• Hey! We're on Twitter!

  • Buy The Book!

  •  

     

    Click to Buy The Mug

    Buy The Book

It’s from our friends at WorldNetDaily:

Dem cops cuff, stuff Christian girls

ELECTION 2008
Dem cops cuff, stuff Christian girls
Sidewalk chalk messages challenged Obama’s moral positions

Yeah, Operation Rescue is back!

But if you read the story, you’ll find nothing about the cops being Democrats (although Operation Rescue does hint that some kind of vast liberal conspiracy might have been behind the arrests, and darkly notes that the cops could have ”had orders” from somebody, possibly Obama, to arrest the Christian teens). 

And, sadly, there’s nothing about the Christian girls getting stuffed.  So, we can only assume that something got edited out of the story before it made it online.

But here’s a little more about the Christian teen martyrs who were brutalized by the pigs just for peacefully coloring with chock.

Streets of gore

[25-year-old Courtney] Blythe was raised in an extended family of anti-abortion activists. After graduating from Montreat College outside Asheville, N.C., she returned to her hometown to work for Room at the Inn, a pro-life Catholic maternity home. She’s now an organizer with Survivors, a Christian group that mobilizes teenagers and young adults for confrontational street protests.

During the summers, Blythe helps run Survivors’ nine-day training camp in Rosemead, Calif., which she calls a “pro-life boot camp.” Budding activists, starting at age 14, are taken to beaches, commercial neighborhoods and abortion clinics for in-your-face encounters that often involve the same graphic photos on display in Denver.

Campers also receive a crash course on what the movement calls “pro-life apologetics.” “They train you in how to argue with anyone and prove them wrong,” says Ian Giacopuzzi, a shaggy-haired 17-year-old who participated in Monday’s demonstration. Giacopuzzi, who says his father was active in Operation Rescue, first attended the summer camp three years ago.

Ian’s 15-year-year-old sister Julia was one of the the two Christian girls who were cuffed and stuffed.

The protesters’ youthfulness, in particular, outraged Joan Lipkin, a theater director and pro-choice activist who is visiting Denver from St. Louis this week. “What these people are doing is street theater,” Lipkin told me. “But they’re also engaging in child abuse. There are minors here who are being brainwashed and manipulated in ways that are most disturbing.”

From an activism standpoint, though, using children can be very effective, if unsettling. Kids haven’t developed adult filters yet, so it’s easier to train them to goad passersby relentlessly. And goad they did. [...]

Blythe insists that provoking passersby is a critical strategy for the anti-abortion movement to succeed.

Because nothing makes a person change their mind about a sensitive issue such as abortion like being heckled by an obnoxiously self-righteous teen.

Oh, and here’s our runner-up best headling of the week (also from WorldNetDaily):

California plans to drug depressed patients to death

Once again, if you read the story you will find that you were a victim of the old “bait and switch,” in that the story is actually about a CA bill which would allow medical professionals to give large quanitities of pain killers to terminal patients to “induce a state of decreased or absent awareness (unconsciousness) in order to relieve the burden of otherwise intractable suffering.”  

The wingnuts object to this bill because since the patient would be unconcious, he could eventually die of starvation if he wasn’t, you know, fed.  And that would be immoral, since God intended people to suffer (otherwise He wouldn’t have given them intractable pain), and He doesn’t want terminal patients to die until He kills them. 

And hey, if we allow doctors to drug terminally ill people to ease the suffering of their last days, then it’s inevitable that soon evil nurses and greedy heirs will be pressuring depressed people to kill themselves. 

(WND didn’t come up with that idea themselves — they quote Republican Doug La Malfa of Yuba City: “They’re already feeling vulnerable, and now, confronted with ways to end your life – this is a very delicate and, I think, dangerous idea here. You could have people like heirs that are anxious to get the estate started and quietly coercing people into making decisions like this.”) 

Now, please enjoy the opening of this fine WND story:

Just as Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama was in Denver preaching to a crowd of thousands of fans about the “change” he wants to see in the United States, his party compatriots in the California Legislature were making a “change,” by approving a controversial plan that would allow nurses to assist terminally ill patients with suicide.

 I like how the writer managed to bring Obama into the story while basically accusing the Democratic party of endorsing murder.   It’s techniques like that which give WND its extra wingnutty flavor and its own special deranged charm.

17 Responses to “Best Headline of the Week”

Wait, you mean these people who went to Denver with the express intention of getting arrested… got arrested? I wonder if they were doing anything, you know, illegal, so that they could get arrested, which, again, was their entire goal. And then these cops come along and *arrest* them, while they’re minding their own business, which again is trying to be arrested. Good Lord, how unfair.

Incidentally, tiny brainwashed children, just because you can out argue someone, you have not necessarily “proved them wrong”. You may merely be more practiced at arguing, and you may indeed be saying very silly things to which your unwilling debate partner has no response simply because she can’t believe how genuinely stupid you are. It’s not uncommon for people to be unable to come up with a witty response to someone who’s just said “Blar, har har, yeargh! Jelly jelly antelope!” But stunned, bemused, confused silence doesn’t mean you proved that pesky theory of gravity wrong.

Re: Abortion

I’m flipping through one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read. It’s called “The Girls Who Went Away” by Ann Fessler, and is all about women who were forced to give away their babies for adoption between WW2 and Roe v. Wade. The level of sexual ignorance is staggering, as is the societal pressure to conform coming at all these women from every source, including their own families. The dissonance between expectations and the reality of the time is so familiar to those who have watched the idealists on the political right babble on about knowing what’s best for whom that it’s uncanny.

Re: Drugs

Speaking as the son of a life-long RN, a can comfortably say that “snowing under” has been a part of the medical profession for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps even as long as abortion has. Anyone who thinks legislation is going to change that is perhaps being a wee touch unrealistic.

You mean medical professionals in CA are not currently allowed to give large quantities of pain-killers to terminal patients?
I do not normally befoul your comment threads with profanity, do I?
Fuck fuck buggerybollocks is all I can say.

A 25-year-old is a teenager? I still may be younger than I think!

Nope, they’re not. Anywhere in the US, even if it’s legal at the state level, the feds will prosecute you. Thanks in large measure to assholes like Rush Limbaugh and Doug La Malfa.

Drug abusers, you see, particularly those who abuse the legal ones (and often they do this because the sentences are much lighter when caught illegally with otherwise legal drugs than getting caught in illegal possession of the illegal ones), make for a regulatory environment where doctors cannot prescribe according to even legitimate needs of terminal and chronic pain patients, but instead must prescribe according to arbitrary guidelines. Otherwise, they risk their licenses. And those arbitrary limits shrink all the time as part of our ever-so-successful War On Drugs (But Not Alcohol). You wouldn’t want anyone, even chronic pain patients or the terminally ill, getting high, now would you? Certainly the God Made You Suffer For A Reason types wouldn’t.

And even within the allowable limits, good luck getting most doctors to prescribe them for you anyway. Because even if your need and their use is entirely legitimate, they face serious supervision of their prescribing records, and even if they’ve done nothing wrong and you’ve done nothing wrong, they can still lose their licenses if someone decides they’re keeping a brain dead terminal case from jumping up to become the next prima ballerina or whatever and starts legal proceedings. Not to mention how screwed doctors are if they end up the entirely innocent sucker of a guy like Rush. Your average dirtbag may go out of his way to get his drugs from eight different sources, and if you’re the only legitimate one, you’re still fucked when he’s caught just because you didn’t spot it, which may not be as easy as people assume.

I am sympathetic to the notion that the aging or ill can be pressured into suicide because it would save their families a burden. But sometimes those decisions are the result of actual thought rather than manipulation, and they are not always wrong. I myself have no interest in bankrupting my partner with medical bills, and we’ve discussed these things. I’m surely not alone in my desire to not see the person I love on the streets because they went broke trying to keep me alive at all costs. I think many people would agree they love their partners more than they love their own lives.

By making assisted suicide legal in these cases, you allow for the requirement that people making these decisions discuss them with outside people, so that everyone knows what the decision is and why it’s being made. This is how we catch cases where people are pressured into “not being a burden”, not by pretending assisted suicide never happens in the first place and just hoping we can keep people from doing it wrong if it does.

Oh yeah. And I understand that “snowing under” and assisted suicide aren’t the same thing, but the laws we have against the former are often there to prevent the latter, and frequently the people who end up doing or choosing the former do so because they can’t accomplish the latter. It’s all the same tangled knot, even if it’s made of different threads.

Well put as always, D. Sidhe.
Oh, and your first comment made me laugh out loud! A lot.
It’s bad enough you’re smarter than me-do you have to be funnier too?

I’m not funny, my life is. I actually had one of those conversations a little while ago. I went for a second opinion on the marsupialization thing (or at least on the condition that prompted its consideration) and ended up at a women’s clinic here.

The women’s clinic in question does not do abortions, I know this because they were in the news some time ago as having trouble getting prescriptions–any prescriptions–filled at certain pharmacies for fear the prenatal vitamins were, I dunno, just a gateway drug to the abortion. Anyway, they don’t do abortions. They do, however, look at your lady bits when you’re having problems, and I was directed there as they are close and could actually fit me in.

There’s a woman who pickets the place, more or less, with whom I have Had Words in the past. Her notion of picketing the place is to sit at the bus shelter around the corner with a variety of repulsive signs, taking up the entire bench. I’ve engaged her in conversation, mostly along the lines of, You understand they don’t DO abortions, right? only to be told that they prescribe birth control pills and that’s an abortion in a bottle. I lack the scientific background to explain to her why she’s a fucking moron, and generally settle for demanding to know why she wants to put out of business a low cost source of pre-natal care for women who *want* to be pregnant. She explains that they can go elsewhere, I scoff, my bus comes.

Anyway, this time she sees me actually go into the clinic and when I come out she wants to know why I’m killing my baby. I bitchily explain, and if you did look up marsupialization you will understand why I’m so bitchy, that I’m NOT FUCKING PREGNANT and it’s NOT FUCKING HER BUSINESS and in fact I’m NOT FUCKING AT ALL at the moment and go on to recount in graphic detail why. She seems to accept this, and as I am in a very bad mood I do not let it go. I note, just as a matter of interest, that if her fucking president had not recently made it legal for medical personnel to refuse to do their jobs because they think some woman’s a slut, I could get permanently sterilized and prevent any future abortions I might otherwise get.

At which point she goes into a mumblerant about the culture of death and how my not getting pregnant if I have sex (assuming it’s with a fertile man, of course) really just kills MORE babies. Only not mine, but I’m still to blame, something like this.

“Jelly jelly antelope” would have left me less speechless, I think, and I’m sure she thinks she Made Her Point. But see, I don’t argue this shit constantly, and while I know there are people who could have responded effectively to her, and in fact I’ve come up with responses afterwards that would have been reasonably effective, all I had at that moment was “Fuck off, you nosy cow,” which means, of course, she WINS!

I’m sure the teenagers use the same logic, but honest to Christ, this is why religious nuts and creationists and white supremacists and assorted other obsessed pigfuckers win these debates: they practice. That’s all. The rest of us aren’t either obsessed or brainwashed, and when people say silly things to us we don’t have the response memorized.

I don’t think “Logic” is quite the word. These people know the Truth, so they don’t really even have to think about the arguments. In computer-eze we call it a hash table: Input is what you say, output is what the manual says is the appropriate response for that entry. No actual thought need intervene.

A roommate of mine in college had a perfect description of this kind of argument: Proof by Blatant Assertion.

And, sadly, there’s nothing about the Christian girls getting stuffed.

I saw this movie: Catholic High School Cheerleaders In Trouble

Yesterday I made “change” for a woman who needed exact “change” so she could take the bus and “change” her location. And I didn’t realize until now just how ironic the whole transaction was.

It’s not hard to figure out why a family named “Giacopuzzi” has a bit of a persecution complex.

One of my earlier mottos: Never argue with a Nut!
The idiot anti-abortion anti-contraception believe they’ve ‘won’ when they engage you in argument. The latter attitude is why, despite what Obama said in his fabulous speech Thursday, there will be little basis for agreement with anti-choicers. They are AGAINST choice of any type for women.

Dang, I should have previewed. I hope my meaning came thru the gibberish?

I lack the scientific background to explain to her why she’s a fucking moron

If you did possess the right qualification — whatever that is — it could easily become a full-time job.

S.Z., as always, you have my undying admiration for braving the hallowed halls (or camper-trailers) of Wingnuttia for our sake. There ought to be a Purple Laptop award for anyone willing to injure themselves by repeated exposure to the radioactive idiocy of these frothing-at-the-mouth assholes.

I don’t admit this often, if ever, but when I was 13 or 14, I was AT the first Operation Rescue rally in Louisiana, on the State Capitol steps, with a group of particularly crunchy nuts from the speaking-in-tongues/slain-in-the-spirit bullshit church of which I was then a member.

Yes, I was a teenaged bibul-banger, and I didn’t even get my own Michael Landon movie.

They didn’t invite our group back the next year, have no idea why.

Why on EARTH wouldn’t they want TWELVE CHRISTIAN CLOWNS to be in the TV shots??? I just don’t get it.

Did you mean LITERAL clowns-like the makeup-and-costume kinds, Annti?
‘Cause the image of a “Christian Clown” has the potential to induce nightmares, let alone a dozen of them.

Something to say?