Notes from Evil Bender

When I started this blog, I had high hopes for seriously engaging the arguments of others. Years of dealing with wingnuts has largely disabused me of that, and now I save serious argument for people who haven’t proved themselves intellectually dishonest, lazy, irredeemably ridiculous, or a combination of the three. Arguing in good faith with those who will not themselves argue in good faith only serves to legitimize dishonest discourse. Such people can only be dealt with via mockery.

Naturally, high on the mockery-only list is Renew America, which ranks right up there with WingNutDaily in terms of horribleness.* So when I found, via S,N!, this amazing display of fallacies and moral corruption: Feminism the greatest evil: the repudiation of life, I knew what had to be done. Strap in for some pure, undistilled wingnut:

In the minds of many, evil is epitomized by Nazi Germany. An embittered Austrian corporal, a racist ideology, and an amoral eugenics movement all came together at the same point in human history, eventually spelling the deaths of six million Jews and others.

Others view Communism as the far greater evil, a godless philosophy that eventually doomed many more millions of souls in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

Yet these staggering numbers pale in comparison to the toll of unborn children whose lives are claimed each year by abortion. Each year 42 million of these procedures are performed around the world. As the Alan Guttmacher Institute boasts on its website, “About one in five pregnancies worldwide end in abortion.”

So while Communism consumed 100 million persons over the course of a century, abortion has snuffed out the lives of 420 million innocents in the last 10 years alone.

Yes, once you’ve assumed that reproductive health is exactly the same as Concentration Camps, medical procedures take on an evil tint. Shocking! Were I to assume that our author, Carey Roberts, commits murder every time he eats meat or whacks off into his sock, I can confidently then declare that he is worse than Hitler, and that Stalin can only shake his head in evil admiration.

And as you read this essay, the United Nations is pushing to make abortion even more accessible. Under the cover of its Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, abortion advocates are now claiming that if you want to reduce maternal mortality, you must offer every pregnant woman the right to abort.

That’s like saying if you want to stop car accidents, we’ll first need to get rid of cars.

Ah, an unsourced “abortion advocates” claim. That’s credible, and not at all a strawman. They couldn’t possibly be claiming that abortion needs to be legal because the state shouldn’t be in the business of compelling childbirth, and because restrictions almost invariably make medically-necessary abortions harder to get? Surely not!

And anyway, it’s not at all like the car accidents thing. It’s more like saying that if you want to stop car accidents, you shouldn’t force people to drive who don’t want to. For some reason, Roberts doesn’t use that particular analogy, though.

Abortion represents more than a moral holocaust. Just last month a woman from Eskilstuna, Sweden who already had two girls learned that her infant in utero was female. She demanded — and received — a state-financed abortion on the grounds that this time she wanted to have a boy.

I’ll give this to Roberts: his assumptions are clear. A woman did something he doesn’t approve of, and so he has naturally concluded that women should not have a right to make their own choices. Only the State can decide what are legitimate reasons to abort, and in Robert’s mind, the State has no reason to approve any abortion. Or maybe he’d just prefer women have to check a box that says “I’m not aborting this pregnancy based on a factor Carey Roberts doesn’t approve of.”

It might also not shock you to know that Robert’s reporting of events is, well, somewhat less than faithful. Meanwhile, Roberts is just getting warmed up:

When similar decisions are made by millions of women, a nation’s sex balance begins to careen out of control. In China, only 832 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, according to UNICEF. A similar problem in China. This has the makings of a demographic disaster.

Poor grammar aside, it should be fun to see how China’s culturally-enforced preference for males can somehow be laid at feminists’ feet. Presumably in the same way that one would conclude it is somehow feminism’s fault that China removes reproductive choice from its women.

All this is driven by the relentless march of radical feminism…

Spluh? So “radical feminism” is in favor of misogyny in China, huh?

All this is driven by the relentless march of radical feminism, which views abortion as a central sacrament to its destructive ideology. A woman cannot consider herself a member of the National Organization for Women or any other feminist organization without proclaiming a belief in what is euphemistically called “a woman’s right to choose.” A general right to abortion does not suffice; a feminist must believe in an absolute, state-enforced right to abortion, regardless of the child’s gestational age, age of the mother, or the wishes of the father.

It’s much easier to get facts on your side when you make them up! Somehow, feminism is responsible for anti-feminist policy in China and for making every feminist believe exactly the same thing. Roberts is supposedly an expert on feminism, so one might wonder if he’s unaware of the many points of contention among feminists. But that would presuppose honesty, which is a mistake here.

As to the last point: if the father would like to carry the fetus to term, he’s welcome to do so. Until then, he has no fucking rights as relates to a woman’s body. And Roberts had better hope that remains true, because I must admit I wouldn’t mind if the State would grant me one of Roberts’ kidneys.

Just as slavery induced moral turpitude in the hearts of slave owners, abortion oppresses the soul of its advocates. If you believe in abortion, the full fabric of human life begins to lose its inherent worth. Children are eventually seen as disposable.

You just know this is going to be good.

A disturbing example of this moral perversity is the growth of so-called “Safe Haven” laws. These laws were put into place after mothers began to leave their newborns in hospitals or stash them in dumpsters. But rather than punishing the nefarious deed, legislators began to pass laws that say it’s prefectly fine to abandon your infant, just as long as you do so at an approved location. And to relieve you of any lingering guilt, we’ll let you do it anonymously!

I must admit, I can’t actually bring myself to mock this. Roberts is actually opposed to laws designed to protect children from neglectful, desperate, or otherwise unfit parents. He’s opposed to abortion, but also opposed to laws designed to make it safe for parents who cannot care for their children to give them up without fearing legal sanction. And he admits this while accusing reproductive rights advocates of being immoral for not caring about children.

Roberts is too stupid or dishonest to admit that abandoned infants are the result of parents who no longer feel able or willing to care for them. So he’s opposed to abortion, but once the baby is out of the womb, fuck it.

We knew, of course, that the anti-choice crowd tends to stop giving a fuck about babies once they’re born, but rarely do they illustrate it so clearly. Thanks, Carey Roberts of Renew America!

By legitimizing the heinous act, Safe Haven laws have only made the problem worse.

Following passage of the 2001 Safe Haven law in in Illinois, 54 mothers have illegally abandoned their babies in non-approved locations. Twenty-seven of those babies died.

Safe Haven laws are to blame for women who do not take advantage of them. Genius!

In Nebraska, the original law didn’t impose any age limit. This past October a woman drove 12 hours from Detroit to dump off her 13-year-old son at an Omaha hospital. And a 14-year-old Iowa girl was abandoned by her grandparents reportedly to “teach her a lesson.”

Roberts would you prefer not to think about what life would be like for these poor kids if their guardians are forced to keep them. Apparently he’s never considers whether parents who want to abandon their children might not be the best guardians for those kids.

And just last month a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature that would lessen the criminal penalty if a mother killed her newborn due to postpartum hormonal shifts. If passed, the measure would re-classify such deeds from a capital murder to a jail felony. Rep. Jessica Farr, sponsor of the proposal, boasted, “I think that we got this far is pretty significant.”

Presumably Roberts does not think severe mental illness should be taken into consideration when a crime has been committed. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider the implications of such a policy.

Abortion on demand. Then Safe Haven laws. And now a proposal that trivializes infanticide. It adds up to the victimization of children and a reckless disregard for the sanctity of human life.

And there you have it: pure wingnut logic is a Gordian knot. It cannot be untied, but must be chopped through with mockery.

What comes next? Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal?

Generally, when a writer makes a series of ridiculous claims and then references a classic of satire, he or she would be hinting that they are in fact engaging in a bit of satire themselves. Roberts, not clever enough to know this, is dead serious.

Which is one more reason any attempt to satirize wingnuts cannot top the actual arguments of wingnuts. They are beyond satire.

*In fact, Renew America may have a PhD in Horribleness.