MONSTER

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

HELL yes I meant it, said alleged Christian Katherine Ragsdale last January. I meant every single damned word of it:

It’s the 37th anniversary of Roe. We should simply be celebrating: celebrating the women and men who had to fight to give women full access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; celebrating the gains women have made — the things we have been able to accomplish — in our families, our careers, our communities, and ministries — once we were given access to adequate health care and freedom from slavery to our reproductive systems.

What Katie Rags calls “full access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” most guys know as a pick-up line. Oh and kitten? “Slavery to our reproductive systems?” Do you really want to run that stupid of a line?

I hate to be the one to break this to you but that car doesn’t drive into that garage whenever the hell it feels like it. Most people figured out on the playground or in health class that somebody has to drive the car and somebody has to open the door.

Or maybe we wouldn’t be celebrating. Maybe by now we would take for granted such basic freedom, equality, and decency — being unable really to remember or imagine when anyone could have suggested that heterosexual women must either deny their sexuality or take their chances — that women’s health and very lives could be a bargaining chip for some guy’s political agenda.

Interesting. The idea that a woman might personally choose to deliberately nothave sex until, say, she got married is a concept Katie Rags can’t seem to grasp. As far as this lesbian is concerned, female breeders not only can but should be doing it all day every day with any and every guy who crosses their path.

Last March I was named President and Dean of Episcopal Divinity School — and the international blogosphere, local press, and far-flung smaller presses went ballistic.

Thanks for noticing. Would a quote have killed you?

The Board of Trustees and seminary community had been prepared for an uproar over my sexuality, but what they didn’t realize is that homophobia is really just a byproduct of misogyny.

Because I said so, that’s why.

There was some brouhaha about my being a lesbian.

You’re a lesbian? Shut up!

One small paper headline read – “EDS Appoints Lying, Baby-Killing Witch.” My staff at PRA had that one turned into a laminated nameplate for my new desk.

Let us know if you ever need a new nameplate because people with actual consciences have plenty of other ideas they’d be happy to send along.

Shortly after EDS appointed me George Tiller was murdered. In the press, and at the service in Boston, I called him a saint and martyr. They grabbed hold of that, and a speech they found online in which I called abortion is a blessing, and went to town.

What’s so damned bad about puncturing the skulls of viable infants and sucking out their brains anyway? You’re damned right George Tiller was a damned saint and a damned martyr, damn it.

And, and here’s one that really gets me in trouble, when a woman simply gets pregnant unintentionally and decides this is not a good time for her to bear and care for a child — there is no tragedy. The ability to enjoy healthy sexuality without risking a pregnancy that could derail her education or career, the development or exercise of the gifts God has given her, is a blessing.

Now just in case there are any aspiring headline writers listening — let me be clear — motherhood also is a gift and a ministry and a blessing — but not for everyone, and not always right now.

As a matter of fact, I did notice the lesbian’s remark about “healthy sexuality” but I’m not touching it; some lines fisk themselves. But the “ethic” expressed here is…enlightening.

As far as Katie Rags is concerned, killing your kid so you can have enough money for a down payment on a new Lexus is a good thing. Hey, you need a reliable car to get to your job, don’t you?

Sort of makes you wonder where Katie Rags would stop, though. If you somehow get out of Mom in one piece, are you home free? And if so, why?

After all, the only difference between me on October 29, 1955, around 7:30 in the evening(Mountain Time), and me exactly 24 hours later was the umbilical cord. Why could my mom have decided that I wasn’t a human being on the first of those two days but would have gone to jail if she had decided it on the second?

And while we’re on the subject of the nature of blessing, let me say a word about the idiots who have responded to my assertion that abortion is a blessing by saying, “clearly I would, therefore, will not be satisfied until everyone has one — perhaps everyone has many. Because, of course we all want to be richly blessed.”

One of the better straw lesbians I’ve seen in quite some time since nobody anywhere has ever said that. But why in Hell, wonders someone for whom this whole discussion is entirely theoretical and always will be, do people, even some liberals, keep calling abortion a tragedy? It’s not a tragedy!! So stop calling it that!!

Abortion is a blessing — sometimes a joyful relief; sometimes a painful choice — but a blessing still.

Why is that so hard to see? How can anyone not understand that unless women can control our reproductive lives we can’t control our economic lives either, we can’t be fully functioning members of the commonwealth or stewards of the gifts God has given us unless we can decide when or if to have children?

There is, of course, one simple way around that little problem. It’s a very old idea that has a number of names. Keeping your clothes on, locking the barn door, keeping it zipped up, keeping the one-eyed snake in the cage, viewing men/women as human beings rather than ambulatory narcotics, saving yourself for marriage, etc.

I have been stunned, since all the uproar, to hear self-described feminists –feminists – say, “oh, abortion is always a morally complex tragedy but it’s sometimes a necessary evil and so must remain legal.” Is it any surprise that people are becoming less and less willing to call themselves pro-choice if even feminists are lamenting a necessary evil rather thancelebrating a means to our own liberation and empowerment?

“You use the phrase ‘killing every single Jew in the entire world’ like that’s a badthing.” - Heinrich Himmler.

Look, the only way abortion is a tragedy or an evil is if a fertilized egg is a baby. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that (and they’re entitled to) but science doesn’t, most theologies don’t, and common sense doesn’t. Why should we believe that? Yet every time we called abortion a tragedy we reiterate the position that a zygote is a human being of equal moral standing with a woman. We create an antiabortion climate and I fear it has come back to bite us.

Two things. Katie Rags was a fertilized egg once. So was her entire audience and so was every single person reading this. And as far as Rags is concerned, you’re still a “fertilized egg” nine months after one of your dad’s swimmers made it inside one of your mom’s eggs, as demonstrated by her lionization of Old Partial-Birth Abortion.

It is only this that makes it possible for people to be as outraged as many have been by the characterization of George Tiller as a saint and martyr. Dr. Tiller — like most if not all people who work in clinics that provide abortions — did difficult, demanding, and dangerous work under constant threat, harassment, and terrorism. He did it even though he could make more money doing easier, and certainly safer, work. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do. It was his ministry. He spent and gave his life on behalf of others. That’s a saint and martyr. The only reason anyone could question that is if they thought abortion was a bad thing. The only way they can think that if they believe a fertilized egg is a baby. And we contribute to that whenever we try to compromise and be conciliatory by calling abortion a tragedy.

Says here that participation in the Einsatzgruppen during the Second World Was was terribly stressful on the German soldiers involved. But the fact that they needed copious quantities of booze to get through the day didn’t make those bastards virtuous.

We must create a climate where to deny women life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness is unthinkable. We must create a climate where abortion is not only a legal, safe, accessible, affordable option for every woman but where she can take advantage of that option without risking socially imposed guilt.

You go, lesbian, says every male slimebag in America.

It’s time to be angry — be fed up — to refuse to be nice. To eschew conciliation. To refuse to bargain with evil in the hope it will agree to play fair and hurt us a little less. It won’t. Every bit of ground we cede becomes its foothold for the next assault. Enough. It’s time for moral outrage, righteous indignation — paired with smart, long-view political strategizing.

At least we agree on something. It is indeed time for “moral outrage” and “righteous indignation” at a once-Christian church that not only tolerates the existence of a conscienceless degenerate like Katherine Ragsdale among its clergy but appointed her as the president and dean of one of its seminaries.

I don’t see the need for “smart, long-view political strategizing” though. It would far better and far easier to treat Miss Ragsdale and her death cult as the pariahs that moral people know them to be.