The Religious Right's War on Abortion

we were. We are here to talk today about the fact that it did, in fact happen here, by which I mean, the Supreme Court has essentially, by fiat overturned drove Way and allowed Texas as a just draconian, weird snitch paying, indescribably illegal anti abortion law to go into effect. And you know, a lot of people I think are shocked by this, and I think we're all sort of horrified. But for those of us who grew up in sort of right wing, magelical Christian communities, and watch how they

organized and watch how I'm mobilized, it's not really a surprise. No, I'm so bored with everybody's surprise. Please stop. I've been saying this for so long, so long, so just like just like standing in the street screaming from the rooftops. Just please, yeah, y'all listen now. It's like like when there's like a list of like the set schedule for a show and then you're surprised that it actually had

that they do all those songs. Yes, it's like it's like the writing has been on the wall and the and the floor and the paper and the years, forty fucking years, like there should be there, like there should be outrage, but there should be no shock. Yes. Correct, Garrison's also here. Hi Garrison, Hello, this is that could happen here. We're talking about Texas is Um abortion ruling and well, and then in the Supreme Court's ruling on Garrison,

Christopher already said that they're here. And then who who are our other two people today? I'm Karen Darkwater. I'm the co host of the Kitchen Table Cult podcast and also a Democratic Assembly District delegate for California, and I have feelings. And I'm Eve Attinger, the other co host of Kitchen Table Cult podcast and angry writer. Mostly I think all of us on this podcast could be qualified

as angry writers professionally angry online. I just realized we should probably say that Karen and I grew up Quiverful, which is you know, relevant to this subject. Yeah, we should go into because I think all all four of us, UM have grown up in some degree of of the of the more extreme Christian factory. And yeah, you two specifically have some what why why don't you explain to the listeners kind of what your background is like. I don't know, like the text version of it, because we

have other other things to talk about as well. Okay. UM. I was raised as part of the Sovereign Grace Ministries cult and was homeschool K through twelve and UM the oldest of nine kids. My family were hardcore, quarter full courtship people. UM. And then I left and got married and then got divorced and got out and it exploded my whole family and now they're all out too nice. Very similar to Eve, with the exception of UM. My

parents did not go to Sam and Grace. They did their own thing, and we're their own cult and church hopped around a lot. Um. I'm the oldest eight ish my parents had. My mom had ten full term pregnancies, but two of them were still born, so I'm the oldest of technically ten, but in reality eight. UM also homeschooled K through twelve, grew up being told that I was supposed to be, you know, a housewife and have lots of babies, ran away in my eighteenth birthday, got married,

was married for seven years and a surprisingly healthy ish marriage. Um, got divorced, started HRT, wound up in California, have been working through all of that ship for the last like twelve years at this point. And we grew up together sort of. We know each other from high school. We've been you know, conspiring to take over the world since we were like fifteen. Yeah. Yeah, we've been friends since we were like fifteen and did a lot of writing

in the day, and we still do. Like everything that we're doing now is still stuff we did in high school. It's like everything and nothing has changed. Like we're still writing, we're still doing podcasts. It's just, uh, we've we've switched. Uh. We were doing pod us when Audacity was in beta, Like it was hard. Yeah, I guess I'm in the slightly weird position of being in a group of people where I had probably like I had not even probably I had the least funked up right wing Christian childhood.

But yeah, I still grew up in a I guess more mainline like a town that was sort of dominated by a sort of more mainline Evangelical University. It's as hard to say, go back to the beginning on this

because you can pick like seven millions of roments. But I think since since we're sort of focusing on abortion, um, I want to start by asking about the story of sort of how the Evangelical started caring about abortion, because that's that's a relatively recent thing, especially compared to sort of Catholicism, and so yeah, I guess how how how did that start? And how you know what what sort relationship between that and and the birth of the modern

religious right. Well, have you heard of Philish? Lastly? Philish? Laughly? So much? Um? Gross, Okay, I'm not enough rage just more than Enoe. I was trying to think of like an appropriate like horror sound effect to go right after her name. Yeah, we can. We can get Daniel to add a horror Daniel add the worst possible sound effect you can think of for after you says do you know philis shop Philip shoply if it will not be enough, but we have to try. Yeah, it will not, It

will not be dark enough. But just no, I'm just sitting here being like, there's so much information. If I just start is going to be a waterfall and like somebody's going to have to jump in and be like stop talking. Yeah, okay. So back in the sixties and the book Jesus and John Wayne by Christ and Dum gets into this a lot um, the church was having kind of like a crisis of self in a lot

of ways. Um, this is the height of the free love movement, and the Vietnam War is going very badly and uh, you know, the church is losing youth to

cynicism and drugs and sex and like. So there's this this whole like contingent of like OCEHP we have to like get the political and religious stuff back on track according to our belief system um, and birth control and abortion we're not really part of the picture um for that that strategy until like the eighties, and it was kind of this whole like thing that was a manufactured crisis, um, but it was it was the thing that they could

get voters of both Catholic and evangelical backgrounds to coalesce around. And they stumbled into this because fucking phillashial athlete was

um really good at direct mail organizing. She was able to get mailing lists and get like housewives with free time to get on the phone and call elected officials and just kind of show up storm Barton, storm Capital Steps and like talk to officials and get you know this like overwhelming appearance of like your constituency is for this thing um, which is a really common thing that you see in the religious rights still to Yeah, mailing lists have such a has such an interesting background and

right wing organizing, but that would be like physical mailing lists back in the day. Lots of the big names in in like the growing fire right to that, and even today you can even look at like stuff for January six with like Trump's email list follows the same follows the same strategy, and like the left ing the Democrats never do this. Ship well, okay, actually there's there's

one instance. So there was someone who was involved with shlafley Is organizing and the mailing list stuff who was who flipped and was participating in Act Up New York

organizing and taught them how to use mailing lists. So sure Sarah Schulman's book about Active New York gets into this, and it's really interesting to see, like, but I think that's the only instance I can think of that like the left picked up on that, but shlaughly started it, focused on the family, picked it up, everybody ran with it, and it is the default method now for organizing a

block voter base. Yea. And one of the things that she was doing, so she was against the r A and that was like her thing was the r A is going to actually limit women's rights. And it was kind of about, like, you have certain protections as a housewife because you're entitled to like this level of support and all of this stuff, and like you don't want to be drafted. And so that was kind of how

she was framing that conversation. And she framed in one of her Equal Forum newsletters the conversation about abortion as being tied up in that, and that got people's attention. And she was a Catholic, and the Catholics are have consistently been against abortion, and the Evangelicals up until that point were not, and they really just wanted to separate themselves from the Catholics on this issue. And they called

it therapeutic abortion. So if it's like rape, incest, or like dangering the life of the mother, they assumed that those were reasonable reasons to do that, and they, you know, we're worried about overpopulation, and so they were talking about birth control is a good thing, and and the Catholics were against all of it. And so Shafley was able to mobilize this Catholic and Evangelical female voter base. Um, white ladies, primarily white women. Um, white women are always

the problem. Um too move the the attention and the conversation in this particular direction. And once they killed the e r A, the rest of the evangelical political leadership on the right, we're like, okay, this is like we're crossing the ecumenical aisle. We should pay attention to this. Um. So I mean, I've got um this this book in

front of me, here, all my sources here. So this is The Evangelicals by Francis Fitzgerald, and it's kind of the definitive history of the Evangelicals in America, and it's fucking great. Um. One of the things that she traces

is this whole conversation. And there's this line in here where it's like the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed a like neutral stance on abortion, like against abortions on demand and like you know, doing it thoughtlessly, but like they were neutral on the concept overall until sucking yep, as they're like group doctrinal policy. And that's around when like the moral majority started becoming a thing, and also when people were starting to freak out about like they're not being

a majority of white people. And at some point the the rhetoric turned from well, I mean, it's always been like about the babies, but at some point it got translated into we have to literally outbreed the left, which is what I grew up in. Yeah, so we grew up in UM under the influence of Mary Pride's The Way Home and The Long like All the Way Home Heard, two books that she wrote about kind of that kicked off the quiverable movement. UM. But let me go back.

I want to I want to go through this timeline that I pulled pulled together yesterday. So the Moral majority was started by way Rich in nineteen seventy The Southern Baptist Convention started their pro abortion or neutral toward abortion policy in in nineteen seventy two was when Schlafley started opposing the e R A. N. Seventy three is rov Wade.

Nineteen seventy four is when Schlafley's newsletter goes out arguing that the ear A is gonna make abortion you know on the and um Billy Graham is still pro abortion, and then Carter loses in yeah, and that's when the

whole thing flips once Reagan wins. That is that is such an interesting timeline of events and basically basically it went perfect for them, except except for like Roevie Wave was a little bit of like a hiccup, but like they really were successful in organizing in a way that's almost kind of unparalleled in the ramp up to Reagan getting an office, right, and then Mary Pride was in the late eighties, and like it was so she like founded the coverful movement of the like, actually, women, you

are being um contrary to your own satisfaction for yourself if you are staying at work and not having babies, and you will be like fulfilled if you go home and keep house and had babies. And birth control is against God's will and is like thwarding your like self fulfillment and your best purpose. So like that's the book that kicked my parents down the quiver full road. Yeah. I think one of the interesting things here is and you see this like in Italy too, although it's a

less right ring form with with the Christian Democrats. But it's like this is like the the focus on, like the sort of Christian focus on on rolling back feminism and then bringing women into their movements is something that's very very important to not just anti abortion stuff, but to this sort of the broader rollback of of the

left over the whole course in the twenty century. And you see this in you know, in the way that's sort of you know, what what what what the left is doing at this time, Like they have the feminist movement, but the feminist movement in a lot of ways is detached from sort of the workers movements, and this becomes like the way you roll back the worker's movement is the workers movements ignoring women, and so you know, the right targets them and wins and and I think also

you know, and this this is also you know, we

talked about this sort of with Reagan's alliance with the evangelicals. Weird, but it's somewhat tenuous, but you know that this is you know, in in in a lot of ways, this stuff like these people that this is more matority, like this is this is how neoliberalism happens, and I think like in in a lot like this, this is sort of like I guess like you could have it like the sort of you know, it's it's one of the sort of electoral shock troop things that that happens to

start pushing this stuff. Well, it's such a class and race based thing. And this is why that, like the pushing back against feminism stuff started being so popular among

this particular group. I think is you had this idea of like, oh, ship, this means that if our husbands leave us or we leave them, we have to support ourselves because we might might not be able to give like stay at home wife levels of alimony anymore because we won't have the legal protections under the e r A if it passes, so like, uh, that means we'd have to work. And that's not what white ladies do. You know. It's just kind of like this like white

lady fragility thing. You know, it goes all the way back through everything. Yeah, it becomes just like it becomes this hammer that you can beat like everyone else with like whatever sort of like and I think this is why there's so much shock about Texas right now is because It's like, um, the only women who are going to be like actually introduced to new dangers right now or the uterus having people introduced to new dangers under this abortion ban under this new policy is white ladies.

Everybody else has been vulnerable in this way already, and so the shock and surprise is like, Yeah, being a white woman does not necessarily protect you from the patriarchy. Yeah, especially if you're not rich, Like if you have money to fleet the state of Texas, you're fine, but otherwise, like you're just sucked. Racial solidarity screws you over once again.

M hmm. Everything comes back to racism, honestly. Yeah, Like I think everything with this coalition is it like a lot of the original basis of this and you can talk about was more than I camp, but was about like the original thing they were trying to do was stopping desegregation from happening and maintaining desegregation, you know, And this this feeds into sort of private school stuff. Yeah, even take it Away movement started. I'm like, so have

you heard about Jones University? Sound effect for that one too? We could we could talk. I'm planning and writing a Bastards about Bob Jones University coming up here soon to degregate. Yeah. Yeah, uh that only and like it was like like ninet nine they allowed interracial dating, I think, Yeah, but they were I think it was like yes, but also only if your parents agree. Yeah, we still require parental consent. All of all of my English was by Bob Jones

University Press. We ran into that a lot too. Yeah, And the fun thing about the English is that you're not actually learning English. You're learning like propaganda through the veil of English. So like you learn about like climate change denialism through your English program. Just just it's one of the most most fun things. Yeah, is the way

that they structure their education. And like oddly to like I'm not sure this is similar to I don't know how your personal opinions on abortion evolved throughout your process of de radicalization. Yeah, but like like like for me, like for some reason, that was one of the last things to change, Like I I got on, like that was one of the last things to actually get like

kicked off of of my brain. Like I like I changed on like a whole bunch of other views around around like queerness and stuff, like way before I switched around abortion, it was one of the things that like they really like, like I think that's their propaganda, and it really was able to like sink sink its claws into my brain. Well, it's like it's like the Q and On stuff and all of the like mythology around sex trafficking that we have right now is like it's

all about save the babies. And then that's like engender such a lack of critical thinking because your emotional engagement locks immediately and they can convince you of anything and most of it's not true. Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think it really is similar to a lot of mean, all the qun stuff we're cut and stuff you know that that was popped that was getting very big last year. It's really just a continuation of this same thing. It's just with it's just for the new mask on um.

A lot of this kind of stuff play is on the same interest that is put into focused by the

same bad actors. Yeah, Like, it's honestly not surprising to me that so many evangelical Christians and just like generally right wing people fell for Q and On because it already confirms all of their priors, Like they're already believing most of this stuff and it's just like, oh, sure, I can make that leap of logic, and like for us, we're like there was, you know, a whole gymnastics of course you had to go through, but they were already

already there. Okay, I want to jump in here and tie up some some threads between these conversations, because one of the things that these these conspiracy theories and the like anti abortion stuff having common is anti Semitism and UM. And so the mythology of the Q and on, like celebrities using babies blood for skincare kind of thing goes back to the Middle Ages to blood libel, which is an anti Semitic um mythology that was used to excuse

like murdering lots of Jews um. And the similarly, the whole conversation around abortion, the using stuff from the Old Testament to proof text your evangelical belief in like like the you know, life starts from conception kind of thing um goes against Jewish tradition and Jewish understanding of these texts, Like the Jewish tradition is life starts at the first breath, so like if the baby is viable on its own and able to come out and like then it breathes,

then it's a life, then it's a person. That's when

the spirit enters the body. As far as I'm my understanding goes, and so the like evangelicals again using biblical literalism and proof texting and trying to you know, shape the Bible into a uh texts that they can reinforce all of their prior beliefs around, rather than reading it as literature with a historical context and like like collective understanding by another group of people, like it's just one of those another one of those examples, and so this

is built into it is this like yeah, well the Bible says this that they It's like no, actually, like that's not how the rest of the world has interpreted these same texts. This plays into so many other things that the right is currently grasping on. Like we we could usually talk about the intersection and not not even not even this intersection, but the direct continuation of anti abortion stuff into anti vaxx stuff, Like all of these things are the exact same thread. They all come from

the exact same place, and it's propagated by the same people. Um, Like all of these things like once you start to look into this, you're like, oh, no, it's all the same thing. It's always wrapped up in this same spiral. Yeah, I mean the m and it goes into using essential oils for like healing and like not trusting doctors and like there's good reasons to mistress the medical institution and

like big pharma. Not for these reasons though, I'm sorry, like Glonial Silver maybe not, Like we couldn't if we went to the doctor as a kid, like if our parents were got to the doctor, that was that was like a breach of faith. Um, you know, yeah, my mom's a nurse, so like we actually had like skipped

a lot of this stuff. But Karen has stories. Yeah, my parents they got involved in this cult called Cleansing Stream and that was where they were introduced to demonic possession and also faith healing, and they left the cult because they believed the demonic possession levels of that group was ridiculous and it was, but they didn't leave behind the faith healing, so did not Like I literally didn't see a doctor from the time I was like maybe five until I was eighteen, and I went to the

doctor and I was like, I know, I had my tetanus before it was ten and everything else nothing happened, So please catch me up, because I didn't see anyone. I had literally like infections that could have been treated with antibiotics and cleared up in like a week that lasted for like two years because my parents were that

adamant about the doctors being evil. And the reason was because in the concordance, if you look up the word uh for like medicine, it's parmachea and farmachea translates into witchcraft. And so my parents were like, well, obviously that means medicine is witchcraft, and witchcraft is of the devil, So therefore all doctors in all medicine is bad. Excuse me? Did they still take communion because that's also witchcraft? That's

that's right. But it was okay because it was Jesus blood and body and not totally this like expired thing of grape juice that has been sitting around in the church closet for like who knows how long, for like at least twelve years. At least it's aged grape juice. I blank communion on all my witchcraft practicings. Now it's got a lot of weird projection stuff with it where

it's like like blood libel. It's like, okay, so you are from a religion the basic practice of which is thinking something you think is blood, and so we are now going to accuse everyone else of doing the thing that we do as a religious tendant. But you know the stuff doesn't that narcissist thing of accusing everybody else

of doing what you actually do? Yeah? Yeah, And I think, you know, I think there's kind of a at least this is something that I've read into, is that like, you know, it doesn't do that much good to point out that there's beliefs or inc consistent like something it

doesn't matter, which it doesn't matter. Okay, so you'll know G. K. Chesterton, right, Yes, Okay, So G. K. Chesterton was a British Englican pundit um had like you know, wrote a bunch of you know, cute little cozy mysteries, but also was a Catholic theologian. And in his book Orthodoxy he has this concept which is like outdated like ablest terms, but I'm going to

run with it because it's a really good analogy. Um. He calls it the Madman's box, and he's like the ad Man is the most sane of all creatures because anything that does not work in his reality, he removes it does not exist. So everything within his universe, if you accept the terms of his universe, is true. And I think about this all the time when you think about fundamentalists and the stuff we grew up with is but like, if it is going to threaten your core

logic system, remove it. It does not exist because it's a you can, you can, and the like his whole thing was like, actually, like the universe is huge, and like we can't control it, and like we have to get okay with that knowing things, which I love because that's true. And the people we grew up with just can't do that because they believe that like God is noble, the universe is noble. And also, um, we're right about everything. You can't. You can't rip someone out of an alternate reality.

It's not it's that's not how that works. You have to you have to slowly coax them up with breadcrumbs and even and that can take that can take years or decades. Like you can't. There's there's never gonna be a switch. Okay, So let's talk about our own shifts like when did you when did you start believing that

abortion was cool? Like everybody here and what changed well around when I was like fifteen or sixteen, Um, I was in the years prior to that, I was learning my own like queerness, which was kind of pulling me out of some of like the harder beliefs that I was into. It's like a it's like a preteen um. So,

like queerness was like the first step. But abortion was like the last thing to crack because you're so ingrained in this thing, like no, like you have to like i'm i'm I'm against killing people, and if babies are people, they have to be against killing babies, you know, no matter what kind of age they are. That gets so ingrained. Um. What what got me out was learning like more about um philosophy of like bodily autonomy. Um. So that that's the kind of thing that was like the last thing

to crack. It's like learning about the importance of autonomy and how that extends to pregnant people. Um. And so that was the but it was, yeah, it was it was like it was the last thing from like my right wing like from like my far right wing upbringing to get expelled, like it. It stuck around for a ridiculously long time. Like I already considered myself kind of like a social democrat, but I was still but still was like yeah, but I think abortion should be avoided

at all costs. It was, it was, it stuck around for such a long time. Yeah. That that was just like for me too, And it was interesting. So like my my like immediate family was like my parents were like pretty liberal, but like everyone else around me was like like extreme, like you know, it's far evangelical people and like that. That sort of like the the well, the pro life people have a point, we shouldn't kill babies.

If if you have to do abortion, it should be like extremely rare, and like we should try to stop it like that. Like that was what was one of the sort of full things that I picked up, even though like you know, like the anti abortion protests will show up my school and I'd be like ha ha, they're doing creation, but like you know that that like that that the sort of like oh, well you don't

you don't want to kill babies, right? Like that that took like even when I was like sort of going further left in high school like that took really until almost like college before I was like, wait, this is

ridiculous and sort of started picking up. Yeah. Again, it was partially the bottle autonomy, and then partly it was about learning the actual history of of what this stuff is about and like coming like understanding the fact that like it's not actually about none of the people talking about this like actually genuine they care about the lives of babies, like it's it's not about that, and like abortion isn't soundmentally about that, and you know, and and

you know it's in some ways, like you know, then this is a lot of people sort of will do this thing where they like they like yell at the at the Amagel closers like you don't care about babies, like you'll shot them off the war or you're like

you let them like starve. It's like no, they don't care, like it's it's not about that, it's just about sort of yeah, and I think, you know, and I think and I think like even a lot of people sort of still get this, like don't understand that very well, even even like the liberals on the left that like they don't care, like it's it's it's it's just about power and not anything else, and that you shouldn't like take their argument seriously. Yeah. Yeah, So for for me

it was it was twofold. When you talk about like the emotional thing that pulls you out of out of like a illogical belief. It was one, I got additional

data about how birth control works. And two I had a friend who had an ectopic pregnancy who was a Catholic hospital and almost died because they wouldn't help her out in time because even though it was very early and it was not viable, the Catholic hospital would not wait until like required her to wait until she was at death store to intervene to save for a wife, thank God. So that was the that was the emotional

thing that like kicked that down the road. The other was just learning about like how conception works and then the math of it and like so like seven out of ten fertilized eggs will not implant in the uteran wall and gets left off, like you can have a whole lot more conceptions than you have pregnancies and you will never know and that is perfectly normal and um and just understanding that like taking birth control actually reduces the risk of that taking oral ramonal birth control means

that you have like far less chance of having a lost conception. That way, I was like, oh wait, so if they were actually pro life, they would be making everybody go on birth control because if they actually believe

to that it started at conception. Oh fuck. And and of course like later on and this is maybe a little t m I, but like, um, I had a super early miscarriage last year, and just like thinking through like how comfortable I was with all of my my logic and decisions and where I'd come from and where it was in believing these things. Like I was like, yeah, twelve weeks, like I barely knew I was pregnant, and like most people don't and I don't. This is not

a big deal. Yeah for me, it was like it was it was a mix um of like one when my when I was seventeen and my mom had her last pregnancy, that's when I knew I never wanted kids ever did not. I was googling how to sterilize, Like what what can I do? I kept Okay, but you have to tell you have to like give give a little more deep one. Yeah yeah, okay, So uh, every time that my mom got pregnant, my life would end, and I, as a child, was the person who was

solely responsible for running the house. So I had to feed my siblings, educate my siblings, bathe my siblings, make sure they didn't die being children, like, do all of the inside girl chores, um, and take care of my mom, who like half the time had untreated preclampsia and like could not move and was like a planet and it

would just happen. I like literally like there. I remember having thoughts of like, she's a fixed object in the entire household, is orbiting, orbiting exactly, That's exactly what it felt like. Yeah, I was like, everybody's gonna assume you mean size. That is not what you mean. I mean gravity. Yeah, Like that's definitely isn't isn't uncommon for anyone in the quiver fool type community at all. Yeah, it's it's pretty par for the course. Like that's that's what the job

of the eldest daughter is. At least that's what my parents blewd, which is why they did it every single time, every like eighteen months for a decade straight. And I got burnt the funk out because it started when I was eight and ended when I ran away. Um, and my mom was still pregnant when I ran away, and I was just like, I can't like stop being a person every like year for nine months straight, like my I was responsible for my education as well, so like

my tank. And then when I was fifteen, they were like, you know everything you need to do to be a successful wife and mother. You don't need to learn math or science or any of that ship um and so yeah, so when I was exactly and they were like and now like after I was fifteen, like when I turned sixteen, they were like, well, now you're basically an adult and

you can like court and get married. So that tried to happen, and they really just wanted me to like go live their fantasy of becoming a wife and mother, and it was a dream I never shared. One last mouth to feed, one less mouth to feed, although I don't think they thought it completely through because then they lost like the one person who knew how to keep

the house functioning, um, which is their fault. Uh. But yeah, so with the last one, nutshell, I was courting my mom got the positive pregnancy tests, they were like, well, like this wasn't the answer they gave me. They were like, we have theological problems with your partners, uh family, and that's why I were breaking you up. But really it was because my mom was pregnant and they needed me

to run the house again. And so I saw that coming because I had, after a decade, become aware of when my mom was pregnant before she was and I was like, hmmm, this feels like pregnancy, um and yeah. I looked up like what it took to become sterilized, and I found Scarlett teen and I read about birth control, and I read about how it works, and I realized that I had been lied to. It doesn't abort babies.

It like, like you said, even it's it's honestly better because then you're not like accidentally aborting by having your period, just a whole fucking thing. Um and yeah. And I was like, Okay, I don't want this for myself, and I became aware that like that was a choice that I had, And so the first thing I did when I saw a doctor was asked for birth control. And it was through like having my own agency and realizing that me not wanting to have children didn't make me

a bad person. And didn't make me a bad spouse, and that it was like my choice made me have a lot more compassion for other people. And then one of my friends had an abortion and I was like, and it was really good idea, and I was like I was there for them, and I was like, yeah, like you're not ready to have a kid, that's valid

and you should do the thing. Because at that point I had been like, you know, after raising my siblings, like I understood how much it is to be a parent and I knew that, like, if I wanted to be a parent, I knew the responsibility that would be and I knew I didn't want that responsibility and I wasn't ready for that responsibility and who my friend wasn't.

So it was kind of through being burnt out by raising children and then reading that like everything I've been talking about birth control was bullshit, that I became okay with it. But that was also like it wasn't it was one of the first things to happen, but it happened slowly, like I I became approach choice gradually over time, instead of it just being like one kind of revelation, it was like, oh, this is okay for me, But am I sure? Is it? Is? It in in a

lot of like internal fighting. And I think all of this can be really hard to understand if you did not grow up inside because like if you grew up in like like a liberal like democratic area and you didn't go to church, all this probably sounds very whacky. You're like, well, why didn't you just like why couldn't you just not do that? Right? It's like it makes very very hard, it's very hard to really grasp you.

We didn't like grub this because like even for me, like I already was like by by the time I was like fourteen and fifteen, I was like yeah, like like birth controls fine, like contraptions like contraceptive should be

free for people, like all these other like things. But it's still like but we still we still shouldn't actually do abortions, like we can, we can do all these other things to limit abortions, so you can you can get you can get like super far into that way because like you get ingrained with this, like like even even like saying like no abortions in the case of incestor rape because as the because the phrase that was

repeated and to me as a kid. It's like, why would you punish the child for the for the for the sins of the father. Like that is so like all of these things get ingrained in use so much you can you can like wrap, you can like change all of these strings in your brain to try to have it make sense. Still you can be like, no, I still want all these other things free, I want all these other preventive measures, but still that this this last part, actually doing an abortion, is still something that

shouldn't happen for for these moral reasons. You know. I think it's one of the reasons that this like decision process or like process of like dismantling that whole thought for us. One of the things that sped it up was the fact that we got married so young, and so it became like critically relevant, this is not theoretical question anymore. This was a like we're burnt the funk out, and like we do not want to get stuck in the same path that our mothers were in. What the

fun do we do? I had in laws and my excommunicated parents who wanted grandchildren, and I was like I told people, like, give me ten years because I'm tired. And then I had a his style. No, Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the time that I've really started to like understand the more science aspects of it and understand the party autonomy aspects was also around the time I was starting to have sex with you with with people like that. You know, I'm sure

that that that is not a coincidence either. It's like it's a combination of learning about these things and personal experience and like the urgency of it got so intensified for me when I realized, like my ex husband was abusive to our cat, which was a kitten, and I was just like, oh God, this is not going to

bode well for kids. And we were in the process of like splitting up, and he listened to a Mother's Day sermon at church and was like very inspired by it and was like, actually, maybe we could make things work if you were a mom. I think I could love you if you or a mom. And I kind of looked at him and I was like, what the fuck did you just really fucking say that? And he was like, where do you have to be like that? I was like, oh no, we're done, Oh no, we

are done. Just like just having to have those conversations brings the issue to the foreground so fucking quickly, like you really suddenly realize it is actually life or death for you. Yeah. And I think the last thing that we could maybe touch on is the whole bounty hunter aspect plays into a lot of this as well, of like raising like holy warriors to track down these people who are doing the ungodly acts. Like this is kind of like a wet and dream for a lot of

young males who grew up in this thought process. Um and watching this start to take shape in Texas is like I think is very much kind of a should be used as a warning of things to come. Do you think they're going to do spin off of Fireproof

inspired by this events? Absolutely? Yeah, you know, like I like really like I'm I'm sure they will be like churches making their own web series that are like you know, like a little like YouTube videos of people tracking down like abortion doctors, Like this is going to happen, like absolutely, Like this is this is like stuff like this has been fantasized about for a long time. Well I'm thinking about like there's this alright, I'm liking on the name

of it, But this movement in Florida in Operation Rescue. No, No, I'm thinking, no, that that's the whole other thing. I'm thinking about the church group that C. J. Mhaney learned

accountability practices from UM. But basically there was this like whole theological movement at in the as like a subset of the Jesus movement that was like encouraging everybody to basically be like syn cops to each other because it was like for your own spiritual purification, and like everybody was ratting out everybody to the pastor, and the pastor would be like, we have concerns about this pattern, simple pattern in your life, and you need to think about

your sin of pride because you are questioning me, you know, stuff like that UM, And it got replicated in sovereign Grace ministries and kind of spread a lot of places out from there. Yeah. So, and like the courtship world and the purity culture world, like you know, you'd have like if you violated modesty codes, writing each other out was like rewarded. If you were like kissing your boyfriend and not telling your parents, you would get read it

out and that would be rewarded. So like all of these things like this is just like we're just involving the police now to get money for it. We're now just making it into an act. Yeah, we're now we're now just turning up the actual consequences of this leading to like violence and acted by the state, which is kind of the wet dream of a lot of these of a lot of these groups, is that being able to like, you know, tie this type of evangelical Christianity

to this state. This is kind of their end that, I mean, that was that was the end goal of Focus on the Family. That was an end goal of a lot of these groups is to start you know, this is just the whole Christian dominionist thing is getting these types of things enforced by the state instead of

having to be enforced by like the church community. And yeah, I mean, I guess the one thing I do want to mention is that there's a a great TikTok video that came out a few days ago about the the the reporting website where you can whistle blow abortion people. There's this this video this person made about and they got a script for iPhones. They can flood you. You can flood the tip line with fake with fake information. Um, So that is great. You should you could vice as

an article about it. You can just look up TikTok abortion was the blower, you can you can get all the info on that. Can. I just add a whole big footnote to this entire conversation, and that is that this just like keep this in mind as you were thinking about this question and this issue. This is the preview for how trans writes were going to be handled, because bodily autonomy for abortion and remmal birth control is the same situation as bodily autonomy to create your gender

through hormonal injections or whatever. Like, same story going to end here. No, their their goals to have this whole whistle blower bounty hunter thing be extended to anyone performing um, anyone performing any type of reproductive character they're doing now, but also any type of gender affirming treatment UM reporting actual like trans youth like oh like like you see this happening in in the in the church all the time. It's like, you know, someone getting reported for having you know,

not not performing there they're prescribed gender correctly. This gets talked about all the time, and this is gonna be the next step for them, um that you know, the abortion thing is gonna is gonna spread to other states, absolutely, But the next thing they're gonna go for after his trans rights, um, and go after this type thing. And then they're gonna go after after like like um, gay

things in general. Um, And like this it doesn't stop here, Like you're not safe just because you are not Yeah, just because you weren't born with uterus doesn't mean you're not safe from this. Like it's gonna this is gonna extend out to many other facets. Yeah, and I think you know, and and the real danger here, and I think this is one of the things we need to talk about is that like the left, particularly democratic parties

organizing this has been terrible. This does not exist, yeah, yeah, you know for their party, like this is like abortion is just a fundraising thing, like they don't care that, don't dre' do noathing and you know, and then the broader left is being just absolutely blown out of the water by by the way, like by the organizations happened here, and like even even in terms of like you know, I mean just yeah, I definitely want everyone else here to talk more about this because I have less way

less knowledge about this, Like you know, like these guys did like terrorism like they were. They've they've murdered people, they bombed clinics like they like that. They did the whole range of sort of like every everything from sort electoralism to like what they're sort of twisted version of profigative politics where you know, you you create your own sort of like right wing like Evnel the households right. They're like a mote of the news side. They did

everything they did. Electoralism they did, yeah, um like they they did, the demonstrations they did, they know, they killed people like they did everything. It worked, and we have not been doing this and this is that's a big part of why this is happening now. So I wrote about this for Rewired News and I guess it should

be coming out to usday. But um yeah, it's basically like the last left, as soon as they achieve a small victory stops organizing, and the right is always thinking if further ahead, and they are they already have the infrastructure for that, like grassroots act like activate the network to get them to call the offices. I'm like, be like, don't vote on that bill or vote this way on that bill, and we really just don't have that infrastructure

in place. We've done it for one off situations, but we don't have it as a habitual, regular, regular, daily practice, and we are not training our teams to be involved in that like they are. UM, and that there's just so much I could say about this. Yeah, I mean I can. I can kind of speak to this as someone who like is kind of up close in the California Democratic Party, at least as up close as you

can be without being friends with the fucking chair. UM. I am still livid because what I learned they're being elected is that there is no organizing structure at all. Like I went to California campus Camp in twenty nineteen. And if you're in California and you go to a community college and you haven't grown up being an organizer, I definitely recommended, Yeah, if you didn't do Teampact, go

to campus camp. But I was there, and they're talking about how Paul Wellstone was this leftist organizer in like I don't know, the eighties, um, and how he invented this radical way of organizing. It's literally grassroots organizing. It's literally what I've been doing since I was a child. And they're like, oh, this is this cool new thing that we're trying to do. This is really effectively he had no ship. That's how the Republicans win everything. We

don't have that. There is no organization in the Democratic Party that is ongoing round advocating for the issues we say we value. There is no connection between the State Democratic Party and the Democratic National Convention or like the National Democratic Party. The d n C literally only exists for the Convention to do the fucking platform and there

was nothing else. There's no except for in queer circles organizing gets this, gets this right, but as soon as you get to like middle class white democratic moderate organizing, it doesn't exist. You know, I am, I'm literally only talking about the Democratic Party itself, like Camocratic Democratic Party,

the institution. Queer organizers have been doing this, like a lot of grassroots leftist organizations have been doing this, labor organized, labor organizers like there are so many organizations in Oakland alone that do this very well, like the Anti Police Terror Project. They're fucking badass. They get ship done. Um. But the Democratic Party itself as an institution does not

have this, does not support this actively like sidelines. The organizers like there is a whole progressive wing of the Democratic Party that has recently gotten elected, and we are sidelined and not allowed to do ship because there is just like we get blocked at every time. I think. I think, I think part of the problem is because of the rights connection to apocalyptic um predictions via the equstianity.

Like the right has the right and even like the conservative establishment, they have a goal in mind, like they have an end goal of how they want to see the world. The Democrats don't have that. Even large swass of the left don't have that. We can just we just want the role to be kind of a little bit better slowly. The right has an actual view like they they have like an end point, which is why they always have the next thing planned that They're never

satisfied with any of their victories. They're always onto the next thing because they have a set goal that they want to see the world become. So you're saying the Democratic Party needs to get in they retreat and do a vision board. That's not what I'm saying. Honestly, it

will help, I think, you know what. I think The other sort of fundamental side, fundamental dynamic of this is that the Republican Party is a real political party, right like, it has, it has a base, it has, it has the thing they're trying to do, and like you know, it has it has a set of goals that that is trying to enact. The Democratic Party is not is not a political party. The Democratic Party is basically a

giant engine for absorbed. So you know, the right is powered by a combination of an enormous amount of money by the sort of capitalist backers, and you get all this AstroTurf stuff from the Cokes and from the sort of the Boultons and their their networks, and then you know that they have they have a sort of right wing social movement base, which is a lot of the evangelical stuff, and you know, and that that that's what drives the party, right like, that's that's that's that's that's

like the party is there to enact, you know, the different facts of different visions that parties there to their visions. Right, the Democratic Party is there too, the party like there's you have the equivalence of the sort of left wing social movements, and the Democratic Party is there to destroy them. Like their their whole goal is to make sure that none of these movements ever actually like come anywhere close to taking power, and so you know, and and this

this creates is symmetry. But we're seeing this on abortion right where you know, you have you have the Publican Party, which is you know, fanatically dedicated to to to this issue to winning here, and you have the Democratic Party who's like there their their their job is to turn like people people's concern over abortion into inaction and fundraising.

And then that fundraising doesn't go doesn't fundraison, doesn't go to you know, keeping abortion legal, Like the fundraising goes to just getting getting getting getting the keep keeping Democratic Party people in power, keeping their consultants paid, and keeping their sort of like you know, keeping keeping their sort of keeping Yeah, it's keeping their corporate their corporate backers happy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's exactly what it is. It just it exists to fondres for elections for people with the D beside their name, who don't challenge things, you don't actually want to get ship done, and to just like like as soon as they get power, they sit back and are like oh cool, we want and and then they're like we're we're fine, now we don't have to do anything like they don't

exist to enact their platform. The most that we can do as delegates is like pass resolutions and amend the platform, so we can, like pass the resolution that says, let's not take any fossil fuel money. This actually happened. We passed the resolution said let's not take any fossil fuel money. The Democratic Party chairs still accept fossil fuel money. Brought it up at the e Or convention, like literally last weekend.

It was shot down and said it was out of order, despite the fact that we were just trying to enforce our own rules that we put upon ourselves. And the Democratic Party is accountable to no one, no one but itself, And so the people who are inside the Democratic Party of problems with the Democratic Party can ask questions and

we get zero response. Like all I know is that we give money to strategists who no one will tell me who they are, no one knows who they are, and just fundraise into this big pot for democratic elections for the people who the chair and his friends like. And the entire by laws of the Democratic Party are written to give like and outrageous amount of power to the people who are already elected, like Nancy Pelosi has

like thirty plus votes in the Democratic Party. I have one, I wrote I I will send you the link to the power breakdown that I wrote about this because I was so mad about it during the convention. But like it really, the Democratic Party is not going to save us. It's not going to save anyone. What we need to do is be building dual power structures like the Black Panthers did. But that is a lot of fucking work and we don't have the funding for it. Yeah, we

we have. We have to wrap this up sooner than later. But like and I try to end these episodes with some type of like if not, if not, like a call to action, but like something to help figure out what the heck to do in the future, Like something that we can think about in a new way or try to try to try to ponder or achieve. And

this this is tough because it's hard. It's well, like, how like wrapping up all of these types of things around, like abortion and the rise of the end of of the of the religious right, what can regular people do? There are groups doing this work already. Do not try to reinvent the We all get involved with your local mutual a groups get involved with your local abortion funds, get involved with your local organizing groups. They exist, they're

doing the work. Figure out what is going on where you live and look at it on a local level and get involved and show up to meetings, figure out who's running for city council, figuring out where the budget is going like, ask questions, attend the meetings, pay attention, like show up to public hearings and hold their feet to the fire. Do the local work and the rest will follow. It is surprisingly easy to take over local politics, like literally, all you have to do is show up.

It's it's it's simple. You get coffee with your city counselor. That's what their job is is to meet with you. So do you have yours? You are their boss, and you can even do that with your state representative, your state senator. They are there to talk to you and if you have a feeling about a thing, email them, call them, be like hey, I want get coffee like that. Some students in college don't use office hours like they should,

and so they fail the course. This is us. We have these elected officials and we are at their boss. We need to show up to office hours and ask them questions. Like, that's what that's what the right is doing. That's why they're so successful. We need to be organizing our own, our own calling about things. If people want to hear more about your, your guys's work and all of these really fun topics, where can where can they find you? Online? They can they can find our podcast,

Kitchen Table Cult at Kitchen Table cult dot com. We're on Twitter at Kitchen Cult Pod. My handle is blue pup Boy but with an eye instead of a Y at the end. And I'm eve Ettinger on Twitter and I'm verified Verified, I'm real good job and the only one. Yeah yeah, yeah, and we're we're working in a couple of big projects. Um, stay tuned, funds down ahead. Thank thank you so much for coming on to talk about the religious right, abortion and all these kind of interconnected issues,

because they really are interconnected. Um, and yeah, we need to We can definitely learn how to organize a whole lot better and learn learn from how the right has been so successful in a lot of ways. Um. Yeah, anyway, uh for more, it could happen here. You can follow us um on Twitter and Instagram, it happened here pod and cool Zone Media can follow me on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie and uh, Chris, I know you. You

you have a Twitter. Yeah, I'm I'm in h R three on Twitter or the ice on speed Destroyed guy. Yeah yeah, cool Zone also as a Twitter that's at cool Zone Media and great, see you see everyone again. Well, we'll talk more about these issues in the next in the next few days and weeks. That's all for today. Goodbye. It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.