Dawn Eden sure is fascinated with Amanda, and writes about her nearly every day. I would ignore Dawn, except she’s also so incapable of right thinking that she accidentally exposes the true psychology of anti-choice religious wingnuts. So damning is her evidence of her own cause that I can’t help but revel in it.
Take today’s gaffe, for example, in which she accuses Amanda of being pro-choice because she doesn’t feel loved:
I haven’t myself quite figured out why a woman would use the parasite analogy, but I have an idea that it begins with the woman’s view of her own birth. A woman who feels unloved is going to see herself as a parasite upon her own parents, spouse, or lover. In viewing the child gestating within her as a parasite, she is extending her own feeling of worthlessness and alienation to her baby. By exterminating the child, she is insuring that it will never be the burden upon others that she believes she herself was or is to those close to her.
That’s the reason for the enduring appeal of Margaret Sanger’s slogan “every child a wanted child.” Those who support the abortion of “unwanted” babies are responding to their own trauma of feeling unloved — and perhaps, without realizing it, exacting revenge upon the people who didn’t want them.
There you have it. By the end, Dawn Eden accuses everyone who supports the right to choose of being totally unloved and wanting to take revenge on little babies to relieve the anxiety.
Now, I know Dawn ran into the arms of Catholicism and not-fucking because those pretty boy rock musicians she used to drool over wouldn’t settle down and make an honest woman out of her, and she’s never gotten over it. I know she makes irrational choices because she’s fighting the wrong battles in her own life. But look at how she ascribes to all of us a similar line of faulty logic, as though she can’t imagine how a person could think outside of her own interests or needs or neuroses and just take an intelligent stand on a rights issue that affects millions and millions of women.
Dawn has laid bare the inability of the self-absorbed wingnut to even conceive of how you’d develop a rationale for your argument outside of your own personal bullshit. The only person to do it better is Senator/psychopath Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, who I’ve linked to before but want to share again:
On the death penalty, he said: “I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”
He said he performed two abortions to save the lives of mothers who had congenital heart disease, but opposes the procedure in cases of rape.
“Under the mores we live under today, my lineage wouldn’t exist,” Coburn said, explaining that his great-grandmother was raped by a territorial sheriff.
Coburn and Eden make shockingly offensive, simple-minded statements because they genuinely can’t understand how our political philosophy and personal life choices don’t come from an entirely self-absorbed point of view.
Coburn asserts that the notion _he specifically_ wouldn’t exist is on its face cause to reject choice even in the face of rape. In a similar state of self-absorbtion, Dawn tries to feel around in the dark for what makes pro-choicers tick, but all she can find are the prickly edges of her own shortcomings. She naturally assumes we all makes our decisions and fight for our causes because we’re victims of love-trauma, which she has repeatedly expressed to be her own issue:
I wasn’t like that. If I had sex with a man, even a one-night stand, I always risked attaching to him to the point that I would pine for him.
I tried different tactics, like the hippie-type bonding, where my sex partner and I would act kind and loving to one another, saying we’d always be friends no matter what physically “happened” between us. It didn’t work; he’d eventually move on to the next “buddy” (or “new special friend,” to use Tony Hendra’s wonderful term from “This Is Spinal Tap”) and I would feel empty.
[...]
Growing into an old spinster used to indeed be my greatest fear. I used to believe that, if I knew that I would never get married, I would kill myself. This was before I had knowledge of Christ, when I suffered from depression and believed that if God did exist, He didn’t care about me.
Dawn hated herself so much the thought of life without marriage [i.e. life left to her own devices] would be bad enough to kill herself. That’s downright scary, and if I had known Dawn at that time, I would’ve tried to get her to seek help. Instead of learning to love herself, though, she invented fake external JesusLove to fill her heart-hole. [I think Bluey might have a thing or two to say about heart-holes, don't you?]
This isn’t really speculation or divination on my part — it’s all right there in Dawn’s own writing. It doesn’t shock me, then, that she assumes we all feel unloved, too. Can you imagine the anger and resentment she would feel if she knew that not only are many of us capable of liking what we see in the mirror, but we care deeply about the rights and protection of other people without basing that on anything other than our own humanism?
Dawn subscribes to the myth that choice has anything to do with babies. If only she could appreciate that small section of society to which she belongs that’s currently described by the slang-term “women,” maybe she’d put that patented wingnut predilection for self-absorbtion to good use.
But… if your mom had an abortion you wouldn’t have been BORN! And then how much would you like abortion?
Raving “Atheist”? Is that you?
As an adoptee born to two public-college students a little less than two years after Roe vs. Wade, I’m pretty much right smack dab in the middle of the “aren’t you glad you weren’t aborted” crowd’s target market. I really enjoy seeing them try to comprehend the fact that it’s not really possible to imagine regretting being aborted…that they’re just imagining that it freaks them out.
I should clarify that the college students in question were my sperm-and-egg-donors, not my adopted parents.
I wasn’t aborted, but I was born in a trash can. In retrospect, I wish my parents hadn’t done that, but hey, it worked out.
This was before I had knowledge of Christ, when I suffered from depression and believed that if God did exist, He didn’t care about me.
I always think statements like this are just the most crazily ridiculous form of narcissism, but you hear it from people all the time, saying that god doesn’t care about them, god has abandoned them, etc. etc., as if, provided there is a god or whatever sort of higher being, YOU PERSONALLy are so important to it that it is responsible for making sure that some rockstar you’re fucking wants to settle down and marry you and if not, you actually have the audacity to feel scorned by that god!
my jury’s still out on the whole existence-of-a-higher-being thing, but I’ve always just sort of assumed, if there is a god, he created the world and then let people go. its called free-will. I believe its even taught, explicitly, in wingnuts precious bible.
god is not your personal dating service and/or pimp, dawn eden.
god is not your personal dating service and/or pimp, dawn eden.
That is the funniest thing I’ve read in days.
This is the part that gets me every time someone links to this particular Dawn Eden post:
I really want to know how she would be living her life differently if she knew she would never get married. It’s not sex, so what is it? It sounds sad to me, like she’s not just being the person she wants to be or living the life she wants to live.
Personally, I think my mother would have been much better off if she (young and Catholic) had aborted me and got on with her life.
That doesn’t mean I hate myself; it simply means I realise that THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO ME TO HAVE BEEN WORRIED about it.
Each of us represents the “death” of at least 12 potential people – those that didn’t get conceived while your mother was pregnant and breast-fed you. I fail to see the same people wailing about fetuses equally bemoaning these “aborted” brothers and sisters.
Except for the Raving “Atheist” who presumably believes that a matched set of 46 chromosomes is both necessary and sufficient for full person-hood.
Those who support the abortion of “unwanted” babies are responding to their own trauma of feeling unloved — and perhaps, without realizing it, exacting revenge upon the people who didn’t want them.
No one could possibly love Amanda like Dawn does. How touching.
If I am to be single for life, I wish I could know it now. It would be wonderful to be able to plan out the rest of my life without having to leave a husband-sized gap just in case.
And — here’s the thing — if I weren’t getting married, I would still be chaste.
It’s who I am.
Jesus, I feel sorry for this chick. I’d marry her myself if I didn’t think she’d expect me to sleep with her once in a while.
Raging Red, Dawn Eden is very sad indeed. Having been hurt by life and by her own unrealistic expectations, she seems to be retreating further from it all the time, and pouring out her pain in the form of abuse heaped on people like Amanda who insist on going out and living the best way they know how.
Isn’t there something in the DSM about believing that God has abandoned you?
[...] I love Rawls for all kinds of reasons, one of the most prominent being his ability to capture the essence of liberal thinking as the opposite of the egocentric limitations faced by aggro wingnuts we discussed yesterday. [...]
Take it from someone who has gestated a couple of children.
Most definitely a parasite.
btw, if you had to live the rest of your life alone with Dawn Eden, wouldn’t YOU want to kill yourself?
Yanno, if my dad had stayed in the Navy like he wanted to and not been guilt-tripped into coming home to work in the family business because his brother couldn’t handle working with my grandfather, I wouldn’t have been born, either. Because my parents would never have met.
Life is a series of accidents.
Dawn sed:
And — here’s the thing — if I weren’t getting married, I would still be chaste.
Oh, you’d be chased, all right. By a pack of ugly horny guys from the church picnic.
And if not for WWII, my grandparents would never have met and I would have never been born. But that doesn’t mean that I should be grateful for Hitler.
Heh, yeah, mine’s like Jill’s. My grandfather was slated to be part of the almost-certainly-extremely-bloody land invasion of Japan. Said land invasion, of course, was obviated by Japan’s unconditional surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki got nuked. So I probably owe my existence to the only offensive use of nuclear weapons ever. It sort of amuses me, in a horrible way.
In addition, some of my ancestors on the other side of my family were Huguenots, who came to the US to escape persecution in France. Of course if they’d never been persecuted they never would’ve come here to meet up with the rest of my family and the whole unique genetic whatsis that is me never would’ve quite gotten it together. And my spouse-equivalent has a similar history — his family consists of Jews from different parts of Europe who only met when they came to the US to get away from bad stuff in their home countries.
Seems to me like the lesson of all these kind of stories is simply that when life gives you lemons, you’ve still got a chance to make a decent glass of lemonade. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight for a chance at some oranges if they’re more to your taste.
[...] Wow. I can’t believe it. Roberts linked to an article describing the wingnut POV as a disease. Everything we’ve ever noted about their extreme egocentrism can be summed up right there. [...]
Of course, if more people were “chaste,” a lot more people would ALSO not have been born. all those sad little sperms and eggses going to waste! doesn’t that just make you want to cry? c’mon!
The hate I’ve read in some of these comments is instense. However, I doubt that many or even any of the authors would admit that they hate anyone.
Aw, it’s always nice when someone digs up a Dawn Eden corpse. Sad, though.