A thread to discuss the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that have arisen in the wake of his death. No trolls.
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The Killing of George Floyd: Open Thread
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
Town currently in lockdown. Worried about what’s gonna happen next from the cops.
@Naglfar
You’re right that abortion didn’t matter before, but it matters now and it is the only thing evangelicals see. Things change; what was an expedient fiction was picked up by young people as fact, and then they grew up and taught it to their own children as fact, and here we are.
Evangelicals want right-wing judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The Republican party is willing to pander to them to get their votes, and doesn’t much object to the evangelical agenda so it’s all good with them as long as they are able to cling to power. If you want to know why evangelicals support Trump in high numbers despite him being anti-everything they claim to stand for, you need look no further than the courts. He’s fulfilling his promises to them to stack the courts.
Evangelical support for Trump is based on the fact that, like Trump, Evangelical Christianity is really super fucking racist. That’s all.
Something I read once (on Slacktivist?) some time ago about the Evangelical support for abortion bans is that originally said bans weren’t supposed to be passed into law. They were supposed to be used as a way to keep the true believers in line and donating their money to the Evangelical leaders. After all, if they got what they said they wanted, then they’d have nothing left to keep the flock in line.
Unfortunately for those original leaders, the message that it was all a ploy to keep the money rolling in didn’t get transmitted to the next generations of leaders, who promptly started to enact the change they were promised and truly believed in.
Whether the current and future crop(s) of Evangelicals will look back at this time (after everything ends one way or the other) with pride or humiliation remains to be seen.
@Redsilkphoenix
I’m pretty sure they’ll manage to twist their history to favor themselves. One hallmark of the right wing is never admitting to being wrong. If abortion does get banned I’m sure they’ll find another pet issue and/or double down on other issues like getting gay marriage banned.
Abortion was selected as the Big Issue in the 70s because being pro-segregation had gone from a winning platform to a losing platform.
It’s very effective, because it enables white Evangelicals to demonize their opponents as Satanic baby-killers while justifying anything Republicans do as a trade-off because “the ONLY thing that matters is Saving The Baybeez.”
It’s all a lie. It is not about Saving The Baybeez, as one will quickly discover when one brings up how the policies that actually lower abortion rates are all liberal policies that the “pro-lifers” vehemently oppose. And that all of those conservative policies that they claim to disagree with but will accept in order to Save The Baybeez are things that they actually support, even when those policies result in higher abortion rates.
It is not about Saving The Baybeez. It was NEVER about Saving The Baybeez. It has always been about feeling righteous for oppressing people.
@Allandrel
Oh, of course. If they really wanted to reduce abortions, they would sink large sums of money into sex ed programs talking about all kinds of contraceptives and their usage. They would be very supportive of Planned Parenthood, as Planned Parenthood’s distribution of contraceptives prevents far more abortions than they perform. But as you mentioned, it’s not about reducing abortions, it’s about hurting people.
I never said it was about “saving babies” or even reducing abortion per se. Well, it is for some of them, generally the young people who haven’t thought it through all the way yet. For most, it’s about overturning Roe v. Wade, so that women no longer have safe, legal access to abortion and therefore must suffer consequences for having unmarried sex. Said consequence being either becoming an unmarried mother (because children are a punishment in this view) or having to access a back-alley abortion and probably suffering some kind of negative medical outcome. It’s about punishing women for “immoral” behavior and has nothing whatsoever to do with babies.
Look, I have half a finger on the pulse of evangelical culture because I used to be one and still have friends who are peripheral to that culture. I’m not underrating the racism of white evangelicals, but I’m not discounting non-white evangelicals or ascribing racism to them, too. The entire push behind supporting Republicans is anti-Roe v. Wade sentiment. Republicans will put in anti-abortion judges. It doesn’t matter if the particular Republican is even Trump – Trump has done all kinds of things that are offensive to evangelicals, but they overlook it and don’t care very much because he puts in Federalist judges. The bench is all they care about, and pointing out the contradictions between what they say they believe and what they support in a politician is pointless because what they actually support is anti-abortion judges. And Trump gives them that.
@PoM
Yes, I understand that. I was commenting on their behavior and responding. I’m not trying to argue or write off what you’re saying, I was trying to add to it. Sorry if what I said seemed dismissive, that was not my intention.
Article about Trump and evangelicals here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/for-god-and-country-review-christian-case-trump-ralph-reed
I found it a bit woolly myself; but it’s not very long so people might want to give it a skim.
Let’s not forget the endgame of anti-abortion policies here. As noted, the idea is to make it difficult and dangerous, and thereby punish women who have unwed sex, and by extension, women who don’t marry, don’t marry early, leave their husband, or are sufficiently “difficult” that their husband leaves them.
In the broader view, the objective is to make life difficult, uncomfortable, and often downright dangerous for unmarried women, so that women will once again be forced to marry early and then stick with their husband come hell or high water, or domestic abuse from him. It’s an attempt to partly undo the effects of women being granted the right to independent incomes, independent title to property, and generally independent finance.
Not to put too fine a point on it: the objective of Evangelical anti-women groups is identical to that of the “Government Get Girlfriends” incel, and the incel movement more generally, and Jordan Peterson with his “enforced monogamy”. And, really, MRAs and the whole rest of the manosphere, too.
The objective is that every man gets a combination sex-slave/house-slave.
That is what they really mean whenever they use the phrase “family values”; that’s what patriarchy is: to every man, a live-in domestic slave as their birthright, and the hell with the rights of women, as well as of gay, trans, NB, and otherwise gender-nonconforming individuals, whose existence threatens the ability to quickly and reliably pigeonhole any given person as “man, child, or live-in domestic slave”.
And unlike the incels and other such groups, the Evangelicals are dangerously well-organized and politically powerful. They may be on the verge of actually achieving their objective.
@Policy of Madness
Indeed. I expect that you, too, have found that if you engage with a “pro-lifer” long enough, they will admit that they see pregnancy as a punishment for women.
@Surplus
Even amongst children, the right seems to profile them as “live-in domestic slave” (girls) and “future owner of a slave” (boys), with anyone who doesn’t fit their assigned mold being seen as a deviant that must be beaten back into shape or destroyed.