God intended women
Some more crazy. From Mary Pride’s The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality (quoted in Quiverful, p 135):
Abortion is first of all a heart attitude: ‘Me first.’ ‘My career first.’ ‘My reputation first.’ ‘My convenience first.’ ‘My financial plans first.’ And these same choices are what family planning, which the churches have endorsed for three decades, is all about.
Yes…………and? Why not? Why not think about one’s own self and career and other plans first when deciding what to do with one’s life?
Well she explains why not.
God intended women to spend their lives serving other people.
Oh. So they don’t get to just decide to have some other kind of life, or to combine taking care of dependents with doing other things.
“Lean not on your own understanding,” Quiverful mo[ther] Tracy Moore tells me, describing the scriptural foundation she discovered for Quiverfull after following the advice of formerly Amish families in Kentucky. [p 154]
No, instead lean on an old book that includes some very harsh laws along with stories and poetry. Nope; I’ll go with the own understanding, thanks.
Weapons grade hypocrisy coming from some one who thinks that their god created the universe with them in mind.
‘Weapons grade hypocrisy’.
Now there’s another fine phrase worthy of wide dissemination.
The idea that woman are supposed to serve others, put others before themselves, and never have lives of their own is own of the most pernicious ideas ever.
and don”t forger weapons grade stupid…
Fuck off.
That’s not even misogyny. It’s just plain, old Too Stupid To Live.
they refer to the amish, the people who found a handicapped child the greatest gift of god.
I am often amazed at how some people find it so easy to discern their god’s intentions when, if those are truely their god’s intentions, he goes so far out of his way to obfuscate it. I mean, if god really wanted women to spend their lives only in service to others there are much better ways to have made them than we find women now. Just off the top of my head, why did he not make women to naturally “walk” about on their knees, only to stand up when they need to get at something? That’s be a pretty strong indicator that god wants women acquiescent and that’s just going for the low- hanging fruit.
I remember hearing somewhere that women can have more than one child. I don’t know how accurate that is, though. Maybe my older sisters can get me more information.
If true, this implies that a woman might be putting her career and financial plan ahead of her current pregnancy because she’s looking after her children.
At the core of the criticism of women who seek abortion is the narrow-minded sexual ethics of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. It’s guilt tripping women. The issue of women’s freedom comes first, and no one with a moral condemnation should even have a look in here. It’s amazing how resilient these religious ideas are, how they continue from generation to generation. Woman as the whore, you see, the Jezebel, following other gods — which were, one and all, in the biblical tradition, fertility gods. Well, this kind of thing, this weapons grade hypocrisy, this religious blame game, really has to be put in its place, now.
And even futile servitude is better than thinking for oneself. Going to die in pregnancy? You shouldn’t terminate. That’s God’s call, not yours.
I sure hope Mary Pride isn’t representing this stuff as her own beliefs, because according her argument her beliefs don’t mean s**t! I presume she only wrote the book because her husband told her to, right?
War on every front, Eric. How do we do it? Submission covers a lot of ground. Maybe that’s the point of attack.
At the core of all Christian moralising on abortion is this:
The baby is there to serve as a punishment to the mother for having sex. That is all it boils down to.
Since being pro-life is also a “heart attitude,” I’m not sure why Pride thinks such language is useful.
Off-topic, but here’s some more fashionable nonsense–James Woods is back with more atheist-bashing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/26/james-wood-the-new-atheism?
What’s a “heart attitude” anyway? Does that mean it’s a subject on which these people turn off their brains? That would explain some things…
(The least of which is her apparently inability to write. Last time I looked, abortion wasn’t an attitude ‘tall, but a medical procedure.)
22,000 children die every day on this earth. That’s one every four seconds. Most of those children are dying from starvation and/or preventable diseases. Millions more live in horrible conditions of abuse, poverty, disease, and hopelessness. How many of these bible touting hypocrites give a shit about any of these children who are already here on this earth? No, they’re too busy worrying about the ones that aren’t even born yet. Why? Because it’s easy to stand on a street with a sign protesting against abortion. It’s easy to toe the religious party line. But it’s hard to actually do anything to improve the world as it is. It’s hard work to help the children who are actually alive, who are actually suffering. Religious people are really good at giving the appearance of helping, of caring, while actually doing nothing at all, or even harming others. They clasp their hands together to pray, they carry their signs calling abortion murder, or telling us God hates fags, all the while feeling like they’re contributing something positive. But what they do is either nothing or worse. This is why it’s so harmful for people to live in a fantasy land created by religion. It poisons everything.
Well done, JT. And of course it’s a fantasy, you’re right. It’s all very well to say that religious believers aren’t really crazy, but do these people differ from other kinds of dangerous cranks — except by being more violent?
Way to go, JT! But not only do they not care about those children dying, one every four seconds, most of the one’s protesting abortion, also hold, if they are faithful to the teachings of their religious organisations (usually called churches), that it is wrong to prevent children from being conceived! And the think they know that it is what their god wants! It’s flaming bizarre!
You really have found a rich vein of crazy when you decided to mine this Quiverfull nonsense. I applaud your constitution, I can not really stand up to the hate that I hear with this.
I wouldn’t even give them that much. It’s just something they like to argue to give themselves a false sense of superiority. The real concern is preserving their religion and the traditions they imagine they’ve inherited from some morally superior age. Everyone’s well being is measured against how they stack up to their counterparts in this forgotten age of morality. Anything and everything that falls short is wrong and what’s causing all of our problems. Women taking jobs that should be their husbands, foreigners taking the jobs that should belong to those who belong here, homosexuals marrying and adopting children, daughters having sex out of wedlock, churches no longer being the center of society ectectect
IA – about the James Wood piece – see
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/never-heard-that-before/
yam – I know; I can’t either, really; I have to take it in small gulps – especially when reading the primary sources.
If abortion is so bad, why does God indulge in it so often?
Oh yeah… he’s ‘mysterious’… got that.
One way of promoting cognitive dissonance among Christianistas who no doubt sing the praises of capitalism is to quote Adam Smith at them and invite them to apply his thinking to abortion:
From Wealth of Nations, 1.2.2.
Ophelia, can I ask if you know whether these anti-feminism movements have seen a recent increase in activity? Because it looks to me as though they are likely to have strong ties with the anti-abortion lobby, and if so they could cause even more damage at present. What particularly strikes me is the similarity between the “heart attitude” quoted in your post and the charge of “depraved-heart murder” that now threatens to be applied to miscarriages.
hermione, I think these movements have been growing steadily since they started (in the 70s and 80s). I don’t think it’s a matter of sudden spikes but of a steady upward trend.
You could well be right about the heart thing. I meant to say in reply to one comment – that use of “heart” seems to be very popular in this movement.