Hobbyists and Little Hitlers: This is the next step along the road towards True Believerdom, Domestic Terrorism division. If you’re the sort of woman who really believes (because it’s what you’ve been taught all your life) that God Wants Woman to Stay Home & Breed, anti-choice rallies aren’t just a pleasant outing, they’re a very public reinforcement of your own virtue. Sure, you “had to” get married and start popping out children (and hope that your fellow congregants won’t count the months between your wedding and the first christening, at least not too publicly) and now you’re stuck home alone with a growing pack of stinky filthy whining needy human larvae sucking up every morsel of your attention 24/7, or you’re juggling a string of sub-minimum-wage part-time jobs to try and keep one step ahead of homelessness, and your husband resents the day he first laid eyes on you, but at least you’re not going straight to HELL like those snotty uptown women in their expensive suits with their fancy degrees and careers! When you take time away from your family, it’s in service to God and the cries of the womb-babies, not because you’re desperate to do work that couldn’t be done just as well by a chimp or a robot, if only those creatures weren’t more expensive to rent than you are! If you truly believe that being a WifeandMother is the highest, the only truly acceptable, calling… and you haven’t hit the reality-show jackpot with a pack of adorable multiples or penned a series of bestseller doorstops based on your teenage fantasies of True Pure Love… well, serving as head of the local anti-choice committee is almost as much public attention as getting on the school board, and you don’t have to run for election and pretend to listen to what the neighborhood liberal pervert anti-creationist satanists might think. Imagine a young Sarah Palin, with a little less determination and a lot less luck.
Of course Governor Palin eloped with her high-school sweetheart, “to save her parents a fancy wedding they couldn’t afford” (seven months before her oldest son was born, I hear) but it’s hard to form lasting bonds when you switch colleges five times over the course of seven years. However, if you’re a young thing still working on her M.R.S. degree, bossing the Choose Life ! ! ! subdivision of your college’s Young Republican chapter is an excellent strategy to draw the positive attention of some future real estate salesman or marketing vice-president, especially if God has not seen fit to reward you with superficial qualities like beauty-contestant looks. Sure, their laundry may be full of crusty tubesocks and their laptops laden with pr0n-sourced viruses now, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that a single young Conservative in immanent possession of an assistant-vice-presidency at his daddy’s firm needs a true Christian helpmate who knows how to impress the neighbors using only her natural moral superiority, a handful of credit cards, and ten years’ worth of hoarded Better Homes & Gardens magazines.
‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.—Matthew 6:5-6
(Thank you, commenter Raven)
Speaking of Little Hitlers, this is the level where most of the male forced-birth terrorists first show up, because of course Their Lord God has informed them that men are meant to be the Head over women, who are only jumped-up body parts. (Ribs, you perverts, Adam’s rib.) Our decadent modern era makes it harder and harder for a (usually) White man of a certain age and no particular claims to brawn, brains, or beauty to attract a covey of female attention sufficiently ego-soothing — even the remaining Catholic nuns have gotten all uppity. And just try treating your so-called ‘personal assistant’ like one of the secretaries from Mad Men! But pius Men of the Cloth, or even the Wednesday-evening-Bible-study-polyblend-polo-shirt, can still demand respect among the anti-choice advocates. As commenter Slaney Black reminisces:
My personal “favorite” is the Irish-voodoo Catholic priest. The one with all the miraculous trinkets and end-of-days talk that would make Jack van Impe blush. Normal routine goes about like this…
“Abortion doctors are baby killers and I have proof because some Polack lady saw the Immaculate Heart of Mary in a bucket of chicken livers! Also, I don’t like Jews and Freemasons! Make sure to get one of these here gen-u-wine miraculous rosaries I got blessed personal by B16 when last I was in the Holy City. (Suggested donation folks, these little babies don’t come free). In conclusion, abortion doctors are like Hitler, who was bad even though I don’t care for the Jews either.”
Redirecting these peoples’ energies is going to be… complicated. Given the parlous state of American education, we certainly can’t afford to put them on the school boards. And I haven’t been able to think of a God-blessed project worthy to absorb their boundless desire to correct other peoples’ morals while parading their own superior worth. (For potential pitfalls, see ‘Maoist Neighborhood Committees’.) I mean, we could try convincing them that the West Nile Virus is an Al-Qaida plot and point them in the direction of mosquito eradication… okay, well, who’s got a better suggestion?
Next: Disgruntled Baby Buyers, Testicle Defenders, and Borderline Crazies — where the funny stops