Schadenfreude
Ted Haggard
And here’s Good Pastor Ted giving Richard Dawkins a Christian “Welcome to the United States”:
{ Monthly Archives }
November 2006
Ted Haggard
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The Uses of Coathangers
Source: Hullabaloo
Tristero has a fine post responding to the media’s attempts to portray the two sides in the debate over re-criminalizing abortion as “equally extreme”. The context is the current attempt by the radical christianists to return South Dakota to a pre-enlightenment culture. Tristero demolishes a NYTimes article which “compare[s] the tactics of the South Dakota pro-coathangers to the pro-choicers, trying to make them out as equally guilty of extreme rhetoric.”
Some of you might point out that my use of the phrase "pro-coathanger" to describe the anti-choice gang is just as extreme as calling pro-choice people "baby-killers." Well, yes, of course it is. And that is the point. I’m using the term deliberately here to shock you into realizing that that is how perverse our rhetoric has to get even to begin to come close to matching the revolting rhetoric of the far-right that we take for granted as normal discourse.
For example, to counter the inaccurate term "pro-life" with the accurate "pro-choice" is to cede the rhetorical advantage to the extreme right by permitting them to lie about their position. There is nothing even remotely pro-life about insisting that poor girls who get pregnant without wanting to must suffer the horrors of an incompetent medical procedure. And yet, every day, this is how the mainstream discussion of abortion is conducted, even by liberals who really ought to know better.
