Pro-life campaigners in the United States are confident and aggressive than ever before with the real prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned in a near future by a new conservative Supreme Court, and they have extended the target of their fight to protect the right to live of unborn babies, or zygotes. They have started to launch an attack on a birthday party, rejecting it as based on pro-choice ideology.
Kerry Galwell, a founder of the conservative religious group Moral Minority, started the campaign last year; “A birthday party is a vast left-wing liberal conspiracy to brainwash our young and innocent children that life begins at birth not conception. It is a particularly subtle form of anti-life propaganda that the first nine months of life of a man he spends in his mother’s womb is not meaningful or worthy and should be ignored and forgotten”, Galwell said.
Several conservative commentators have expressed their support for Galwell’s crusade against a birthday party. “We have to protect our children from mentally insane liberals and their secret weapon called a birthday party”, Michael Brutal said in OX News’ The Preilly Influence. “Godless faggots who celebrate birthday shall suffer in the Hell eternally”, Annie Doulter wrote in her column. Several movie stars and celebrities received a threatening letter demanding to cancel their birthday party or “we would bomb you under the God’s name, to punish the heresy called a birthday party and to cleanse the modern Gomorrah called Hollywood”.
As a family-friendly leader of the Religious Right, Galwell is not just depriving an important occasion of the nation’s families. Galwell devised a concept of “a conception day” party and has vigorously promoted it in his rallies across the country. Conception day party has already gained certain popularity among evangelist parents; 8% of the parents surveyed already substituted a conception day party for a birthday party, reaching 17% high in South Carolina. “It is a great way to teach our children the proper values based on our Faith. A decade ago today my son was conceived, and that’s what really matters”, says George Wade, 33, (he insists he is 34) who is holding a conception day party for his son George X. “I like the idea of the conception day party because it’s cool and I feel nine months older”, said George X, 9 (he has just turned 10, counted from the conception day). Currently a date 270 days before birthday is used as an estimate, but “we are currently working with faithful doctors and God-fearing scientists to develop technology to evaluate the exact date of conception, the date one’s life has truly begun”, says Galwell. Galwell himself celebrated his ‘conception day party’ last November, just after the Republican’s election defeat.
He expresses his ultimate aim of his campaign as the “total elimination of the concept of ‘birthday’ from our society”. Moral Minority is lobbying the conservative Republicans in the Congress to legislate to calculate the legal age of a person from the date of conception not birth. Senator Sam Brownforward (R-Dorothy’s Homeland) has indicated his support and is planning to submit the Elimination of the Date of Birth from Official Registrations Act 2007 to the Congress. However, this proposal met some opposition by his fellow Republicans and Alcoholics Anonymous, as it would effectively lower the drinking age.
Businesses are not missing the golden opportunities to appeal to the conservative customers. Val-Mart, the biggest retail chain in the country, has started to sell “conception day card” and “conception day present”. “We have started to cater the needs of religious customers, and we are proud of it“, says Benedict Rudolph, a retail manager for Val-Mart. He also stated that Val-Mart was considering stopping the sales of all products with “birthday” references, following intensive lobbying campaign to the company by conservative groups.
The anti-birthday movement has also been spread to conservatives in other countries. In New Zealand, Brian Panmure of the evangelist Fate Church has prohibited a birthday party for his followers, and declared ‘enough is enough, enough of this birthday nonsense”, in his conception day party.
5 comments:
And how do they plan to celebrate this "conception day"? Attempt to "re-enact" it with your own partner or something?
On the status of the unborn baby, there is no clear answer. It would be wrong to discount it as not living at all, but nor is it a "living human being".
LL: was this an April Fool's Day post, or is this for real? If the former, ha ha ha - good one! If the latter - holy crap!
Thanks for your comments; probably it is better to make it clear now that it is a fictional story written on the April Fool's Day, as TG has figured it out. Glad to hear you liked my humour:), which is sometimes bit quirky and hard to be understood!
theloverock; I won't go into the nitty-gritty of the abortion debate now as it takes at least a long long essay to adequately address the topic, though I plan to do so sometime. But regardless of your position on the status of zygotes, it is true that there are some fanatical so-called "pro-life" people, and I believe that if they had pursued their premise to the extreme "conception day" would be a logical conclusion for them.
I thought April Fool's when I read this, but the sad thing about the "conservative" movement right now is that with what the GOP has done lately, one can read a post such as that and with all seriousness believe it - in some ways, they are so far gone they are beyond satire. Like some Daily Show segments where they just straight report what they are doing and don't need to embelish to get the laughs at how ridiculous they are.
This reminds me, I was going to post on abortion.
Yes it is so true, but fortunately no one has started attacking birthday, yet! Not living in the US I can't feel how conservative the US has become, but I hope that with Bush's low popularity and Democrat's victory in the last election the tide has started to change, though it would take longer to change the Supreme Court.
I'm looking forward to reading your views on abortion.
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