There was an interesting discussion in Betty’s thread about about the legislator who was shocked that actual women are being hurt by the law he helped pass. If you missed that post, I think it’s worth going back to.
Bupalos shared his theory about the Republican position on abortion:
I think a lot of folks make the mistake of thinking the Republican abortion position is either more convoluted and conflicted or rational than it is.
It’s quite simple and clear. Their position on abortion is simply part of the overall agenda. They want to go back in time to an imaginary past. They want to solve what they see as social and moral and economic problems with one weird trick that has the benefit of being so impossible that it will never be tried and thus never be disproven. They can’t bear to look ahead, so they cover their eyes and dream.
The reason this guy didn’t think about the real world consequences of his vote is that he had a prior commitment to not living in the real world, where we are all here in the present and time is moving forward. Conservatives long ago gave up on slowing the movement of time and upped the ante to reversing it.
It isn’t “hate” or “controlling women” and he never wanted to actually hurt real women. He’s quite genuine. He wanted to help imaginary women, in a made up land of yesteryear. Unfortunately he got a real phone call in the real world that intruded on that delusion…
I think there’s a lot to be said for the idea that they want to go back in time to an imaginary post the exists only in their minds.
Kent replied with a different view:
I think it is simpler than that. I think abortion was simply a culture war issue that Republicans could use to cement their fundie base and mobilize large numbers of shock troops to go door to door during elections. The pro-life wackos are more or less the GOP equivalent of the unions that provide foot soldiers for the Democrats.
As long as Roe was in place they could stir up their rabid base of fundie foot soldiers by demagoguing on abortion because it didn’t really affect anyone else. Because Republicans are absolute masters at demagoguing to their base.
But with Dobbs they are now the dog that caught the car and they don’t quite know what the fuck to do. Suddenly their positions and laws are not simply performative nonsense that doesn’t actually affect anyone. Suddenly it affects EVERYONE and not in good ways.
Anyway, fuck them. They are now caught in a trap of their own making. The only way to deal with it is to flush them down the toilet via the ballot box.
And Roger Moore chimed in:
I think you’re missing an important point. Yes, the R position on abortion started out as a cynical ploy to recruit foot soldiers for the cause, but that was 40-50 years ago. The people who developed that cynical ploy are retired or dead, replaced by the foot soldiers they recruited. To them, abortion isn’t a cynical political ploy used to convince the rubes; it’s evil and the defining issue of our time. It’s a real shock to people who have believed in abortion as an issue for their whole political lives to discover it’s more complicated than they realized.
Maybe everybody’s right?
I want to include this tweet again, even though I posted it last night.
Michigan Deputy Attorney General Christina Grossi making an impassioned plea to allow women the ability to continue making their own decision about their bodies, their futures and their lives. pic.twitter.com/hSGwGhYQ6k
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) August 19, 2022
It seems to me that the case that Deputy Attorney General Christina Grossi (Michigan) makes above is language that we can all use as we talk about this with people. Watching that clip also makes me feel especially good about the funds we have raised for Michigan, where the Governor, Secretary of State, and the Attorney General are all offices held by strong women who are up for reelection.
Regardless of why or how we got here, what are we going to do about it? How do we keep this issue front and center through the election in November?
Someone in the comments last night mentioned Roe, Roe, Roe your Vote – I checked twitter and it doesn’t appear to be a hashtag yet, but people do seem to be including that as sort of a tag line on their comments. I like that because it’s clever enough that we can use it over and over again without it being tiresome.
Open thread.
Spanky
I forget who it was sometime in the past couple of days who pointed out that there’s a term for those who don’t control their own reproductive choices.
Livestock.
Spanky
Also, Handmaid’s Tale. Novel or instruction manual?
Falling Diphthong
I think the heart of revanchist political movements is the yearning for a mythical past. Just before the dreamer’s time, a person like the dreamer would just automatically be placed on top in any way they cared about–guaranteed a good job, assured their values and actions were absolutely the correct values and actions, ushered to the front of the line, etc.
For an unusual bit of revanchist fantasy I recommend Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, an alternate history novel in which the Civil War gets diverted when the dead rise and start trying to eat everyone in sight on all sides. The book is set several years later, and revanchism permeates the highly illogical plans to return to a glorious past. I happened to be reading this on 1/6/21, and it was a surreal experience.
WaterGirl
@Spanky: I have quoted that more than once since I saw that comment yesterday. It’s so true.
The right sees women as breeders, second-class citizens at best. And I for one am really pissed.
I do think we need to start using the term “forced birth” when we talk about the repeal of Roe.
Cmorenc
Evangelicals like my wife’s sister-in-law have a fervently religious virw that at the moment of conception, god imparts a “divine spark” creating full human status. No mention of what happened to that divine spark in a natural miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, abrupted uterus, etc, in short why their concept of god is so casual about seeing those sparks of life to full-term successful delivery.
About the best they can come up with is “god has a plan – that often works in mysterious ways”.
Lapassionara
I actually grew up in the fifties, in the pre-Roe days. Abortion was not legal, but there were ways to get one, if you were white and well-connected. This is the past they want to go back to, where the “right” people could get an abortion, but the “wrong” people were out of luck.
Cmorenc
@Lapassionara: In particular, in most communities in the 50s and 60s, no one second- guessed the doctor’s decision that an abortion (vid d&c) was a medically prudent move. Part of the reason these abortions by legit providers flew under the radar screen was also sort of a don’t ask, don’t tell mentality that prevailed among those involved. Of course, not everywhere nor every ob-gyn was so willing or tolerant, hence the resort to underground (much riskier to health) often-unlicensed abortion providers
Roger Moore
@Cmorenc:
I think this gets back to the idea of them living in an imaginary world that doesn’t have the complications and difficulties of the real world. They avoid dealing with the messiness of real pregnancies by building their ideas around an idealized world where they don’t have to worry about that stuff. Their way of dealing with real world complications is to shove their fingers in their ears and shout “I don’t hear you”.
Chetan Murthy
@Falling Diphthong:
The Christofascists aren’t the only ones yearning in that manner. This was a key aspect of Nazi mythology — of a German nation pure and unsullied, until those dirty foreigners (== “joooooz!” but also Roma and other …. dirty pollution of the body politic) came along.
ETA: and of course, the same is true of the US: in 1860, 12.5% of the *entire* population was enslaved (and hence, Black). America was never a White nation.
SiubhanDuinne
@Lapassionara:
Yeah. And then complain nonstop that there are too many black and brown people, and do all they can to make those people’s lives a misery.
Shantanu Saha
My take: After Roe, really the only group that had a commitment against abortion in almost all cases were conservative/reactionary Catholics. Before the 70s, these Catholics were primarily Democrats because of the city Democratic machines, which were heavily Catholic. But with the busting of many of these machines by “good government” Republicans, Catholic voters were adrift politically. Also, many Catholics had risen from the working class to the managerial and business class, making them natural bait for the party of the plutocracy. So the anti-abortion plank was devised as a way to get the reactionary Catholics together with the reactionary Evangelicals.
Now they’ve won the issue in court and in these ever more draconian bans, they have nothing to coalesce around, except defending the indefensible.
Jim Appleton
@Lapassionara: Ding ding ding!
This underlies all or nearly all “conservative” id. Cruelty is a primary motive.
Roger Moore
@Lapassionara:
And, of course, there are plenty more things you can substitute for “get an abortion” and have this still be true. This gets back to Frank Wilhoit’s observation that conservatism’s sole principle is that there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect. You can naturally figure out which group they think they belong to.
azlib
There are certainly “true believers” that think human life begins at conception and abortion should be 100% illegal. There are also cynical politicians who used the issue as a fund raising vehicle and to recruit foot soldiers and make them a reliable part of their coalition to get elected. As long as Roe was in place this all worked fine. Coalition partners were cemented and funds flowed. This all required Roe to stay in place so the real complexity of pregnancy was out of sight.
Overturning Roe brought to the forefront the complexity of pregnancy whether voluntary, accidental or forced. This is why you are now seeing stories about 10 old pregnancies because of rape or incense and later term abnormal conditions where the fetus is non-viable. All would have been taken care of by Roe and out of sight.
The cyncial politicians really do not know what to do. A signicant part of their coalition really believes abortion is evil. Admitting now that it is not evil in most cases means losing a significant part of their coalition. That course is political suicide. They are left with doubling down on what is a losing hand.
Chetan Murthy
@Lapassionara: Many have written that this is precisely what they yearn for. But unfortunately, with the passage of time and the evolution and deployment of massive surveillance and electronic transactions, it’s become harder and harder for “the right sort of people (white and well-connected)” to get abortions if they’re outlawed. I think it’s a fair bet that there’ll be such cases getting prosecuted, b/c the mouth-breathers want Gilead, not Gilead-for-the-mudpeople. Gilead for everybody.
Roger Moore
@Shantanu Saha:
Sure they do. That’s exactly what the anti-trans panic is about. They want another culture war issue that religious conservatives can agree on.
Jackie
FYI You can order a free ROE, ROE, ROE Your Vote sticker from MoveOn.org.
I’ve got one on order.
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Exactly. In their ideal world, ectopic pregnancies don’t happen and 10-year-old children don’t get raped, so of course they would never have to have an abortion.
That’s why this stuff doesn’t compute. (for them)
But part of being an adult and making decisions – let alone making decisions for other people – requires living in fucking reality.
different-church-lady
The entirety of the GOP mindset is to bypass the intellect and plug directly into the tribal lizard brain. To say that there’s any intellectual motivation at all for their behavior is giving too much credit. They are solely about what creates a primitive sense of outrage and attachment. They never thought any of this through.
Josie
@Chetan Murthy:
This is a good point. Here in Texas, the law empowers any person to file civil suit against any other person for aiding a woman to get an abortion. Everyone is at risk with a law like this. Some people who think, because of wealth or social position, that they will not be affected by the court’s decision may be in for a rude awakening.
Nettoyeur
@SiubhanDuinne: In the wake of Dobvs, there has been a boom in vasectomies and tubal ligation, esp in the white population. Can’t wait until the MAGAts discover that a long term consequence of Dobbs is faster decline of the proportion of whites in the US population. The “replacement theory” is a key factor in the MAGA movement.
MattF
As I’ve mentioned before, my dad was a physician pre-Roe, and he told me several times that arranging an abortion was not a huge problem. He hinted, in fact, that getting one at a Catholic hospital was no harder than getting one anywheres else. Physicians had (and, I assume, still have) access to the sorts of hospital and practitioner statistics that make this doable.
guachi
@Spanky: I came to the comments to make this exact point and I’m glad you made this point with the first one.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl:
It was *instructive* how their response to the former is “that isn’t an abortion, so it should be allowed” (even though the laws make no such distinction, and doctors sure don’t think they have that lattitude) and their response to the former was “suffering is good, she’ll learn and grow thru the suffering! (think of babby!)”
Really instructive. In both cases, they prize an ideology over (as in “running over”) real existing human beings and their suffering. That’s the definition, almost, of totalitarian ideology (that it privileges “ideas, principles, grand sweeps of history” over real existing humans and their suffering).
Urza
I posit that 99.9% of conservatives across the planet do not actually live in fucking reality. They do however truly enjoy making decisions for other people.
Most American Conservatives I know are socially deficient in one way or another. Its intentional in how they were raised even if they don’t know it was intentional. Trying to keep certain personality traits like asking questions and thinking outside the box from taking root in their children, etc. Generally disbelieving in Psychology as a science helps them ignore that they intentionally create this damage.
Reboot
@WaterGirl: Also, ‘forced pregnancy.’
Martin
I’m of the view it’s a culture war marker. Roger isn’t wrong, but I think he misunderstands the role it plays now. It’s a signal of cultural membership.
The GOP is now fully in a mode of ‘We will never allow someone else to set the cultural rules’. And what they mean by that is, well, everything. Abortion is just part of it. Guns is another good example. You cannot convince them that carrying a gun in a bar or a church or a school is a bad idea. The very act of trying to convince them of that hardens their position because *you* are not part of *their* culture. And all outside ideas are to be feared and opposed. It applies to Covid masking and vaccines, climate change, EVs, you name it. *Nothing* is spared. And so you get this constant stream of culture war bullshit – trans kids, having books in libraries, etc.
And at some point the situation gets reversed. Hardly anyone actually believes the election was stolen in the mechanical sense (in the entitled sense, that’s a different matter), but your position on the election is a signaling function of culture. If you are willing to say that 2+2=5, then you are sufficiently loyal to the cultural cause. Eventually everything kind of fills that role – abortion, masking, etc.
The hard line of the GOP is that there is only one viable culture and that’s white christian nationalism. It’s no longer the case that they can tolerate the existence of other cultures (gay culture, black culture, disability culture) because white christianity is no longer powerful enough to suppress them in media, education, etc. so they can no longer be permitted. Everything else is secondary.
The danger is that cultural supremacy cannot be negotiated with, and democracy only functions through negotiation. So, that’s why I think we’re only going to be left with violence of some form.
Peeperino
Everyone is missing one big point – When they re-voted for the same bill, this “enlightened” legislator refused to vote against the bill.
Redshift
@Shantanu Saha:
It’s worse than that. Evangelicals weren’t anti-abortion or involved in politics at that point. One of the founding myths of the modern evangelical movement is that they were outraged by the Roe decision and motivated to become involved. The reality is that Fallwell and his ilk wanted political power, and manufactured the “abortion issue” as something evangelicals should be outraged about.
Baud
Y’all too sophisticated. George W. Bush said it best when he called bad people evildoers.
Kent
Well, yes and no. If you are wealthy and connected you can always catch a flight to California.
Red state lawmakers might rattle on about extending their jurisdiction and abortion prohibitions beyond the borders of their states. But they honestly can’t do that. Unless, for example, they want, red state coal executives to be hauled off airplanes in LAX in handcuffs for environmental crimes that they committed in West Virginia that California decided to outlaw.
Danielx
The cruelty is the point.
different-church-lady
@Baud: But he never thought the Evildoer Party would evildo his face.
calmer tiki
I was driving though mid Hudson valley New York and there were signs saying “Choice is on the ballot” in pink. The candidate Pat Ryan’s name was in a smaller font
WaterGirl
@Reboot: Yes! “Forced pregnancy” is what I was intending to type when I ended up typing “forced birth.”
Ohio Mom
@Cmorenc: Two other cases where you have to wonder how that “divine spark” thing works: First, when one fertilized egg splits into identical twins, does each have half a spark? Second , how about when there are two different fertilized eggs and one embryo/fetus absorbs the other, leaving one fetus with some cells containing one set of DNA and others containing the other set of DNA, does that future being have two divine sparks?
On another note, I’ve waded into some of the discussion boards at the Cincinnati Enquirer’s site. The rabid forced birthers are horrified that Dobbs could force a ten year old to give birth or lead to the death of the pregnant person, what they want is pregnancy termination in those cases. They insist that the law allows terminating ecoptic pregnancies, “that’s not an abortion.”
What they want is the women they are sure are using abortion as birth control to have to give birth as punishment. They hold to a variation of, If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
Yes, they are a sorry, mixed up and hateful bunch.
WaterGirl
@Peeperino: Wow, that’s sad. And by sad, I also mean awful. Do you have a link?
trollhattan
Which case(s) is in the federal court pipeline that would overturn Griswold? “Forced birth today, no contraception tomorrow” would seem like a way to further hone people’s attention and direct their energies.
You know what would be great after making abortion illegal? Making more pregnancies!
Citizen Alan
@Redshift: Power and also tax exemption. The moral majority was born in the aftermath of the Bob Jones U Supreme Court case that said Private schools can’t be tax exempt if they’re segregated.
karen marie
@Cmorenc: Have you ever asked her where she got such knowledge?
I get really annoyed by people who claim to speak for god.
Ohio Mom
@Redshift: Here is a detailed history of the right wing deciding contesting abortion was the way to go: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/10/roe-v-wade-federalist-society-religious-right/
karen marie
@Jackie: Thank you!
different-church-lady
The fact that just this one member of the party failed to get the thrill only goes to show they haven’t fully mastered the technique yet.
Ken
@Falling Diphthong: A few years ago, someone collected a bunch of those revanchist “things were better in the 19xxs” quotes, and correlated them with the speaker’s age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a large fraction the 19xxs were when the speaker was a child. Yeah, the world often does look pretty good when you’re six years old.
UncleEbeneezer
“It isn’t “hate” or “controlling women” and he never wanted to actually hurt real women.”
No, no, NO!! This issue has been around for my entire lifetime and a majority of women have been telling us the whole time how criminalizing abortion harms both their physical and mental health and restricts their life and economic freedom. When women are telling you that something harms them and you refuse to listen, yes, you hate women. Just because someone doesn’t want to see their wife or daughter or sister individually harmed does not give them a pass on hating women. You don’t get to say “I don’t hate (group x), I just plug my ears when they tell me about the things that are oppressing them.”
If you won’t listen and defer to women on stuff like abortion, then yes, you hate women.
If you won’t listen and defer to Black people about racist policing/voter suppression/discrimination etc. then yes, you hate Black people.
If you won’t listen to Transgender people about gender-affirming care then yes, you hate Transgender people.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Baud:
Now there’s a sentence that’s never been uttered around these parts before.
RaflW
When I read that Tim Michels, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin Governor, said he supports “an exact mirror of the 1849” ban on abortion, which includes forcing victims of rape and incest to give birth, I crafted this lil’ tweet:
I know there’s always bandying about re: Talibangelicals and all that. But the similarity is strong – A total inability to accept that the past 100+ years of human flourishing have happened and meant that many more people have some modicum of self-actualization and happiness.
Cathie from Canada
Cathie from Canada
One other minor point is that I think the advances in reproductive science have also confounded the forced birthers.
They didn’t understand how much medical care for women has improved in the last 50 years. Women who would never have risked pregnancy in the past – like women over 35 – or women who couldn’t conceive without IVF – are now getting pregnant but they risk increased complications. And also, of course, women in the past who experienced catastrophic complications like entropic pregnancy, if they survived at all, never got pregnant again.
Now doctors are stuck with these simplistic women-hating laws and hospital lawyers are trying to figure out how to apply them to deal with complex situations that didn’t exist in the imaginary times before RoeVWade.
Edmund Dantes
@Kent: expecting consistency from scotus as to which of those is legal extradition and which is not is a fools errand.
they already do it quite blatantly with religious freedom cases and presidential powers (R good, D bad)
trollhattan
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
I think too purdy.
Geminid
One way Republicans got to where they are now was their aggressive gerrymandering. That started a race to the bottom in red states, and the more moderate Chamber of Commerce types were left in the dust.
Kent
I am pretty close to the fundamentalist world. My father is a retired minister and I have an enormous extended family who are mostly Mennonites which is a fundamentalist but not evangelical denomination (there is a difference).
When I was growing up, Mennonites were still conservative but the intersection of religion and politics was mostly over topics like the Vietnam war, social programs, the civil rights movement, and so forth. And even though Mennonites were often pretty conservative religiously, they were more often than not on the right side of political questions like Vietnam and Civil Rights.
Today the church is largely consumed with just two issues: LGBT hatred and abortion. Those two issues pretty much consume 90% of the political energy of the church. And of the two, LGBT hatred is the more potent issue than abortion frankly.
I honestly can’t even talk to these people anymore even though they are my kin. I don’t have any answers. They are un-reachable and consumed with hate and suspicion. I think it is a toxic maelstrom of conservative religious leaders, FOX news, alternative “Christian” media, and social media of which there seems to be no escape. They truly live in their own hermetically-sealed world
If you look at the Mennonite position on abortion in the 1970s it was actually pro-choice just like the Baptist position. https://anabaptistwiki.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Abortion_(Mennonite_Church,_1975) This is all entirely new.
PaulB
It’s also worth remembering the “us” and “them” narrative. “Us” can get an abortion because “us” would only do it if we absolutely have to. “Them” cannot get an abortion because “them” would do it willy-nilly, on a whim, just because they felt like it. So the fact that so many of these evangelical and conservative families know of someone who got an abortion doesn’t really matter to them, as the ones they know who did that are “us”.
For the hardcore evangelicals, there is also the aspect of sex outside a religious-sanctioned marriage. This goes against their religious beliefs and there must be punishment for those women (but, oddly enough, not for the men). So no to contraception, no to the morning-after pill, and no to abortion. If you had sex, you deserve to be punished for it. See also “us” and “them” when it comes to such punishment.
karen marie
@MattF: The thing that’s concerned me for a long time is that many medical schools don’t teach abortion procedures. I’ve seen the occasional article about it but they’re few and far between. Looking at the google, I see a few such articles between April and June of this year but the only other ones that come up in the first page are from 2015 (I’m linking to the cached version because paywall) and 2018.
ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) has been consistently working to increase training and access. They’re on twitter (@acog) if you’d like to follow and show support.
Martin
@Shantanu Saha: The documented history disputes this to some degree. What we know from the people who led the effort was that the real issue was the ability to keep protestant private colleges segregated (Liberty, Oral Roberts, etc.) which the Supreme Court and Congress were going after – threatening to take their tax exempt status and taking their access to federal financial aid away.
The folks trying to preserve this system needed to change the argument away from segregation and settled on ‘religious liberty’, a new concept they invented. But it couldn’t just be rebranded ‘segregation’ so they chose to expand it into something that sounded innocuous. And so they needed to bolt other religious issues to the concept, and the recently decided RvW provided something they could easily grab onto. They grafted on gay marriage, transgender issues, and so on and lo and behold, ‘religious liberty’ is now a legal thing for Alito to terrorize the nation with.
That platform of ‘religious liberty’ was a tool to then attract reactionary Catholics and Jews to this quite obvious sectarian movement in order to gain political majorities.
But fundamentally abortion became a ‘thing’ in order to diffuse a platform of segregation into a broader movement to protect any entity that the GOP could pass off as church connected as being immune to government intervention.
Geminid
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: That’s just more Yankee cultural appropriation of Southern lingo. Like I often do.
craigie
@WaterGirl:
“Forced birth” but also “Miscarriage Police” because you can bet money that women will be going to jail for having miscarriages.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@UncleEbeneezer: But it isn’t always hate. Sometimes they just do not care. With hate, there is still an investment of energy in your issues. Indifference is harder in some ways to combat. I also think it is harder for people to understand or accept. When issues are life or death for us, we deeply believe they are important and that if people don’t support it, there must be a good reason, like hate. Its harder that a LOT of people do not care what happens to anyone outside their immediate circle. With issues like abortion, they think abortion is immoral, period. If lack of access results in your horrible death, they really aren’t bothered about it.
Dan B
@Cmorenc: I believe the fetus is pure concept and once born is exposed to sin explains the obsessive views that fetuses must be saved but children must be controlled and disciplined. Most people are baffled but the desire to protect divine innocence is potent. It’s also a reaction to the fact that a fetus is closer to the carnality of sex than an infant or child. Sex negativity seems to arise from the feeling that pleasure and carnality reveal a lack of control and thus surrender to temptation and sin. It’s extremely twisted. But then again we can get into the weeds on Mother Theresa’s worship of pain and suffering as redemptive. Twisted is a good word. Twisting oneself into a mass of contradictions to excuse one’s emotional discomfort has a long history.
Martin
@karen marie: All Ob/gyn residencies in California must provide abortion training. There’s additional requirements for mandatory training for nurses in the state.
CA, and specifically UCSF, has been pushing very hard to expand and normalize this training.
Kent
I’m convinced that abortion laws will function EXACTLY like drug laws in that prosecutors across the south and red states will use their prosecutorial discretion to go after those women from backgrounds and races of which they disapprove while leaving “Good Christian White Women” completely alone. Exactly as they do with drug law enforcement.
That is the real danger and horror that will unfold here.
trollhattan
Oh and by the way, if there were any doubt about coming for the Civil Rights Act, cast those aside, too.
https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1560948719620706305?cxt=HHwWgsC-meOlzakrAAAA
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@Cmorenc: For those Christian type people who believe that the embryo has a soul starting at conception, why don’t the have baptisms in utero? Why wait ’til after birth. I think it’s because they know how casually nature/God disposes of embryos that have problems and how common those problems really are.
planetjanet
I am sorry, but it really is about controlling women and wanting to feel superior to others. A lot of men just don’t think about the consequences for other people. It is easy to judge others. A lot of women don’t think it affects them either and again, like to judge others as being unworthy. Once it became such a political issue, it just accentuates to ability to get power and prestige for judging other people.
Kent
Most evangelicals have a believer baptism theology whereby adults or older children are “Born Again” through the process of baptism. That is literally what it means to be a “Born Again Christian”.
It is really only the Catholics and Catholic-adjacent denominations like Episcopal and Orthodox that practice infant baptism. And since the rite of baptism requires getting anointed or immersed in water you basically have to wait until the child is born. Then you get it done as soon as possible for fear the child might die before being saved.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
There is a quote in Michener book Hawaii about a Christian missionary loving the souls of people he wishes to convert, but not the people themselves. Seems to apply here. I am sure the good and true Christian that Bupalos is referring too would excuse any harm caused to women by an abortion ban as trivial next their enteral salvation (as Landover Baptist would put it “can’t you see we want to save your worthless collage educated, she-hussy, union joining, vaccinating, recycling, mask wearing, LGBT affirming backside from eternally bobbing on Satan’s barbed tallywacker like an extra in a Rob Zombie video, because we love you, libertard?”)
lowtechcyclist
@Cmorenc:
And the response is, “if you don’t have a clue what that mysterious plan is, then kindly STFU.”
“And oh yeah, you guys didn’t give a shit while a million Americans died of Covid. Life! Don’t talk to me about life! You guys never gave a damn about life!”
I’ve been channeling Marvin the Paranoid Android with great frequency over the past two years.
JPL
@Kent: GA six-week abortion law declares the fetus a person, so I expect they will prosecute for murder.
Dan B
@karen marie: If they say that they got the knowledge from the Bible that the divine spark is installed at conception then the Bible is a handy tool. Ask what it says about abortion. Answer: Here’s how. What does it say about when life begins? Answer: At quickening.
Anticipate outrage.
Kent
@JPL:
Of course they will. My point is that they will use their enormous discretion to only prosecute women of whom they disapprove. So substance abusers, poor women of color, liberal activists, and other easy targets.
Exactly the same as how the bulk of drug war enforcement has been targeted at the minority community despite the fact that drug abuse rates are equal or higher in the white community.
Frank Wilhoit
There is only one practical option. Make them say what they believe. Make them say why they believe it. Make them say in public what they say in private. No debate, no gotchas, no rebuke, just lead them on and draw them out and let the foulness speak for itself. Don’t let them run away from what they are proud of. Don’t make them own it; let them own it.
Almost Retired
@Kent: That’s interesting. I didn’t know any of this. I went to college near a heavily-Mennonite town (Yoders aplenty!). When I left 40 years ago, they were sort of gentle pacifists with limited interest in earthly politics. That they’ve gone full metal wingnut on abortion and sexual equality is distressing, to say the least. I don’t think Kalona, Iowa has much of a Pride Parade (if it did, it would involve horse-drawn floats) so I don’t know why this issue has them all stirred up.
Duke of Clay
“Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.”
Baud
@Frank Wilhoit:
A second,. non-exclusive option is for us to say what we believe.
Another Scott
It probably depends on the intended audience.
For the politically disconnected, most have leanings and cartoon pictures (that we all know – “strong on defense! low taxes!”). For the people they want as riled-up foot-soldiers they have the “baby killer” and the “take your hard earned money” and “special rights” memes. For the people they want to fund them they have “you worked hard for your success and those lazy moochers think they are **entitled** to take your success from you”.
But mainly, IMO, it’s tribalism. It is automatic unless people are really forced to think about it, and even then some will never give up the tribe. Nixon was polling at 24% on the day he resigned. 538 had TFG’s approval polling average at 39% in mid-late January 2021.
We need to motivate and turn out our voters with compelling, emotive stories in addition to having facts and reality on our side. Biden understands the power of “We’re the United States of America! and there’s nothing we can’t do when we work together!!” and similar things even if they sound hokey to lots of us. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
FelonyGovt
These idiots think all fetuses are perfect sweet little fully-formed babies and how could you do that, don’t you love babies?? That plus the hatred of and desire to control women, all dressed up with “religious” conviction, are the motivations IMO.
Falling Diphthong
@Ken:
Yeah, the world often does look pretty good when you’re six years old.
Someone made the excellent point that when you were six there were big questions that could have gone either way. (Civil rights, same sex marriage, etc.) At the time, no one knew how these things would come out. But looking back, it’s easy to cast it as a simple time, since obviously all right thinking people were going to come down on what turned out (in hindsight) to be the correct side to occupy. Not complicated and confusing like today.
WaterGirl
@PaulB:
I think you are absolutely right about this.
Baud
@Almost Retired:
With the internet, the whole world is Kalona.
WaterGirl
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I agree. It doesn’t have to be hate, but it is total disregard for the person (woman, black, brown, LGBTQ, Trans). They are not seen as equals. They are definitely seen as other and as “less then”.
lowtechcyclist
@Kent:
I’ve been one for 52 years, and that’s news to me.
There may be some evangelicals that believe baptism is what does it, but for most of them, if you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior first, baptism means nothing.
Anyway, many things get watered down over time, and within evangelicalism, I’m sure being “born again” is one of them. When you have a deep emotional need to see all of your children and grandchildren ‘saved,’ along with those of all your friends, there ain’t no way “born again” can continue to refer to such a transformational experience that no lesser phrase is adequate to describe it.
Besides, what’s going to change for them when they step forward at the altar call and make a commitment to Christ, when they’ve been attending their evangelical church since birth, and the only question was which Sunday of which year they’d step forward and say the magic words. They wake up the next day in the same life in the same church family, and not a blessed thing has changed. No transformation, no real ‘born-again’ experience, just the same old same old, inside and out, but they still have to pretend that this was the key moment of their lives. As the prophet Isaiah asked, “why pay money and get what is not bread?” So they fill the void with causes like those precious ‘unborn babies.’
Falling Diphthong
@WaterGirl: I think abortion is the sine qua non of issues where Republicans are always discovering the miracle of the personal exception. Inconvenient pregnancy in your mistress, your girlfriend, your 16 year old daughter, your sister whose life would be endangered? An exception will be made.
I’ve been saying the GOP was down to “It’s okay when Republicans do it” as a moral principle for some years, but it’s become particularly unhinged from reality under Trump.
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Wow, this is lovely in its awfulness! “loving the souls” is the same as “we want to create the socialist paradise where everyone will receive according to his needs, give according to his abilities, etc, etc”. It’s ideology, without any real-world referents, b/c souls don’t exist (just as that socialist paradise doesn’t exist). And so, loving the souls while hating the people, is precisely a totalitarian ideology. Perfect for murdering mass numbers of people.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@craigie: They’ve already started talking about shit like this, which is just unconscionable. If we’re talking about a miscarriage from a wanted pregnancy, that can be an extremely upsetting and harrowing thing for someone to go through. And adding salt to the wound is the fact that with most miscarriages, doctors simply can’t say what caused it, which leads some people to blame themselves for the tiniest thing. When my friend had a miscarriage a few years ago, she spent months berating herself for everything she could think of: She’d had too much salt in her diet, she didn’t get enough sleep, she shouldn’t have gone running, etc etc. My heart broke for her, and if she’d been hauled in for questioning in an investigation over it? I truly would’ve feared for her safety at her own hands.
lowtechcyclist
@Lapassionara:
Which is kinda weird, considering their obsession with the “great replacement” theory. If they’re gonna force the “wrong” people to have kids when the women of the “right” tribe don’t have to, guess which tribe is going to have more kids?
Duke of Clay
@lowtechcyclist: Yet another thing they didn’t quite think through.
Geminid
@Almost Retired: Mennonites may not have gone as far over the edge as the Baptists. At least that’s my impression from observing the two sects in western Virginia. For instance, my Republican state Senator Emmitt Hanger has easily beaten two straight tea party challengers, despite his vote to expand Medicaid, which was anathema to the radicals. Hanger has crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats on other occasions.
Hanger is a member of the Church of the Brethren, like the Mennonites a German-origin nonconformist sect prevalent in the Shenandoah Valley. I don’t think Hanger would have survived politically if his district was in Baptist-dominated Virginia Piedmont.
The Shenandoah Valley is very red, and Republicans there are definitely conservative. But they don’t seem to be as feral as their counterparts on the other side of the Blue Ridge.
Chip Daniels
The American Right can best be compared to the Taliban, in that it is a mixture of true zealots, cynical grifters and cold blooded power grabbers.
But all of those factions consider the suffering of others to be merely collateral damage, acceptable sacrifices they need to achieve their goals.
WaterGirl
@Chip Daniels: Wow, I wish that weren’t quite so true.
Kent
@lowtechcyclist: In the protestant traditions that I am from, salvation is directly linked to baptism. In your denomination can one be “saved” without being baptized? If so that would be unusual.
One might perhaps consider baptism to be the culmination of the process of being born again and the start of the process “letting Jesus into your heart” But it is all tied together.
Scout211
I finally have internet again, so apologies if this has been posted already, but this crazy statement from Tudor Dixon is crazy.
Bold added. Link.
More of her crazy-talk at the link.
Kent
Two of the most Mennonite counties in the country in terms of percentage of the population are Holmes County Ohio and Mifflin County PA.
In the 2020 election they voted as follows:
Much of my extended Mennonite family is from Mifflin County, PA
The current GOP and Christian Nationalist candidate for governor in PA, Doug Mastriano, attends a Mennonite Church from the Conservative Mennonite Conference.
Geminid
@Kent: I understand that Mennonites vote Republican. I’m saying they’re not as politically radicalized as the Baptists are. At least not the ones I’ve lived among in the Shenandoah Valley.
Kent
Historically that was very true. However it is fast changing. Witness Doug Mastriano who attends this Mennonite Church https://www.pondbankchurch.org/ which has recently recently changed its name from Pond Bank Mennonite Church to Pond Bank Community Church but is still within the Mennonite fold and part of the Conservative Mennonite Conference.
These are my people and my relatives. Many are as archly right-wing politically as any southern Baptist.
Geminid
@Kent: Doug Mastriano is one politician. Does he speak for all Mennonites?
PaulB
It also applies to things like welfare, health care, etc. “Us” can get welfare and free health care because “us” are hard-working folks who deserve these benefits.
“Them” are lazy layabouts who just want to suck on the public teat and never do a lick of work. “Them” don’t deserve any of those benefits.
Nelle
@Kent: My sister’s Mennonite Brethren church just got kicked out of the MB conference for being an inclusive church.
kindness
Anti abortion folk don’t care how it affects the women out there. Those that see abortion as a religion issue think they are doing God’s work and don’t think beyond that. For the bulk of the anti choice folk, it’s just a power trip and exercising control on others gets them off. In both instances they are a bit looney.
Kent
No one speaks for all Mennonites. They are as diverse as Jews and have churches that range from ultra liberal urban churches to ultra-conservative Amish types who are roughly protestant equivalent to ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews.
There are dozens upon dozens of different Mennonite conferences and groupings. It is one of the most fractious denominations with churches splitting from each other over seemingly trivial things like Sunday school.
However these days the conservative wings of the Mennonite church are ascendent in terms of numbers and they are growing increasingly right-wing politically with every passing year. And within that world the old Mennonite political issues of peace, social justice, and civil rights that were present in say the 1960s and 1970s are LONG GONE and almost entirely replaced by LGBT-hatred and abortion. And, of course other nonsense like moral panic over CRT.
Wapiti
@Dan B: I thought that quickening was a concept from the Catholic Church, not from the Bible. Glancing at the googles, quickening, as a concept, goes back at least to Aristotle. iiuc, Jewish belief based on their reading of their scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) is that life begins at birth.
Baud
@Kent:
It’s sad when once decent groups lose their way.
Bupalos
Yes I don’t think any of the 3 views cited there are really even in conflict. My view of the desire to go back to an imaginary past is really more of a kind of outer framework that lots of things fit in, but which one needs to understand in order to understand the nature of the things that fill it out.
Abortion bans fit in not directly because we used to have abortion bans, but because they are emblematic of a more religious society and one in which gender roles are more defined and women tied more closely to childrearing.
The point that this framework has made me see most clearly and usefully is that these people really are terrified. Their imaginary past is a coping mechanism for existential fear of the future. The idea that the past is a place you can go means somewhere to go where everything will be ok.
Anonymous At Work
Broader Question:
How much of the movement away from the Republican Party in Kansas or that polling shows in Hispanics is because of “Holy Crap! Republicans were serious!? No one is safe!” It makes me wonder if Labor and others couldn’t actually use abortion as “See? We told you!” on other fronts.
gene108
Republicans got what they wanted. They spent decades laying the groundwork for an ultra conservative Federal judiciary to “legislate from the bench” about unpopular issues Republican legislators did not want to risk sticking their necks out for like overturning campaign finance and voting rights laws. Overturning Roe is just part of the plan they set.
The only thing that upsets 99% of Republicans about Dobbs is it might cost them electorally this fall. Possibly losing elections they thought they’d win in a cakewalk is they only thing they’re upset about.
They will not rest until abortion is banned in all 50 states and U.S. territories. Dobbs is just the first step. There’ll be more cases challenging Democratic states abortion laws, like the 109 year old NYS gun law on carrying in public that was struck down the day before Dobbs.
Subsole
@Cmorenc:
Just a small aside, but this is why people roll their eyes and dismiss you when you tell them the GOP are Fascist. Even though they are unquestionably Fascist. Like, you can go down the checklist and the GOP fills literally every single space on the card.
Fascism’s core pathology is remarkably uniform in its effects and progression, but the surface symptoms are shockingly varied and depend almost entirely upon the past of the nation in question.
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Francoist Spain and Mussoline Italy were all unquestionably Fascist. They all idolized a mythical past because they thought it would relieve their insecurities. Or at least furnish a ready stream of excuses for the violent expression of those insecurities.
Kind of a national midlife crisis that spirals into a murder-suicide spree.
How each Fascist movement saw those Glory Daze differed, though. They were all chasing a different face of the same wretched, decrepit, hollow, pipe-dream dragon.
For Japan, it was the warrior cult and a sort of cartoon shogunate, solidified into a rigid cult of the Emperor Deified.
For Italy, it was the potemkin pomp and bankrupt, sleazy swagger of Blackshirt Caligula’s Nova Roma.
For Germany, the Wagnerian Barbarossa: Little Brother Germany finally upstaging Big Sister England.
For Spain, a vengeful Church protecting the Hacendados of the Blessed Realm from the Enlightenment and its corruption of the peasantry with the ‘dangerous mania of reason’.
For the GOP, a place where they never have to encounter anything that makes them feel inadequate. In any way. A world where the only slings and arrows they encounter are placed securely in their hands by Almighty God His very own Self. A world where they get to stay 19 forever, and everywhere has to remind them of the neighborhood they grew up in (or their grandparents: there are a LOT of young fascists, alas).
They are all, in a word, BRATS. Sniveling, angry, sullen, petulant little asshole brats.
How do we handle them? Extensive, all-encompassing, deeply-invasive memetic campaigns lasting decades. Or a good thrashing with a peach switch. Maybe both.
PaulB
One other point about “us” and “them”. For many people, the anger and hatred toward “them” outweighs any positive feelings they have for “us”. The “us” are perfectly willing to shoot themselves in the foot if they know that “them” are also getting shot.
A commenter at TPM related a story (that he insisted was true) that perfectly illustrates this. His mother had a lemon tree in her front yard, and she was convinced that someone was stealing lemons from the tree. Now, the tree always had enough lemons for her needs, and there was never any real sign of lemons being taken, but she grew increasingly angry about the supposed theft.
In a fit of rage, she chopped down the tree. Problem solved! Nobody could steal her lemons anymore. The fact that she herself no longer had fresh lemons was less important. She had triumphed over “them” and that was all that mattered.
For such people, a win-win scenario is not possible. It’s not enough that “us” must win; it must also be the case that “them” must visibly lose.
Mimi
@Ohio Mom: In actual medical terminology, a pregnancy that ends without a live child being delivered is an abortion. “Miscarriage” is not a medical term, though doctors use it talking to would-be parents whose pregnancy ended in a bad way.
Kent
Regarding the original post in this thread.
My wife and I spent 13 years living and working in Waco Texas which is essentially the epicenter of the Baptist Heartland (home of Baylor University and a bazillion Baptist churches). So I had a lot of time to observe Baptists, White Republicans, and conservative politics up close.
I have come to conclude that abortion and guns are largely proxy issues for race among a certain portion of the population, especially white men.
What do I mean by that? I knew a LOT of conservative white men who were not particularly religious and who I guaran-damn-tee did not particularly give a shit about abortion one way or the other and would pay for an abortion in a nanosecond if their daughter or girlfriend on the side happened to get pregnant. These white men are almost exclusively Republican and I think are Republican largely for tribal and racial reasons. In the south Democrats are the party of Black and Brown people and “libs” from the cities who are just as bad with all their ANTIFA and BLM and Green New Deal nonsense. And the GOP is the party of good Christian White People.
However they have learned not to say they are Republican because of race. That just isn’t done anymore. What you say instead is that you are voting for X-candidate because he is “pro-life” which pretty much ends the argument. Because people just assume sincerity and are deferential when it comes to issues of faith. So I think a whole lot of white men claim they are pro-life when it is really just a proxy for race.
The 2nd Amendment and guns serves the same purpose. There are a lot of gun fanatics out there. But also a lot of people who say they are voting GOP on 2nd Amendment issues when it is also really more about race. But also like abortion, no one really ever questions their sincerity on that issue either.
Abortion and guns are basically the get out of jail free card for white men to vote for the most absolutely egregious and horrible GOP candidates and have no one question their sincerity.
Citizen Alan
@Dan B: I am of the opinion that the closest the Bible comes to defining personhood is in Genesis, which indicates that it starts with the first breath and not one second before.
Martin
@Kent: Yeah, it’s sad to see. I went to a Brethren affiliated college (as an atheist – I contain multitudes) that was kind of the leader on mennonite and amish studies. The turn right had already started in the 80s and I reached out to one of my old profs when the Nickel Mines shooting took place and he commented that the community had changed significantly since I took classes from him.
He was the one who explained to me how these religious/political alliances form, almost exclusively to the detriment of the religious groups. ‘Religious liberty’ and the attachment of that concept to the GOP is almost tailor made to turn these groups into goddamn fascists, with no awareness of their own history that should the GOP become ascendent, the first groups they’ll put against the wall are the minority sects like the anabaptists and quakers. No reason to trust the historic pacifists before the religious war kicks off.
JWR
@Spanky:
@WaterGirl:
I can’t find it using Google Advanced Search, but I did copy most of it because it’s such a great comment.
Baud
@Kent:
I don’t have quite your up close experience with them, but I agree.
Citizen Alan
@Scout211: I’ve come to the conclusion that all Republicans are rapists at heart. They sympathize with the rapists and hate their victims.
Geminid
@Kent: I’m not sure “the old” Mennonite political issues like peace, social justice and civil rights are “LONG GONE” from the Eastern Mennonite College community around Harrisonburg, Virginia. At least, they don’t seem to be.
Another Scott
OpenThread? One for Martin, and the rest of us keeping an eye on these things. ICYMI – Elecktrek.co – Porsche drives deeper into electric bike market (from August 2):
Porsche is part of VW (VW and Toyota every year battle over who is the world’s largest car manufacturer), so there’s a lot of power behind this direction – if they want to use it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Speaking of transportation technology, whatever happened to that balky ignition switch on your Volkswagon? Could it be healed?
Suzanne
@Lapassionara:
I see people say this, and I really don’t think it accurately captures the mindset. They really want to stop all abortions. Will women with more resources always be able to get one? Of course. But the forced birth contingent isn’t really thinking about this with an escape hatch in mind. They really want to stop all abortions. Are they considering the consequences of stopping all abortions? No. They think we’re making it all up. They think we are making up dead women and septic infections and ten-year-old rape victims, they think we’re being alarmist.
The crazy religious people we’re sharing this country with are not merely in denial. They literally refuse to entertain any scenario, real or imagined, that might challenge their beliefs. It is worse than denial.
They’re not thinking, “Well, at least my wife or daughter can get a secret abortion!”. That kind of thinking would at least require some awareness, some acknowledgement that life throws curveballs and shit happens. They’re literally refusing to even entertain possibilities.
Chetan Murthy
@Suzanne:
I think this is right. They subscribe to the maximalist version of their religious dogma, and imagine no exceptions. THEN when OF COURSE an exception arises in their personal lives, well, y’know, God works in mysterious ways, and He will provide and that jazz. “Not perfect, but forgiven” and all that shit.
It fits perfectly with their Calvinist mindset: there are The Elect (who can do no wrong, and if they err, well, God Forgives His Chosen), and the mudpeople, who can do no right, b/c God didn’t Choose them, and they’re gonna rot in Hell anyway, no matter how much good they do.
Another Scott
@Geminid: I fixed it after buying all the parts to replace it.
It seemed to have just been 18 years of just enough lint and grime buildup causing a “tumbler” to hang up. Using a piece of brass wire as a “digger”, some canned air, and some silicone spray in the 100F heat got it freed up in about 30 minutes. It’s been fine since.
(I eventually figured it was the ignition lock because the symptoms didn’t seem to fit with something being broken inside the column lock housing (the column lock worked fine when I turned the wheel enough), and at that point it was worth spending the time trying to get it freed up.)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Well, you hung in there and made a successful repair. I hope you get many more miles from the car and that this never happens to me.
Ohio Mom
@Mimi: Yes, you know that and I know that but the forced-birthers in the comments sections of my local paper are convinced that “abortion” refers only to pregnancy terminations by women, to their way of thinking, who had no business having sex in the first place
Everything else — treatment of ecoptic pregnancies and incomplete spontaneous abortions, termination of pregnancies in 10 year old girls, etc. — by their magic thinking, is something else.
That’s how they quell their cognitive dissonance.
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: I know a crazy evangelical dude — who fucked around on his wife, he literally cheated a bunch of times — who didn’t want his daughter to get the Gardasil shot (HPV vaccine). He said it would remove consequences for promiscuity. It took his cheated-on wife, who stayed with his sorry ass, to remind him that SOMETIMES MEN LIE.
They literally just cover their ears and eyes and LA-LA-LA-LA-LA as the only way to get through the day.
Calouste
@Another Scott: I assume Ponooc is a subsidiary of Pon Holdings, which is the Dutch importer for VW, Porsche, and related brands, as well as the owner of a number of bicycle brands. Not sure whether this is going to amount to much more than slapping a Porsche badge on an existing bike and adding a $300 markup.
Kent
No, but what is happening is that Eastern Mennonite University is essentially being purged from the larger conservative Mennonite world. And parents who a generation ago who would have sent their kids to EMU are now sending them to places like Hillsdale or Grove City College or even Liberty University or fundamentalist Mennonite bible colleges like Rosedale https://rosedale.edu/
The Mennonite Church USA Conference of which EMU is affiliated has actually shrank by more than half in the past decade as so many churches have split off to join more conservative branches of the church over the issue of gay marriage and to a lesser extent women pastors. I expect that with every passing year the student population at EMU becomes less and less Mennonite and it becomes more of just a regional private liberal arts college like many others. I would expect that in a decade or so EMU will no longer have a direct affiliation with the Mennonite Church and be more like say Wake Forest which has Baptist roots but is no longer affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
EarthWindFire
@Kent: Having spent my formative years in a highly conservative state, I agree with this. Here’s the question now: what do these white men do now that the real gun and abortion nuts are getting their way? Is it anti-trans, CRT, LBTQ that keeps them ginned up?
Calouste
@EarthWindFire: Extremists can always go further. You just have to hope they lose short of starting a war and/or a genocide, but often they don’t.
J R in WV
@Kent:
nHave to pick a bone with you, but as a Very young boy I remember attending my little brother’s infant christening ceremony, sprinkling blessed water on and around him at the age of babe in arms. Was in a big stone southern WV Presbyterian church, I was growing towards 4 at the time. Little bro was just a few weeks old. 1954 probably.
I can’t speak to the theology, I attended Sunday school for a few years, wasn’t much interested, eventually the folks decided to join and found a UU fellowship, which didn’t hire a pastor, too small, they would take turns reading sermons written by pastors at larger churches. Unitarian works much better for me, though we aren’t UU, too organized for us.
Kent
I think with economics if you can do it at all. Jobs, higher wages, industrial policy to bring good high-paying jobs home, that sort of thing. It goes against the grain of elite coastal Dem globalism of the sort who go to Davos and that sort of thing. But it is the only potent political issue I think will reach ordinary middle class white men. Also just not being too feminine. Which is probably why Hillary did worse than Obama with white men even though he was black. And why Kamala Harris would stand no chance with that bunch.
Kent
@J R in WV: Presbyterians do too? I guess I come from more fundamentalist roots where it isn’t done.
Subsole
@Ken:
This.
Half these goobers don’t realize that living through your teenage years when you’re 50 is a very, very different proposition.
Like I said. Brats. Angry fucking brats who refuse to grow up, but ALSO lash out in seething rage when anyone tries to be a grownup in their stead.
J R in WV
@Kent:
I imagine Presbys also do baptism, but of course that can’t happen to a 2 or 3 month old baby, they would drown, or at least suffer negative consequences. We had moved on to U-U by the time we would have been expected to go for baptism. So I’m sharing really early memory here, don’t hold me to any of it.
Suzanne
@Kent: Yes, lots of the mainline Christian denominations do infant baptism. Presbyterians (most of the subtypes), Methodists, etc.
Suzanne
@J R in WV: Infant baptism is usually just a “sprinkle”, i.e. the pastor pours a drop of water on his/her hand and then touches the baby’s head.
Subsole
@Kent: That was the impression I got. It is overwhelmingly wrapped up in insecurity over manhood. All of it. Every last component is geared towards telling them that they are-too bigboys, whomst deserve bigboy respect.
The guns? That’s not about self defense, or protecting property, or the 3 percenters, or whatever. It’s about automatically winning any argument you cannot actually argue your way out of. It’s about extorting respect out of people who you could never, under any circumstance, earn it from.
Abortion? They have to pay alimony and child support, why should those bitches get to live consequence-free? Think they’re better than me? (Protip: these people seldom, if ever, pay their support. And the ones that do pay howl about it like you put a red-hot clamp on their peritoneum).
Economics? All performance. Big trucks and rugged living and ripped denim and immaculately scuffed cowboy boots. Most of that culture seems geared towards selling soft-handed car salesmen and suburban dentists the fantasy that they could, in fact, be resilient. Under the right circumstances.
All that ostentatious individualism is a cover for some of the most embarrassingly needy people I have ever met.
Subsole
@Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!): I only know Weirdass Texas Evangelical, so, y’know, quarryload of salt and all…
Believe it or not, they don’t do that because they believe you have to freely choose Jesus. Baptizing in-utero is basically an empty gesture.
You have to accept Jesus into your heart, which a baby cannot do because it isn’t old enough. And doesn’t need to anyway because it is pure and perfect and untainted, so if it dies, rejoice! It automagically goes to heaven! (I knew a girl who lost her pregnancy and got that treatment. From people who, I do think, genuinely loved her and were trying to ease her pain…)
When I was in the Evangelical church (years upon years ago) the real cachet was Tongues. You didn’t just have to get dunked in the magic wading pool, you had to come up soaking wet and shouting gibberish.
See, the idea was that Jesus was forcing all the sin out of you, and replacing it with His power and compassion. Being full of His mercy, you were no longer a sinful human. So you would not speak sinful human language. You would start speaking in the tongue of the angels. “Rashanda ledjam al bashkan,” and all that.
And yes, they would keep dunking you until you started gibbering.
WaterGirl
@Subsole:
A self-fulfilling prophesy of a different kind.
lowtechcyclist
@Kent:
Can’t speak for my denomination, because I currently have none. And I don’t worry about eternal salvation; the Lord I know isn’t going to send anyone to eternal torment because they didn’t get dunked or sprinkled or whatever. I mean really, AYFKM?! What’s he saying, “I love you with a love beyond mortal comprehension, but you didn’t get baptized, so into the fire you go”?!
What
somefar too many people who call themselves Christians believe about their God makes absolutely no sense to me.Anyhow, I’m mostly thinking about evangelicals here. Since the “suppose you were hit by a bus tonight and hadn’t accepted Christ” bit is a standard part of their repertoire…well, first of all, since that’s the line they’re pushing, it’s clear that they believe accepting Christ is what ‘saves’ you, baptism or no. If the bus hits you after you’ve accepted Christ but before you get baptized, you’re saved, as far as they’re concerned.
Anyhow, I’ve had a varied past, denominationally speaking. I was baptized and confirmed in the Presbyterian Church back in the 1960s before it split in various ways. I attended an Episcopal school for a few years. Later on, since I found the Lord, I’ve belonged to or fellowshipped with Episcopalians, Lutherans (ELCA), Methodists (before all the splits), and a couple of smaller denominations. The Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Lutherans were clear that Christ’s death and resurrection saved us, but they didn’t talk much about individual salvation – who was or wasn’t saved, and whether you in particular were or weren’t. Whatever church doctrine may have been on that, it wasn’t stressed at all.
Which is how I didn’t even know there was such a thing as being ‘born again’ until it freakin’ happened to me, despite having been confirmed a Presbyterian, and despite the daily religion classes at the Episcopal school.
lowtechcyclist
@Subsole:
That’s interesting. There used to be a serious division between Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. The latter didn’t believe you were fully saved until you were baptized in the Holy Spirit (accompanied by tongues), and the former believed that tongues was somewhere between a bunch of BS and being ‘of the devil.’
Sounds painful! I actually did hang out with Pentecostals for awhile early on, but fortunately missed out on this experience.
artem1s
@Ohio Mom:
Well we’re going on what 30-40 years now of little or no sex ed in public schools and/or who knows what passes for sex/biology/science education in home and religious schools? Is it any wonder that we have politicians and pundit and internet kooks spouting nothing but nonsense when it comes to cause and effect of passing laws?
Ramona Rosario
@Peeperino: Exactly! He could shed tears but not take a step towards reversing a situation even worse than the one he was claiming he regretted he helped bring about!