RedState, ever the bastion for right-wing faux discourse, Friday published a blog not only defending John Brown’s violence but also that of men like Scott Roeder while refusing to canonize him.
Contributor Streiff draws parallels between slavery and abortion, using violent revolts as the starting point in a rant not quite defending the over 6000 instances of violence instigated by anti-abortion militants against abortion providers.
I have never really understood the honoring of John Brown for his violent actions helping make our state “Bleeding Kansas”. I understand the desire to show our commitment to abolition of slavery by saying Kansans were willing to kill (and be killed) leading up to the Civil War, but is this really something worth honoring?
To be sure, I understand the importance of violence used to free people from slavery. I question, rather, the honoring of the violence. I do not honor the War for Independence, but, rather, the American Revolution.
I understand that the men who wished for self-determination knew that war was upon them (which slowed the move towards independence as many who wished freedom from the Crown still respected and loved their British brethren and wished not to go to war), but they did not fight for war’s sake nor did they seek war as the answer to their problem.
Rather, war was an inevitability when King George refused to grant the Colonists representation and, later, independence. Without the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would not have happened when they did, and the 14th may not have been as strong as it was. The Industrial Revolution perhaps would have rendered slavery unnecessary; and the struggle for suffrage may have taken as long for freedmen as it did for women (who wants to wait 70 years for the right to vote?). Who could be upset with the swiftness of these amendments? But that still does not mean one should honor the violence.
It is this honoring of violence, the idea that unrelenting violence will eventually gain you what you desire, that made life in the South for black Americans incredibly dangers, what kills and irreparably injures LGBT people, and what makes would-be abortion providers choose a rather less dangerous career path.
The poorly-worded “denunciation” of Dr. George Tiller’s assassination by leading “pro-life” organizations left many pro-choice activists fairly certain that while Mary Kay Culp of Kansans for Life would not have encouraged Scott Roeder to kill Dr. Tiller, she was not actually sad he had died. Streiff points this out, confirming Women’s Rights advocates long-stated beliefs:
Many of us, however, have long since passed the point of denouncing or even being concerned by the death of a Bernard Slepian or a George Tiller but haven’t yet reached the point of holding up their killers as heroes. We haven’t yet reached the point where a man like Paul Hill receives the kind of eulogy that sparks others to emulate him.
Most anti-choice zealots – those who wish not only to remove women’s right to seek a safe, legal abortion but also to keep us from having access to contraception and safer sex education – will not publically idolize those who bomb and burn clinics or harm and kill providers (but will accept those who stalk clinic employees into gas stations such as their leaders), though they seem not to stop these domestic terrorists when they beat up escorts outside abortion clinics. They may not write to Roeder in jail, but they certainly wouldn’t stop him from killing again.
As we’ve seen over the years, when the power of the state in used in defense of the indefensible, whether dogs and water cannon at Selma or the noxious, if comically named, Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, neither does the injustice become just nor do those opposing it go away.
I do not understand how abortion rights are analogous to slave-owner rights. Then again, I see women as fully functioning members of society and do not hold sex up as a holy sacrament allowed for only a few.
How is keeping harassing (and violent: clinic escorts regularly report assaults while helping patients and their companions into clinics) zealots away from women the same as siccing dogs on non-violent protestors? Streiff believes the many legislative compromises prior to the Civil War were in bad faith, bastardizations of the Constitution and “anyone capable of reading English.” I am quite capable of reading and comprehending English and fully understand slavery was not a right guaranteed under the 9th Amendment of the Bill of Rights but was written into the body of the Constitution itself.
The bastardization came in the reach of the U.S. Congress to compromise away a state’s rights before its foundation (such as the Missouri Compromise, found unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision). But Roe verses Wade is no bastardization of the Constitution: it is the fruition of many proceeding cases and the further fulfillment of women’s autonomy and sovereignty under the Constitution.
Quite often, the debate over abortion centers around women’s right verses fetus’s rights. Pro-choice advocates see a born person as having rights exceeding that of a fetus; pro-life advocates see a fetus as an independent life deserving to be born. Women who seek abortions overwhelmingly say they did so for financial reasons: having another child would place an undo burden upon her and her family (61% of American women who have abortions already have a child).
Anti-abortion advocates say this is a selfish reason. Though I do not understand how that could be the case. She is seeking to protect not just herself but her family; after all, the Constitution was written not just for ourselves but also our posterity (or so says the preamble). This issue travels far beyond who has more urgent rights: a woman or a fetus. It is a war against sex.
Many anti-choicers will say they believe women have a choice – to keep her legs shut. Women should only be having sex when we are married and then at our husband’s bidding. We cannot prevent pregnancy using contraception and should be open to childbearing, and if we are not, we should not marry. Our sex exists for children. It is not ours. It belongs to our husbands. Those of us without husbands should accept the consequences of our improper sexual activities and bear the fruit of our womb.
This idea is brought home by a commenter, speaking not of “father’s rights” but of “family’s rights”:
I submit that the socially conservative movements [sic] pushing for a return to “Biological nuclear families as the core unit of society” would be that struggle [against the "Women's Rights" movement]. The rights of fathers to be fathers in the same home as their children, the rights of children to be subordinated to their biological parents vice [sic] the state, and the rights of mothers to “just say no” to the state as the de facto “Father” over their lives.
Rights of children to be subordinated? Is that like the right to be owned? Rights of mothers, not of women? And not to choose their father (husband?) over the State but to automatically have a father?
This battle in the culture wars has never been about the right of a baby to breathe life but of the authority of men over women. Rights have play no factor in the anti-abortion ideology (and the conservative ideology, for that matter). The only people deserving of any rights are men; any rights women or children have is at the behest of men.
The government (being of the people and for the people) cannot in any way determine that women should have rights equal to men, and children can only be as safe and educated as men choose for them to be. Preferably, the men with the most rights are those with the most property. Those with less deserve fewer rights. The property of men – be it in the form of money, land, wives, or children – belong to him alone, and no one else can take it from him. Women owning their sex takes away his property from him.
Will we, metaphorically, reach the stage of a John Brown’s raid? Or will we be able to keep the movement within the bounds of civil disobedience?
Perhaps slavery, and John Brown, is indeed an apt analogy. While I will not revolt against ownership of me using violence, I shall certainly revolt. I do not mind seeing the downfall of the America that teabaggers knew. I certainly look forward to an America where people own themselves – and their sex.
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