Death and Texas

Texas Gooper mouthbreather (pardon the multiple redundancies) Steve, I say, Steve Stockman has a fresh, bold new slogan/bumper sticker for his perennial House campaign. Either that or he has some sort of weird bet with Louie Gohmert to see whose knuckles can make the most noise dragging on the Capitol Hill concrete.

It's not even worth deconstructing the sheer nonsense populating the entirety of Stockman's buffoonish slogan, except to point out that, again, I wish I had thought of it first, I'd have had a CafePress swag account going full-tilt to skim the rubes out of their disability checks. I would also say that Stockman forgot to shoehorn a gay marriage reference in there somewhere, so I assume the baby Jebus is crying now.

It is worth pointing out the primary logical flaw in this ham-fisted jabber (which of course would then be conflated by your usual conservaturd as further evidence of the "humorless" librul -- because har har, gun carryin' fetuses killin' their murderous mothers and the abortonazis that tricked 'em into it, amirite?). Both the Second Amendment and Roe v. Wade are matters of settled law, and interests from either side try to nibble at the margins of each.

But here's the thing -- virtually nobody (and I defy anyone to find a decent example proving otherwise) from the pro-choice side is a strict absolutist on the subject. It is very difficult to find anyone who seriously thinks that abortions should be allowed for any reason aside from the health of the mother beyond 20-24 weeks. Yet pro-life obsessives such as Stockman enjoy propagating the awful notion that "liberals" or "pro-choicers" believe as a bloc that live babies can be killed under the Roe rubric. I sure as fuck don't believe such a thing, and I don't know (or know of) any other pro-choice person who does, either.

This assumption is proven by the #gosnell hashtag on Stockman's Twitter comment introducing the bumper sticker. For those of you who don't spend every waking moment donating money to Pat Robertson, reading Chuck Norris columns, and self-flagellating over the American Holocaust, Kermit Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortion provider facing seven murder charges under a grand jury indictment. By all accounts, Gosnell is a butcher and a fiend and a fraud, and at 72 years of age, it is entirely likely that he will spend the rest of his rotten life pushing ass out of Club Fed. And good riddance to him. No reasonable person could read the report on Gosnell's gruesome operation and not be utterly repulsed.

But here's where Stockman's clumsy abortion-guns analogy, um, backfires (see what I did there?) on him. Second Amendment absolutists hasten to point at the near-constant spate of spree killings and firearm incidents involving children as mere outliers. It's a big, big country, and shit happens, y'know? Yet Gosnell's singular butchery is presented as prima facie evidence for both the supposedly routine nature of beheading live babies at Planned Parenthood, and the mendacious negligence of the lamestream media in failing to report every lurid detail of Gosnell's baby abattoir.

As far as the argument that the media sucks, well, it's hard to argue with that one. Is there a conspiracy to deny the 'murkin public their well-earned details of a scumbag abortion doctor's attempt to keep up with Jeffrey Dahmer? Sure, in the sense that the corporate media understand deeply that what their audience wants is meaningless fluff about royal babies and poop cruises. In other words, the conspiracy is driven by market considerations, not ideology.

The mission of the nightly news is not to give you news per se, it's to get you to buy automobiles and snacks and pharmaceuticals. Its goal is to get you to spend money you don't really have on stuff you don't really need or want. This is not exactly a secret. When they lose viewers, they lose sales. And nothing will lose viewers more quickly than some trumped-up bullshit about one whackjob abortionist in urban Philly operating a slaughterhouse filled with cat shit and baby parts. Hokay?

So the apparent lack of sufficient national coverage of the Gosnell case is indefensible, but hardly proof of an overarching conspiracy to protect the constantly beleaguered Planned Parenthood, especially since Gosnell was never a PP provider, as far as I've read. Certainly there's laziness involved there, but if it's a conspiracy, so far its accusers have yet to attribute whence said conspiracy originated. Reporters may tend to be liberal, but their bosses do not. Are we to assume that the conspiracy of silence is political? Then provide some proof, or even some evidence of this.

Obviously none of that will happen, this is merely a shithead southern congresscracker doing what they do, grandstanding on an issue that allows him to not have to explain to his poor cracker constituency why they're still broke and jobless, pretending that a tremendous outlier is standard operating procedure. And again, that is exactly what Gosnell's operation was -- an outlier, an aberration, a serial killer posing as a doctor. Gosnell is no more a typical example of reproductive health care than Jared Loughner or James Holmes or [fill in several dozen other spree killers off the top of your head] are examples of typical gun owners.

Yet that will be how it is presented. Just you watch. Pro-lifers and Second Amendment absolutists are birds of the same wretched feather; the verities of a single sentence written in the eighteenth century are as sure and unchanging (despite massive, unprecedented technological advancements since then) as the certainty that a fertilized egg is a fully-realized life whose minutes of existence trump any and all rights its host might have. The notion that maybe getting a deadly weapon and cop-killing ammunition ought to present as least as many challenges as, say, driving a car or obtaining allergy medication, are utterly foreign to them. Yet the idea of telling women what they can and can't do, even if they're only five or six weeks along, is as natural to them as masturbating to an Oral Roberts scrapbook.

And while we're at it, let's dispense with the implicit notion that a rabid pro-life stance means that they care more -- about anything. They don't care about the women they wish to force to have kids they don't want, and they don't care about the kids themselves once they're out of the womb. They don't care about the families who can't afford more mouths to feed, since they always support gutting social services, and will never lift a goddamned finger to help them improve their economic lives. They don't care about whether those kids are born to abusive parents, or have to attend shitty, underfunded school, or end up in soul-deadening jobs that don't pay enough to live on, or if they end up in prison.

Just as the universe is so much more than the Big Bang, the singularity that precipitated its existence, so is a human's life so much more than the instant of birth. But a pro-lifer couldn't care less about any of that shit -- their obsession is with the blessed event of the singularity. And all the other fully formed, fully realized lives are secondary -- or hell, of no consequence at all --- in their estimation.

As Barry O begins his typical punt-on-first-down tiptoe toward compromise on modest gun-control measures, such background checks, clip capacity limits, and mandatory liability insurance, look for Stockman's half-witted jabber to become the rallying cry of hundreds of teabaggers seeking re-election next year.

[Update 4/13/13 4:10 PDT:  What Mistermix (and the commenters) said. The anti-abortion crowd would like to believe and perpetuate the notion that the Gosnell case is evidence for overturning Roe, but as the Juicers say, Gosnell is actually a case for why Roe exists in the first place.

Pro-choice is really pro-life; pro-life is really just pro-fetus. Again, the anti-choice folks do not care about the rest of the family, or even about the child itself once it exits the womb. Once you're born, you're on your own.]