{"id":65399,"date":"2015-06-26T13:43:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-26T17:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"\/news\/?p=65399"},"modified":"2015-12-07T13:02:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T18:02:06","slug":"behold-salons-craziest-pro-abortion-essay-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/behold-salons-craziest-pro-abortion-essay-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Behold Salon’s craziest pro-abortion essay yet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"womanThere are many ways to spot a fanatic, but a particularly damning one is when, on the rare instance where one admits to acting fanatical, it\u2019s still somehow the victim\u2019s fault. This was on full display in a recent Salon <\/em>column<\/a> by Catherine Landis, a Planned Parenthood of Middle & East Tennessee board member and Knoxville Advocates of Reproductive Rights community action team leader.<\/p>\n

In a piece that stunningly alternates between confessions of abominably unjustified incivility and suggesting it was totally justified, Landis recounts an encounter with a pro-lifer at a Tennessee early voting station last November in which she \u201cdidn\u2019t mean to scream,\u201d but \u201ccould not stop,\u201d as if \u201cinside me some hidden beast was waking up,\u201d wounded and stirring.<\/p>\n

As if preemptively trying to compensate for how badly she comes across in her own account of the incident, she starts out by complaining that in the South \u201cit doesn\u2019t feel safe to stand alone if you\u2019re going to publicly come out as pro-choice,\u201d because \u201cSix years ago, a man walked into a local Unitarian Church with a gun hidden in a guitar case because he wanted to kill some liberals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah, and six years ago a pro-abort shot and killed a man<\/a> in Michigan because he didn\u2019t like his pro-life signs. Three years ago a man walked into the Family Research Council<\/a> and opened fire because he wanted to kill \u201cas many people as possible\u201d for their conservative views. In recent years, other unhinged pro-aborts have committed numerous violent acts against pro-lifers<\/a>, such as a rock thrown into a window of a home and demonstrators threatened with a knife and a Molotov cocktail. And Human Life International has been documenting many more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet pro-aborts endlessly claim a monopoly on the victim card, as if the rare fringe anti-abortion nut means they have to constantly live in terror but the pro-abortion ones should mean nothing to us. Somehow, I doubt I\u2019d get much sympathy from the other side (or even my own) if I threw a similar tantrum at a pro-choicer and tried to blame it on frayed nerves that the next Harlan James Drake might be just around the corner.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, back to the tantrum in question:<\/p>\n

[S]omething, my dumbfounded brain, my outraged tongue, that uninvited beast inside, took over. The women claimed I was screaming, as in, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to scream!\u201d<\/p>\n

But yes, I did. I can scream all I want to! I will scream bloody murder if I want to, I will scream and scream and scream some more because you are trying to take away my rights!<\/p>\n

Or something like that. I can\u2019t remember exactly everything I said, although I won\u2019t deny my outburst may have included I don\u2019t give a damn what you think and many other things that might or might not have been prudent. Blinding rage is not conducive to prudence or a reliable memory. The more interesting question to me is not what I said, but why. What caused such a raging, overwhelming, immature, unapologetic, visceral and primal reaction?<\/p>\n

Wow! The pro-lifer must have been a real jerk to provoke such a reaction. What was her crime? Landis writes that the \u201cwoman was friendly as she invited us to explain why we were against the amendment,\u201d but disliked the way her \u201cvoice was silky with feigned cordiality but behind it was the cocksure certainty of people who know they\u2019re right and you\u2019re wrong because God is on their side.\u201d (Apparently that\u2019s why the folks at Jezebel and RH Reality Check don\u2019t bother faking cordiality to begin with. At least pro-aborts are never arrogant!) But what ultimately got \u201cthe beast\u201d stirring was\u2026are you ready for this?<\/p>\n

You may want to be sitting down. The lady had a flier. The flier said\u2026it said\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026it said \u201cinformed consent.\u201d<\/p>\n

[youtube https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Qw2uvhmeCZQ&w=420&h=315]<\/p>\n

Seriously, that\u2019s it. If you\u2019re as stumped as I am why that should reduce a rational human being to blind, sputtering rage, Landis explains:<\/p>\n

It does not mean telling patients what they need to know about the procedure. Abortion providers in the state of Tennessee are required to be physicians with active hospital privileges and they already do that. They do that in the same way gastroenterologists inform patients about colonoscopies. Informed consent is what doctors do. Only in the context of abortion does \u201cinformed consent\u201d mean legally requiring physicians to read a script written by non-medically trained politicians telling patients all kinds of factually challenged scary stories designed to induce second thoughts.<\/p>\n

So you see, in those two little words, this poor, unassuming Planned Parenthood leader was overwhelmed by \u201cthe audacity, the disingenuousness, the callous pretense written in black and white\u201d of pro-lifers \u201clying to get their way.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one problem, Ms. Landis: you know what the difference is between informed consent in gastroenterology and informed consent in abortion. In the former, there is no vested interest in widespread deception about one of its key facts, upon which the practice\u2019s very existence depends. In abortion there is: the destruction of a separate, innocent human being, which must be denied in order to make abortion not sound monstrously evil.<\/p>\n

You ought to know this as well as anyone, Ms. Landis, considering you hold a substantial position with an organization dedicated<\/a> to perpetuating<\/a> it and other lies<\/a>. So might I suggest an alternate explanation for your anger: some subconscious awareness that you couldn\u2019t actually debate the logic of informed-consent laws without confronting your own role in why they\u2019re needed in the first place?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my bet, but Landis throws out a couple more post-hoc rationalizations for her behavior: talking to that woman \u201cfelt physically threatening,\u201d like \u201cthe emotional equivalent of being hauled off to a cell for a crime I did not commit\u201d\u2014solely because of a line on a flier about abortionists having to provide pertinent information they\u2019d rather hide\u2014and it just feels so hard to be \u201ca liberal in the South\u201d who \u201cfeel[s] like you don\u2019t have a voice\u201d because of \u201ca subtle sense that this is a government hating, gun-loving, God-fearing, kind-of-racist, kind-of-sexist, kind-of-homophobic, big-car-driving, live-free-or-die kind of a place.\u201d I don\u2019t know about you, but to me, I had to scream at that pro-lifer because I\u2019m bigoted against my fellow Tennesseans <\/em>makes things worse, not better.<\/p>\n

Landis spends another few thousand words attempting to at least look like<\/em> she made up for her intolerance by wondering \u201cif it\u2019s even possible anymore to sit down and talk with somebody from the other side\u201d and recounting how she sought out a respectful dialogue with someone from the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform<\/a> whom she refers to as \u201cSue.\u201d Her account is full of\u2026creative<\/em>\u2026spins on pro-life views, but her key takeaway? \u201cWe need to call the \u2018pro-life\u2019 movement what it is: a cult\u201d:<\/p>\n

Because like a cult, its members manage to use the exact same talking points with no deviation. Facts contradicting their stated beliefs are tossed aside. There is no room for nuanced thinking.<\/p>\n

Proving that Landis has little to no sense of irony, this accusation came in the midst of her:<\/p>\n