Steinem’s not so gloria-us moment
How frightened has the abortion movement become from the recent light shown on states passing laws allowing the killing of fetuses just before birth and determining what to do with a child born after a botched abortion?
Left-wing feminist Gloria Steinem showed just how frightened last week when she compared members of the pro-life movement to German Nazis because their leader, Adolf Hitler, opposed abortion for certain ethnic groups.
“On a more serious note, to put it mildly,” she said on NBC’s ‘Today,” “is why Hitler was actually elected, and he was elected and he campaigned against abortion. I mean, that was – he padlocked the family planning clinics. OK, so that is still relevant in the terms of the right wing.”
Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza quickly responded to the 84-year-old Steinem’s odd statement.
“Hitler was vehemently anti-abortion for Nordic Germans,” he tweeted, “and vehemently pro-abortion for the so-called inferior races. This can hardly be called a pro-life position.”
A recent Marist poll showed the effects of the late-term abortion controversy. In a big shift, 47 percent of Americans now identify themselves are pro-choice and 47 percent identify themselves as pro-life.
Didn’t cotton to cotton remark
The Northams of Virginia can’t seem to get a break. First it was Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s devastating remarks about determining what to do with babies born alive after a botched abortion, then the exposition of his yearbook photo (in which apparently he either wore a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood or black face). Now it’s his wife handing raw cotton to a black middle-school child and asking her to imagine being a slave.
The latest of the incidents occurred last week, with only two more days of Black History Month to go.
Pam Northam, a former middle school teacher, was providing a tour of the governor’s mansion, built with slave labor in 1813, and took a group of some 20 children into an adjacent cottage that once served as a kitchen. At one point, she handed cotton to nearby children so they could feel its sharp stems and leaves and asked them if they could imagine what it would have been like to pick cotton all day.
The mother of one of the few black children present was furious.
“I cannot for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American [students, though she apparently didn’t] for this – or – why she would ask them such an insensitive question,” Leah Dozier Walker wrote.
Though we’re sure Northam didn’t intend harm, Virginia media pounced and chalked up the incident to racial insensitivity.
Red-hat hate crime
Attacks on individuals wearing red, “Make America Great Again” hats are becoming all too commonplace. One of the most recent was the assault on an 81-year-old New Jersey man who’d just finished buying groceries.
The man was leaving a ShopRite in Franklin Township in Somerset County when 19-year-old Ryan M. Salvagno confronted him and began to argue with him. Following what police said was a “brief verbal confrontation,” the elderly man tried to walk away. “As the victim turned to walk away, defendant Salvagno was able to grab the victim’s hat, and the two struggled for sole possession of the hat. Salvago then took the victim by the arm and threw him to the ground, tipping over the victim’s cart of groceries and ultimately throwing the hat to the side.”
Fortunately, the victim only suffered minor injuries, but Salvagno was arrested and charged with assault and harassment. He will be arraigned later this month.
Fathers are controversial?
Former President Barack Obama had a line or two about the need for black culture to change at a town hall recently, and that didn’t sit well with human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell, who wrote an opinion piece about it in The New York Times.
“If you are really confident about your financial situation,” she quoted Obama as saying, “you are probably not going to be wearing an eight-pound chain around your neck.
“Because you know,” he said, “‘Oh, I got a bank account.’ I don’t have to show you how much I got. I feel good.”
Obama was trying to send a message, but Purnell said “scolding” is part of “problematic practices, like calling out black children for having ghetto names or wearing Air Jordans. Such remarks by Mr. Obama reflect his administration’s failure to tackle the systemic inequality that shapes black people’s lives in America.”
“America’s Got Talent” host and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Terry Crews didn’t think much of the criticism and tweeted, “If a successful black man can’t advise the black male youth of the next generation, who will? THE STREET. That’s who.”
He wasn’t done, adding more fighting words to left-wing thinkers – that “men need to hold other men accountable,” that “fathers are just as necessary as mothers” and that he was “calling on black men who are AWOL (absent without leave) to actually be the fathers those fatherless boys need.”
Time will tell if once such mainstream advice finds him shunned in Hollywood.