Via Right Wing Watch, I learned that the director of Personhood USA, the organization behind fetal personhood laws across the nation, had an editorial in USA Today yesterday which began,
Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values.The only way I can make it make even a pretzel-logic-Glenn-Beckian sort of sense is by pulling another quote from later in the piece:
No greater example exists of this abuse of raw judicial power than Roe v. Wade, a decision by seven unelected men to impose abortion on all 50 states.Ah. So I guess I can sort of squint and tilt my head and make it out now. If you accept the premise that Roe v. Wade "imposed" anything on anyone - as opposed to defining and protecting a fundamental right, which is what it actually did, but let's go with the right-wing bizarro-logic for now - then I guess I can sorta see it: the Ebil Gubmint unilaterally imposed this icky procedure on us because Father Knows Best, thus, paternalism.
Except that for those of us living in the reality-based community, who have not drunk unending gallons of anti-choice Kool-aid, it's flat-out hilarious that the organization operating at the far fringes of a movement whose sole goal is to tell other people what to do with their bodies is crying about government "paternalism".
I mean, we're talking about anti-choicers here! At its core, it's an explicitly paternalistic movement in which cis men spend lots of money and effort to be allowed to dictate what pregnancy-capable people can and can't do with their bodies. And then to go further and hear it from not just any anti-choicers, but *personhood* advocates in particular, whose pet cause would open the door to banning not only abortion, but certain forms of contraception and in vitro fertilization, along with potentially criminalizing every single miscarriage that occurs, well! "Hypocrisy" seems a mild and weak word to describe the epic whiplash you might get from trying to follow the abrupt about-face of logic they're employing.
PS: It's election day! Go forth and vote if you can! And if you're in Mississippi, for the love of all the gods, VOTE and VOTE NO ON 26.
