Like the Other Charlotte, I scrupulously avoided the march, though I couldn’t help encountering participants in my trendy, lib ’hood. They were mostly old ladies who probably haven’t had a good protest in years, poor dears.
Although IWF has never taken a stand on the issue of abortion–we’ve always included both pro-choice and anti-abortion women in our organization–we don’t have much trouble decrying the kind of nastiness that was reported at the rally.
A journalist from the American Spectator, for instance, reported that several protesters didn’t stop with attacking George W. Bush and Pope John Paul II–they went after their mothers!
As the Spectator noted, “They used placards to convey the lament that Barbara Bush hadn’t killed her son in the womb. ’If Only Barbara Bush Had Choice,’ read one sign. ’Barbara Chose Poorly,’ read another. Marchers were also disappointed that the Pope’s mother hadn’t killed him in the womb. ’The Pope’s Mother Had No Choice,’ said a sign.”
The article continued:
“One could call the Sunday march a festival of paganism, but that’s probably not fair to ancient pagans. Worshippers of Baal would have regarded it as a little too depraved for their taste. If C-SPAN covered the event, it must have had to black and beep out much of it. It sounded like a sustained FCC violation and many of the placards were too baldly obscene (usually twisting the president and vice presidents’ names in various vulgar concoctions) for any newspaper to report.”
On the news, the event took on the aspect of a therapy/12 step session–“I’m Hillary, and I’m pro-choice America!” “I’m Madeleine, and I’m pro-choice!”–and I kept wondering if the march wasn’t as much a manifestation of a psychological reality as a political reality.