DON’T GET HER STARTED... ON MOGG’S MORAL MARCH
Jacob Rees-mogg – tipped as next leader of the Conservative Party – last Wednesday told Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan of GMB that he was against gay marriage and abortion. When I heard this, I thought the following things…
Trump, Boris, now Rees-mogg – never trust the ones that look like cartoon characters, or make the funniest memes. They rise high on hilarious hair and catchphrases, then make free with cruelty and abused power.
At least he’s out and proud with his gay/woman-oppressing BS. I’d take an out-and-out ‘abortion is wrong’ over those insisting they merely seek to reduce the time limit (you know: ‘for the good of women’). Once your political enemy has identified himself clearly… Well. Then you really know who not to vote for.
Why are abortion and marriage rights routinely conflated in political debate? They’re very different issues. How interesting that Rees-mogg hedged his language on gay rights, refusing to condemn gay sex as a sin, just saying he ‘supports the teaching of the Catholic church’, let ‘he who is without sin cast the first stone’, et cetera… Only to get stuck into abortion rights with rabid relish. Rees-mogg is happy to cast all the stones at women who want abortions. ‘I am completely against abortion,’ he said. ‘In cases of rape and incest?’ asked Piers Morgan. ‘I’m afraid I am… Abortion is morally indefensible.’
That is one way of looking at abortion. Me? I tend to look at it as the cornerstone of women’s rights, by which I mean, the cornerstone of human rights; because women are – in fact – human, and to deny us this particular power over our reproductive lives is to reduce us to baby-making machines who should stop worrying our pretty little heads about owt but babies, and go away and hide our pointless, failed bodies if we find ourselves infertile/once our baby-makin’ years are done.
Piers Morgan wrapped up by asking Rees-mogg if he’d oppose a woman, pregnant after being raped by a family member, from terminating. Rees-mogg said he would. In Morgan’s position, I would have asked if JR-M would prevent a woman he himself had made unhappily pregnant from having an abortion. Anti-choice men loathe that sort of thing. It’s so much easier to talk about what women mustn’t do with their bodies, when you don’t also have to talk about what you’re doing with your penis.
To conclude: Jacob Rees-mogg is not a fun person on whom to have a bizarro crush any more; and we gotta hang on tight to our abortion rights. There are people who really want to take them away.