echoboots:

Hey look, an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is!

So inurashii showed me this link today on my lunch break—and I want to show you the actual link, so I’m including it in all its glory here:

http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/159430/the-anti-abortion-wailing-wall/ 

You can tell just by the name that this is gonna be good, right?  And by ‘good,’ I mean ‘flames.  Flames down the side of my face.’

Thankfully, the link is to a Jewish feminist site discussing somebody else’s idea, in relatively sanitized terms.  Of course, being me, I just had to see the original public statements, which are kindly included in the link above.  But since friends don’t let friends read the incoherent rantings of anti-Semetic hatemongers, I’m not going to link to them directly.  So let’s take their guided tour through this cesspool of damaged rhetoric together, shall we?

The gist, as the link suggests, is that an anti-abortion group, the Word of Life Church, is planning to build a life-size replica of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.  But not for Jews, and ostensibly not even for Christians.

It’s for people who have had abortions.

Yeah, you read that right.  Go ahead, take a few minutes to process.  I can wait.

Are we good?  OK, great.  Anyway.

This practice is just the latest development in a depressingly protracted abortion-is-the-Holocaust metaphor that I really wish would just go quietly lie down and wait for its time in a ditch somewhere.  Assuming, you know, that ‘its time’ was six years ago when this phenomenon first came on my radar as A Thing.

I think, however, that the article I linked to above expressed exactly what’s wrong with this whole thing, from a Jewish perspective, more eloquently than I ever could.  So I’m just going to include it here:

“For many Jews, the Western Wall is the living testament to centuries of Jewish suffering and exile. It’s deeply specific and personal, not a symbol to be appropriated. As feminist blogger “Angry Maiden” wrote recently, given that Jewish law isn’t anti-abortion, this “co-option [is] a gross misappropriation of a religious artifact and an affront to Judaism as a whole.”

Lots more where that came from, by the way; I encourage you to read the whole article.

There are, of course, a whole host of other things wrong with this bizarre Fake Wailing Wall plan as well, but the above quote captures the part that offends me the most deeply on a personal level.  Hey Christian right wing?  Please stop appropriating my culture, and while you’re at it, maybe you should find a metaphor for your political cause that doesn’t invoke my culture’s collective trauma, loss, and grief.  Thank you.

[End public service announcement.]

In which teh ‘bootz asks anti-choice activists to stop appropriating genocide.