Roe vs Wade
Jan. 23rd, 2009 01:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lykomancerWell, yesterday was the 36th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.
My boyfriend and I had decided to make a trip yesterday to the Smithsonian Natural History museum, which took us straight into the heart of Washington, DC.
This was...unfortunate...timing.
To all the anti-abortion protesters:
I should have been an abortion.
My mother was a desperate, lonely sixteen-year old who just wanted some love and attention.
My father was a forty-year old drug-addled alcoholic who hit my mother so hard her hair came out in clumps and who, apparently, had no qualms about fucking someone less than half his age.
I was born into a family too poor to really afford me and raised by my grandparents.
When my mother was the age I am now, I myself was twelve.
I should have been an abortion. If my mother had chosen to abort me, I would never have existed. I would never have known regret for the life I did not live because I would not have lived it. The world would have continued without me, as it always has and always will, and I would never have woken even for a single moment.
And God, who knew me before I was formed in the womb and who knows where every sparrow falls; God Almighty, omnipotent and omniscient; God, wise and just and merciful and, above all, gracious, who exists in all-time and all-space and who knows what I need before I even kneel to pray; the God of the oppressed and downtrodden, who breaks bonds and sets nations free... That God-- the God of Moses and Jesus and Augustine-- would have understood my mother's abortion, had she gotten one.
So when I see signs that urge, "SMILE! Your mother was pro-life!"-- when my mother's teenage decisions, my family's structure, and my very existence is personally addressed-- I want to take your sign away and snap it over my knee.
Fuck you and your smiley face sign and your presumptive arrogance.
That's what happens when you haul out your signs and get in people's faces about personal and private matters. Many people who disagree with the religious pro-life stance-- my boyfriend included-- ignore you, hope that you'll go away if you stop getting attention.
Perhaps they are thinking a little in line with Matthew 6:1-- Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
Marching on Washington in crowds? Waving signs and banners? Yeah, that's attention-whoring. Whatever happened to the left hand not knowing what the right is doing?
But personally, I'd add to that: Why do you worry about the speck in your neighbor's eye, but not about the log in your own? You hypocrite, for take the log out of your own eye, and then you might see clear enough to remove the speck from your neighbor's.
Pro-lifers, how much money was spent on this trip to Washington to push this "all life is sacred" agenda?
How much money could have been spent in homeless shelters and soup kitchens-- and was not?
How much money was given to the poor, to charity, to food and clothing banks-- and was, instead, spent on a glorified field trip?
How many hours could have been volunteered at community centers and food distribution points, at libraries and schools that were spent traveling and protesting?
How many lives could all of that money and time saved or improved? How many individuals in local communities could have benefited from the talents and resources of those hundreds of people?
How many houses could have been built or winter-proofed; how many immigrants could have practiced English or learned job skills; how many children's books could have been donated or scarfs knitted?
Yeah.
Fuck you and your "all life is sacred". Fuck it. If you really meant it, you'd start by caring for all people, not just the ones still inside of a womb.
I would also like to complain about the wastefulness and environmental impact of this rally, beginning with the volume of trash you left on the National Mall, pro-life rally attendees. There was at least one dumpster's worth of fliers, notecards, bumper stickers, and abandoned signs left littering the entire length of the Mall, ground into sidewalks and flittering in the hibernating grass.
Yes, the trashcans were full. In case you'd forgotten, there was a huge national event two days ago and about 1.8 million people were packed into that space. I'm sure they had trash, too. However, I note that the vast majority of litter scattered far from the cans was all pro-life propaganda...indicating that no one among your groups thought to bring trash bags, nor thought to belatedly acquire some, nor even attempted in any way to pick up all the garbage you brought and subsequently left.
That's not mentioning the fact that so many people came so far in gas-guzzling vehicles just for one day's protest, some as far as Raleigh, NC. Quick math: how much gasoline does it take to fill up fifty non-hybrid coach buses? And how many pounds of carbon dioxide and other chemicals pour out the tail-pipes of said fleet of coach buses?
Oh, but of course not all of you took mass transit. Some of you drove, which is much less efficient.
Thanks for taking good care of God's good and beloved creation, and also ensuring that all those precious embryos inherit an even more polluted planet.
The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; and the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. -- Isaiah 24:4-5
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
My boyfriend and I had decided to make a trip yesterday to the Smithsonian Natural History museum, which took us straight into the heart of Washington, DC.
This was...unfortunate...timing.
To all the anti-abortion protesters:
I should have been an abortion.
My mother was a desperate, lonely sixteen-year old who just wanted some love and attention.
My father was a forty-year old drug-addled alcoholic who hit my mother so hard her hair came out in clumps and who, apparently, had no qualms about fucking someone less than half his age.
I was born into a family too poor to really afford me and raised by my grandparents.
When my mother was the age I am now, I myself was twelve.
I should have been an abortion. If my mother had chosen to abort me, I would never have existed. I would never have known regret for the life I did not live because I would not have lived it. The world would have continued without me, as it always has and always will, and I would never have woken even for a single moment.
And God, who knew me before I was formed in the womb and who knows where every sparrow falls; God Almighty, omnipotent and omniscient; God, wise and just and merciful and, above all, gracious, who exists in all-time and all-space and who knows what I need before I even kneel to pray; the God of the oppressed and downtrodden, who breaks bonds and sets nations free... That God-- the God of Moses and Jesus and Augustine-- would have understood my mother's abortion, had she gotten one.
So when I see signs that urge, "SMILE! Your mother was pro-life!"-- when my mother's teenage decisions, my family's structure, and my very existence is personally addressed-- I want to take your sign away and snap it over my knee.
Fuck you and your smiley face sign and your presumptive arrogance.
That's what happens when you haul out your signs and get in people's faces about personal and private matters. Many people who disagree with the religious pro-life stance-- my boyfriend included-- ignore you, hope that you'll go away if you stop getting attention.
Perhaps they are thinking a little in line with Matthew 6:1-- Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
Marching on Washington in crowds? Waving signs and banners? Yeah, that's attention-whoring. Whatever happened to the left hand not knowing what the right is doing?
But personally, I'd add to that: Why do you worry about the speck in your neighbor's eye, but not about the log in your own? You hypocrite, for take the log out of your own eye, and then you might see clear enough to remove the speck from your neighbor's.
Pro-lifers, how much money was spent on this trip to Washington to push this "all life is sacred" agenda?
How much money could have been spent in homeless shelters and soup kitchens-- and was not?
How much money was given to the poor, to charity, to food and clothing banks-- and was, instead, spent on a glorified field trip?
How many hours could have been volunteered at community centers and food distribution points, at libraries and schools that were spent traveling and protesting?
How many lives could all of that money and time saved or improved? How many individuals in local communities could have benefited from the talents and resources of those hundreds of people?
How many houses could have been built or winter-proofed; how many immigrants could have practiced English or learned job skills; how many children's books could have been donated or scarfs knitted?
Yeah.
Fuck you and your "all life is sacred". Fuck it. If you really meant it, you'd start by caring for all people, not just the ones still inside of a womb.
I would also like to complain about the wastefulness and environmental impact of this rally, beginning with the volume of trash you left on the National Mall, pro-life rally attendees. There was at least one dumpster's worth of fliers, notecards, bumper stickers, and abandoned signs left littering the entire length of the Mall, ground into sidewalks and flittering in the hibernating grass.
Yes, the trashcans were full. In case you'd forgotten, there was a huge national event two days ago and about 1.8 million people were packed into that space. I'm sure they had trash, too. However, I note that the vast majority of litter scattered far from the cans was all pro-life propaganda...indicating that no one among your groups thought to bring trash bags, nor thought to belatedly acquire some, nor even attempted in any way to pick up all the garbage you brought and subsequently left.
That's not mentioning the fact that so many people came so far in gas-guzzling vehicles just for one day's protest, some as far as Raleigh, NC. Quick math: how much gasoline does it take to fill up fifty non-hybrid coach buses? And how many pounds of carbon dioxide and other chemicals pour out the tail-pipes of said fleet of coach buses?
Oh, but of course not all of you took mass transit. Some of you drove, which is much less efficient.
Thanks for taking good care of God's good and beloved creation, and also ensuring that all those precious embryos inherit an even more polluted planet.
The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; and the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. -- Isaiah 24:4-5
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-23 07:09 pm (UTC)I'm glad to hear from someone else who could/should have been an abortion, though. My situation wasn't quite as messed up as yours, however, my single mom's whole family demanded she get rid of me, even took her down to get an abortion, and yet here I stand. For all the crap that happened to me in my life, and for the fact my mother is now dead in no small part because she chose to have me, my life is a million times more precious to me because they could have gotten rid of me and in the end she chose not to. I was important enough to her for her to try, and that is wonderful to me.
I have a hard time convincing many people that there are situations where abortions are necessary; their response is always "then those people shouldn't be having sex to begin with", and it frustrates me to have to pull out the "what if they were raped?" card.
Then of course a few of them have to pull the "god only gives us what we can handle" card, and say that the woman should have the baby anyway, maybe just give it up for adoption. I always laugh, because it's only men who say that, only men who don't understand how terrifying it would be to have something growing inside you thanks to the man who attacked you...
I recounted to one of them the tale of a girl at my school who was forced to do exactly that, to carry the child of her rapist because her family felt it was the punishment she deserved. First of all, who sets a child up for that, to be doomed to know they were born as a punishment for their mother? Hadn't she been punished enough by being raped and then shown no support by her family? Wouldn't that child be miserable their whole life for it? We never knew because the girl, only 15, killed herself before her third trimester, soon after she started to show. And the pro-life, I-love-god-so asshole who I was telling it to simply called the girl weak. Ugh.
I want a Tshirt with the splinter/log quote on it now. I need like, a whole collection of bible verses to hold in the faces of my "Christian" friends. Then maybe they'll stop telling me on a regular basis about how I'm just a few inches from having a red-hot cloven hoof up my ass.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-24 01:08 am (UTC)I learned a lot of things there in seminary, including (but not limited to) what I went to learn. I pride myself on my coherent liberal theological arguments.
Everytime I see a pro-life billboard-- and there are A LOT-- I try to reformulate its spiel as a pro-choice billboard.
"Life isn't a Choice" many say.
"Rape isn't a choice, either," I retort. "Neither is sexual abuse, birth control failure, grinding poverty, nor birth defects, or poor education. Most of the time, neither is prostitution."
I recounted to one of them the tale of a girl at my school...
Jesus wept.
...no, really. I really mean that. Jesus Christ himself bowed his head and wept.
"What you do to the least of the people, you do to me," he said (paraphrased). Jesus emphasized that the character of a people is shown best by how their society treats the weakest, the poorest, and the most in need of help.
Anyone who disowns a raped girl is not Christian. Anyone who withdraws support from a pregnant woman is NOT Christian.
And anyone who calls a rape victim and suicide victim weak?
...I want to vomit just thinking about it. I would have hit that asshole so hard he'd have never been able to walk right again. I hope he ends up with some horrific, debilitating chronic illness.
I pray that the Lord is just.
Where in the hell do you live?
no subject
Date: 2009-01-24 12:27 pm (UTC)I'm little miss raised in a sheltered mildly abusive rich white christian family and befriended all the misfits and minorities, and am one of the few whites I know who has black friends not to keep from feeling guilty about being "racist", but just because dude, these are my friends, buzz off, most the white people around here are homophobic and self-centered anyway.
Let me summarize my local position on abortion this way: Focus on the Family headquarters are less than an hour's drive from here. Yeah. Lots of bullshit round here.
And me, the atheist who gets called "more Christian than most Christians I know" by the Very Christian (and I mean that in a good-ish way) boy at the Christian College. Heh.
*suddenly realizes she doesn't know if she actually answered the question or not, and goes to bed*
no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 12:57 am (UTC)According to Dante, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for traitors; the way her family turned on her is, I feel, the worst form of treachery, and I hope the devil spits out Judas and chews on them instead for a while.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-26 12:49 am (UTC)The pro-life billboards in Duluth almost all say "Embryos are just tiny babies!" Which makes me think, first of all, that they're not, as anyone who's ever taken even the most bare-bones middle school health class should know; and secondly, that if embryos were indeed miniature babies, why the sign featured a "cute" photo of a baby instead of an image of a fetus.... Since they're so convinced that people can see a little worm-like fetus and immediately equate it with a "cute" baby.