It Could Happen Here - The Religious Right's War on Abortion

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Eve Ettinger and Kieryn Darkwater comes on to discuss the (short) history of the evangelical fight against abortion access and birth control. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome, welcome, welcome to it could happen here a podcast here it happens uh yeah that that that happens yeah i'm christopher wong i'm doing my best robert impersonation because robert has abandoned us for another interview we yeah we 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 roe v wade 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 evangelical and christian communities and watch how they organize and watch how they 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 many years. I feel like a Cassandra.

Just like standing in the street screaming. From the rooftops. Just please. Y'all listen now. It's like when there's like a list of like the set schedule for a show. And then you're surprised that it actually surprised that they do all those songs. Yes. It's like the writing has been on the wall.

And the floor, and the paper, and the screen. 40 fucking years. 40 fucking years. There should be outrage, but there should be no shock. Yes, correct. Garrison's also here. Hi, Garrison. Hello. This is a good happen here.

We're talking about Texas's abortion ruling and will end in the Supreme Court's ruling. I'm Garrison. Christopher already said that they're here. And then who are our other two people today? I'm Kieran 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 Ettinger, the other co-host of Kitchen Table Cult podcast and an angry writer, mostly. I think all of us on this podcast could be qualified as angry writers.

Yeah, just like professionally angry online. Yeah. I just realized we should probably say that Kieran and I grew up quiverful which is oh yeah you know relevant to the 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 fuckery and yeah you two specifically have some 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 homeschooled k through 12 and i'm the oldest of nine kids

my family were hardcore quiverful courtship people. 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 my parents did not go to Sovereign Grace. They did their own thing and were their own cult and church hopped around a lot. I'm the oldest of eight-ish. My mom had 10 full-term pregnancies, but two of them were stillborn. So I'm the oldest of technically 10, but in reality, 8. Also homeschooled K through 12. Grew up being told that I was supposed to be, you know, a housewife and have lots of babies.

Ran away on my 18th birthday. Got married. Was married for seven years in a surprisingly healthy-ish marriage. Got divorced. Started HRT. Wound up in california have been working through all of that shit for the last like 12 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 15 yeah yeah we've been friends since we were like 15 and did a lot of writing in the day and we still do like everything that we're 15 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've switched sides yeah yeah we were doing podcasts in 2005. Before it was cool, 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, not even probably, I had the least fucked 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 sort of more mainline evangelical university. It's hard to say, go back to the beginning on this because you can pick like 7 million moments. abortion um i want to start by asking about the story of sort of how the evangelicals started caring about abortion because that's that's a relatively recent thing especially compared to sort of catholicism so yeah i guess how how did that start and how you know what's the relationship between that and and the birth of the modern religious right well have you heard of phyllis schlafly phyllis schlafly so much um

gross okay i'm like i'm like not enough rage there's more than enough rage i was trying to think of like an appropriate like horror sound effect to go right after her name. We can get Daniel to add a horror sound effect. Yeah, Daniel, add the worst possible sound effect you can think of after Eve says, Do you know who Phyllis Shafley is? Because fuck Phyllis Shafley. It will not be enough, but have to try right yeah it will not it will not be dark enough but just know i i'm just sitting here being like there's so much

information if i just start is gonna be a waterfall and like somebody's gonna have to jump in and be like stop talking we'll stop talking. This is the height of the free love movement and the Vietnam War is going very badly. And, you know, the church is losing youth to cynicism and drugs and sex. So there's this whole, like, contingent of, like, oh, shit, we have to, like, get the political and religious stuff back on track according to our belief system. And birth control and abortion were not really part of the picture for that strategy until, like, the 80s. until like the 80s 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 phyllis schlafly 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 you know barnstorm 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 right still today yeah yeah mailing lists have such a have such an interesting background in right-wing organizing. But there'd be like physical mailing lists back in the day.

Lots of the big names in the growing far right did that. And even today, you can even look at stuff for January 6th with Trump's email list follows the same strategy. And the left and the Democrats

never do this shit. Well, okay. Actually, there's one instance. So there was someone who was involved with Schlafly's 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 Sarah Schulman's book about ACT UP 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 schlafly started it focus on the family picked it up yep everybody ran with it and it is the default method now for

organizing a a block voter base yep and one of the things that she was doing so she was against the era and that was like her thing was the era 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 Eagle 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. And they, you know, were 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 Schlafly was able to mobilize the attention and the conversation in this particular direction. political leadership on the right we're like oh hey 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 got 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 fucking 1980 yep as their like

group doctrinal policy and that's around when like the moral majority started becoming a thing yeah 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 which are her two books that she wrote about kind of that kicked off the quiverful 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 1970 the southern baptist convention started their pro-abortion or neutral toward abortion policy in 1971 in 1972 was when schlafly started opposing the era 1973 is roe v wade 1974 is when schlafly's newsletter goes out arguing that the era is going to make abortion you know on demand um 1975 billy graham is still pro-abortion and then carter loses in 1980 yeah and that's when the whole thing flips yeah once reagan wins that is that is such an interesting timeline of events like basically it went perfect for them except i guess except for like roe v wade 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 80s i'm like it was 1985 so she like founded the quiverful 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 have babies and birth control is against god's will and is like thwarting your like self-fulfillment and your best purpose so like that's the book that like kicked my parents down the quiverful 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-wing forum with with the christian democrats but it's like this is like the 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 the sort of the the broader rollback of of the left over the whole course of the 20th century and you see this in you know in in the way that sort of you know 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 workers 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 is also you know we talked about this sort of with reagan's alliance with the evangelicals is weird but it's somewhat tenuous but you know this is you know in in in a lot of ways this stuff like these people that this is the moral majority like

this is this is how neoliberalism happened and i think like in in a lot like this this is sort of like i guess like you can talk about like the sort is sort of like i guess like you can have like the sort of i don't 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 shit this means that if our husbands leave us or we leave them we have to support ourselves because we might not be able to get like stay at home wife levels of alimony anymore because we won't have the legal protections under the era

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. And it becomes this 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 like 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 flee the state of texas you're fine but otherwise like you're just fucked racial solidarity screws you over once again yep everything comes back to racism honestly yeah like I think the other thing with this coalition is that like a lot of the original basis of this and you didn't

talk about this more than I can but was about like the original thing they were trying to do was stopping desegregation from happening and maintaining desegregation you know this feeds into sort of private school stuff yeah how the homeschooling movement started I'm like

so have you heard of Bob Jones University? also let's drop a sound effect for that one too I'm planning on writing a bastards about Bob Jones University coming up here soon but like 1981 was when they were forced to desegregate yeah

and the only and like it was like 99 they allowed interracial dating, I think. Yeah, but they were... It was static 2000. I think it was, like, yes, but also only if your parents agree. Yeah. Yeah.

We're going to still require parental consent. 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. It's one of the most fun things imaginable is the way that they structure their education. And like oddly enough, 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.

That's a long story. Yeah, but for me, for some reason, that was one of the last things to change. That was one of the last things to actually get kicked off of my brain. I changed on a whole bunch of other views around queerness and stuff way before I switched around abortion. It was one of the things that they really – I think that's common. Their propaganda on it really was able to sink its claws into my brain.

sink its claws in into my brain well it's like it's like the q anon 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 like that's like engenders such a lack of critical thinking because your emotional engagement locks in immediately and they can convince you of anything and most of it's not true yeah yeah yeah i think yeah i think it really is similar to a lot of i mean the all the q and on stuff we're talking about stuff you know that was pop that was getting very big last year it's really just a continuation of this same thing it's just with it's just with a new mask on um a lot of this kind of stuff plays on the same interest that is put into focus by the same bad actors right yeah like it's honestly not surprising to me that so many evangelical christians

and just like generally right-wing people fell for q anon 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 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 like conspiracy theories and the like anti-abortion stuff have in common is anti-semitism and um and so the the mythology of the q anon like celebrities using baby's blood for skin care kind of thing come 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 yeah 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 alive 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 text that they can reinforce all their prior beliefs around

rather than reading it as literature with a historical context and like a like collective understanding by another group of people um blasphemy 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 meet.

And it's like, no, actually like, that's not how the rest of the world has interpreted these same texts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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Like, we could easily talk about the intersection, not even just intersection, but the direct continuation of anti-abortion stuff into anti-vaxxer 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 all just wrapped up in this same spiral yeah i mean the and it goes into using essential oils for, like, healing and, like, not trusting doctors.

And, like, there's good reasons to mistrust the medical institution and, like, big pharma. Don't get me wrong. Not for these reasons, though. But, like, I'm sorry, like, collodial silver, maybe not. No, like, we couldn't, if we went to the doctor as a kid, like, if our parents were to go to the doctor, that was like a breach of faith. Yep. You know, I know all of you are familiar with all this. Yeah, my mom's a nurse, so like, we actually had, like, skipped a lot of this stuff, but Kieran has stories.

skipped a lot of this stuff but kieran kieran 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 yeah so did not like i literally didn't see a doctor from the time i was like maybe five until i was 18 and then i went to the doctor and i was like i i know i had my tetanus before i was 10 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. doctors being evil and the reason was because in the concordance if you look up the word uh for like medicine it's pharmakia and pharmakia 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 and all medicine is bad. Excuse me. Did they still take communion? Because that's also witchcraft. That's a blood rite. Right. But it was okay because it was Jesus's 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 12 years. Yeah, at least. It's aged grape juice that has been sitting around in the church closet for like who knows how long for like at least 12 years yeah at least it's aged grape juice I blame communion on all my witchcraft practicing now it's the first I'll start it I feel like you get 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 drinking 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 tenet. But, you know, this stuff doesn't- It's 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 run into, is that, like, you know, it doesn't do that much good to point out that their beliefs are inconsistent like

it doesn't matter it doesn't matter okay so have you y'all know gk chesterton right yes we should explain maybe okay so gk chesterton was a british anglican pundit 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 ableist terms, but I'm going to run with it because it's a really good analogy. analogy um he calls it the madman's box and he's like the madman 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 i think about fundamentalists and the the we grew up with is like if it is going to threaten your core logic system. Yeah. You remove it.

It does not exist. Yeah. Because it's a you can't you can't even consider it. Yeah. 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 OK with not 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 yeah you 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 out with breadcrumbs and you have to go with emotion and that can take that can take years or decades like you can't there's there's never going to 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 15 or 16 um i was i 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 as like a it's like a pre-teen 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 against killing people and if babies are people you have to be against killing babies you know no matter what kind of age they are that gets just so ingrained yeah 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 was what it was like for me too it was interesting so like my my like immediate family was like like my parents were like pretty liberal but like everyone else around me was like like extremely you know far-right 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 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 cultural things that i picked up even though like you know like the anti-abortion protesters would show up my school and i'd be like ha ha ha they're doing creation but like you know that like that the 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, sort of picking up. Yeah. Again, it was for 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 the, none of the people talking about this, like actually genuinely care about the lives of babies. Like it's, it's not actually about the none of the people talking about this like actually genuinely care about the lives of babies like it's not about that and like abortion isn't fundamentally about that and you know and you know it's in some ways like you know this is a lot of people sort of will do this thing where they like they like yell at the at the evangelical like ah you don't care about babies like you'll shoot them off the war or you're like you let them

like starve it's like no they don't care. It's not about that. It's just about power and control. Yeah, and I think even a lot of people sort of still get this, don't understand that very well, even liberals on the left, that they don't care. It's just about power and not anything else and that you shouldn't like take their argument seriously yeah uh yeah so for for me it was it was twofold when you talk about like the emotional thing that like 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 at 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's door to intervene to save her life 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 like math of it and like so like seven out of ten fertilized eggs will not implant in the uterine wall and get sloughed 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 just understanding that like taking birth control actually reduces the risk of that taking oral hormonal 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 if they actually believed that it started at conception oh fuck and and of course like later on and this is maybe a little tmi 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 I was in believing these things like I was like yeah 12 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 a mix of like, when I was 17 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 can I do? Okay, but you have to tell, you have to like give a little more detail on why. Yeah, okay. So 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. 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 preeclampsia and like could not move and was like a planet and it would just happen i like literally like i 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 i i was like everybody's gonna assume you mean size that is not what you mean no gravity yeah i mean gravity, like she was just in her chair. That definitely isn't uncommon for anyone in the quiverful type community at all. Yeah, it's pretty par for the course. Like that's what the job of the eldest daughter is. At least that's what my parents believed, which is why they did it every single time, every like 18 months for a decade straight.

And I got burnt the fuck out because it started when I was eight and ended when I ran away. 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 15, 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 shit. And so yeah, so when I was 13, let's graduate you. Exactly. And they were like, and now like after I was 15, like when I turned 16, 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. Also like one less 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 test they were like well like this wasn't the answer they gave me. They were like, we have theological problems with your partner's family. And that's why we're 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, hmm, this feels like pregnancy. And yeah, I looked up like what it took to become sterilized. And I found Scarleteen and I read about birth control and I read about how it works. And I realized that I'd been lied to. It doesn't abort babies. It like, like you said, Eve, it's honestly better because then you're not like accidentally

aborting by having your period, which is a whole fucking thing. 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 ask 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'd 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'd been taught 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. I became pro-choice gradually over time instead of it just being one kind of revelation. It was like, oh, this is okay for me, but am I sure? Is it? Is it in a lot of internal fighting?

I think all of this can be really hard to understand if you did not grow up inside. If you grew up in a liberal, democratic area and you didn't go to church, all this probably sounds very wacky. Why couldn't you just not do that? It's very hard to really grasp if you didn't grow up because even for me,

by the time I was 14 and 15, I was like, yeah, birth control is fine. Contraceptives should be free for people. All these other things. But we still shouldn't actually do abortions. We could do all these other things to limit abortions. So you can get super far into that way.

Because you get ingrained with this. Even saying no abortions in the case of incest or rape. Because the phrase that was repeated to me as a kid is like why would you punish the child for the sins of the father? Oh, yeah. That isn't fair. Yeah, that's the thing that's sad. Yeah. So like all of these things get ingrained in you so much.

You can like change all of these strings in your brain to like try to have it make sense still you can be like no i i still want all these other things free i want all these other preventative 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 on 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 yeah this is not a theoretical question anymore this was a like we're burnt the fuck out and like we do not want to get stuck in the same path that our mothers were in. What the fuck do we do?

I had in-laws and my ex-communicated parents who wanted grandchildren. And I was like, I told people like, give me 10 years because I'm tired. And then the ninth year I had a histo. 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 bodily autonomy aspects was coincidence that the time that i've really started to like understand the more science aspects of it and understand the bodily autonomy aspects was also around the time i was starting to have sex with with with people like 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 her cat, which it 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 can make things work if you were a mom. I think I could love you if you were a mom. And I kind of looked at him and I was like, what the fuck? Did you just really fucking say that? we could make things work if you were a mom i think i could love you if you were 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 why 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 i think the last thing that we could maybe touch on is the 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. This is kind of like a wet dream for a lot of young males who grew up in this thought process. 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 a spin-off of Fireproof inspired by this current turn of events? Absolutely. No, like, I like really like I'm sure I'm sure they'll be like churches making their own like web series that are like, you know, like 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.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

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Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's

head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From

thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I'm thinking about like there's this, I'm blanking on the name of it but this movement in florida in operation rescue no no i'm thinking no that that's a whole other thing i'm thinking about the church group that cj mahaney 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 sin 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 like pattern simple pattern in your life and you need to like 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 ratting each other out was like rewarded if you were like kissing your boyfriend and not telling your parents you would get ratted out and that would be rewarded so like all of

these things like this is just like we're just involving the police now yeah and you 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 enacted by the state. Which is kind of the wet dream of a lot of these groups, is that being able to, like, you know, tie this type of evangelical Christianity to the state. This is kind of their end goal. 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 um yay theonomy and yeah i mean i guess the one thing i do want to mention is that uh there's a a great tiktok video that came out a few days ago about the reporting website where you can whistleblow abortion people. There's this video this person made about they got a script for iPhones.

They can flood, you can flood the tip line with fake information. Love it. So that is great. Vice has an article about it. You can just look up TikTok abortion whistleblower. You can get all the info on that. Can I just add a big footnote to this entire conversation?

Yes. And that is that just keep this in mind as you are thinking about this question and this issue. This is the preview for how trans rights are going to be handled. Yep. Because bodily autonomy for abortion and hormonal birth control is the same situation as bodily autonomy to create your gender through hormonal injections or whatever. Like, same story.

It is not going gonna end here no their their goal is to have this whole whistleblower bounty hunter thing be extended to anyone performing um anyone performing any type of reproductive care like 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 happen in in the in the church all the time it's like you know someone getting reported for having you know not not performing their their prescribed gender correctly yeah this gets talked about all the time and this is going to be the next step for them um you know the abortion thing is going to is going to spread to other states absolutely but the next thing they're going to go after is trans rights and go after this type thing.

Then they're going to go after gay things in general. And it doesn't stop here. You're not safe just because you are not— This is the trial run. Yeah. Just because you weren't born with a uterus doesn't mean you're not safe from this. This is going to extend out to many other facets yeah and and i think you know and the real danger here and i think this is one of the other things we need to talk about is that like the left particularly democratic party is organizing

this has been just terrible and it doesn't exist this is true yeah this is true the left literally does not exist stay tuned for my op-ed about this. For the Democratic Party, abortion is just a fundraising thing. They don't care. They're not doing anything. And the broader left is being just absolutely blown out of the water by the organizations that happened here. Even in terms of

I definitely want everyone else here to talk more about this because I have way less knowledge about this. These guys did terrorism. did like terrorism like they were they've they've murdered people they bombed clinics like they like they they did the whole range of sort of like everything from sort of electoralism to like what their sort of twisted version of prefigurative politics where you know you you create your own sort of like right-wing like evangelical households right they don't model the new side they did everything they did electoralism they did yeah um like they did the

demonstrations they did they yeah you know they killed people like they they did everything and 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 rewire news and i guess it should be coming out tuesday but um yeah it's basically like the left as soon as they achieve a small victory stops organizing and the right is always thinking 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 and 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 daily practice.

And we are not training our teens to be involved in that like they are um and 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'm so livid because what i learned after being elected is that there is no organizing structure at all like i went to california campus camp in 2019 and if you're in california and you go to a community college and you haven't grown up being an organizer i definitely recommend you didn't do team pact yeah if you didn't do team pact go to campus camp um but i was there and they're talking about how paul wellstone was this leftist organizer in like i don't know the

80s 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 effective. I'm like, yeah, no shit. That's how the Republicans win everything. We don't have that. There is no organization in the Democratic Party that is ongoing around advocating for the convention to do the fucking platform. And there is nothing else. There's no communication. There's no big asterisks.

Except for in queer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Organizing gets this and gets this right. But as soon as you get to like middle class, white, democratic, moderate organizing, it doesn't exist. Yeah, no, I am. I'm literally only talking

about the democratic party itself like capital d democratic capital d democratic party the institution queer organizers have been doing this like a lot of grassroots leftist organizations have been doing this labor organizers have been doing 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 shit done. But the Democratic Party itself, as an institution, does not have this, does not support this, actively 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 shit because there is just like we get blocked at every turn i think i think i think part of the problem is because of the rights connection to apocalyptic um predictions via Christianity. Apocalyptic thinking, yeah.

The right and even the conservative establishment, they have a goal in mind. They have an end goal of how they want to see the world. The Democrats don't have that. Even large swaths of the left don't have that. You can't fight without an imagination. We just want the world

to be kind of a little bit better slowly. The right has an actual view. They have an end point, which is why they always have a next thing planned. They're never satisfied with any of their victories. They're always on to 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 a retreat and do a vision board? That's not what I'm saying. Honestly, though, it would help i 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 a base it has it has a thing i try to do and like you know it has it has a set of goals that it's trying to enact the democratic party is not a political party. The Democratic Party is basically a giant engine for – so the right is powered by a combination of an enormous amount of money by their sort of capitalist backers. And you get all this AstroTurf stuff from the Kochs and from sort of their balltons and their networks. And then 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 the the party is there to enact you know the different facts different visions the party's there to

enact their visions right the democratic party is there to they they're like there's you have the equivalence of the sort of left-wing social movements and the democratic party is there to destroy them yes 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 this this creates a symmetry but we're seeing this on abortion right where you know you you have you have the republican party which is you know fanatically dedicated to to do this issue to winning here and you have the the democratic party who's like their their their their job is to turn like people people's concern over abortion into inaction and fundraising and that fundraising doesn't go doesn't fundraising doesn't go to you know keeping abortion legal like

that fundraising goes to just get getting Party people in power, keeping their consultants paid, and keeping their sort of – Keeping seats. Yeah, keeping their corporate backers happy. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It just it exists to fundraise for elections for people with the D beside their name who don't challenge things, who don't actually want to get shit done. And to just like, like, as soon as they get power, they sit back and are like, oh, cool, we won. And and then they're like, 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 a resolution that says, let's not take any fossil fuel money. This actually happened. We passed a resolution said, let's not take any fossil fuel money.

The Democratic Party chair still accepts fossil fuel money, brought it up at the E4 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 who have 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 bylaws of the Democratic Party are written to give like an outrageous amount of power to the people who are already elected.

Like Nancy Pelosi has like 30 plus votes in the Democratic Party 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 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. 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 ponder or achieve. And this one's tough because it's really hard. Well, like wrapping up all of these types of things around like abortion and the rise of the religious right, what can regular people do? There are groups doing this work already. Do not try to reinvent the wheel. Get involved with your local mutual aid 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. Show up to meetings. Figure out who's running for city council, figure out where the budget's 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 simple. You get coffee with your city councilor. That's what their job is, is to meet with you. So do a virtual coffee. You're 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 to get coffee like that you know how 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 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 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 kitchentablecult.com. We're on

Twitter at kitchencultpod. My handle is bluepupboy but with an I instead of a Y at the end. And I'm Eve Ettinger on Twitter and I'm verified apparently. Verified. I'm real.

Good job. And the only one. yeah yeah and we're we're working on a couple big projects um stay tuned fun stuff ahead thank you so much for coming on to talk about i think the religious right abortion and all these kind of interconnected issues because they they really are interconnected um and yeah we do to we can definitely learn how to organize a whole lot better and learn learn from how the right's 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 at happen here podoneMedia. You can follow me on Twitter at HungryBowTie. And Chris, I know you have a Twitter. Yeah, I'm ItMeCHR3 on Twitter,

or the Ice Wants to Be Destroyed guy. Yeah, CoolZone also has a Twitter. That's at CoolZoneMedia. Great. See everyone again. We'll talk more about these issues in the next few days and weeks. But that's all for today. Goodbye. Bye. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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