Hmmm. I’m pretty sure Michael Jordan is best known for something else…
Lol no, Fox.
“failed baseball player Michael Jordan”
“anti-police activist Carmelo Anthony”
…
I refuse to believe this is real.
I simply refuse to believe this is real.
This can’t be real.
I definitely love how anti-choicers feel that it’s okay to appropriate everything that has nothing to do with them to further their oppressive movement.
Seriously, just stop that and be decent human beings, please?My favorite part of the abortion debate is when anti-choicers use Hitler or the Holocaust as a comparison to something in the abortion debate because most don’t realize that they want to live in a society that Hitler actually created.
Under Hitler, abortions for Aryan people were outlawed unless the fetus was going to bring down the “master race” somehow (then they were basically forced). Hitler made abortions illegal and people died because of it and yet, anti-choicers want to live in a society like the one Hitler created but LOVE to use him and his legacy and the mass genocide he ordered as examples of what being able to choose has done?
Love,
Rabble
Here’s an overview on what Hitler intended for the role of women in Nazi-era Germany. See if you can spot the parallels between this and some modern-day rhetoric from the far Right (especially those that advocate against things like pay equality and reproductive justice), and keep in mind this is just basically a thumbnail sketch.
Also, Jewish doctors routinely performed abortions on pregnant women in concentration camps to spare them the horror of undergoing Nazi science experiments. Abortions saved lives in those camps.
(Source: prolife4ever)
Yes, the FCC can try to fine you a half-million dollars for a "wardrobe malfunction," but bundles of bloody body parts is A-okay.
The unexpected guest at your Super Bowl party this year? Graphic anti-abortion ads.
LAPD uses excessive force, NPR ignores and apologizes for them
I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.
At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.
With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.
I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.
Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.
As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”
Thank God news outlets like NPR are all over what happened there that day. Here’s what NPR has to say about it:
In the end, there was very little force used, in part because this is a new LAPD. It exercises much more restraint than it once did
Thank God for NPR, or we might actually learn about what the LAPD did to Occupy LA!
Ignore That Self-Affixed Halo: Anti-Choicers Know Just What They Are Doing to Incite Violence
Immediately after the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in the vestibule of his church in Wichita, Kansas just over two years ago, anti-choice leaders who had long used stridently violent language to describe Dr. Tiller specifically and abortion care generally, fell all over themselves proclaiming innocence of any connection to the murder. Among these was Troy Newman, current president of Operation Rescue, who stated:
“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down… Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”
But the fact is that Newman and his cohorts regularly used imagery and language that depicted Dr. Tiller himself as a monster and in many ways indirectly if not directly suggested him as a target for someone willing to commit a violent act. That someone turned out to be Scott Roeder, who had, it turns out, several links to Operation Rescue.
And, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Any doubt of Newman’s own gruesome feelings of glee about Dr. Tiller’s murder can be summed up in a photo showing Newman standing at the site of Dr. Tiller’s clinic after his assassination giving a thumbs up.
Operation Rescue and other anti-choicers have now turned their sights on Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who is providing late abortion care to women in need several times a month in Germantown, Maryland. During the several hours I spent on three days in Germantown, to help with clinic defense, I saw suggestions of violent action everywhere, courtesy of the anti-choicers marshaled by Operation Rescue and its colleague organizations.
First, for example, there was the truck plastered with photos of what the anti-choicers claim are mangled fetuses. These photos, whether real or not, are obviously distasteful, and meant to be so. But they are also misleading if not outright fake. If, for example, a woman is carrying a fetus that has died in utero, and it is removed for her own mental and physical health, it may well look grisly. So would, for example, heart surgery. But the implication without context is that someone is killing near-born babies without reason. Using photos-and science for that matter—that is either created entirely for shock value or so grossly misrepresents reality as to have no relation is a primary strategy of the anti-choice movement.
But also plastered across this truck, amidst the “dead baby” photos were photos of Dr. Tiller and of Dr. Carhart. Those of Dr. Tiller pronounced him “dead,” and those of Dr. Carhart had large yellow arrows fixed around the perimeter with the word “Abortionist” in large black block letters, pointing to Dr. Carhart. The message, if not explicit, is nonetheless clear: “One of these men is dead, the other is still working. Whaddya gonna do about it?”
Then there were the sidewalk chalk drawings, pictured here.
These drawings, which were one version of other drawings that appeared on a different day as well, were drawn out by teenagers “called in” by OR to help out with the protest.
Among these on Sunday were the sayings:
- Would it bother us more if they used guns?
- What would Jesus do? (with a gun)
- Would it bother us if they used guns?
A drawing of an exploding gun as at the bottom of this row of chalk drawings.
Again, these images have two purposes. One is to suggest violence is an answer to something that anti-choicers don’t like, namely, women exercising self-determination in their lives by determining whether and when to have children, taking control over their own reproduction and sexual health, and safeguarding their own and their family’s health when a wanted pregnancy goes horribly awry.
The other is to intimidate those who are protecting women seeking care, and doctors who serve them. What would come to your mind if you walked the street toward your doctor’s office and there were exploding guns sketched on the sidewalk leading up to the office door?
Operation Rescue and other anti-choice groups such as those in Germantown use religion and piety to advance a patriarchal agenda cloaked in religious fervor.
But it is violence by any other name.
This article was amended at 5:06 pm, Wednesday, August 10th to make a correction. The photo of Troy Newman is at the site of Dr. Tiller’s clinic after his assassination, not at the site of the church where he was murdered.
A couple of months ago, I asked if movements get to decide who to claim as their own, and who to distance themselves from. It’s completely disingenuous to use inflammatory rhetoric and harassment bordering on terrorism, then act surprised when one of your more fervent followers takes it a step further. They know exactly what they’re doing: allowing a few “martyrs” to go to jail while continuing to incite violence, just within the law (or not), on the outside.
