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Tyrades! By Danny Tyree
Sometimes something said in passing by a person-on-the-street interviewee sticks in my mind.
Such is the case of a so-called “economic conservative” who said he wasn’t really concerned about abortion “and stuff like that” in the GOP primaries.
Okay, I know that he meant to say “and other hot button social issues,” but his choice of phrasing says a lot about the indifference and seared consciences in our society.
What other “stuff” is LIKE abortion? Can you imagine an elevator operator announcing “Third floor…housewares, linens, abortions…”?
Would a reasonable person talk about the Holocaust AND STUFF LIKE THAT or date rape AND STUFF LIKE THAT?
Certainly not Doonesbury cartoonist Garry B. Trudeau, who has stirred up a firestorm with an extremely one-sided sequence satirizing a Texas law requiring abortion seekers to be given a mandatory sonogram and the CHOICE of experiencing the unborn child’s image and heartbeat. (Good thing he didn’t hear about the legislature’s original plan to show patients a short film of Meryl Streep portraying their unborn child as an accomplished old lady or gentleman.)
Our computers give us a last-minute chance to reconsider a file deletion or an online bill payment. Thank goodness my wife and I had a brief window to cancel a rash time-share transaction. But supposedly there is something awful and back-alley and un-American about a last-minute chance to reconsider this particular irrevocable action.
I have followed Doonesbury for four decades. I have written edgy material myself for nearly as long. I can respect both the editors who chose to pull the six-day sequence and those who chose to run it. But I have to pity Trudeau for becoming so smug, self-satisfied and “damn the torpedoes” about a procedure that even Bill Clinton opined should be RARE.
Trudeau, with his “settled social issues” mentality, is aghast that there should be any speed bumps at all for a legal medical procedure. Cigarettes are a legal product. Stock transactions are a time-honored legal activity. But I’m sure many of Trudeau’s fans would love to embellish cigarette packages with ghastly tumors, and regulate Wall Street out the yin-yang. Consistency?
Society is asked to view abortion seekers as living, breathing human beings and show sensitivity to the agonizing decision a woman and her doctor must make. But people on the other side are reduced to one-dimensional CARICATURES. Trudeau and other broad-minded individuals cannot IMAGINE anyone possibly having any reason for opposing abortion EXCEPT a Neanderthal male desire to subjugate women.
“Discrimination” has developed a narrowly focused definition; but people SHOULD be able to draw common sense DISTINCTIONS between things, and Trudeau has gone off the deep end with his belief that the use of an ultrasound wand (without any sexual gratification or “brute force for the sake of brute force” on the part of those mandating or administering the procedure) is OBVIOUSLY equivalent to rape. I suppose in Trudeau’s world a measles shot is BREAKING AND ENTERING and a J.C. Penney sale on neckties is a tacit approval of LYNCHING.
Whether you view a fetus as a baby or a mass of tissues or something in between, it’s obvious that in this case Trudeau’s strip displays as much genuine thought and sophistication as the corniest paint-by-numbers dinosaurs on the comics page.
©2012 Danny Tyree. Danny welcomes reader e-mail responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades”. Danny’s’ weekly column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns, please email Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com or call 800 696 7561.
