101 Damnations

You’ll never see it coming how this title ties in.  I have a standing  morning appointment three times every week.  This obligation requires me to drive past a small and little known family services clinic.  The two trips during the business week are uneventful, however the Saturday morning journey offers a bit of a distraction.  Every Saturday morning, rain or shine, high humidity or freezing ass cold there is a small band of abortion protesters on the public easement in front of the clinic and across the street waving signs and bibles at everyone unfortunate enough to have to walk or drive by.

The fun part of this sideshow besides laying on my horn as i slowly drive by (and watching these religioneers[not a real word] try to puzzle out whether it is a honk of support or one of derision ) is watching the escalation of the conflict.  First an off duty police officer was added to the mix, paid for by the clinic to keep the peace and make sure they stay off private property no doubt.  Then in an attempt to protect their clients’ privacy and to possibly help to dampen the effects of the protesters bullhorn they added an eight foot privacy fence.  Undeterred after two weeks of yelling at a planked wall the pro-lifers started bringing ladders and actually began erecting a small scaffolding each and every week so that they could now look over and yell at people on the other side of the fence!

To these protesters I have this to say;  don’t you have anything better to do with your time?  If  you really think that screaming slogans at people from a court ordered distance is going to encourage anyone to reexamine their decision that late in the game, you’re nuts.  Yes, I said nuts.  I don’t care how you feel about abortion, for it or again’ it, if you are standing on top of a scaffold in the freezing cold so that you can whinny at people over an eight foot fence like some kind of judgmental screech owl, you’re a nut.  The decision to terminate a pregnancy is a very personal, painful and agonizing choice, one which I do not believe anyone would make without all due consideration.  All your angry name calling chants, and catchphrases only serve to push more reasonable minds further away.  Sometimes even wanted pregnancies have to be terminated due to medical complications, try to imagine how much more pain your heckles and taunts inflict on an already hurting and conflicted person in this instance.  You have no idea why those people are visiting these clinics or what their circumstances are or how much they may be suffering already so how about trying to practice a little  of that Christian charity and compassion I hear so much about. 

Instead of wasting time and money building scaffolds and renting bullhorns (although any right-to-lifer worth their salt should have their own bullhorn) try doing something sensible or maybe even something helpful.  Like stop opposing sex education and birth control.  Education is not permission and the head in the sand belief that if you don’t tell your children about reproduction they will never figure it out own their own is simply quite ignorant.  They’re going to figure out how their equipment works whether they know anything about reproduction or not and regardless of any kind of abstinence pledge they may have signed to make you happy, they are going to put their limited knowledge into practice.  The most responsible thing that you can do is to teach them how to protect themselves and not ruin their entire futures unless you want sick or dead children or to be grandparents at the ripe old age of thirty-seven.  Or both.  Your choice.

I feel that the clinic is missing an opportunity to fight fire with fire as well.  If it were me I would schedule the landscaping contractor to perform their services at the same time the protesters show up each week.  Let them scream themselves silly and hoarse ruining  their voices trying to compete with the mowers, blowers, and weed whackers!

And while we are on the subject of foolish behavior, please leave those poor homosexuals alone.  Don’t they have enough problems already without you relentlessly hounding their every move for no good reason?  Doesn’t the constitution give every one the right to the pursuit of happiness (with them though i believe the emphases is less on the hap and more on the piness) ?  The most confounding of these policies is the decades long boycott of the Disney corporation of all things. All just for doing something nice in offering health benefits to same sex spouses of its’ employees for God’s sake!  The religioneers are not going to tolerate this outrage no siree, how dare they do something to help someone.  Just wait until God hears about this! They have no protests against companies that poison the environment and their workers while ripping off consumers.  No protests against corporations using child slave labor.  Not a word against the alcohol, tobacco, or firearms industries which kill millions every year but they fly into a blinding rabid fury because someone they don’t know is getting healthcare coverage.  Un  be  lievable.  Having been raised a reluctant Baptist, it should come as no surprise to me that these religioneers would consider that the absolute worse thing you could do, the greatest crime you could commit on this Earth is to love someone.  I told you you wouldn’t see it tie in.  God bless Disney.

funny footnote:

All this sex education stuff was easy for me.  I knew all the anatomy and processes including their medical names, how they worked, and what caused pregnancy and std’s by the middle of second grade.  Well ahead of most of my classmates but not all.  Just a benefit of growing up in the seventies I guess.  Some of my contemporaries were already trying to fool around with each other to varying degrees of success early in the fourth grade, so by the time the school board thought it was appropriate to teach reproductive science- eighth grade health class- all they succeeded in doing was embarrassing themselves.  I did not know until much later that that is when sex ed was taught.  the health/gym teacher kept sending me to the library during class and I was too happy to be free to ever wonder why.  Only later did i find out that in yet another example of my mothers complete insanity, she had listened to the religioneers hysterical cries of “ don’t let you children take sex ed, they’ll teach them how to have SEX!”   knowing full well that she was banning me from a subject that I already knew everything about.  Un be lievable.