Man, they are insane over at National Review! I mean it literally - their minds don’t work normally. I usually think that’s just the inherent limitation of being a right-wing second-stringer (you’re already lower than a very low bar), but here I’m not even talking about their developmental team at The Corner - today NRO runs a feature piece by some professional abortion-myth peddler that simply takes a wig-out and keeps on flippin’. The reason Sarah Palin is a laughingstock, you see, is that . . . her critics all feel guilty about abortion.

[Digglah: Forget the baseball tie-ins. The Gibbering Abortion-Rights Exquisite Corpse Dadaesque Word Association Prize has now been retired.]

Here’s Kevin Burke explaining what everyone else pretty much figured needed no explanation:

Some of the very personal and often uncharitable criticism of vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family may have a relationship to [the country’s] collective grief, shame, and guilt from personal involvement in the abortion of an unborn child.

Right. The massive outpouring of largely political, fact-driven, and entirely reasonable criticism of a complete airhead who consistently offers an unrecognizably garbled version of basic constitutional principles affecting the job she is currently seeking, began her campaign for that job by stating she did not know what it entailed, invariably responds to the simplest substantive questions with idiotic evasions and irrelevancies, cites the most bizarrely tangential facts - often incorrectly - as evidence of her own preparedness for office, conducted personal vendettas in office and attempted to ban library books as mayor, has been cited by her own state’s attorney for abuse of authority as governor and is still under investigation for related transgressions, cannot name any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, cannot name any magazine or newspaper she herself reads (while claiming to read “all of them”), constantly infantalizes her office and her own supporters by filling public appearances with childish slogans, jargon, meaningless folksy expressions, and winking in lieu of answers to topical questions, campaigns almost exclusively by vague generalizations and character assassination, denies scientific consensus on environmental protection, global warming, and creationism, and adheres to extremist religious superstitions about witchcraft, “the apocalypse”, and God’s supposed direct intervention in her career and electoral campaign . . . is an expression of everyone’s personal feelings about . . . abortion.

What kind of a nut thinks so? The kind of nut who spends his life promoting the entirely made-up, and repeatedly scientifically disproven, myth of “post-abortion syndrome” - a supposed psychological malady that afflicts women who have had abortions (and now apparently the entire nation). It’s particularly an issue in Palin’s case, you see, because she has a child with Down Syndrome, but the majority of such pregnancies are aborted, so all those women are - he knows this - racked with guilt over the fact that Palin is a better woman and mother than they are. They attack her to assuage their own feelings of guilt and inadequacy. I’m not making this up (though, obviously, Burke is):

Seeing the Palin family, in a very visible public forum, with an uncompromising and public pro life philosophy arouses deeply repressed feelings in post abortive parents, as well as media members, counselors, health care professionals, politicians and others who promote abortion rights, especially the abortion of children with challenges such as Down Syndrome. These powerful repressed feelings of grief, guilt and shame can be deflected from the source of the wound (i.e., abortion) and projected onto an often uncharitable focus upon the trigger of these painful emotions…the Palin family.

Burke, by the way, is a founder of a Catholic anti-choice organization specifically dedicated to promoting the “post-abortion” myth. It’s his job to say nonsense like this. But it’s important to re-emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of this is true - this Burke clown, and people like him, made this up and just keep saying it. The “post-abortion syndrome” lie has been disproven again and again, by multiple studies in different settings over a period of almost 30 years - there is simply no general phenomenon of depression or regret following abortion (though individual women have differing reactions, of course), and on average women who have had abortions are happier after having done so than they were before. As to whether people’s reactions to Palin have to do with guilt over abortion, he obviously can’t know that and it’s obviously insane. It makes as much sense as saying they love Obama because of feelings of guilt about suntan lotion. He made it up, and asserts it as fact because it serves his purpose. He’s been doing that for decades, shamelessly, in direct contravention of established evidence proving his statements to be lies, and with no evident regard for that fact.

What strikes me, more and more over the years, is the bizarre lengths the anti-woman crowd goes to to promote their false and absurd view of women, sex, and the world in general. They really do see everything as related to those topics. Archbishop Egan, in the risible and obnoxious essay cited in my last post on this topic, claims to hope for “one day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life”. Can he really be that un-self-aware? Is there anyone who better fits that description than people like him and Burke - for whom the merest mention (or photograph) of a fetus is grist for an unhinged and reality-free rant about abortion, in whose minds the entirely predictable failings of an absurdly unqualified political candidate are actually caused by a fictional product of abortion that they themselves made up out of whole cloth? (I guess Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley, Charles Fried, and Ken Adelman are all suffering from “post-abortion syndrome”.)

There is a kind of funhouse-mirror aspect to the ways these people’s minds work. Back in 1994, when the Edvard Munch painting The Scream was stolen from the Norwegian National Gallery, an anti-abortion group announced that they could get it returned if anti-abortion propaganda were shown on national television (in fact they had no connection to the incident and were just grandstanding). After 9-11, Jerry Falwell famously declared that “the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this  because God will not be mocked.” (It also turned out that gays, lesbians, feminists, and the ACLU were involved.) In 2006, a panel of Republicans in the Missouri State Legislature investigated the problem of illegal immigration (into Missouri?), and discovered it was the result of “the effects of 30 years of abortion.” It is a commonplace within the crypto-racist right that Western (i.e., white) societies are facing a “demographic bomb”, resulting from the different birthrates of white and non-white population groups, caused by abortion and birth control. Certain Catholic scholars, including John Noonan and Philip Rieff, have declared that abortion is itself the product of the “therapeutic culture” which seeks “wellness” (scare quotes always, please) rather than rule-following - sexual autonomy is for them a mental illness. The latest fad phrase among conservative thinkers is “the culture of death” - our entire society, or at least its progressive faction, is devoted to killing human beings, not because preserving biological life is not always the only goal in the healthcare setting, but as some sort of ideological principle in itself. Another fad phrase is “the contracepting culture” - society that accepts the horrors of sex with contraception (do you really think I’m making this up?). And of course, Sarah Palin declares that William Ayers, who helped bomb a number of government installations during an illegal war while causing no deaths, is a terrorist, but when questioned whether the bombers and shooters who murdered numerous people in legal abortion clinics were terrorists refused repeatedly to address the question.

It appears there simply isn’t any issue or circumstance, however far-fetched, that isn’t relevant to abortion; there isn’t any problem or trend, however dubious, that isn’t caused by abortion; there isn’t any need or difficulty, however unlikely, that can’t be solved by criminalizing sexual freedom. The bizarre obsession that leads to such thinking, and the contortions and delusions it requires to make such leaps while ignoring the glaring contradictions they entail, is difficult to grasp. It is simply very hard for a normal person - one who isn’t terrified by sex and obsessed with controlling and limiting other people’s sexual freedom - to imagine how this kind of thinking originates.

Make no mistake: this has nothing to do with taking a reasoned position on the appropriate balance of moral rights and interests between a pregnant woman and her fetus. This is simple full-gone loony craziness. These people make up absurd factual claims and baldly lie when they are refuted, hypothesize bizarre psychological projections upon those they disagree with, and obsessively posit - with dizzying certainty - the most tenuous and far-fetched links between virtually any event or phenomenon in the world and their consuming misogynist bete noir. They’re nuts. And these are the leaders - the thinkers - in the anti-choice movement. This is what the anti-choice movement is like when it’s not ranting at patients in front of health clinics or shooting doctors. This is what being anti-choice is like at its most subtle, sophisticated, and learned: bat-shit loony.

[NB: Crossposted to the blog Lean Left, where I also contribute. I don’t usually cross-post, but Lean Left is picked up by the aggregator Memeorandum, and this blog is not, so on topics where I think it’s important to reach a wider audience, or to respond directly to posts from Memeorandum, I sometimes do.]

Cardinal Egan, supremely obnoxious Catholic Archbishop of New York, has an essay up on some Web site, complete with the standard handwringing condescension and heart-tugging photos, declaiming how desperately we need to take control of women’s bodies and impose forced pregnancy as a matter of law and culture. Its contents are typical of this well-worn genre: a lame argument about whether a human fetus is a “human being”, willful elision of the difference between biological identity and moral status, sweeping moral declarations grounded on nothing but his unreflective certainty, and of course obligatory references to Hitler, Stalin, and Dred Scott.

The heart of this superficial and nonsensical (or perhaps it could be said: “a-sensical”) piece is a photograph of a 20-week fetus - a photograph which, Egan declares, proves by itself that abortion is wrong and it is utterly worthless to even consider the actual moral issues raised by the question.

Why, you might inquire, have I not delved into the opinion of philosophers and theologians about the matter? And even worse: Why have I not raised the usual questions about what a “human being” is, what a “person” is, what it means to be “living,” and such? People who write books and articles about abortion always concern themselves with these kinds of things. Even the justices of the Supreme Court who gave us “Roe v. Wade” address them. Why do I neglect philosophers and theologians? Why do I not get into defining “human being,” defining “person,” defining “living,” and the rest? Because, I respond, I am sound of mind and endowed with a fine set of eyes, into which I do not believe it is well to cast sand. I looked at the photograph, and I have no doubt about what I saw and what are the duties of a civilized society if what I saw is in danger of being killed by someone who wishes to kill it or, if you prefer, someone who “chooses” to kill it. In brief: I looked, and I know what I saw.

Why it is that the moral attack dogs of the right wing are always so eager to proclaim their own lack of comprehension I don’t know, but it is no longer surprising as a practical fact, and still less in light of the product of their “reasoning”. But ask yourself: who would take such idiocy seriously in any other context? On what moral issue would anyone seriously say “I saw a picture of an organism affected by this subject that moves me in some way, so I refuse to think about it carefully or read what the best thinkers on the subject have said, and that justifies both my unsupported, idiosyncratic religious beliefs about it and my intention to impose them on everyone else in the country!”? Who would seriously claim that not thinking about, reading about, or analyzing a serious problem could possibly produce a correct answer, or was a proper ground for imposing a solution to it as a matter of law and policy? Well, who but a religious right-winger?

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