Tea at Trianon: The Woman Who Killed Roe

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

The Woman Who Killed Roe

Another brave spiritual warrior. From The Cut:

When Marjorie Dannenfelser first came to Capitol Hill, before she became the most politically relevant voice of the anti-abortion lobby, before she extracted from the host of The Apprentice a promise to appoint anti-abortion judges, and before those judges tilted the Court decisively against a constitutionally protected right to an abortion, she was a young assistant to West Virginia Democrat Alan Mollohan. While out for a sandwich, Alan Mollohan had once been handed a flyer depicting an aborted fetus, a moment he recalled as having pressed upon him a certain undeniable horror. In 1989, he was head of the pro-life caucus in the House. “He was good to me,” Dannenfelser told me, “like a father. He cared about me.” He let her ignore her boring responsibilities to focus on the issue about which she had become passionate.
It was from Mollohan that Dannenfelser learned what she considers “one of the most important lessons” in politics: There can be no hesitation in the exercise of political power. “If you shoot a bear,” he told her, “you have to kill it.” Two decades later, in 2010, Dannenfelser was the head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that works exclusively to elect anti-abortion legislators. That was the year Mollohan, now a 14-term congressman with impeccable anti-abortion credentials, voted in a way that she considered objectionable. He believed Obamacare effectively excluded federally funded abortions; she did not feel Obama’s executive order to this effect was reliable. After he voted for the bill, she directed her PAC to spend $78,000 against Mollohan, running radio ads that said, “Alan Mollohan betrayed us and voted to spend our federal dollars … on abortions,” though this was at best unclear. The congressman lost his 14th bid for reelection. If you shoot a bear, you have to kill it. (Read more.)