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You are here: Home / Archives for Civil Rights / Women's Rights / Vagina Outrage

Vagina Outrage

Pre-emptive Sarah Palin Bleg

by Anne Laurie|  June 8, 20095:45 pm| 147 Comments

This post is in: Vagina Outrage, Clown Shoes

It is a fact universally acknowledged that Governor Palin’s every action and pronouncement over the next three years will be scrutinized with the assumption that she’s going to run in the 2012 primaries:

“It was so recent, yet it feels so foreign,” she said of the time before women had the right to vote, standing in front of pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Palin also remarked with pleasure on a black-and-white photograph of four women aiming pistols, and passed in silence under another of a woman holding aloft a sign reading, “Black lesbian feminist.”

She then toured the National Women’s Hall of Fame a block away, concluding with a handshake for the town’s mayor, Diana Smith, and a word of cheer for “mommy mayors and girl governors.”

Admittedly, as a target for mockery, that’s just about irresistable. But it also makes my stomach hurt, because dismissing women elected to public office as ‘mommy mayors and girl governors’ has been the standard misogynist trope going back to at least Samuel Johnson. (“A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well, but you are astonished to see it done at all.”)

So, I would like to petition the good thoughtful progressive men and women here — maybe especially the men — to try a thought experiment in regard to mocking Sarah Palin. Your zingers may be both justified and delicious, but would you repeat them in front of your Black Best Friend if Alan Keyes were your target?

Pre-emptive Sarah Palin BlegPost + Comments (147)

Your Neighborhood Womb Bigots, Pt. 3 & Last

by Anne Laurie|  June 5, 20093:48 pm| 126 Comments

This post is in: Vagina Outrage

There is nothing entertaining about the relatively few and fortunately rare specimens of human Ebola virus incubated, however unintentionally, in the warm petri dish of Pro-Life civic virtue.

Disgruntled Would-Be Baby Buyers Many years ago, a pro-choice friend working the gantlet outside her local clinic had a very white protestor shove an Asian-featured baby at her while hissing “Because of you people, I had to settle for this!” Would-be adoptive parents remain a small but fervent subset of the forced-birth terrorist squadrons. If they had as much power, education and money as Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, they could ship babies from Ireland to Latin America to circumvent inconvenient international adoption laws and guarantee themselves a couple of perfect adorable blue-eyed blonde infants. As it is, they’re reduced to dreaming of a Golden Age when healthy white American teenagers who “got in trouble” had very little choice but to “give up” their by-blows to be raised by decent, God-fearing middle-class white married couples. Yes, it can be argued there is some kind of “biological imperative” to crave a baby of one’s very own, a proto-human to carry the best possible simulacra of one’s one features, genes, and philosophies into the future. But, NO, here in America, not at the cost of using teenagers as their incubators.

(And for a brief but hair-raising tale of the dark side of this very human impulse, try The Baby Thief: Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption.)

Testicle Defenders These are the men who make the police officers monitoring the legally-mandated separation zones nervous, the men whose photos are posted at every battered women’s shelter. Murder may be the number-one cause of death for pregnant women in America, but that doesn’t mean the Real Men are going to let “their” women screw them over…

“Bitch thought she could get away with killing MY baby.”
“She won’t be slutting around on me while she’s swollen out to here.”
“Good luck finding someone else dumb enough to support her lazy ass, once she’s got another man’s kid(s) hanging off her leg.”

“Everybody knows” the stories about the teenager on her fourth abortion because she doesn’t want her parents to find her birth control pills, or the lawyer who has a second-trimester abortion so she won’t lose billable hours when a big case goes to trial. But the women murdered *because they got pregnant* are just statistics — they only make the local news if there aren’t enough camera-worthy car crashes, fires, or sporting events to fill the evening timeslots.

Certified Crazies Dr. George Tiller, “Tiller the Killer”, was widely condemned by the “pro-life” media cheerleaders as a willful baby-butcher whose murder would be “justifiable homicide”. Scott Roeder, “Sovereign Citizen” and diagnosed schizophrenic, walked into a church and fatally shot Tiller in the midst of his family and friends.

There are a lot of sad, disturbed individuals wandering around unsupervised. Instructing these people that they will be applauded — even rewarded — for committing acts of violence may not be illegal, but it’s still evil.

I’m saying the pro-life crowd is full of real-life assholes doing real-life harm, and it’s imperative that we call them out for the specific, factual, actual things they do.
I’m not excusing what they do, for fuck’s sake, I’m demanding a thorough and honest accounting of what they’ve done and said so that they can be held responsible and shunned by polite society.

I wish I could competently address the plea that I am using “strawmen” or “caricatures” when it would be more effective to point at actual individuals. There needs to be a discussion about the boundary between identifying a specific person’s acts, and encouraging would-be “martyrs” to target them. Because “Naming & Shaming” is what Bill O’Reilly did to a good brave man in Kansas… and now Dr. Tiller is dead.

I want to thank all of you who commented on my earlier segments. Even when we don’t agree, I have learned from you, and (still) believe it is important that we look at these issues and discuss them honestly. I also want to thank John for his forbearance, and the opportunity to get my ideas before some of the smartest, most widely experienced commentators of any political blog I know.

One reason I set up a new personal tag is so that people who just don’t care to read about these contentious issues can killfile my offensive posts. I promise I will diligently use this tag whenever it’s relevant.

Your Neighborhood Womb Bigots, Pt. 3 & LastPost + Comments (126)

Field Guide to Womb Bigots, Pt. 2

by Anne Laurie|  June 2, 20096:09 pm| 224 Comments

This post is in: Vagina Outrage

Hobbyists and Little Hitlers: This is the next step along the road towards True Believerdom, Domestic Terrorism division. If you’re the sort of woman who really believes (because it’s what you’ve been taught all your life) that God Wants Woman to Stay Home & Breed, anti-choice rallies aren’t just a pleasant outing, they’re a very public reinforcement of your own virtue. Sure, you “had to” get married and start popping out children (and hope that your fellow congregants won’t count the months between your wedding and the first christening, at least not too publicly) and now you’re stuck home alone with a growing pack of stinky filthy whining needy human larvae sucking up every morsel of your attention 24/7, or you’re juggling a string of sub-minimum-wage part-time jobs to try and keep one step ahead of homelessness, and your husband resents the day he first laid eyes on you, but at least you’re not going straight to HELL like those snotty uptown women in their expensive suits with their fancy degrees and careers! When you take time away from your family, it’s in service to God and the cries of the womb-babies, not because you’re desperate to do work that couldn’t be done just as well by a chimp or a robot, if only those creatures weren’t more expensive to rent than you are! If you truly believe that being a WifeandMother is the highest, the only truly acceptable, calling… and you haven’t hit the reality-show jackpot with a pack of adorable multiples or penned a series of bestseller doorstops based on your teenage fantasies of True Pure Love… well, serving as head of the local anti-choice committee is almost as much public attention as getting on the school board, and you don’t have to run for election and pretend to listen to what the neighborhood liberal pervert anti-creationist satanists might think. Imagine a young Sarah Palin, with a little less determination and a lot less luck.

Of course Governor Palin eloped with her high-school sweetheart, “to save her parents a fancy wedding they couldn’t afford” (seven months before her oldest son was born, I hear) but it’s hard to form lasting bonds when you switch colleges five times over the course of seven years. However, if you’re a young thing still working on her M.R.S. degree, bossing the Choose Life ! ! ! subdivision of your college’s Young Republican chapter is an excellent strategy to draw the positive attention of some future real estate salesman or marketing vice-president, especially if God has not seen fit to reward you with superficial qualities like beauty-contestant looks. Sure, their laundry may be full of crusty tubesocks and their laptops laden with pr0n-sourced viruses now, but it is a fact universally acknowledged that a single young Conservative in immanent possession of an assistant-vice-presidency at his daddy’s firm needs a true Christian helpmate who knows how to impress the neighbors using only her natural moral superiority, a handful of credit cards, and ten years’ worth of hoarded Better Homes & Gardens magazines.

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.—Matthew 6:5-6

(Thank you, commenter Raven)

Speaking of Little Hitlers, this is the level where most of the male forced-birth terrorists first show up, because of course Their Lord God has informed them that men are meant to be the Head over women, who are only jumped-up body parts. (Ribs, you perverts, Adam’s rib.) Our decadent modern era makes it harder and harder for a (usually) White man of a certain age and no particular claims to brawn, brains, or beauty to attract a covey of female attention sufficiently ego-soothing — even the remaining Catholic nuns have gotten all uppity. And just try treating your so-called ‘personal assistant’ like one of the secretaries from Mad Men! But pius Men of the Cloth, or even the Wednesday-evening-Bible-study-polyblend-polo-shirt, can still demand respect among the anti-choice advocates. As commenter Slaney Black reminisces:

My personal “favorite” is the Irish-voodoo Catholic priest. The one with all the miraculous trinkets and end-of-days talk that would make Jack van Impe blush. Normal routine goes about like this…
“Abortion doctors are baby killers and I have proof because some Polack lady saw the Immaculate Heart of Mary in a bucket of chicken livers! Also, I don’t like Jews and Freemasons! Make sure to get one of these here gen-u-wine miraculous rosaries I got blessed personal by B16 when last I was in the Holy City. (Suggested donation folks, these little babies don’t come free). In conclusion, abortion doctors are like Hitler, who was bad even though I don’t care for the Jews either.”

Redirecting these peoples’ energies is going to be… complicated. Given the parlous state of American education, we certainly can’t afford to put them on the school boards. And I haven’t been able to think of a God-blessed project worthy to absorb their boundless desire to correct other peoples’ morals while parading their own superior worth. (For potential pitfalls, see ‘Maoist Neighborhood Committees’.) I mean, we could try convincing them that the West Nile Virus is an Al-Qaida plot and point them in the direction of mosquito eradication… okay, well, who’s got a better suggestion?

Next: Disgruntled Baby Buyers, Testicle Defenders, and Borderline Crazies — where the funny stops

Field Guide to Womb Bigots, Pt. 2Post + Comments (224)

Field Guide to Your Neighborhood Womb Bigots, Pt. 1

by Anne Laurie|  June 1, 200910:25 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: Vagina Outrage

These are the people standing in front of your local reproductive services clinic, assuming you’re lucky enough to live where reproductive services clinics haven’t been firebombed or otherwise destroyed by forced-birth domestic terrorists, shading from the harmless-if-clueless to the very, very dangerous.

Bingo Ladies Gone Bad: Probably 85% of the “regulars”, the ones who show up on the bus from God’s Love Evangelical Church of the Risen Spirit Incorporated or the whitest of the local white-bread outburbs every week. They’re the women (mostly women) shoving their homeschooled kids in front of the news camera as they shriek “Don’t kill your babies! Repent or you’ll burn in the eternal fire!” And most of them are exactly as sincere about their deeply held anti-abortion belief as the average male sports fan standing on the next street corner, yelling “Go Sox! Yankees suck!” for another anchorpod’s evening news segment. It’s an afternoon out of the house, a socially excusable way to spend some quality time bonding with their friends. And the ‘Choose Life’ ladies don’t get beer, but the sports fans don’t get bonus points towards their version of heaven.

These are also the people of the “Choice for Me, But Not for Thee” contingent who ensure that abortion rates are just as high in the Heartland(tm) as they are among us godless liberals. Every abortion services provider has stories about the “pro-life” protestor who shows up in the front room, looking to get rid of a little “medical problem” for themselves or their teenage daughter. But Jesus knows that *they* are good people who made a mistake, or were victims of an unfortunate accident! Not like all those sluts and parasites sitting in the waiting room with them — those people are just murderers! In other words, many of the Bingo Ladies are really members of the Church of the Hypocrites, just like the rest of us.

Next up: Hobbyists & Little Hitlers

Field Guide to Your Neighborhood Womb Bigots, Pt. 1Post + Comments (77)

Forced-Birth Terrorists

by Anne Laurie|  June 1, 20099:09 pm| 126 Comments

This post is in: Vagina Outrage

If President Obama were my personal “change agent”, he’d have announced that the National Guard would now recruit gynecologists to serve as abortion providers in those parts of America — which would be most parts of America — where domestic terrorism and religious extremists keep American women from accessing medical services which are not only legal but supported by the majority of Americans. And he’d add that the National Guard would also be protecting the facilities where those gynecologists worked, with the intention of prosecuting all lawbreakers to the full extent of the anti-terrorism statutes.

If President Obama were my own Magical Unity Pony, he’d give some version of the Healthy Babies Initiative speech I posted last night, while I was still teetering on the edge of full berserker mode.

Because yesterday, I wanted to visit Terry RandallRandall Terry’s* house and break his lying jaw with an axe. I wanted to take the current spokesmonster of Operation Rescue and abandon him naked in the middle of Death Valley, where he could petition his god for a miracle to save his worthless hide. And I wanted to air-drop every single “choose life” protestor waggling fetus-pr0n and screaming abuse in front of reproductive clinics to the Afghan-Pakistani intertribal regions, where they could enjoy all the benefits of living under the Taliban authority they crave.

If I were granted one superpower, I’d have the ability to take all the “snowflake babies” and “pre-born” embryos and “womb babies” and implant them in the abdomens of every single anti-choice leader — men first. Sure, ectopic pregnancies are very rarely viable and almost inevitable damage the human carrier’s health, but hey! Most women (excuse me, baby-pods) survive the experience, and there are cases in the medical texts where abdominally-implanted fetuses actually lived long enough to require expensive neonatal services. Live your beliefs the hard way, Reverend Phelps! Who knows — maybe your Special Snowflake will turn out to be a healthy little blue-eyed blond angel! But of course, if it’s damaged or “ethnic” or just requires months of expensive medical intervention… well, don’t come whining to us taxpayers, looking for a handout. You should have known what you were getting into before you opened your legs yap, you disgusting worthless parasite on the body public! (This is why my god has not granted me superpowers. For which I am duly grateful.)

Most of us, most of the time, manage to ignore the self-styled Pro-Life anti-abortion protestors, those draggled sadsacks yowling on streetcorners, waving rosaries and shoving their exploited offspring in front of the local news cameras. We have a vague idea that they’re well-meaning people expressing their civic opinions, like good citizens should, and besides, religious tolerance is a virtue even when those hiding behind the First Amendment are intolerant loons and borderline psychotics. And there probably are well-meaning decent Christian individuals at those anti-choice rallies — in my life, including the 12 years I spent in parochial schools, I’ve met at least a handful of people the Jesus Christ described in the New Testament would recognize as Christians, so I know the breed may be rare but it’s not mythical. But let’s be honest: Sturgeon’s Law posits that “90% of everything is crap“, and that law holds just as true for human motivations as it does for bad skiffy novels. I’ll be posting a Field Guide to Your Neighborhood Womb Bigots later, because the weasel-wording and mealy-mouthing about this is driving me fvcking mad.
*I plead lysdexia

Forced-Birth TerroristsPost + Comments (126)

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