Yesterday, I mentioned some typically terrific comments Republican Mike Huckabee made at an anti-choice fundraiser sponsored by Susan B. Anthony List. Via the AP, some of the other Republican attendees also had great things to say:
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said those who support abortion rights favor a "culture of death" and engage in "savagery."Ha ha Huckabee, you are definitely getting all the other issues wrong.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is a favorite of the tea party, reminded the crowd of activists that supporters of abortion rights chanted "Hail, Satan" to silence their enemies during a heated protest at the Texas Capitol. ...He was referencing protests in Austin, Texas, last year over an abortion bill. While anti-abortion activists were giving speeches and singing "Amazing Grace," others tried to drown them out with chants.
..."Whether it's politically expedient or not is of no consequence to me," Huckabee said. "If we get this issue wrong, we will get all the other issues wrong."
During a separate appearance, Sen. Deb Fischer, a first-term Republican from Nebraska, told the activists: "Abortion is not a women's issue. It is not a men's issue. It is not a health care issue. It is a violence issue."Well, Fischer is right about that, although not for the reasons she imagines.
As I've said before (and will almost certainly have occasion to say many times again, until everyone is yawning about what a goddamn broken record I am), if anyone not seeking cover under the auspices of a "difference of opinion on abortion" suggested that I should be forced to submit my body against my will to nine months of potential discomfort and pain, followed by an act that might include the skin and muscle between my vagina and anus being torn open, I don't think we'd mince words about whether they were using violent rhetoric.
And yet all these anti-choice dipshits talk about is the supposed "violence" done to a fetus during an abortion. There is no discussion of the actual violence of forced pregnancy and birth.
The anti-choice position is inherently violent. Their assertion that the pro-choice position is violence is nothing but sheer projection.
And it is precisely this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric—"culture of death," "savagery," "save babies"—that underwrites a decades-long campaign of intimidation, harassment, and violence directed at abortion providers and abortion seekers, which is the most brazen, unapologetic terrorist campaign in the US, its co-ordination and orchestration done right out in the open, where no one in the media or politics will call it what it is.
Elected Republicans are not ignorant of the existence of anti-choice terrorism. They are not ignorant of the how their inflammatory language encourages violent anti-choice activism. And they continue to engage in it, anyway, because they don't give a fuck about violence done to women (and others) seeking abortions, nor to the doctors who perform them.
In case it weren't already evident that fetuses are valued more highly than the people who carry them, here is further proof. Anti-choicers are more concerned with the rhetoric of "saving babies" than they are about actual people's safety, about actual people's lives.
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