Something Only an Academic Could Believe

from Stand Firm by David Fischler 

Given the overwhelmingly liberal beliefs of the American professoriate, it isn’t surprising that for many abortion is an ideological touchstone. That doesn’t mean, however, that those academics understand the issue, have coherent beliefs about it, or can talk about it without sounding like complete fools. The latest example, captured by LifeSite News, comes from Salamisha Tillet of the University of Pennsylvania’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies department. On MSNBC, she beclowned herself by pontificating on the pro-life movement thus:

Well, I think, the Census just released data, so part of it is the changing racial demographics in the United States. For the first time in American history, children born under the age of five are racial, the majority of them are racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.

So I think that there’s a kind of moral panic, a fear of the end of whiteness that we’ve been seeing a long time in that I think, you know, Obama’s ascension as President kind of symbolizes to a certain degree. And so I think this is one response to that sense that there’s a decreasing white majority in the country and that women’s bodies and white women’s bodies in particular are obviously a crucial way of reproducing whiteness, white supremacy, white privilege. And so I think it’s just a kind of clamping down on women’s bodies, in particular white women’s bodies, even though women of color are really caught in the fray.

Calvin Freiburger at LifeSite slays this especially stupid (not to mention utterly incoherent) dragon with just a few strokes:

It is inconceivable that anyone possessing a basic familiarity with the abortion debate does not understand that revulsion at killing innocent babies is what animates pro-lifers. This would be the equivalent of arguing that abolitionists sought to free slaves only to secure an economic advantage over the South.

And it is inexcusable that an academic would not know that the racial breakdown of abortion actually has the opposite effect, with non-Hispanic white women having the lowest abortion rates and non-Hispanic black women the highest. As we discussed last week, abortion kills over 125 times the number of black people in a single year that the Ku Klux Klan killed over the span of nearly an entire century.

One of my favorite lines from Robin Williams is “reality: what a concept!” Wouldn’t it be great if people like Prof. Tillet would become acquainted with it before slandering people with whom she disagrees?