Awesome:

My only quibble is that pro-choice policies do far more to protect fetuses than so-called “pro-life” policies, so the sign sort of gives them more credit than they deserve.

More here if you’re interested.

I, of course, mean looking at the long game, not the day-to-day uphill battles we’re still fighting.  But in the long term, here’s one example of why Wayne and I have said time and time again this year that we’ve crossed a tipping point in the fight for equality.  Over at Jill Stanek’s blog, the extremely anti-choice, extremely medically ignorant Jill Stanek poses this question to her readers:

Are social conservatives losing the gay debate but winning the pro-life debate? If so, why? And does this really matter to pro-lifers?

The comments section is fascinating.  The majority of commenters are anti-choice, but they come at it from all different directions, and that’s beside the point.  What’s striking is the sheer number of extremely anti-choice people who not only understand why anti-gay opinions are losing several percentage points per year, but also [some of them] support this, to varying degrees.  There are, of course, some serious wingnuts in there, which is to be expected at Jill Stanek’s blog, but the pro-gay commenters are exposing them as the uninformed malcontents they are.

Now, if you’ve read me at all, you know I’m fiercely pro-choice, so I’m not in any way endorsing the content at Stanek’s blog.  But man, when anti-choice wingnuts are having an honest argument about gay rights and the anti-gay set is losing, bad, well then, we’ve reached a damn tipping point.

Click over and peruse…you’ll see what I mean.  Here’s an example:

I think the simple answer is, the US is growing more secular.  People go to church less frequently and claim no religion more often.  And while there are a number of excellent secular reasons to oppose abortion, there aren’t really any great secular reasons to oppose homosexuality.  And I’m saying this as a Christian.  A Christian who doesn’t believe any part of the Bible is there by mistake, even.  But, from a thoroughly secular point of view, every argument we use to oppose abortion can be used exactly the same way to support gay marriage.  Which, logically, suggests that more people are doing just that since they are more sincerely pro-life and are applying that to their views.

Another:

This is a trend toward expanding rights for the unborn or for the LGBT community. Hopefully this is a wake-up call to gay-rights groups that they should embrace rights for the unborn and to multi-issue, pro-life groups to be more accepting.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating read.  There is more disinformation about reproductive rights than you could possibly shake a stick at, and I think their premise that there’s some tidal shift happening where people are becoming more anti-choice is extremely wishful thinking, but if you read through it and continually remind yourself what blog you’re reading, it’s heartening.

Hatred of gays and hatred of women’s rights to have autonomy over their bodies in all situations, including reproduction, are deeply entwined. Both are about the flouting of the patriarchy; both are about human beings living with integrity in ALL areas, including sexually, despite what the straight Christian men who fancy themselves our overlords might have to say about it.

So it’s useful, as a gay rights organization, to occasionally look over the fence and see what our common adversaries are doing to victimize women and families dealing with painful decisions regarding reproductive health. On that note, I’d like to highlight an extremely painful, but important piece about what happened to a straight couple who had to make the hardest choice they never wanted to make, and how they reacted to the Christian protestors in their midst. Read it all, but here’s the first little bit:

“You’re killing your unborn baby!”

That’s what they yelled at me and my wife on the worst day of our lives. As we entered the women’s health center on an otherwise perfect summer morning in Brookline, two women we had never met decided to pile onto the nightmare we had been living for three weeks. These “Christians” verbally accosted us—judged us—as we steeled ourselves for the horror of making the unimaginable, but necessary, decision to end our pregnancy at 16 weeks.

After extensive testing at a renowned Boston hospital three weeks earlier, we were told our baby had Sirenomelia. Otherwise known as Mermaid Syndrome, it’s a rare (one in every 100,000 pregnancies) congenital deformity in which the legs are fused together. Worse than that, our baby had no bladder or kidneys. Our doctors told us there was zero chance for survival.

Yeah, read it all, please. The fight for gay rights and the fight for reproductive choice are the same fight. I’ve quoted it before, but take it away once again, Amanda Marcotte:

After all, these two fights—for reproductive rights and gay rights—are the same fight. It’s about the right of people who aren’t straight men to have a sexuality without punishment or shame. We’re the ones who deserve the label “pro-life”, because we support the right for gays and women to survive and to thrive—to live. And make no mistake, we’re all up against a patriarchal right that is sadistic and violent.

Yep yep yep!

Whoa nelly.

As Joe Jervis points out, we’ve been hearing the propaganda for weeks now about how Tim Tebow’s mother was confronted with a difficult pregnancy, encouraged to have an abortion, and made the heroic and courageous choice to carry the pregnancy to term, so that her son Tim would one day sport Bible verses in his eyeblack and have a really hard time at NFL tryouts. As you all know, the propaganda has become even fiercer as Focus on the Family has spent $2.5 million on an anti-choice ad to be aired during the Super Bowl featuring Tebow’s story.

Yeah, well, Gloria Allred begs to differ:

(Read More)

In a harsh rebuke of the increasingly extreme United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a major Catholic health group backed the Senate’s health-care compromise on abortion. The Catholic Health Association said that the most important thing that Congress could do was pass a bill that would cover the nation’s uninsured.

Needless to say, the uncompromising, obstinate Bishops proclaimed the compromise “morally unacceptable.

I suppose the Bishops believe that leaving people uninsured to die in the cold in order to use health reform as a platform for abortion politics is the moral and ethical route.

The current crop of conservative Bishops appear hardhearted and clueless to the concerns of real people who desperately need help. They seem to believe that priestly polemics will solve the health care problem in this country.

“The Catholic Health Association does not represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life,” the conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson said in a statement, calling the association’ move “utterly offensive.”

The difference between The Catholic Health Association and ideologues like Hudson, is that the hospitals actually deal with uninsured sick people. Well, Hudson and his ilk also deal with sick people – but in their case, a good shrink and medication is all that is needed.

Good for the Catholic Health Association for standing up to the extremists in the Catholic Church and the Republican Party.

In other Catholic News:

The Associated Press reports that two more Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland have resigned in the wake of a damning investigation into decades of church cover-up of child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.

The bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field, offered an apology to child-abuse victims as they announced their resignations during Christmas Mass on Friday. Priests read the statement to worshipers throughout the archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland’ 4 million Catholics.

In his Christmas sermon, Archbishop Martin said the church for too long had placed its self-interest above the rights of its parishioners, particularly innocent children. “It has been a painful year,” he told worshipers. “But the church today may well be a better and safer place than was the church of 25 years ago ‚Äî when all looked well, but where deep shadows were kept buried.”

Of course, we know this is nonsense. Until the Catholic Church does the following, there will be abuse:

1) Allow openly gay, sexually active priests. Doing so will attract psycho-sexually healthy gay men who will not use the priesthood to hide their sexuality – and in many cases use their power to take advantage of the young and vulnerable. Out gay priests will look for age-appropriate partners.

2) Allow women into the priesthood. This would immediately break up the good old closet boys network.

3) Allow married heterosexual priests. Just as it is imperative to attract sexually mature gay people, it is just as key to attract sexually healthy heterosexuals. Having a team of immature, pent-up priests is a recipe for disaster.

Until these rule changes are made, the Vatican is just spinning us.

In recent decades, some concerned critics say, portions of U.S. conservative Christianity have been overrun by an army of little so-called antichrists.

These “antichrists” are said to be smug and willfully ignorant people who worship a god of warfare and death. When they aren’t justifying wars, obsessing over demons, and rejecting the scientific method, they vote for egocentric autocrats and special interests who favor Armageddon-like living conditions — deteriorating seas, poisoned skies, melted ice caps, runaway ethnic cleansing, no privacy, and large-scale religious conflict. Some of these would-be antichrists — doomsayers Timothy LaHaye and Hal Lindsey come to mind — have earned tens of millions of dollars by writing best-selling books that call other people “antichrists.”

In promoting sales of his own new book, ex-gay activist Anthony Falzarano this week decisively associated himself with this supposed army of believers in a god of death.

Falzarano’s latest message to a sexually-honest former Exodus leader is basically this:

Falzarano’s god is a sadistic tyrant that kills individual people with cancer in order to punish other individual people for petty reasons — and in order to bolster the wobbly egos of Biblically illiterate and impenitent ministers like Falzarano.

I won’t repeat the full text of Falzarano’s latest meme here. It is linked above; it has been repeated by other major bloggers; and we at TWO have already allowed Falzarano to spout his memes here in the past week.

Right-wing religious demagogues spread these memes, sugar-coated with godtalk, for the following reasons:

1. to make money when they are ill-qualified for productive employment

2. to inflate their unstable egos by degrading and bullying other people

3. to intimidate practitioners of traditional, modest, and minority religious creeds, replacing those faiths with egocentric, cynical, and authoritarian cult-like movements that are insulated from any dangerous persons who might express faith in a genuinely loving, graceful, life-affirming, self-sacrificial — or non-existent — higher power

4. to promote conflict, bloodshed, and destruction in a “fallen” world that they admittedly hate

5. to victimize other people, putting them perpetually in a defensive position

It’s a bit difficult for me to imagine anything more anti-life, or antichrist-like, than the culture of death and defamation that Falzarano affirms in his recent messages to TWO and to a former Exodus ministry leader.

But I’ll try: (Read More)