August 28, 2009
“ [T]he racist bent of anti-choice protesters isn’t news to anyone who actually bothers to listen to clinic workers and escorts who deal with protesters on a regular basis, and are witness to both vicious racist slurs and racist assumptions from the protesters. It’s the sort of thing that gets ignored or papered over in an attempt to paint anti-choicers as earnest people with moral qualms about abortion, instead of right wing nuts who are in a full-blown panic over the fact that they don’t have a legal right to control and punish women who have unapproved sex lives. Though it would seem obvious that’s what’s going on when someone is driven to hang out at clinics so that you can titillate yourself looking at women who you know have likely had sex recently, and so you can scream at them.

Amanda Marcotte on Pandagon.

Last weekend I took one for the team and got an earful about how ‘The Rockefellers’ (read: Jews) made black people move to cities and kick out the (white) Catholics. (This is an interesting version of history. Most historians who have looked at this concluded that outside of the dirty south, there were a lot of conscious efforts to relegate black folk to cities and keep them out of suburbs and rural areas — see James Loewen’s work on the phenomenon on Sundown Towns.) The reason I listened to all this crazy shit was because one of our more badly behaved protesters was reaming a black escort out over ‘supporting black genocide’ and Margaret Sanger and some shit. Username bthny has posted about some classy dude at her clinic who keeps making racist remarks to Asian people about how it’s legal to have more than one kid now. And there’s always the old classic of old white dudes speaking Spanish to anyone who doesn’t look white enough for the Aryan Nations, which I am pretty sure happens at every clinic.

A particular point here needs to be shouted from the fucking rooftops, I think: While pro-life people may be people with genuine moral qualms and concerns, anybody who cares enough to say a rosary in front of a clinic and scowl at people walking past, hassle women walking into clinics, or hold up gross pictures and yell out phone numbers of crisis pregnancy centers, or film people walking into clinics and post that footage on the goddamn Internet go beyond ‘genuine moral qualms’ into ‘motherfucking lunatic crazy shitshow’ territory. They are more likely to be extremely sexist, racist, and anti-semitic than not (seriously, the fucking Rockefellers?) And bad news for the people with genuine moral qualms: These are the people who run the pro-life movement, and they make you look dumb and so goddamn crazy.

•
  1. robot-heart-politics reblogged this from catbus
  2. bthny reblogged this from catbus and added:
    really couldn’t...any better myself.
  3. catbus posted this