist Bram Stoker. Most great evil figures are not so lucky. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and others are known today mostly for their acts of barbarism and genocide.<\/p>\n

History may not be so kind to Barack Obama. He is a gay enabler who with a few well-chosen words has dismissed mostly the entire Bible except the Sermon on the Mount and has abandoned civilization\u2019s longest standing sanctified, God given ordinance \u2013 the marriage of one man and one woman.<\/p>\n

What will we put in his presidential library? If someday his real birth certificate is found and a release of his school transcripts is made, they may be on display, but who will come to the library other than a few democrats and liberals and those of the LGBT persuasion. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, yeah, Bresciani is a birther who equates marriage equality with genocide and thinks Obama is Hitler, Stalin and Vlad the Impaler all rolled into one.<\/p>\n

None of that, of course, is \u201ccontroversial\u201d for the folks at The Christian Post.<\/em> That site is a click-factory \u2014 one which, lacking the SEO-savvy of Buzzfeed or Upworthy, pursues pageviews by constantly cranking the outrage-meter up to 11. That site\u2019s steady stream of Hitler references, white-extremist conspiracy theories and fever-dreams doesn\u2019t keep it from being seen as a respectable part of the white evangelical tribe, though. The white evangelical gatekeepers are quite comfortable condoning this cesspool as an acceptable, non-\u201ccontroversial\u201d forum for good, upstanding members of the tribe because, even though it\u2019s basically a sanctimonious version of WorldNet Daily and a firehose spewing fevered lies, those lies are all of the proper partisan bent.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m not interested here in rebutting Bresciani\u2019s attempts to replace the lectionary with readings from Orly Taitz, Cliven Bundy and Phil Robertson. What I want to focus on, instead, is this accidentally revealing statement from his Christian Post<\/em> rant. Speaking of President Obama, he writes:<\/p>\n

Being the most active and highest ranking politician in history to wholeheartedly support abortions it is not impossible to imagine a presidential library haunted by the ghosts of millions of aborted children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ignore the awkward grammar there and just consider that image: Barack Obama\u2019s presidential library \u201chaunted by the ghosts of millions of aborted children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bresciani says it \u201cis not impossible to imagine\u201d such a thing. I think he may have meant to say it was impossible not<\/em> to imagine such a thing, although he fails to imagine it himself. Bresciani imagines that he has imagined this. And I imagine that\u2019s true for most of his target audience as well. This idea of \u201cthe ghosts of millions of aborted children\u201d is something they imagine that they have imagined, but have never really bothered to do so.<\/p>\n

They should. This is important.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not being facetious here \u2014 this matters. It matters a great deal that these folks have not, in fact, truly attempted to imagine this thing that they seem to think they have imagined.<\/p>\n

So let us try to imagine it for them. As Bresciani said, this is not impossible to do. It is, however, much harder than he seems to think.<\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s just consider the sheer scope of this idea: millions<\/em> of ghosts.<\/p>\n

Bresciani isn\u2019t wrong to cite a figure of \u201cmillions\u201d there. During Barack Obama\u2019s first term, there were more than 5 million<\/em> abortions performed in the United States.<\/p>\n

Oh, wait, I\u2019m sorry \u2014 that\u2019s the figure for the first term of President George W. Bush, during whose presidency the abortion rate that supposedly animates Bresciani\u2019s grave concern was far higher<\/em> than it has been during the Obama years. But there were 4.35 million abortions performed during Obama\u2019s first term \u2014 with the number and the rate falling every year during his presidency, and that rate now falling, for the first time ever, below<\/em> where it was before the Roe v. Wade<\/em> ruling in 1973.<\/p>\n

In any case, we are, indeed, going to need to imagine millions<\/em> of ghosts.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a bit much for a first step. It can be hard to imagine millions of anything, so let\u2019s start smaller and work our way up. Let\u2019s just picture one<\/em> such ghost.<\/p>\n

Yes, yes, I know \u2014 there\u2019s no such thing as ghosts. Fine. They may be legendary, fictional, imaginary things, but we all still know what ghosts look like, don\u2019t we? If I say \u201cpicture a unicorn\u201d or \u201cimagine a dragon\u201d we can all do so even though none of us has ever seen an actual, real<\/em> unicorn or dragon because there\u2019s no such thing to be seen.\u00a0We all know what ghosts look like.<\/p>\n

But the problem here \u2014 and this is a huge<\/em> problem \u2014 is that Bresciani\u2019s ghosts cannot look like that. The ghosts that Michael Bresciani has imagined he\u2019s imagining don\u2019t look anything at all like any ghost you\u2019ve ever imagined, heard of, read about or seen portrayed in the movies.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look again at those 4.35 million abortions performed between 2009 and 2012. These, remember, are the \u201cchildren\u201d whose ghosts we are being asked to imagine.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of those abortions \u2014 98.5 percent \u2014 were performed during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, with 94 percent performed during the first 15 weeks.<\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re thinking of a \u201cghost\u201d as anything like the ghosts you\u2019re accustomed to imagining, you\u2019ll need to reimagine these ghosts.<\/p>\n

These ghosts will be much, much smaller than that \u2014 with the largest ones about the size of a quarter. Their heads make up about half their overall size. It may help to think of Casper the Friendly Ghost. That\u2019s a cartoon, of course, and so we tend to think of Casper as an \u201cunrealistic\u201d portrayal of a ghost. But because he\u2019s a cartoon, Casper is usually drawn with an overlarge head (about a third of his total size, usually). So it may help us to imagine Bresciani\u2019s ghosts if we start with something like Casper, blur his face, shrink his body and limbs and \u2026<\/p>\n

Well, no \u2014 forget Casper. He\u2019s still a bit too typically anthropomorphic for us not to be misled into inaccurately imagining the \u201cghosts of millions of aborted children\u201d Bresciani has assigned us to imagine. Let\u2019s try a picture instead.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That picture to the right is a rendering of a 12-week embryo \u2014 with the dime included for a sense of scale. That\u2019s a good picture of what we need to imagine many of these millions of ghosts looking like.<\/p>\n

So try, if you can, to imagine millions of these almost-dime-sized specters haunting a building at the University of Hawaii. They\u2019re ghosts<\/em> remember \u2014 so make them kind of white and shimmery and translucent. And since they\u2019re ghosts, we can imagine them flying around \u2014 which is good, since they haven\u2019t got legs and obviously can\u2019t be walking<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That picture is still misleading in that it\u2019s still too large and too well articulated for a great many of our millions of ghosts. That\u2019s a picture from the end of 12 weeks, but many abortions are, in fact, performed at six weeks or earlier \u2014 so those ghosts would be even tinier, less-distinct spectral blobs.<\/p>\n

And, of course, a small percentage of our ghosts would also be from abortions that occurred after 12 weeks, so we should also try to imagine a few hundred thousand of these tiny phantoms with disproportionate little limbs and with the early stages of male or female genitals.<\/p>\n

The largest of our ghosts would thus have \u201cbrains\u201d with more than a million neurons, although these would still be largely unformed. This also is important if we are to imagine these ghosts accurately. Most of our ghost stories involve the spirits of the departed who remain here in the world of the living because they want something. Hamlet\u2019s father wanted vengeance. The ghosts of doomed lovers long to be reunited with their beloved. The ghosts of the wrongfully accused want justice.<\/p>\n

These ghosts are not like that.\u00a0Ghosts, the stories all say, seek<\/em> something, but these ghosts are incapable of seeking. They do not want<\/em> anything. They are not able<\/em> to want anything, let alone to accost the living with their demands \u2014 or even to acknowledge the presence of the living or of their surroundings.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the trickiest part of Bresciani\u2019s ghost story. How could these millions of tiny ghosts find<\/em> Obama\u2019s presidential library? They\u2019re all blind and deaf. They cannot speak, whisper, decide, seek, imagine or remember.<\/p>\n

None of these ghosts ever took a breath. They never spoke or heard anyone else speak.<\/p>\n

These ghosts, if we are to imagine them accurately, are incapable of doing anything on their own without the support provided by the women whose bodies hosted them and gave them life.<\/p>\n

And that, I\u2019m afraid, may mean that Bresciani is wrong. It may mean that it is<\/em>, in fact, \u201cimpossible to imagine a presidential library haunted by the ghosts of millions of aborted children,\u201d because it is, in fact, impossible to do what Bresciani\u2019s fantasy requires us to do \u2014 to erase all those millions of women and remove them from the picture as irrelevant.<\/p>\n

These women do not exist in Bresciani\u2019s mind. But without them, this whole nightmare fantasy of his is impossible.<\/p>\n

Erasing those women \u2014 eliminating them from our imagining \u2014 is probably the second-most horrifying thing about the ghost story that Michael Bresciani has assigned us to imagine.<\/p>\n

Perhaps even worse than that, though, is this terrifying realization: Bresciani\u2019s surreal imaginary haunting of the Obama presidential library provides an image\u00a0of what the majority of white evangelicals insist that Heaven is like.<\/p>\n

This is why it is important to try our best to imagine as accurately as possible the haunting that Bresciani has tasked us with imagining. Because doing so enables us to imagine \u2014 and to understand, perhaps better than they do themselves \u2014 what it is that millions of our fellow citizens believe that Heaven<\/em> will be like.<\/p>\n

These good people do not believe that \u201cmillions of aborted children\u201d will become ghosts haunting some archive in Hawaii or Chicago. They believe those \u201cchildren\u201d will all go to Heaven along with all the \u201cchildren\u201d who were conceived and then miscarried (a third or more of all pregnancies). If what they believe is true, then Heaven will look exactly like what Bresciani asks us to imagine. Heaven will be every bit as disturbing as his haunted presidential library.<\/p>\n

Let us, at least, cling to one ingredient from traditional ghost stories and imagine that these \u201cchildren\u201d will somehow be able to fly<\/em> in this haunted Heaven. That\u2019s still an unnerving image \u2014 the heavenly air filled with tiny blind, deaf, mute creatures devoid of thought, memory and emotion \u2014 but it\u2019s still far less disturbing than the alternative image of all these heavenly \u201cchildren\u201d lying about as billions of tiny dots across the heavenly landscape.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Anti-abortion activist says Obama's presidential library will be just like Heaven","description":"Erasing those women -- eliminating them from our imagining -- is probably the second-most horrifying thing about the ghost story that Michael Bresciani has assigned us to imagine. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}