Show Yourselves Out.

What is it with “conservative” people? Not even the term does their political agenda justice, because it is not about the conservation or preservation of any “traditions” that have shown to work out well for most people, it is about pushing an agenda of discrimination against anyone and anything who/that does not comply with their world views and/or their personal preferences.  If it is about conservation and preservation, it is about the conservation and preservation of kyriarchy, of white supremacy, of sexism – paired with the goal of not only keeping discriminatory structures the way they are, but of actively furthering them.

There have been studies that tried to show that prejudices are actually linked to a lower IQ. Personally, I think those are crap. Clearly, a lack of education seems to result in ignorance many times. This does not mean, however, that people who have not had the privilege of higher education are automatically discriminatory in their behaviour (yay, classism!), and nothing could be further from actual reality than claiming that people who are well-educated or (self-proclaimedly…) smart are automatically “liberal” or anything the like in their way of thinking. Indeed, trying to put people into boxes according to simplified schemes, like this study does, seems to be exactly what conservatives do, and yet, a strategy the academics who conducted this study employ just as well.

Too Much Incense Makes People’s Brains Go Fuzzy.

Joachim Cardinal Meisner, the arcbishop of Cologne, has always been known to be an asshat. Not only did he casually equate abortion to the Shoah in a sermon and revoke an openly gay priest’s license to teach in his diocese, he makes it a point to express the most reactionary filth on a monthly basis. Catholicism – always a  pleasure…

This time, Meisner continues his personal crusade against abortion (and women in general, obviously). Since the repetitive mumbling of canonised fairy tales isn’t cutting it anymore when it comes to defending the church’s disproportional influence on german politics, Meisner has picked a more recent topic, germany’s nuclear phase-out programme, to make a point about “unborn life” [sic].

He asserts that whoever may be occasionally wondering about the country’s social and ecological future should be more concerned with abortion than with, uh… well… little incidents like Fukushima or Chernobyl; abortion happens to be the ultimate “daily, secretive worst case accident” of our times, in his view. Make sense?

In his little quest to equate women to nuclear power and abortions to nuclear accidents (does that mean my uterus can actually split atoms? Awesome!), he goes on to say that nuclear power stations are completely safe – as opposed to women, I presume, who are just so darn hard to control these days and certainly cannot be trusted when it comes to decisions regarding their own lives and bodies.

Completely safe…? Tell that to the prefecture Fukushima in Japan. Or to Harrisburg in the US. Or to Prypjat, near Chernobyl, in the Ukraine. Or to Seascale, near Sellafield, in the UK. Or to Biblis in Hesse in germany (…where the atomic pile Biblis A nearly tried to kill me when I was three years old, living 2 miles away). Although I guess nuclear disasters do look rather “meh…” compared to the biblical apocalypse?

Eager to make an impression (and he does alright), Meisner moves on to spread the lie that 8 million fetuses were aborted in the last decades in germany, thus “more than ten class rooms are wiped out everyday.” Actually, the number of abortions performed in germany last year was 110,440, and it has been basically consistent since 1996 (when the infamous §218 concerning abortion in germany’s penal code was altered after the german reunification, regulating the requirements for impunity for abortions in certain circumstances). Hence, as a rough calculation, there were about 1.6 million abortions within the past 15 years. If I was mean, I would say that Meisner obviously isn’t in touch with reality much (duh!), and his math skills are not up to speed either.