CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Hide your children. This is what the progressive left's idea of women's empowerment looks like: For the past two weeks, radical feminists from the group Code Pink have paraded across the fruited plain in giant female reproductive organ costumes.
The goal is "respect" for women's bodies and women's abortion rights. It's part of the coordinated campaign to fight the right's purported "war on women." The Vagina Puppets' Democratic Party sympathizers, from professional birth control freeloader Sandra Fluke to first lady Michelle Obama, dog-whistled the same messages of "choice" and "freedom" from the convention stage.
"We are ... focusing on the issue of the GOP's war on women and trying to take away women's reproductive rights, so we have been going around in our vagina costumes," Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told The Daily Beast. "We were the dancing vaginas. One of the things we have found is the surest way to make the police go away is try to get your picture in front of them wearing a vagina. They will blush and disappear."
The group organized a "Bring Your Own Vagina" event at the RNC in Tampa and a protest with Planned Parenthood in front of the NASCAR Hall of Fame museum here at the DNC. A press release touted: "VISUALS: The famous CODEPINK vagina costumes!" Bright pink placards proclaimed: "VAGINA. Can't say it, don't legislate it." Another demanded: "GOP: RESPECT WOMEN."
Bless their hearts, but why must they so publicly flaunt their private parts? It's hard to take these poster chicks for the Nanny State seriously when they look and sound like walking, talking gynecological checkups. Dressing as life-sized genitals, ranting about their entitlement to taxpayer-subsidized birth control, defining women as bio-objects and reducing "women's issues" to sex without consequences: This is progress?
Pro-life activists and public officials aren't waging a "war on women" when they defend the sanctity of life. Exercising decency, sensitivity, compassion and charity toward those who choose not to exercise deadly "choices" is pro-woman. It's the callous ideologues who deny the existence of abortion regret and whitewash abortion victims' suffering who are the true misogynists.
The bizarre circus of the vagina-gogues is vulgar on multiple levels. It's visually tacky, gross and exhibitionist. More to the point, it's so tastelessly beside the point.
While Code Pink and their sorority of Democratic Party soul mates glorify abortion and indulge in condom-clutching fear campaigns, there are countless true-life horror stories of women and unborn children being preyed upon by those who masquerade as "reproductive health care providers."
Their voices are the ones squelched in the public square. Yet, Fluke and her ilk grab the national spotlight to complain that they are victims of censorship.
Despite their ghoulish record and eugenics-rooted foundations, Team Obama rewarded Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards with a key speaking role at the DNC this week. She and the White House shamelessly accused the rival GOP ticket of causing cancer deaths, encouraging rape and increasing domestic violence all week.
Yet, the Democratic men and women in power in Washington look the other way at Planned Parenthood's predation of poor women and young girls who have been advised by abortion counselors to cover up statutory rape. Undercover investigators at Live Action have caught the abortion lobbyists on tape endorsing sex-selection abortions and approving race-based abortions.
President Obama can take time out of his schedule to console and promote Fluke in the name of women's health and safety. But he has nothing to say to the dozens of black female victims and their families in Philadelphia who suffered at the hands of convicted abortionist butcher Kermit Gosnell. Or to the family of Tonya Reaves, a black female patient at Planned Parenthood's Loop Health Center in Chicago, who died this summer after the staff performed a careless abortion on her and neglected her for more than five hours while she bled to death.
Doesn't fit the Vagina Narrative. Now, on with the femme puppet show!