Nancy Pelosi Plays God: To Be Against Abortion Is “Sinful”
[guest post by Dana]
It was at the Women’s Health Day of Action and Women’s Equality Day conference when she proclaimed that it’s “sinful” to be against abortion:
“The fact that this is such an assault on women of color and women [in] lower income families is just sinful. It’s sinful. It’s wrong that they would be able to say to women what they think women should be doing with their lives and their bodies. But it’s sinful, the injustice of it all,” Pelosi said August 26 at the Roundtable on Women’s Reproductive Health in San Francisco.
The California representative, who is a Catholic, then claimed that “extreme MAGA Republicans” are harming women by restricting abortion.
“We take pride in California’s leadership on reproductive health,” Pelosi said. “A beacon of hope and refuge in a time of widespread fear. Emboldened by the radical Supreme Court, extreme MAGA Republicans are inflicting unimaginable pain on women and their families.”
Nice spiel of condescension toward women of color you’ve got going on there, Nancy. This brown anti-MAGA-not-a-Republican woman resents a lily-white woman assuming the position of God and telling me what’s what like I can’t figure it out for myself. As if my views would automatically line up with hers because she knows best. Wake up, girl, it’s 2022!
I realize that, in the circle game of abortion, my views are not necessarily your views, and your views are not Nancy Pelosi’s views, and Nancy Pelosi’s views are not my views, but I would guess that a great number of us have some overlap. When Pelosi makes a blanket judgment that it’s “sinful” to be against abortion, she arrogantly dismisses out of hand that for many, faith factors heavily into the formation of views on abortion. And clearly, faith compels millions of Americans to hold a sinful! pro-life position. This is ironic, of course, given that Pelosi’s own faith as a self-identified Catholic seemingly doesn’t factor into her abortion views one bit. Moreover, I don’t believe that abortion is the black-and-white-binary-you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us issue that she presents. Life is more nuanced than that. People are more complicated than that. And life gets messy. At times, very messy. So consider me sinful in Pelosi’s judgy eyes: I want limits on abortion yet support exceptions for rape and incest, and if the mother’s life is in danger, or if it is known that the baby has died in uteror or will be stillborn. But if Pelosi wants to act like the 2020 Republicans screaming that it’s a binary choice and hold a similarly narrow-minded and politically cynical view (about human worth), then I happily remain a sinner. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily slough off the very complicated issues surrounding abortion, adopt her blinkered view of life and dismiss out of hand the inherent worth of a living soul in the womb because I know what it would cost me to do so.
Anyway, that wasn’t the biggest line of bullshit Pelosi spewed at the conference:
And I’ll just say this: yesterday, I was at something in Los Angeles and a mom told me that – listening to all of this going on – her three-year-old daughter – the mother said something about, one time, she would go to bed, and she said, ‘Mom, nobody should tell girls what to do with their bodies.’
[Laughter]
Three years old. So it’s coming through. It’s coming through. A whole other generation.
Thus confirming that this god, anyway, has feet of clay.
–Dana
A three-year-old…
When you know it’s time to re-calibrate your political rhetoric.
Dana (1225fc) — 9/1/2022 @ 11:19 amSince she’s a disciple of Moloch I’m not surprised.
NJRob (4f3cc4) — 9/1/2022 @ 11:48 amA thirst for blood.
Colonel Haiku (8049f2) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:11 pmShe’s a politician. One of the best ever. She knew to whom she was talking and what they wanted to hear.
In her personal life, she is more conservative than … well, you know who they are. She has been married to the same man for 59 years. They have raised five children and have nine grandchildren.
Her local Archbishop barred her from Communion unless she repudiated her abortion views, but forty days later she received Communion from the Pope. So I’ll just leave that as something that’s between themselves.
Personally, I consider her a feminist icon and I wish there were more like her. Her stance on abortion considered. It is not unusual for leaders to hold themselves to a higher standard that they impose on their followers.
nk (193dbf) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:20 pm“Playing god” – by voicing her opinion.
Compare with abruptly decreeing from on high that the women can’t be trusted to correctly manage their own bodies. Not playing god at all!
Or injecting yourself in referendum decisions to derail a democratically organized question on the status of abortion – something these people have been claiming to want all along. That is, until they noticed that they will lose that way, so now they’re going just as authoritarian as Trump and DeSantis and the rest are.
When conservatives are offered a choice between democracy or their own pet obsessions, democracy always loses. The rest is just interparty fighting over who gets to play god.
john (cd2753) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:20 pmPlaying God by telling others that being pro-life is “sinful”.
Dana (1225fc) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:37 pm“California is seeking to become a sanctuary state for children seeking dangerous hormone treatments and body mutilation from red states that ban these procedures for kids. Without any debate, the Assembly passed a bill (48-16) that would offer legal protection to parents of transgender children from other states who risk having their kids taken away or facing criminal charges.”
When they aren’t killing the children they’re grooming or providing assistance to those who do.
Colonel Haiku (8049f2) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:44 pmthe three-year-old bullcrap is revealing though
if our pre-schoolers aren’t indoctrinated in feminist, trans, queer lingo is it from lack of intent?
JF (900e01) — 9/1/2022 @ 12:49 pmNk,
Where did the Pope provide communion to the abortion worshipper? I see she took advantage of an open communion, not one from the Pope.
NJRob (4f3cc4) — 9/1/2022 @ 2:04 pmAnd there are people here who accommodate Pelosi and other such politicians by hiding behind “federalism” to avoid enacting a federal ban.
Rip Murdock (d2a2a8) — 9/1/2022 @ 2:08 pmNow that she is a theologian, I hope Pelosi will clarify her position further, and tell us whether it is a mortal sin, or a venial sin. (Perhaps Bill Clinton’s public position years ago, hoping that abortion would be “rare”, would be the venial version of the sin.)
Speaker Pelosi could have made her argument — if she has one — in a more tolerant way.
(I’ve heard of “cafeteria” Catholics, of course, Catholics who take the parts of their church’s teaching that they like, and skip the ones they don’t. But this from Pelosi goes beyond that, and for the moment, I can’t think of an appropriate metaphor.)
Jim Miller (85fd03) — 9/1/2022 @ 2:42 pmI don’t necessarily disagree with your assessment of Pelosi, nk, and I would say that she will stand out as one of our country’s most effective modern politicians. She is indeed a feminist icon too. I bristle, however, when she is loyal to her politics to the point of condescending to others in such an imperious manner. As much as Dems and Reps want to believe that blacks and browns are monolithic voting blocs, they aren’t. And it’s sloppy and lazy to presume they are. Especially over something as fraught with emotion as abortion.
Dana (1225fc) — 9/1/2022 @ 2:55 pmSo forcing a woman to give birth to fetus with no head in lousiana is not a sin?
asset (f3d3dc) — 9/1/2022 @ 4:55 pmI’m not a Pelosi expert by any means, but I will say that my experience with her generation of Catholic women (and lord knows there are more than enough of them on my mom’s side, what with my grandfather’s nine siblings) is that they tend to use “a sin” or “sinful” as a synonym for bad, rather than it’s actual religious meaning. My mother does it all the time with things like interior decorating or bad fashion.
Nic (896fdf) — 9/1/2022 @ 6:14 pmAll,
I just re-read my post and realized I posted an incomplete list of my exceptions to abortion and have amended it: I want limits on abortion yet support exceptions for rape and incest, and if the mother’s life is in danger, or if it is known that the baby has died in utero or will be stillborn.
My apologies.
Dana (1225fc) — 9/1/2022 @ 6:30 pmor if it is known that the baby has died in utero or will be stillborn.
That is not an “abortion.” The abortion has already happened. Miscarriage, fetal death, whatever you want to call it, it’s not an abortion at that point.
It MAY have been an abortion via drugs, but denying subsequent medical care is a violation of actual due process. If there’s a law criminalizing the act of medical abortions, that can be handled later, like maybe when you have some proof.
Texas seems to have the idea that they will make medical abortions less frequent by making it difficult to get medical treatment for a miscarriage. I wonder if federal civil rights laws might have something to say about that.
Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 9/1/2022 @ 6:41 pm“extreme MAGA Republicans”
Keep track of this. One of the ways you kill a democracy is by making political ideas (and then parties) illegal. As much as I despise Trump, I worry that illiberal politicians will use him and this temporary idiocy as cover for something permanent.
And Trump is quite capable of leaning in.
Kevin M (eeb9e9) — 9/1/2022 @ 6:45 pm@15 unfortunetly what we want is not the issue. The state’s gerrymandered legislature will decide. Republicans have just stoped a vote of the people in michigan on abortion.
asset (0ef0ee) — 9/2/2022 @ 1:46 amThe issue in Michigan is typographical errors (in formatting – words were run together).
That’ not the way to treat initiatives.
Sammy Finkelman (1d215a) — 9/2/2022 @ 1:55 pm