Thread by @mcjulie

Roe is already dead.
Look around you.
How is the majority responding?

https://twitter.com/wajahatali/status/1440783024971419656

Note: in case it's not obvious, this is not a resigned giving-up sort of "Roe is already dead" it's a serious call to arms "Roe is already dead"

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1440078897169657864?s=20

Part of why the SCOTUS knifed Roe in the back in the dead of night is so the religious right could *pretend* that Roe is still technically settled law & keep us fighting the wrong battle.

Too many people for too long have coasted in a kind of Schroedinger's Choice bubble -- supporting abortion & contraception rights, mostly, but being unwilling to make a firm stand in favor of them.

This article is a perfect example -- an interview with a "pro-choice Democrat" who thinks there's some kind of middle ground between legal and illegal, some third way, where abortion is legal, sort of, but not TOO legal.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1294374652970561536?s=20

Sorry, I meant "pro-life Democrat"
Say, whatever happened to "pro-life" Democrats anyway? patheos.com/blogs/slacktiv…

Large companies are particularly guilty of this. They ALWAYS want to play EVERYTHING both ways, and only change when it becomes apparent ONE way carries a lot more heat for them.

https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1440369798769098759?s=20

We have the power, and the necessity, to make these abortion bans backfire on the religious right.

For years, THEIR side has counted on abortion rights support being nowhere near as bold, firm, loud and motivating as support for abortion bans.

This is an example of what I was talking about earlier -- how extreme fundamentalist Christians on the right have used purity & shame rhetoric to influence secular law.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1440389140617457667?s=20

Conservative Christians weep and moan about how they're losing the culture, and mostly they are, but they have managed to hang onto one very important aspect of it: patriarchy-based sexual shame.

Read that article again. "you have to not be so in love with how pro-choice you are"

What even IS that, other than a demand to be ashamed of your idea that abortion should be legal?

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1294374652970561536

"It doesn't mean you have to be actively anti-abortion, it just means you have to act decently embarrassed & reluctant when you state your support for abortion rights."

It's misogyny, obviously -- or it should be obvious. And it's a specific kind of misogyny that was threaded into the Christian church from the beginning, or at least, from the letters of Paul.

But, in the last 40 years under the rule of the religious right, the misogyny in Christendom has gotten WORSE, not better.
It's true.
Modern white evangelicals (the Republican mainstream, anyway) are MORE misogynistic than Paul "women should keep silent" himself.

Because Paul, at least, was fairly serious about the idea that men were as subject to purity & celibacy rules as women were.

Pauline "rules" like "ideally no sex at all for Christians, but, uh, if you're horny AF get married I guess" applied equally to women and men.

But nowadays anti-sex patriarchal shame is pretty much ALL they've got left, and that was always reserved for women & LGBTQ people.

Remember, the anti-abortion cause was always about resisting racial integration. Opposing abortion rights was COVER. They kept doing it because it worked.

And why did it work?

Misogyny.

It's like the religious right was saying to secular America "hey, I know you don't go to CHURCH anymore, but you still hate women, right?"

And were met with a resounding "Oh, hell, yeah we do!"

The religious right could reliably get the secular majority to vote for them -- or at least, not oppose them too STRONGLY -- by framing things in to evoke misogyny (hatred of women, an urge to make women suffer) and sexual shame.

So, upshot: people basically get *sexually shamed* out of making too strong of a pro-legal-abortion stance, even if, ultimately, they support abortion rights.

And you could sort of get away with that, maybe, kinda, sorta, in a world were Roe held maybe, kinda, sorta.

Because Roe was based on the right to *privacy*

Which doesn't threaten shame

The "Roe" basis for abortion rights allowed sexual shame associated with support for abortion rights to continue unthreatened.

And that's what put us where we are.

I recently had a little tête-à-tête with an anti-abortion Twitter entity (as I often do) and I found it instructive (which is why I do it)

Here's the entire exchange as a series of screen grabs, summary to follow:

He -- and I use the pronoun loosely, the actual Twitter entity could be three ducks in a trenchcoat for all I know -- wanted to get me stuck arguing whether abortion bans in Texas & Mississippi are technically "bans" or whether there's meaningful difference between TX & MS.

But I appeared to stick him on "Either you support abortion bans or you don’t, which is it?"

Because he did not want to answer.

And so I think I might -- just maybe, mind you -- have hit on a fairly decent rhetorical counter-strategy.

Make them answer yes or no to "do you support abortion bans?"

I, myself, do not support abortion bans.

The entity did not come back, but I anticipated a response like, "then do you support abortions right up to the moment of birth?"

And my response to that would have been, "I think the government should stay out of it. Pregnant people and their doctors should be making those kinds of decisions, not the government."

As I said before, we can make the Republicans pay for this, but we have to MAKE them, it won't just happen. We have to push back hard, with voting, activism, and -- my area -- rhetoric. Narrative. The WAY we talk about reproductive rights.

Traditionally, the way we talk about reproductive rights cedes too much ground to conservative Christians right from the start, by accepting the framing idea that we should be at least a *little* bit ashamed of a pro-rights stance.

The thing we can do right away is take that rhetorical ground back.