I was going to reply to this article, but then I realized it is just professional flamebait. The guy is being paid to be a troll. Go back under your bridge Kevin Williams, we don’t want you around any more.
And people complained that Mary Rickert’s short story “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” from a couple years ago which has basically this as the plot (though I’m damaging the experience by announcing that upfront) was implausible because no one is actually that crazy. That story was not a suggestion, it was making a point.
I wish more anti-choice fanatics would admit this. Most of them manipulate language to hide the fact they are working to ensure more suffering and deaths. If they were actually honest, people in the middle would realize there really isn’t a middle at all and run to the other side of the spectrum in a heartbeat (pun intended).
Perfect timing. Tennesseans are going to go to the polls in November to vote on Amendment 1, which states,
Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother.
The amendment is all but guaranteed to pass, but it’s still helpful to have an explicit statement of how its most ardent supporters feel.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, no?
Fuckwits.
Someone should clue the reporter in that casting that first stone -is- a sin.
So much for “Pro-Life”. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.
Although, after further reflection, you have to give him props for honesty–he’s not hiding behind the sanctity of life BS like most of the anti-choicers do. He’s at least coming straight out and saying that he’s more interested in punishing women for having sex than he is for saving lives.
Well, at least he’s being consistent. In being a total asshole, that is.
So does “conservative” have any value as a name for something resembling a “position” or is it just a fancy way of referring to a psychological inclination toward sadistic and juvenile trollery?
I am shocked and horrified by just how not shocked I am at this.
It’s getting to the point where trolling is the sum of Republican policy. Didn’t they used to have things like ideas?
Must be, because it certainly isn’t Biblical. The Old Testament repeatedly says the unborn (and even a baby less than a month old) is not counted as a person (Numbers 3:15-16, Leviticus 27:6). And if a person maliciously causes the termination of a pregnancy, the penalty is a fine (Exodus 21:22-23).
That is just so fucking specific.
Best case scenario: Kevin Williams becomes to the pro-choice movement what Fred Phelps became to the LGBT rights movement. He spouts such disgusting, inflammatory rhetoric that everyone instinctively wants to be on the opposite side of the debate than the one he’s on.
Then he dies hated and alone.
I know we all love being outraged, but there’s some nuance we’re ignoring. Williamson went over the controversy with Charles CW Cooke in yesterday’s episode of the “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” podcast.
In responding to Lena Dunham’s silly listicle for Planned Parenthood, he wrote…
Our national commitment to permanent, asinine, incontinent juvenility, which results in, among other things, a million or so abortions a year, is not entirely unrelated to the cultural debasement that is the only possible explanation for the career of Lena Dunham.
… which started the whole furore. Williamson believes life begins at conception. Therefore, the pre-meditated end to that life is murder. The liberal arguments in favor are childish self-justifications that overlook the murder of a living being.
But, as he and Cooke discuss, there are degrees of murder. A guy who kills another in a bar fight is a different matter than a guy who kidnaps and tortures an old woman. A dead four-year-old is treated differently than a dead 21-year-old, not just by the law, but by society as well.
So, in an ideal world where the majority of society agrees with him, Williamson would like to see abortion classified as murder and punished as such.
In the less-than-ideal world we live in, he argues for over-the-counter access to birth control and believes that universal contraception will soon make the entire argument moot. He quotes from Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles:
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
I think his whole article is worth reading, even if you disagree with him. I especially like his characterization of the Bill of Rights as a “List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On.”
(I’m 100% pro-choice, for what it’s worth.)
Well if you enjoy hateful, misogynistic garbage, sure, I suppose it’s worth reading.
Because we all know birth control is 100% effective. Even in cases where a non-sexually-active, non-birth-control-using woman or girl is raped. Miraculously, in any society where birth control is available women also can’t have life-threatening complications in their pregnancies which could necessitate an abortion! I tell you, he’s really thought this thing through.
Democrats are the party of no ideas, and republicans are the party of terrible ideas
OK so I took your advice and read the article. He argues that voting is a useless tool for affecting change on particular issues, and that decisions relating to the affordable health care act should be disconnected from one’s vote, so Lena Dunham is an idiot to urge women to vote so they can have a say in what they can and can’t legally do with their bodies.
It’s a fucking stupid, self-serving argument, obviously constructed to discredit someone campaigning for planned parenthood, and it hasn’t altered my opinion of Mr. Williamson in any positive way.
