Abortion Debate Comes A-Knocking

Friends,

This is strange.

Over at Seth's blog,(if you aren't reading it, then shame on you) he has a fine write up about his encounter with some anti-choice (Seth's term) abortion protesters on the Kent State campus. Naturally, those anti-choice people were waving signs with dead babies, making all kinds of ridiculous claims, like how abortions are like the Holocaust and so on (unless, somehow, all babies are Jewish and abortion doctors are all Nazis). So, there's that.

Now, I have to admit this, I have another blog that I don't talk about here. I know, I know. It's for the class that I teach, and since I have my students blog in class about the reading assignments, I do it too. Today's reading was about cloning. And in my reaction to the writing, I said how you never really hear about cloning anymore, and probably won't until someone clones a human. And after that, I wrote the following:

"Certainly cloning will be a huge problem once someone finally clones a human and announces it. I can’t imagine what it would be like, especially for the staunchly religious type who bomb/protest abortion clinics."

Yeah, there's a typo, big whoop. But my point being that once a human gets cloned, I can't fathom the media shitstorm which will ensue. And I especially can't fathom the crazybrained reaction religious zealots will have. Okay, so you know why I said what I did?

About 15 minutes ago, I get a comment awaiting my approval about my post. Now, my students don't comment on that blog, so when it happens, it's always someone outside my class who stumbled there somehow.

Here's the comment:
"Well those that do "bomb/protest abortion clinics" do a good thing protecting innocent babies from being murdered by babykilling abortionists."

It came from a man named Donald Spitz. He signed with an honorific that I don't think he has the right to use, so I'm not going to. And here's his e-mail address: glory2jesus@armyofgod.com (yes, armyofgod is a website, and notice the .COM and not a .ORG) And Army of God (wikipedia page) is a radical, pro-abortion clinic bombing organization. They were also responsible for doing a fake anthrax attack on abortion doctors in 2001. Essentially, the are a domestic terrorist group.

I have several problems with this. First, I really want to argue with this guy. And I know that's just feeding Donnie's monster. Hell, even talking about it here is giving him what he wants and he'll probably find it as you know he'll google himself in between image searches for dead fetuses for posters (how fucking sick is that though...you know somewhere a person had to select which gory abortion pictures would be best to rile a crowd so someone looked at a picture of a dead fetus and thought, "No, that dead fetus isn't gross enough for our poster. Could we get a bloodier dead fetus?"). Anyway, he wants to be looked at...fine, I'm looking, pal.

Another problem, of course, is that he won't listen to me no matter how reasoned I could be and I won't be convinced that murdering abortion doctors is right. We might as well not even waste the air and go find something to do that we find useful. I'll work on my thesis. Donnie, you go work on a sermon. There we go.

My biggest problem, and one that will bug me, is that do I need to tell the FBI about this guy? Yes, this is freedom of speech, so he's free to be crazy all day long, and his comment did not make any direct terroristic threats, so he did nothing wrong. But it's still a little troubling.

And the FBI is already aware of him. I mean, if he's on Wikipedia for being associated with a terrorist group, somebody with a badge and an earpiece has an eye on this guy. And I guess I'm having a hair trigger lately when it comes to police involvement in matters of personal safety.

Anyway, I'm not really amused by any of this. Not only because of the sheer amount of abortion chatter that's floated around me lately, but...what the fuck? A terrorist group trying to comment on my English class blog? I say again, what the fuck?

Also, for a long, but reportedly fair take on the entirety of the abortion debate is this movie, Lake of Fire. Here's a preview:


Man, terrorism blows. Amen.

viva el mustache.