Glenn Beck Is a Garbage Nightmare

I know. No doy. But sometimes he goes so far over the top that it's breathtaking, even when your expectations are that he's a garbage nightmare who emits nothing but a steady stream of diarrheic disgorgances putrid with the oppressive stank of bigotry, hatred, and stupid.

[Trigger warning for sexual violence and hostility to agency.]

Case in point: One of Glenn Beck's catastrophically clueless listeners admits he's not sure how to argue why women who are pregnant as the result of rape should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term and give birth to their rapist's baby.

Beck's guest, anti-choicer Lila Rose, helpfully explains that women who terminate pregnancies caused by rape are cowards, while Beck adds that they are eugenicists.



[Transcript below.]
I also love (where love = "loathe with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns") Lila Rose's brave assertion that people born of the result of rape are human beings, too, and are not to blame for the rape, as if the survivors who terminate pregnancies resulting from rape, and the people who defend their right to do so, might be arguing otherwise. Smells like straw!

And, you know, as someone who has written extensively about how being an anti-rape advocate retroactively gives meaning to having been raped, an otherwise senseless crime against my body and mind, I fully support (and understand) any survivor who finds purpose in carrying to term a pregnancy resulting from rape.

Thing is, I recognize that what is meaningful for me is not meaningful for everyone. Frankly, being a survivor has given me a virtually sacrosanct respect for allowing women to do whatever they want with their bodies.

Which will be various things. Because survivors are not a monolith.

I don't know who the fuck Lila Rose thinks she is, self-appointing herself our spokesperson, especially when she doesn't even identify as a survivor herself, but she really needs to STFU.

And, for the record, abortion is not an inherently violent act. Forcible birth, on the other hand, is.

[Commenting Guidelines: Disablist comments musing about Beck's psychological state or outright calling him crazy, nuts, deranged, delusional, unstable, a lunatic, in need of commitment, etc. are both unwelcome and not on-topic. I have a mental disorder, for example. It doesn't make me a lying rightwing dipshit.]

Glenn Beck: Nels Robinson is from Montana. He says he is a conservative and a constitutionalist, but…

Nels Robinson, Beck listener: But I'm having a I have a hard issue with, um, the aspect of, like, a rape case, or, uh, violence—something like that, as a conservative, what other conservatives feel about, you know, abortion in that case.

Beck: Yeah, so, you're kinda with me, that you're, you're so strong on this, except you get fuzzy when it—right?

Robinson: Yes.

Beck: And most people are like that. How do you answer that?

Lila Rose, President of Live Action: So, first of all, I want to talk about my friend Rebecca, and she's a pro-life speaker, and she was the victim, the [makes air-quotes] "product," of a rape. But she's just as much a human being as you or I are. So, that's the first thing there, is that unborn children that are conceived by violence of a rape, that is not the fault, their fault; that's the fault of their father, who's a criminal who needs to be put behind bars, et cetera.

But the other aspect here is, is the solution to the PAIN of a rape or incest victim an abortion? Is abortion something that they're going to—ten, fifteen, twenty years later—going to be happy that it happened? Is that going to take away the suffering of their rape? And I think you'll talk to rape victims and, and the ones that have BRAVELY chosen to go through with the pregnancy and give that child a chance, and they're not gonna say, "Oh, I wish I'd had an abortion." They're gonna say, "Wow, that was a redemptive part of this suffering; that was something that helped to redeem it." But abortion adds more violence to a violent act of rape.

Beck: I will, I will tell ya another argument, um, another argument for it would be, um, "Well, he's got the genes. You know, that child's got the genes of a rapist. " And that goes back to eugenics. That goes back to the argument, "Oh, you've gotta get rid of 'em, because they're imbeciles." Or they're criminals, and they'll always be criminals—and as, um, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, you know, isn't three generations of imbeciles enough?