More Magical Thinking from Professional Conservative Troglodytes: "These Wombs of Women Who Have Been on the Birth Control Pill Effectively Have Become Graveyards for Lots and Lots of Little Babies"

The personal is political...again.

Pastor Manning is entertaining with his "Mack Daddy white women in heat voting for Obama" theory of voting behavior. By contrast, this story about the alternate reality and magical thinking of the Right-wing in regards to birth control and women's reproductive rights is not in any way funny. 

Well, here’s some medical research we hadn’t heard about. Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson, who last week delved memorably into feminist theory, tells us this week that “certain doctors and certain scientists” have researched the wombs of women on the pill and found “there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb…Those wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.” 

Swanson must be speaking with the same doctors as former Rep. Todd Akin. Even Kevin Peeples, whom Swanson is interviewing about his anti-contraception documentary Birth Control: How Did We Get Here?, isn’t quite sold on the evidence. 

Swanson: I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies. 

Peeples: We’ve actually heard on both sides of that. We’re researching that and want to make sure we speak correctly to that in our second film. But we have medical advice on both sides of the table there, so we want to make sure that we communicate that properly. 

Swanson: It would seem, and I realize that people are a little split on what are all the effects of the birth control pill, but it would seem that there’s a tremendous risk in the use of it for the life of children.

As Right-Wing Watch details, there is even the obligatory stab at "progressivism" and an obligatory mention of  Hitler:

Earlier in the interview, Peeples and Swanson discuss how birth control came to be widely used and accepted by many churches. Women, Peeples laments, “desire the men’s role” and are now missing out on “the role God put them in that he laid out in Genesis.” Before World War II, Peeples claims, “abortion, sterilization, eugenics and birth control were all tied together” until “Hitler took the fall for taking it very aggressively and dramatically.” 

Peeples: It starts with men and women fighting and not being happy with the role that God put them in that he laid out in Genesis. So whenever you seek to desire, when women seek to desire the men’s role, they lose the part and the idea of what children does, not just for the kingdom and not just does with their family, but does for their gender role. 

Swanson: Are you saying that the population control stuff, egalitarian feminism, birth control, abortion, they’re all sort of interrelated? 

Peeples: Yeah, it wasn’t until after World War II that they begin to separate them. Abortion, sterilization, eugenics and birth control were all tied together, they were all kind of a package for eugenics and population control. Hitler took the fall for taking it very aggressively and dramatically, and so they said, ‘Hey, let’s kind of take this back, let’s get rid of the negative things and let’s play on Christian liberty, let’s play on freedom, let’s play on people kind of taking this upon themselves to control population rather than forcing it on them. So, again, it’s just another effect of not researching our history to know what happened in the world alongside of the Church.

On a panoply of issues ranging from tax policy, the economy, the public health crisis caused by guns, science, and the general accepted consensus that governs empirical reality, the Right-wing in America has become drunk on magical thinking. 

We cannot come to a shared consensus to advance the Common Good because a significant portion of the public lives in a bubble of epistemic closure of Fox News and conservative talk radio. These same professional troglodytes are now rewriting school textbooks, changing school curricula, and pressuring colleges and universities to remove "offensive" and "problematic" course offerings in order to fit the White Right herrenvolk conservative Christian worldview. 

When professional anti-intellectuals possessed of magical thinking want to intrude on the life of the mind nothing good can come of it. Ever.

As I often ask: where are the responsible conservatives? Are they not ashamed of the Christian Right and how the latter is ruining their (supposedly) shared name brand? 

Birth Control: How Did We Get Here? is poised to join the Right-wing propaganda film oeuvre alongside 2016: Obama's America, Runaway Slave, Maafa 21, and other related conservative agitprop ilk.

I do not recommend seeing any of these "documentaries" except to mock them as necessary. But while some reasonable folks see the lies wrapped in the veneer of "truth," too many of our fellow citizens embrace the alternative reality presented by the Right-wing dream makers and propagandists. Possessed of a Christian Nationalism informed view of politics and society, where faith rules all things--quite literally as a belief in that which cannot be proven by ordinary means--they cannot be moved by appeals to empirical reality. 

Reasonable people can dream that generational replacement will solve this impasse in our country's political discourse and policy-making. I am less sure, as the Right-wing alternate reality machine creates new members every day. Am I just being to cynical and jaded? Or is there a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel?