Category: Abortion

Because @EWErickson Is Right

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Greta Van Susteren went off on Erick Erickson’s criticisms of Texas Democrat Wendy Davis. Love ya, Greta, but you’re wrong.

Everybodyknows Erick and I fell out in 2011 when he endorsed Rick Perry after I’d already gone all-in for Herman Cain. This happens. But if hating Wendy Davis is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

When Texas Progress listed the “Top Ten Worst Comments Made by Conservatives About Wendy Davis,” I was Number One on the list.

Got your back here, Erick. We’re good to go.

 


Feminists Lie: Why @WendyDavisTexas’s Dishonest Personal Narrative Matters

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Professor William Jacobson points out that Democrats now claim it is sexist to criticize Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis for her dishonesty, even though “she made her parenting a critical part of her political narrative.” Professor Glenn Reynolds adds:

When women say that Wendy Davis is being treated more harshly than a man, I wonder if they aren’t really reflecting just that it bothers them more when a woman is criticized this way than when it happens to a man?

All Democrats habitually lie — John Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia, anyone? — so Wendy Davis is not really unusual in that regard.

What makes Wendy Davis a special case is that in 2013, as part of the Democrat Party’s plan to continue their 2012 “War on Women” theme in attacking Republicans, she led a filibuster against a bill in the Texas legislature that would limit abortion, from 24 weeks to 20 weeks of gestation. In other words, Davis made her debut as a national figure in support of late-term abortion, and she did so in the immediate aftermath of the Gosnell “house of horrors” revelations.

You can be pro-choice and still agree that late-term abortion — butchering an unborn child that is already at or near the point of being able to survive outside the womb — is a grisly atrocity.

It was in defense of such atrocities that Wendy Davis became a Democrat “star,” and her personal narrative was a crucial factor in her stardom. So when it turned out that she had been dishonest in describing her “single mom” status, this was important.

Many people are mystified by the Democrat strategy of running “Abortion Barbie” as their candidate in Texas — where polls indicate a 2-to-1 pro-life majority — but this was part of a national strategy, and if Davis was doomed to defeat, so what?

What Democrats want is to promote a victimhood narrative to women voters, to portray pro-life Republicans as extremist bullies, and Wendy Davis was happy to volunteer as national poster girl for their partisan propaganda campaign. This much is obvious, but what many people don’t understand is that the feminist crusade for the past half-century, specifically including the embrace of abortion by the so-called “women’s movement,” has been built upon a foundation of deliberate deception.

We need only mention Betty Friedan’s Communist Party connections as a reminder that feminism is a species of Marxism, whose leading advocates in the 1960s and ’70s were all part of the anti-American, pro-Soviet radical Left. In this sense, feminism is merely a stale Cold War leftover, like the “anti-imperialist” views of foreign policy that Barack Obama learned from his Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Yet while feminists today usually conceal the fact that they spent decades cheering for freedom’s deadliest enemies, they meanwhile are mostly ignorant of how their support for abortion was purchased by male capitalist plutocrats with decidedly non-“progressive” objectives.

The effort to legalize abortion wasn’t led by women seeking a “right to choose,” but by neo-Malthusian population control fanatics:

The population control movement . . . was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
[B]etween 1959 and 1964 one organization alone, the Population Council, got more than $5 million from the Rockefellers, $8.4 million from the Ford Foundation and $2.1 million from Scaife. So that’s $15 million in five years, back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America:

[T]o raise the public’s consciousness about the threat of overpopulation . . . the population movement undertook a concerted public relations campaign through a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles. This campaign was aided by the involvement of key publishers and editors who were actively involved in the movement, including George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine. The drumbeat around the population crisis reached crescendo by the early 1960s. Readers of popular magazines were faced with a barrage of articles warning of an impending population crisis . . . Women readers were inundated with articles like “Are We Overworking the Stork?” (Parents Magazine, 1961), “Why Americans Must Limit Their Families” (Redbook, 1963), “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Population Explosion” (McCall’s, February 1965), “Overpopulation: Threat to Survival” (Parents Magazine, 1967) and “Population Increase: A Grave Threat to Every American Family” (Parents Magazine, 1969).

 The truth about this is something I’ve mentioned before:

Like the facts about feminism’s Marxist origins, it is not really difficult to discover the truth about Rockefeller’s funding of this population control campaign — which connected abortion to the feminist cause  — once you are aware of its existence. But as with so much else in our culture, liberal hegemony in academia and journalism results in the suppression of this important truth.

Do you remember when feminist Meg Lanker created a hoax at the University of Wyoming by threatening to “hate-f*ck” herself? Her fictional victimhood was typical of the lies that feminists tell routinely, a phenomenon I began to notice about 15 years ago in examining a series of feminist memoirs that were a vogue with publishers in the mid- to late 1990s. What caused that trend? My surmise was that publishers figured out the institutionalization of feminism in university Women’s Studies programs had created a certain baseline level of demand. College libraries would more or less automatically buy any book about feminism, and if an author had a few friends who were professors that would assign her book as required reading for students, even the most tedious and badly-written memoir could sell thousands of copies.

Whatever the inspiration, in the 1990s there issued forth a number of books by middle-aged feminists whose life stories tended to follow a certain narrative arc: They grew up in suburban middle-class homes, got involved with the anti-war movement in the 1960s, endured a series of failed relationships with men, had a feminist “epiphany” at some point, and ended up as radical lesbians.

After reading about a half-dozen of these books, I noticed that their theme was usually at odd with their narrative, and that many elements of their narratives were “just so” stories, i.e., unverifiable anecdotes that — coincidentally! magically! — just happened to prove whatever political point they were trying to make.

When I say there was a conflict between the themes and narratives of these memoirs, what I mean is that the oppression they claimed to have suffered was not generally perpetrated by reactionary right-wing forces. No, these women left behind their bourgeois homes, got involved with the anti-war Left and then were treated abusively by left-wing men in the movement who, if you take these feminist memoirs at face value, were all insensitive monsters with a knack for turning women into angry lesbians.

While I’m willing to believe the worst about hippie peacenik creeps, however, the tendency of feminist memoirists to use unverifiable anecdotes to form their indictment of oppressive patriarchy struck me as inherently suspicious. If “the personal is political,” as feminists insist, why did it seem that the “personal” always involved a male victimizer known only by a pseudonym, so that there was no way to check the facts or learn the other side of the story? Unless you’re an angry lesbian whose confirmation bias predisposes you to believe such tales, at some point you begin to notice how these victimhood anecdotes serve the narrative function of providing male scapegoats whose alleged villainy relieves the author of responsibility for her own choices and decisions.

“The patriarchy made me do it!”

Victimhood tales are to feminism what success stories are to capitalism. Just as no entrepreneur would start an independent business if not for the belief that success was a possibility, so no woman would become a feminist unless she thought she could parlay sympathy for her tales of victimhood into career opportunities. Organized feminism provides a ready-made audience of credulous listeners for these victimhood narratives, and the Democrat Party’s political investment in women’s victimhood provides an incentive for the partisan publicity machinery of left-wing blogs and liberal media to promote such feminist myth-making.

If Wendy Davis’s single-teen-mom-in-a-trailer story is not as complete a fiction as Meg Lanker’s rape-threat hoax, the deception is not really a difference of kind, but merely a difference of degree. And if feminists are crying foul about Wendy Davis’s disgrace, this is only because feminism as a movement is implacably hostile to truth.





 

 


Hateful @SarahKSilverman Mocks Christianity in Pro-Abortion Video

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The Daily Caller’s Caroline May caught this on Friday: In a 5-minute video for “Lady Parts Justice” — the pro-abortion group she formed last year with Daily Show producer Lizz Winstead — Sarah Silverman pretends that she was visited by Jesus Christ, who told her to spread a pro-abortion message. Also, Jesus gives Silverman an orgasm:

This kind of pro-abortion fanaticism is always difficult for me to comprehend. It’s hard to imagine anyone could have such a bloodthirsty enthusiasm for killing babies, but it is especially hard to believe women could harbor this kind of monomaniacal death fetish.

Aleister points out that Siliverman’s choice of religions to mock doesn’t include Islam or Scientology:

If Sarah Silverman had any guts she’d take on Hollywood’s only approved faith, the so-called Church of Scientology which is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme disguised as a UFO religion. Do you know why she doesn’t do that? Because like everyone else in Hollywood, Sarah Silverman is always looking for her next job and she doesn’t want to offend anyone who might offer her a part in their next movie, TV show or commercial.
You never know when Tom Cruise or John Travolta might call, right Sarah?

Actually, she has done jokes about Scientology in her stand-up routine, but her career is rapidly going downhill anyway. She was popular for a few years when she was young and dating Jimmy Kimmel, but now she’s in her 40s and resorting to this: Political videos on YouTube, hoping to land an appearance on MSNBC maybe. In a few years, she’ll be like Joan Rivers, doing jokes about facelifts and menopause.

 

So I Guess @PaulWaldman1’s Basic Message Is: ‘Vote Democrat, You Sluts!’

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Before addressing Paul Waldman’s partisan nonsense, let’s first briefly discuss chlamydia. This is one of the lesser-known sexually transmitted diseases, not one of the big-name celebrity STDs like syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes and HIV. Despite its comparative obscurity, however, chlamydia is potentially devastating to women. The disease can lead to infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID):

Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) refers to infection of the uterus (womb), fallopian tubes (tubes that carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus) and other reproductive organs that causes symptoms such as lower abdominal pain. It is a serious complication of some sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), especially chlamydia and gonorrhea. PID can damage the fallopian tubes and tissues in and near the uterus and ovaries. PID can lead to serious consequences including infertility, ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy in the fallopian tube or elsewhere outside of the womb), abscess formation, and chronic pelvic pain. . . .
Each year in the United States, it is estimated that more than 750,000 women experience an episode of acute PID. Up to 10-15% of these women may become infertile as a result of PID. A large proportion of the ectopic pregnancies occurring every year are due to the consequences of PID.

That’s from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which, the last time I checked, was not run by right-wing extremists.

Well, why am I bringing up chlamydia, you ask? About 15 years ago, researchers found the disease to be surprisingly prevalent:

Almost one in 10 female U.S. Army recruits are infected with chlamydia . . . Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine tested urine samples from 13,204 recruits at Ft. Jackson, S.C. They found that 9.2% of the recruits — women between the ages of 17 and 25 — tested positive for chlamydia. But among 17-year-olds, the percentage jumped to 12.2%.
In women from five southern states — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — the rate for chlamydia was higher than 15%. Among recruits from states such as Washington, Oregon and Idaho, which have made aggressive efforts to control the disease, the rate of infection dropped to less than 5%. The medical team found that the risk of having the disease was highest among sexually active young recruits and African American women.

Are female Army recruits disproportionately sluttier than other young women? I don’t know, but the Army seems  a bit worried:

Results showed that the adjusted incidence of gonorrhea and chlamydia among Fort Bragg soldiers remained higher overall than comparable state and national rates during the period of analyses. The 1996 adjusted chlamydia rates for male and female active duty soldiers were 3-fold to 6-fold higher than rates for males and females in North Carolina and in the United States as a whole.

This problem was brought to my attention in an amusing way recently. My son completed Airborne School at Fort Benning, and then was put on a bus that delivered him to Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne Division and U.S. Special Forces Command. Upon arrival there, he had to attend a mandatory briefing on the risks of chlamydia — evidently the problem is serious enough that every new arrival at Fort Bragg must go through this. But my son was tired after the bus ride and fell asleep during the briefing, and when the instructor saw him nod off, my son was required to stand at attention for the remainder of the session.

Since then, every time my son starts to talk about his girlfriends, my response is automatic: “Chlamydia! Wake up, soldier!”

Promiscuity is not without actual risks, and condoms are not a guarantee of protection. Despite all the idiotic clamor about “safe sex,” condoms are not 100% effective, and it helps to ponder the question, “If you knew for a fact that someone was infected with an STD, would you still have sex with them, even with a condom?”

If your answer is “no,” and you then consider that a significant percentage of sexually active young people are infected with one or another STD, isn’t this a persuasive argument against promiscuity?

Facts and logic are utterly wasted on liberals, however, and so the enthusiastic embrace of sluttishness is the theme of a deliberately insulting column by Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, in which he attributes Republican anti-slut messages to the “ignorance” of “older conservative men who have no idea how ladyparts work, and really don’t want to know.” Really?

The obvious temptation is to go ad hominem here, to raise the question of whether Paul Waldman is so superior in his knowledge of the workings of “ladyparts” that he is fit to issue pronouncements on Republican men’s “ignorance” thereof. But let’s resist that temptation and instead ask: Is it really true that Mike Huckabee’s comments were rooted in “ignorance” and that, by implication, female voters prefer Democrats for their greater gynecological knowledge?

Excuse my skepticism. Exit polls show the “gender gap” advantage for Democrats among women is almost entirely a function of lower marriage rates for Democrat women. Barack Obama got 67% of the vote of unmarried women in 2012, while Mitt Romney got 53% of the vote of married women. If a woman’s romantic experiences are of the “happily ever after” variety, she’s probably a Republican, whereas women who are bitter because they have been used and discarded vote Democrat.

Anyone care to speculate what we might learn if we could correlate women’s votes with the incidence of chlamydia infection?

Democrats advocate and endorse promiscuity, going so far as to distribute “Sluts Vote” pins at their national convention. Knowing the harm to women caused by such behavior, why are Democrats so enthusiastically in favor of it? It’s the Worse-Is-Better logic borrowed from Marxist-Leninist radical theory: The more poverty, crime, disease and unhappiness there is, the more people become alienated from, and hostile toward,  mainstream society. This alienation and hostility can then be organized into political support for the kind of radicalism that proposes “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Happy, successful people aren’t interested in radical transformation, and so Democrats want more people to become miserable failures. And this is what “SlutWalk” is all about:

When I bring up “Marxist-Leninist radical theory” in discussing feminism, I’m not kidding around. Take a look at these photos from the 2012 San Francisco Bay SlutWalk:


The first photo shows a woman whose sign promotes Radical Women, an organization founded by avowed Marxists, including Susan Stern of the Weather Underground/Seattle Liberation Front. The second photo shows a SlutWalk flyer issued by Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD) which is actually a front for the Workers World Party, a Marxist group that led anti-Iraq War protests through its International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition.

This connection between Marxism and feminism is neither coincidental nor insignificant. “Taking Feminism Seriously“:

[University of California-Santa Cruz Women’s Studies] Professor Bettina Aptheker is the daughter of a famous American Communist, the late Herbert Aptheker . . .
Professor Bettina Aptheker is by her own proud admission both a Communist and a self-described “lesbian activist.” . . . Aptheker’s course syllabus describes lesbianism as the “highest state of feminism” . . . In other words, change in sexual orientation is an inevitable final stage in the development of the socially conscious individual.
Allison Jaggar is professor of philosophy and a former chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder  . . . Integrating Marxism and feminist theory, Jaggar describes herself as a “socialist feminist” and “activist,” who seeks to combat “the male-dominant structure of everyday life.” . . .
“The political economy of socialist feminism,” writes Jaggar, “establishes that, in contemporary society, women suffer a special form of exploitation and expression. . . . The distinctive social experience of women generates insights that are incompatible with men’s interpretations of reality . . . The validity of these insights . . . must be tested in political struggle . . .”

Understanding feminism’s Marxist worldview solves what is to many women a mystery: Why are feminists embracing the “slut” label? Don’t they understand that promiscuity is degrading to women? Shouldn’t feminism be upholding women’s dignity?

If you ask questions like that, you haven’t studied Marxism, which has always scorned “bourgeois morality” as an expression of “false consciousness” that Marxists attribute to religion, “the opiate of the masses.” Haven’t you been paying attention?

Popular culture has been so corrupt for so long that many young people are incapable of making any distinction between vice and virtue, categories that sophisticated people are expected to reject as old-fashioned, if not altogether obsolete or, indeed, hatefully oppressive.  . . .
“Deviant” is a word we don’t hear much anymore, for the simple reason that its meaning has become invalid or irrelevant or, as any Democrat would say, an expression of hate. America has in recent years gradually lost its vocabulary of moral judgment. “Deviant,” “abnormal,” “perverse,” “immoral” — each of these terms for sexual behavior that is wrong and bad implies the existence of an antonym for what is right and good. . . . Politically correctness forbids us to assert that any form of sexual behavior is more wholesome or more normal than any other.

A synonym for “political correctness” is cultural Marxism, and the elimination of traditional morality is essential to this radical idea, so that advocating promiscuity is now a feminist imperative, even though women will suffer most as a result.

There is no good and bad, no right and wrong, no true and false or — to express Marxist doctrine more accurately — no one should prefer that which is good, right and true, if that which is bad, wrong and false is more conducive to socialism. Anything that assists in subverting the capitalist order is “good” by Marxist standards, no matter how much hardship, suffering and death may result.

Feminists and Democrats want women to be sluts, because the more women are lonely and miserable, the better for Democrats.

Of course, after these sluts become infected with diseases that render them incapable of reproducing, they won’t need birth control.

“Chlamydia! Wake up, soldier!”

“What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense
and its replacement by a political ideology.”





 

 


‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’

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“Nobody cares about ‘social issues’ anymore, we have been told. Democrats have become the Pervert Party . . . and Republicans are now the Party That Dare Not Disagree. Morality is no longer a matter of the divine ‘thou shalt not’ that Jehovah declared to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Nowadays, moral authority is determined by Hollywood, Harvard University and the New York Times. In post-Christian America, we have reverted to a sort of neo-heathenism, depending on guidance from secular wizards and a priestly caste of experts who gaze at poll numbers the way ancient astrologers looked for omens in the stars.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “The New Abnormal,” The American Spectator, July 31, 2013

Mike Huckabee gave a speech yesterday at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that has been treated as scandalously controversial. Chris Moody of Yahoo News provided the full context of Huckabee’s remarks:

“I think it’s time for Republicans to no longer accept listening to Democrats talk about a war on women. Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women. For them to be empowered; to be something other than victims of their gender.
“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them birth control medication.
“Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do. Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on women, it’s a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it — let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them to be. And women across America have to stand up and say, enough of that nonsense.”

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” — a quaintly Freudian term for “sex drive” — was the specific button-pusher here, but let’s face reality: No one can say anything about women that deviates from Official Feminist Dogma without committing Thought Crime and, because Democrats control the terms of what is accepted as Official Feminist Dogma, the Thought Police are always more vigilant in scrutinizing Republicans for deviations from the script. Allahpundit:

Does it really matter what he said? The liberal thought process on this works this way, I think: “Known social conservative + something about women + something about sex and birth control = outrage.” Right? It’s basically Pavlovian.

Allah links Ace’s rant against social conservatives:

The elevation of strictly personal decisions . . . into a major political issue is childish and tribalist.
Yes we all have a preferred mode of living. News at 11. The law is not about preferred modes of living, and neither should we make “political issues” about it.

The problem, of course, is that it was feminists and their Democrat allies who decided that “the personal is political,” so that radical messages about How We Should Live are the constant theme of propaganda from the news media, Hollywood and academia.

Children are being indoctrinated in public schools, at taxpayer expense, about How We Should Live. If you are a parent who doesn’t want your daughters living the Disney Starlet Lifestyle — or if you don’t want your sons performing in “bareback orgy” videos — who is on your side?

Well, certainly not the Republican Party, I guess, because if any Republican so much as mentions the Culture War nowadays, he or she will be denounced not only by the Left, but also by conservative pundits who insist that the GOP must cede the field to Democrats on social issues and never say a word about how The Pervert Party benefits from America’s descent into decadence.

This position of pre-emptive surrender in the Culture War seems to have begun in 1992, when the GOP ran for cover rather than to defend Dan Quayle’s critique of “Murphy Brown.” It seems to have escaped the notice of most Republicans when, a year after that controversy, Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead declared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

Whitehead developed that article into a fascinating book, The Divorce Culture, but apparently I’m the only conservative blogger who read that book, because I never see Ace or Allah or anyone else acknowledge Whitehead’s critique of the “Love Family” ideology which “liberates sexual, compassionate, and parental love from its institutional and cultural moorings in marriage.” For that matter, have you ever seen any conservative blogger mention Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism or Dana Mack’s The Assault on Parenthood?

My point is that social conservatism is more intellectually respectable than most people imagine, but for 20 years, those who are serious about fighting the Culture War have been shunted aside and told to be quiet, lest they cause Republicans to lose elections.

Oddly, however, the GOP’s active suppression of social conservatism has not translated to Republican electoral dominance. The nomination of John McCain — whose profound contempt for social conservatives is no secret — did not produce a GOP triumph, nor was the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney able to dodge the remarkably counterfactual Democrat propaganda that painted him as an extremist Trojan Horse, an agent of the Republican Taliban.

The fundamental problem here is probably too large to be reduced to a blog post, and I’m not in a mood to tackle the whole problem today, but let’s say this: Systemic incentives encourage conservative writers to devote themselves to the day-to-day political headlines, and to identify as “important” only those issues which directly and immediately affect the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, liberals — who comprise 80%-90% of journalists and academics — are writing about Everything Else, including sexuality, marriage and parenthood. So it is that, outside of whatever issues bear directly on the daily R-vs.-D political battle, nearly everything you read is written by liberals. This explains how the cultural “mainstream” is dragged steadily leftward, and most people don’t even notice the shift until Phil Robertson creates a firestorm by quoting the Bible, or one day you click an Internet link and find people arguing that high-school boys getting bareback butt-humped in porn videos is no cause for concern.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Glenn Beck.

Almost unnoticed, a posture of enlightened non-judgmentalism has become compulsory, because liberal dominance of the intelligentsia means that nearly every articulate person has been indoctrinated in the Egalitarian Orthodoxy, and no critic of the Left’s social agenda has access to a vocabulary of rational dissent.

One afternoon last August, I found myself amid a crowd of feminists marching down the street and chanting about rape, and I was denounced as a misogynist for noticing that several of the marchers were displaying their bare breasts during this political parade.

“Nice tits” is now hate speech, even if the aforesaid tits are brandished naked in broad daylight in downtown D.C. By the same token, a Republican may not suggest a connection between “libido” and the demand for taxpayer-funded contraception.

What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense and its replacement by a political ideology. Common sense tells us that it is unusual — indeed, the word abnormal is appropriate — for women to parade bare-breasted through the streets. Common sense likewise tells us that the Contraceptive Culture is directly related to the prevalence of licentiousness and promiscuity in society.

Has it been only 10 years since Lawrence v. Texas? Has it been only 15 years since Nina Burleigh said she would cheerfully give Bill Clinton a blow job to thank him for keeping abortion legal?

Am I the only one who has noticed how rapidly the “Emerging Awareness” doctrine has gained a death-grip on our culture?

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” caught my attention for reasons entirely different than the reasons that made him the object of a leftist Two-Minute Hate. Huckabee is 58 years old. He graduated from Ouchita State University in the mid-1970s, and is therefore old enough to remember when Freudian ideas about “libido” were entirely respectable. Nowadays, Freud’s categories are mocked as obsolete, and neurobiology is made to explain what was once attributed to “Oedipal complexes,” repressed impulses and so forth. Whatever way you are, we’re now told, you were Born That Way, and never mind if this biological determinism is vaguely redolent of Nazi race doctrine.

This is Science with a capital “s,” and Progress with a capital “p,” and no enlightened person is ever supposed to question whether today’s ideas of Scientific Progress are really any more valid than the discarded ideas of yesterday’s Scientific Progress.

Lost somewhere in all this is the old-fashioned understanding that humans are creatures of habit, and that if one gets into the habit of indulging certain unruly appetites, those habits may become the shackles of lifelong slavery, impairing the individual’s capacity for happiness, and inflicting various forms of misery on society at large.

Where did Kathryn Camille Murray get the idea that having sex with a 15-year-old boy was a pleasant and harmless amusement?

Perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere among the penumbras and emanations where Justice Douglas found a “right to privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, a few decades before Justice Kennedy invoked the hitherto unknown doctrine of “emerging awareness” in striking down the Texas sodomy statute. And who knows whither the emerging awareness shall henceforth emerge?

 

 


Let’s Slut-Shame @WendyDavisTexas!

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“Over time, the Davises’ marriage was strained. In November 2003, Wendy Davis moved out. Jeff Davis said that was right around the time the final payment on their Harvard Law School loan was due. ‘It was ironic,’ he said. ‘I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.’ . . . In his initial divorce filing, Jeff Davis said the marriage had failed, citing adultery on her part . . .”
— Dallas Morning News

Smitty already took a whack at the Wendy Davis piñata today, and that’s probably enough Wendy Davis bashing for the week.

She’s so far down in the polls as to be hopelessly doomed. She will lose to Greg Abbott in November without any further help from us.

However, the point of mocking progressive celebrity women is not because such mockery will contribute to their electoral defeat. No, the purpose of deriding Democrat women is to inspire feminists to frothing rage over the alleged sexism of conservatives.

Of course, Republican women are routinely disparaged in the most foul misogynist ways by left-wingers, and feminists never say a word about that, but let Rush Limbaugh make a wisecrack about Sandra Fluke and suddenly it’s a right-wing #WarOnWomen.

Conservatives are going to be slammed as misogynists no matter what we say or do, so we might as well have some fun and try to do something that will provoke a wildly unhinged Amanda Marcotte rant.

Most of the resentment over Wendy Davis’s fudging of her biography — “My language should be tighter,” she admitted to the Dallas Morning News — is focused on her depiction of herself as a struggling “single mom,” despite the way she hooked up with an older sugar daddy when she was 21, married him when she was 24, moved into a posh neighborhood, and got him to pay her way through Harvard Law. Then Wendy left him with custody not only of the daughter they’d had together, but also with her daughter from her first marriage.

Not to be judgmental or anything, but that’s scarcely the tale of hardship and woe that wins much sympathy from actual single moms, many of whom are conservative women, and disinclined to RSVP to the Wendy Davis Feminist Victimhood Pity Party.


You get the general idea: We want to force feminists to defend the real Wendy Davis — a liar, a cheater, a selfish gold-digger — and to make them explain how her actual biography (and her dishonesty about her biography) is consistent with progressive ideals. And if they refuse to fight Wendy’s fights for her, we’ll then have a wonderful headline: “Feminists Abandon Democrat Wendy Davis.”

Heads we win, tails they lose.

 


NBC’s Maria Shriver Raves About How Abortion Barbie ‘Became a Star’

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Erick Erickson dubbed Texas Democrat state Sen. Wendy Davis “Abortion Barbie” last year when she filibustered a bill to reduce the legal window for abortion from 24 to 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Stop and think about that for a minute: 24 weeks is nearly six months. Even if you are an advocate of “a woman’s right to choose,” you can hardly say that limiting abortion to 20 weeks is a serious infringement of that right. With advances in neonatal medicine, a fetus at 24 weeks is now viable. Let’s not mince words: Abortion at such a late stage of pregnancy is killing a baby that could survive.

Yet maintaining the legality of abortion at 24 weeks in Texas was such a crusade for Wendy Davis and Democrats that they shut down debate in the legislature to try to stop a bill — one with widespread voter support — to limit abortion to 20 weeks. And they did this even in the aftermath of the horrific Kermit Gosnell revelations.

So, guess who NBC decided to feature on the Today show?

In a glowing profile of Texas state senator and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis that amounted to a campaign commercial on Wednesday’s NBC Today, correspondent Maria Shriver proclaimed: “Wendy Davis became a familiar name last year when she stood in her pink tennis shoes for eleven hours to defeat a Texas abortion bill. Even though the bill eventually passed, Davis became a star. And her story, her personal story, resonated across this country.” . . .
Beyond vaguely describing how Davis tried to “defeat a Texas abortion bill,” Shriver failed to ask a single question about the would-be governor’s staunch support for abortion in such a pro-life state. . . .
Having not once referred to Davis as liberal, Shriver made sure to label her Republican opponent: “Her likely opponent is Texas state attorney general Greg Abbott. He’s a man with a conservative record to match the blanket of red that covers most of Texas.”
According to a poll conducted by the Democratic polling company Public Policy Polling in November, Davis trailed Abbot by fifteen points. Shriver avoided any such polling data in her report.

 

Kyle Drennan’s report at Newsbusters doesn’t mention the crude partisan calculation involved in the Davis campaign (and NBC’s one-sided promotion of her campaign). Everybody knows Davis is ultimately doomed. However, by turning Davis into a national celebrity for “a woman’s right to choose” and then running her for governor, Democrats turned her into a magic fundraising machine.

This won’t turn Texas “blue,” but it will force Republicans to spend more money than usual to elect Greg Abbott governor. And this is a national Democrat Party strategy to force Texas GOP donors (who otherwise might be funding Republican candidates in “swing” districts around the country) to keep their money “at home.” The meltdown of ObamaCare has evidently upset that strategy — Democrats are now clearly on the defensive, and there is now little prospect Nancy Pelosi can recapture the House speaker’s gavel — but that was what the whole media-generated Wendy Davis “star” saga was originally about, and it’s disgusting.

Wendy Davis, Maria Shriver and Democrats’ fanatical support of “choice” is revealed as a bloodthirsty enthusiasm for death.

 

Value Judgments

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This seems simple doesn’t it?

If it isn’t wrong to kill children, then it can not be wrong to do anything else. . . .
Believe it or not, even politically incorrect comments about homosexuality have to be excused if we are to believe that baby killing is a moral act.
I’m often told that I need to be more understanding on this topic, but this is an unfair request. There are people — millions of them, in fact — who think it should be legal to murder babies, but then illegal to, say, pay a fast food worker less than minimum wage, or refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. How could I possibly understand this mentality? How could I wrap my head around the thought process that leads one to conclude that the latter cases are so atrocious — so dehumanizing — that they ought to be outlawed, but the former case is so acceptable that it ought to be vigorously defended, and even funded, by the federal government? . . .
I say all of this because my initial intention was to sit down and write about the couple in Washington who just won a 50 million dollar “wrongful birth” settlement. Brock and Rhea Wuth sued a hospital because their son was born severely disabled. No, they were not alleging that the hospital caused the disability; they alleged that the hospital (and a lab testing facility) did not run the correct tests that would have detected the genetic defects while the child was still in the womb. Had they been given the correct tests, they would have known that the baby was “defective,” and then killed it. Tragically, they were robbed of the opportunity to abort their son, so the hospital must pay for the son’s care — for the rest of his life.

“Wrongful birth”? You can sue somebody for that?

Does this mean Red Sox fans can sue because Bill Buckner was born?