You always want to find the theme for the week when you’re recapping things. We’re going to go with: “Jezus Fucking Christ is this Kavanaugh shit over with or what?!”
By way of summation, the harrumphing and sneering elderly white guys are making snide and nasty remarks about the “mixed up” and “confused” woman (what, no “hysterical”?) with her story of attempted rape at the hands of a drunken prep school monster who is now being elevated to a platform where he can and undoubtedly will completely fucking gut reproductive rights for all the women of this country. Those vicious old white men try to publicly bully her into being unable to tell her story and she’s getting death threats for speaking out.
It’s as though you tasked somebody to create a scenario for educational purposes that illustrated every way in which a woman (and women in general) could be belittled and brutalized. All that’s missing is a workplace discrimination angle … oh wait.
It’s beyond belief. News programs don’t need B-roll to run while they discuss this—they should just be running clips from The Passion of Joan of Arc. Too bad they didn’t have Chuck Grassley to cast in that movie in 1928, but I think he was just a first-term Senator.
Another fascinating thread runs through the stories we concentrated on for this week. Basically, it’s that you can tell how utterly dickish the whole anti-choice movement is by what dickish things they do and say in the rest of their lives. “Asshole is as asshole does,” as it says in the Book of Deuteronomy, or should if it doesn’t.
We’ve seen how their quest to put an enemy of repro rights on the Supreme Court has brought out the not-so-hidden misogynist in conservative Congressmen (yes, ALL of them “CongressMEN.”). They’re more concerned with his Kavanaugh’s possible loss of a powerful job than in investigating how he’s misused his power in the past.
Along those lines, we also examined the question of whether or not the anti-abortion movement is inherently anti-woman. (The scholarly consensus is “Duh!”) As we summed up—you can’t be a feminist and yell at women all day. Unless you’re yelling “You go, girl!” and that gets old fast.
And it turns out that anti-choicers don’t mind spicing up their misogyny with a dash of racism if they think it helps, as we pointed out in blowing the whistle on the womb-raider who referred to Planned Parenthood’s new president, Dr. Leana Wen, as a “Doctor from ‘One-Child’ China.”
And finally, we called out their pathetic attempts at smearing the pro-choice movement. They keep trying to tie it to people like their favorite boogeyman, Dr. Gosnell—implying that he represents the truth about abortion. Gosnell doesn’t represent the true story of abortion providers any more than John Wayne Gacy represents the truth about clowns, or Hitler represents vegetarians. (Though clowns can be scary and some vegans can get a tad strident. Still.)
This week we’ve seen the anti-choice types revert to form with their mistruths, casual racism, and yes, inherent anti-woman attitude (not to mention the nasty they save for anyone non-cisgender.) This week their own words condemned them. If you want to know what somebody is really about, just keep listening. Eventually they’ll tell you.
