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The Maggot Punks

December 19, 2006

Conversation With JFA

Seldom do I waste my time by engaging a fundy in a conversation unless I'm terribly bored or feeling masochistic. The conversations tend not to last long. One fundy by the name of Gene Cook who fancies himself a reverend (anyone can take that title, it requires no educational achievement) and has a silly radio show called the Atheist Hour where he rants or challenges Atheists. He invited me on but while I was waiting for the call he announced he was ending the show and was sick of debating Atheists. So some conversations never even get started as the fundy runs away as Gene Cook did but who managed to waste a perfectly good evening for which I cancelled plans for.

Well the other day I received a piece of Email from David Lee of Justice For All, a local anti-abortion group that gives biased, misinformation about abortion in the guise of an educational program. I attended one of these events while looking for someone to interview for a story on Plan-B, the after morning pill which was recently approved for over the counter use. I signed a guest book label "Pro-choice" at the event, with no indication that I'd be put on a spam list for anti-choice propaganda. As a result I received an e-mail asking me to pray that some woman in California not get an abortion. The message assumed I was a god believer and that I was anti-choice so I responded out of annoyance. Here is the following conversation between me, D-cubed, and David Lee, Executive Director for Justice for All here in Wichita. David's comments are in yellow, mine are in white.

URGENT PRAYER NEEDED – One of JFA’s volunteer alumni presented the JFA Exhibit to her California church’s youth group on Sunday evening. Afterward a student came forward to say that a friend haS an abortion scheduled for Tuesday (December 12, 2006).

The student took a JFA Exhibit brochure with the hope of meeting and showing her friend the truth about abortion, and offering her assistance. Pray for the friend’s success in speaking to the mother scheduled to abort her child tomorrow. Give thanks for the JFA volunteer and concerned student.

I’ll pray that they get a good, cheap abortion.

Why so angry?

Why send me spam?

Our mailing list is an opt-in list. Not sure how you made it onto it if you don’t want to be on it. We would be happy to remove you from it if that is your preference.

You ignored my question about your anger, calling it spam. Are unwanted unborn children also merely “spam”?

I was at one of your absurd rallies and signed the pro-choice document. There was no anger in my initial response, the only anger came from your preconceived notions about me. Therefore any anger is your own personal problem you have to deal with. If you can e-mail children then I’ll call it spam. You really are a silly nutter.

So what are unborn humans if they are not children?

Unborn humans? That sounds like predeceased corpse, it’s pretty much a contradiction. Or did you mean to say something more like blastocyst or zygote? In that case no, they aren’t any more human than skin on my nose and I don’t shed a tear for the cells that fall off my nose when I scratch it.

Why are you so opposed to women receiving medical treatment?

Re: women receiving medical treatment. I’m much in favor of women receiving the best medical treatment possible. Ten years ago I helped found a women’s medical clinic in my home city which spends over half a million dollars each year providing women medical services, free of charge.

Pro-choice advocate Naomi Wolf made an interesting observation about unborn humans in an article she wrote for The New Republic (not exactly a right-wing publication):

“So, what will it be: wanted fetuses are charming, complex REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, while unwanted ones are mere ‘uterine material’?” The New Republic, Oct 16, 1995.

I assume that you’ve seen the Justice For All Exhibit. I find it difficult to believe that you believe the child in the lower right hand corner of this Exhibit panel to be the equivalent of one of your epidermal nose cells.

Are you in favor of the death penalty?

That’s great that you are in favor of medical treatment so it makes me wonder why you are casting hexes about a woman getting a medical procedure done on her. Is this a normal thing witchdoctors do to aid in medical practices?

The primary basis for our concern is that the medical procedure called abortion kills an unborn child.

The medical community doesn’t normally offer or agree to do surgery on women unless they need it. Abortion has become the exception to this standard of care. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organization, 9 out of 10 women have abortions for socio-economic reasons. This means women are using abortion as a means of birth control.

In no way do we hinder women who want an abortion. In every way we try to provide understanding, education and free services to women, even those who might eventually decide to kill their unborn child.

What is it that we’re destroying in an abortion? What’s the difference between unborn humans versus born humans?

Five differences come to mind: age, size, location, degree of development and degree of dependence. None of these are normally acceptable reasons in a civilized society for killing another human being.

I’m sure you’d be giddy if you had the opportunity to make the medical decisions for women. BTW, there is no procedure called ‘abortion kills an unborn child’ it’s too cumbersome. For someone who just wants to educate and provide understanding that doesn’t match your efforts to cast spells to prevent a woman you don’t know from getting the procedure done. I know your spell casting is ineffective but the intent belies your rhetoric. I’m sure your “educational” material is filled with references to studies showing how RU-486 can help prevent breast cancer. I’ve spent plenty of time with antis and I know them to not be the most honest people as you have demonstrated today.

What have I said that is dishonest?

Don’t play ignorant, your intent has already been revealed. As I have said your intent doesn’t match your rhetoric.

How do you propose to know someone’s intent if it is not stated?

Don’t play naïve, I’m not as ignorant as you think I am.

No one is ignorant unless they choose to be. We are all uninformed at some level on any topic. When confronted with information that contradicts our opinion, we must choose between maintaining our opinion (ignorance) or investigating the contradiction (education).

So how were you educating the woman you didn’t know by asking people around the nation to cast spells so this stranger doesn’t get an abortion for reasons you are not sure about?

Great question. The odds are quite high that the high school girl who had scheduled her abortion (without her parents knowledge or consent) knew very little about abortion other than it would relieve her of her pregnancy. The goal was to support the efforts of her high school friend, who had herself only recently learned the facts about abortion, to put the same information (www.jfaweb.org/exhibit.html) in her friend’s hand before the abortion.

The language you use to describe Christian prayer sounds like you actually believe in the power of prayer, though not necessarily from the same side of the power equation. Do you believe in the existence of a deity(ies)?

I don’t see how images of the Holocaust, lynchings and such relate to abortion. Hitler outlawed abortion and had the death penalty for anyone who provided abortions. The entire effort is to make an emotional appeal rather than allowing a person to make an educated decision. That’s what the real world likes to refer to as propaganda. When I went to your exhibit here in Wichita, to interview someone about the recent decision to allow Plan-B over the counter I met with a doctor who was at one of the tables. Choices Medical Clinic was the table. She provided mountains of misinformation that were easily refuted in the medical journals. So the purpose of the event appeared more to misinform and appeal to emotion rather than provide objective information.

As for your prayers, spells or hexes or whatever it’s all the same. I don’t believe in your Christian gods or any other gods for that matter. However, the best scientific study (probably the only double blind, controlled study) done on prayer showed a correlation where patients who received prayer actually had their medical condition worsen. So maybe it’s best that you don’t pray for anyone if you actually think the prayer can result in something.

Wow, you’ve raised a lot of good points for discussion.

For a brief historical perspective on abortion in Nazi Europe, see Wikipedia’s article on the legal history of abortion in Germany. If you’re really into history on this subject, you might try Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). I own a copy if you want to borrow it (I’m a former history and ethics prof).

You’re right; Hitler did outlaw abortion in Germany, but only on so-called Aryan women and children. The historical record indicates that abortion was actually promoted, even forced at times, for other ethnicities, and in other countries, and especially on races with a high incidence of genetic diseases. Forced sterilization was also certainly a prominent feature in the healthcare policies of Hitler’s Germany.

It is primarily this “forced” aspect of Nazi eugenics that makes it relevant to abortion. Abortion is the forced destruction of unborn humans. That’s the parallel by which we include images of Nazi genocide, lynching of blacks and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, as a comparison to aborted victims in the Justice For All Exhibit.

The United Nations 1948 Resolution 260, on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Act 2 reads, in part:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The blue text (my highlight) is the most relevant to your question. Let me first admit that to date, most historians will not yet agree with my thesis that unwanted unborn humans constitute a group that will qualify them to be included within the definition of UN Resolution 260.

But neither will many Jewish Holocaust historians allow the use of “genocide” for the Armenians killed and displaced in 1915-1917(by the Turks) or the Cambodians killed by Pol Pot (1975-1979), primarily because these tragic episodes don’t fit the tightly constructed model of genocide authored primarily by the Jewish historians and the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe during the Third Reich. They practice what might rightly be called genocide snobbery.

Was Hitler’s policy against the homosexual community of Europe genocidal? Yes, according to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. If homosexuals constitute a unique group under an acceptable definition of genocide, so could unwanted unborn humans.

The three elements outlined in UN Resolution 260 that must be present for atrocities against humans to qualify as genocide are: 1) it must be systematic; 2) it must be destructive; and 3) it must be aimed at an identifiable people group. Abortion is certainly systematic (1) and in the U.S., government sanctioned; it is destructive (2), i.e., kills humans; and it destroys a group that has a unique identification (3)—unwanted unborn humans (i.e., no one aborts wanted babies). Groups don’t have to be totally destroyed, and preventing births is cited (d) as a qualifying act of genocide.

The fact that Americans have democratized the destruction of a group known as “unwanted, unborn children” by leaving it up to a woman’s individual “choice” seems a minor detail to the main result – dead people, killed by people with greater power, who also stand to benefit from the death of those they’re “terminating” (same word Hitler used for killing Jews).

The disqualification of unborn humans as full persons (like Jews, Blacks, Native Americans, etc) is classic pre-genocide and ‘might makes right’ legalese. Do you at least agree that what was done to homosexuals in Hitler’s Germany was genocidal according to UN Resolution 260?

On the debate about Plan B, a simple Google on it will demonstrate that research on Plan B is hard to come by. Is a study on “Twenty-nine women in Santiago and 29 women in Santo Domingo” really the best we can do?

As long as it doesn’t force harm upon members of the human community (including born women), I technically don’t have a problem with it. Unfortunately if we are to believe the manufacturer, it might harm a developing embryo before implantation.

An important aspect within the Plan B debate is the definition of “pregnancy”. In what seems to be an effort to change the debate, some of redefined when pregnancy begins, i.e., at implantation rather than at conception. Since virtually no contraceptives, EC or otherwise, abort an implanted human embryo (though they may harm the embryo), the estrogen/progesterone protocols including Plan B are said to be non-abortifacient.

If the definition of pregnancy is changed to implantation there appears to be no problem. But no embryologist will ever agree to such a proposal—what happens in the developing embryo within the first 5-6 days before implantation is accomplished is incredible to say the least.

Good point on prayer, though if the study to which you refer is the one funded by the John Templeton Foundation, only the people who knew they were being prayed for showed any significant difference from the control group. So in the case of the pregnant girl in question (assuming she didn’t know she was being prayed for), there was at least no apparent harm done by praying? (By the way, she didn’t get the abortion.)

Logically, if there is a god, and if that god is a moral being, and if that god does not answer prayers of humans for forgiveness of their moral failures, aren’t humans in BIG trouble?

Not believing in any god is a bold position—would you call yourself an atheist or merely an agnostic? If there is no god, and by inference, no metaphysical or moral dimension to our existence, would it not also follow that there’s really no difference between a parent who feeds her child, a parent who kills her child, or a parent who eats her child?

Not believing in a god isn’t a bold position, it’s a default position that we are all born with. God belief is a learned behavior and the gods you believe in is largely determined by geography and by what time period you live in. You live in 21st century America so odds are you’d pick up the version of Christianity that is popular with this age. Sixty years ago you’d be presented with a different version of Christianity which held the slaughter of Jews (quite the historical practice of Christians) is morally acceptable. Go earlier back and that Christianity not only justified the enslavement of Blacks but the genocide of Native Americans. As time progressed and Humanism had a larger influence on Christianity, like Zooastarism (I’m spelling that wrong) had an influence on Judaism and altered the religion. Zooaster’s influence brought about the development of what later became Christianity (as well as the addition of other religions, then again Judaism came about by being heavily influenced by Egyptian religion and culture eventually developing into a monotheistic religion). And so on. So any moral views that you extract from your religion are developed in the same way any non-believer’s is, just the non-believer doesn’t throw a god behind their beliefs therefore we have the added task of trying to use reason for our actions.

Fellow Christians like Hiter didn’t need to use reason because he had God and a thousand years of Christian history to justify his treatment of the Jews. What reason would he have to slaughter so many people? It’s harmful to the society especially during war time because that reduces the number of citizens for weapons development and soldier recruitment. Hitler alluded to in his speeches and writings that he was just going the work of his god. In Colonial America the good Christian settlers we call Pilgrims had no moral problems killing the Natives. They could rape the women and bear offspring and abandon their second families. They could kill them without recourse because the Bible has no problem with killing non-believers. In the same country millions of Blacks were enslaved because the Bible condones slavery and it was the Quakers who disregarded parts of the Bible to oppose slavery, not the other way around. The Bible tells slaves to obey their masters, especially the Christian ones so they can partake of their righteousness. Darwin noticed that in Brazil the most brutal slave owners he saw were the most religious.

So I don’t know why you don’t include your religion alongside the panels of historical brutality. It is most relevant when you go back to the Torah and see a specific passage which details how a fetus is merely property and that the woman is considered a life. For some reason the passage was rewritten in the NIV, I suppose for political reasons people rewrote their holy book and altered their religious and it’s absolute, objective truths. Anyway, it says, and I’m sure you know, that if a woman is attacked and she is to miscarry a fine is to be paid. However, if she is attacked and is killed then a life will be taken for a life as was the punishment for murder. So it would be your same god that is as guilty as the other historical societies in, as you say, dehumanizing what you call unborn children.

Therefore believing in a god means there’s really no difference in a mother who feeds, kills or eats her own child. It all really depends on what sort of god you create for yourself to follow.

Plan-B is used in over 50 countries and has been for quite some time so there is a lot more to go on that just one study.

In regards to a question you asked, I’m an Atheist. I’m assuming you’re a Christian and I really never thought the religion was remotely believable.

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And there the conversation ended. For an organization that pulls in over $360,000 a year they need to keep informed about more issues and refine their rhetoric. The discussion was more informative than the typical conversations with Operation Rescue where they rely either on violence or suggestions that I'm some sort of homosexual hedonist with compulsive drug use (probably just projection on their part). The discussion revealed that antis tend to rely more on emotional arguments rather than intellectual ones. That isn't surprising since that's what JFA's presentations are meant to project. Perhaps they rely on the religious argument the most and that's why the conservation ended when it was revealed I can't be persuaded with appeals to mythology. Nor can anyone when a supposed moral god that opposes abortion is the same god who doesn't consider a fetus a life like a born human, has no problem with slavery, approves of genocide as well as torture. So it goes without saying that their presentations are in venues to attract passerbys and young adults who probably aren't well versed in the subjects. Clearly, as is reflected here, the arguments are ineffective when the audience is familar with their debate tactics and rhetoric.

December 14, 2006

Bill O'Reilly, ORW's Shill

On a recent episode of The O'Reilly Factor, hosted by Bill O'Reilly the issue of Dr. Tiller came up once again. He interviewed a 20 year old woman who went by the name Kelly.

O'Reilly Video

She went into a story about how she was lined up with other women, had to give birth into a toilet and other strange tales. The story seemed familar and it didn't take long to remember where I heard it from.

Terri's Story

The story is pretty much the same. She was 13 or 14, from out of state and so on. In a previous Factor episode Bill claimed to be contacted by an inside source. No surprise Terri (or Paige or Tina as she calls herself sometimes) claimed to work at

Dr. Tiller's clinic although she's never had a Wichita address. Could this be the inside source Bill was talking about?

Tina's story on ORW's page

Operation Rescue paid to fly Terri/Tina/Paige to Wichita and use her in an effort to get Dr. Tiller busted on a grand jury investigation. They've been milking this story for all it's worth. So it appears they've gotten someone to be an actor and retell the story on Bill O'Reilly's show. They made a few glaring mistakes. One was not to repeat the same story over and over again with a refuted source. The other is that in every late term abortion it's absolutely mandatory that the patient have a follow up to remove any lingering tissue and check for side effects. No parents in their right mind would fly their kid back home the next day.

There's a clear case for libel here and Bill O'Reilly just because a pawn in Operation Rescue's smear machine.

Book of the month: The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right by Robert Lanham

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