Religious Righties Have Trouble With the Irony. And the Facebook. And the Truth.

Religious Righties Have Trouble With the Irony. And the Facebook. And the Truth.

(Via Right Wing Watch.)

This post at pro-life site lifenews.com highlights this video:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/d-XHPHRlWZk

The video shows a woman with bruises and cuts on her face. She shows how to use makeup and accessories to cover up the fact that she was beaten. The video ends by saying “65% of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden. Don’t cover it up.”

The video, which uses the irony that kids today seem to appreciate, is by the British anti-domestic-violence organization Refuge. Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with it, as far as I know. They just chose to link to it on their Planned Parenthood for Teens Facebook page.

So far, so good. lifenews.com even says as much. Where Life News’s article goes off the rails, is

The video is from a legitimate organization in the UK that fights domestic violence. But the way Planned Parenthood headlines it—with “How to look your best the morning after,” teens are mislead by Planned Parenthood into the cover up mentality. On the anti-domestic violence site, the video is introduced with the headline: “Don’t cover it up.” That headline makes a world of difference to young teens who run across the video.

(emphasis added.)

Ah, so maybe Planned Parenthood didn’t watch the video to the end, didn’t realize that it was ironic, and thought that their readers would really and sincerely appreciate some advice on how to cover up their beatings, rather than doing something to stop them. So what did Planned Parenthood for Teens write about the video?

A recent study showed that almost 1 in 10 high school students has been hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend in the last 12 months. Watch this video and tell us in the comments what you would do if Lauren was your best friend.

Below that are the things you normally get when you link to a YouTube video from Facebook: the title and description as they appear on YouTube. The title “How to look your best the morning after” was chosen by the uploader, not by Planned Parenthood.

But I guess it’s too much to expect Life News to understand that, or to accuse Planned Parenthood of a position that no one in the history of compassion has ever adopted. It would apparently also be too much to expect Life News to link to the actual post so that people could see for themselves (perhaps they realize that doing so would undermine their point).

And given how Life News didn’t exactly go out of its way—or even get up off the metaphorical sofa—to make this easy to find, perhaps its readers can be forgiven for just believing the article and launching accusations against Planned Parenthood without checking them out:

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

See also Twitchy’s article. I don’t know enough about Twitchy to know whether this is serious, sarcastic, or merely unfiltered, but they do have links to lots of tweets by people who didn’t stop to get basic facts first. Actually, I’m leaning toward right-wing nutbaggery, because the Sarcasm-O-Meter isn’t twitching, and because of passages like:

But the way Planned Parenthood framed it, the message is just the opposite: “You probably had it coming, girls. May as well try to doll yourselves up afterward.” Appalling.

At the bottom of the page, the author of the piece is outraged—outraged, I tell you!—that PP would dare to tell teenaged girls that yes, their labia are normal.

It’s too bad that whichever edition of the Bible these people are using doesn’t seem to have anything about “do not bear false witness against your neighbor”.

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Comments 3

One thought on “Religious Righties Have Trouble With the Irony. And the Facebook. And the Truth.”

  1. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always a bit surprised at what we’re willing to believe about our opponents. When I see the Scandal of the Day, I ask myself, “Do these people honestly believe that Obama is intentionally trying to cover up the fact that terrorists do bad things?” or, “What would make you believe that George Bush bombed the World Trade Center?” Those things only make sense if you really think that Obama belives that terrorism is the bee’s knees or that Bush came to the White House solely to bring death and destruction to American citizens for his friends’ enrichment. Heaven forbid we believe that Obama is just a guy who makes very guarded and culturally netural statements or Bush was just a little bit out of his depth and naiive about foreign policy. No, they have to be people who are evil not for their own personal gain but for evil’s own sake.

    I think it has something to do with the implicit assumption that if you believe X, Y and Z, your enemy (who must be the opposite of you in all ways) must necessarily believe ~X, ~Y, and ~Z. Like bizarro you. You hate terrorism and you disagree with Obama on taxes, so he must be for terrorism. You would never kill thousands of people by blowing up a highrise and you think GW Bush’s position on abortion is an abomination, so he must be planning to blow up another highrise as we speek. It’s simple logic, right?

  3. By coincidence, one thing that showed up in my list of podcasts today is an episode of Focal Point entitled Barack the Destroyer wants to destroy private charities, private generosity. So you know it’s an objective and even-handed discussion of the issues.

    I think what this really is, is a consequence for our (humans’, but especially right-wing authoritarians’) preference for a neat black-and-white world. “{Bush,Obama} is not One Of Us, therefore everything about him is wrong, from his foreign policy to the way he combs his hair” is simple, neat, and easy (also wrong, but that apparently matters less than it ought).

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