Planned Parenthood protestors provoke perverse ponderings

I have been volunteering as an escort at Planned Parenthood in my midwestern town. My job is to stand in the parking lot and walk over to cars as they drive in, walk up to the windows, and warn the people in the cars that there are protestors and that they shouldn't listen to what they are shouting. Then I try to talk over the protestors' shouts as I walk the people into the building--I inquire where they are coming from, whether they are going to have lunch in town, tell them I really like their hair, etc.

There are two groups of protestors: the ones who just stand there silently and pray, and the ones who shout and carry signs. Here's a sampling of their comments.

To the women:
"Don't kill your son or daughter! You'll just be the parent of a dead child!"
"We can offer you real help! We have someone who will adopt your baby!"
"They are profiting off the blood of innocents!" (This one makes me lol, because fundies think PP is some moneymaking scam.)

To the men:
"It's your job to protect her! Be a man and stand up for your child!" (Problematic in so many patriarchal ways.)

To me and my colleagues:
"I hope you can't sleep when you lie down on your pillow tonight because of all the innocent children you've led to their deaths!"
"You're no different than Hitler!" (Of course they have to follow Godwin's rule. They are basically the original trolls.)

PP's official policy is to not engage them, so I restrain myself while I'm wearing my official vest. But gosh, I really wish I could talk to them. It's fun to give fundies a taste of their own medicine and respond to them in ways that throw them off their game.

Here's some of the things I would say.

"Hi, how are you this morning?" *offers to shake hands "I'm Apodosis. What's your name? Good to see you again today. It's nice to have an opportunity to help others, and I wouldn't have that without you."

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Don't you think there are better ways you could show Christ's love than yelling at people? Why don't you go feed the homeless or something?"

(To the woman with the 'I regret my abortion' sign) "Would you like to tell me about it? How long ago? Under what circumstances? It seems like you are still carrying around a lot of baggage from that. Have you seen a therapist?"

"What church do y'all go to? I go to the UCC church on the east side of town. Do you guys have a mailing list or something? How do you always arrange to be here? Do you carpool?"

*raising my hands in prayer "Lord, bless us all here today. Grant us the wisdom to understand the reasons behind other people's choices, even if we do not agree. Grant us the faith to trust women's ability to make the most ethical decision available in a set of bad options. Grant that we may abandon our attempts to control others' bodies and instead turn our wills towards freeing ourselves from the blindness of our privilege. Grant us the compassion to pity all your children, not just the ones who die before they are born. In Your name, Amen."

Fantasy books and fundamentalism

Libby Anne's post on fantasy books and fundamentalism today got me thinking. Responding to a reader question about why fundamentalists love Narnia and Lord of the Rings, but hate Harry Potter, she argues that there really is no internally consistent reason for it.

I've been wondering about this too. There was a fundie family at my parents' church growing up who had the same restrictions--Harry Potter evil, LOTR good. I enjoyed bringing my HP to church to torment them.

Just sitting here pondering, I wonder if it could have something to do with semantics and gender--"witch" vs. "wizard" definitely have different connotations. [Note: I'm leaving out more contemporary deconstructions of magic, as in SF/F mid-century and all its descendants.]

"Witches", in the common understanding, are evil. They worship the devil in medieval Christian lore, and more than 40,000 people (men and women) were executed as witches between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. (Incidentally, I wonder how modern-day fundamentalists view these events.) In popular culture, witches are evil too. The Wicked Witch of the West, Baba Yaga, Morgan le Fay; witches in fairy stories like Hansel and Gretl and Rapunzel, in Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. My mom didn't become a Christian until she was in her teens, but she is afraid of witches and dark magic. She told me as a kid that I should stay away from Ouija boards and Wicca because they were filled with forces of evil, and I was afraid to watch Buffy when it was on TV. Note how most of these examples associate witches with femininity.

"Wizards", on the other hand, have a completely different connotation in popular culture. They are wise old men, gifted in alchemy, healing, and lore, like Nicolas Flamel, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. There is Merlin, generally viewed as a hero of the King Arthur stories, and definitely a Good Guy in Disney's A Sword in the Stone. There's Prospero, a complicated protagonist but a protagonist nonetheless. The Wizard of Oz, again, not evil, just weak. Of course there's some bad ones, like Aleister Crowley, but in general wizarding is something you learn to do, a tool you can use for good or evil, rather than something you are. And, the word "wizard" is uniquely used for men.

And then we have the fantasy stories we're talking about here. The only witch in LOTR is the Witch-King of Angmar, the king of the Nazgul (whose masculinity, interestingly, has to be specified with the "-king" modifier). The White Witch and the Emerald Witch in Narnia, both female, are evil. On the other hand, Coriakin and other (male) wizards like Ramandu in Narnia are Good Guys (although Lewis takes pains only to refer to them as "magicians"). Andrew Ketterley, the Magician of The Magician's Nephew, is a villain, although not the major one. LOTR's wizards Gandalf and Radagast the Brown are, of course, heroes, and Saruman was a good wizard until he was led astray. Again we have witches/women=bad, wizards/men=good (mostly).

Now let us turn to Harry Potter. In Harry Potter, "witch" and "wizard" are just synonyms for "female magical person" and "male magical person". Both witches and wizards can be good or evil or just complicatedly human, and it has nothing to do with their gender. The wizarding world is pretty good on gender equality as well. The workforce, Hogwarts' students and staff, the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army--all seem pretty evenly split between men and women. We have strong herione witches and strong hero wizards, and (one?) evil witch and a bunch of evil wizards. In other words, Harry Potter upends the traditional conception of magic--that is, power--as evil when wielded by women and good when wielded by men. And I can totally understand why fundies would be scared of that.