Operation Save America, I wipe my ass with your pamphlets. Says Uni Q. Mical , Monday, July 21, 2008 at 5:26 PM, in

I can't even fathom what kind of week this has been. Flat, subjective statement, yes. But honestly.

If I can talk to you people about the rights that I believe in and hold dear to me, then everyone else falls into place, like jenga blocks tumbling to hardwood.
Or shooting straight thru the cerebrum while the pawned body still stands.

I already know everything you’re going. To. Say.

It’s a baby.
Rebuttal: But it’s a baby.
We’re spreading God’s word, and the bible says murder is wrong.
Rebuttal: But murdering a small, innocent life is wrong.

Your time’s up. Anymore uninformed, generalized, empty statements for the jury?

But what catches me off guard, and boils my blood essentially, is the exploitation of our ugly, racist history (AND PRESENT) for your sick, twisted benefit. And, being it’s the south, to poke and evoke lynching and God in the same sentence…WORKS!!!! Every. Time. For many people.

For others, not so much, such as the capped black woman in the white tee and capris, when approached with a pamphlet, shouted, almost on command:
FUCK THAT! YOU GON’ HELP ME RAISE THIS BABY? WHEN THE MOTHER ON DRUGS? U GON RAISE A RETARDED BABY? FUCK THAT.

Rebuttal: Silence.
*********
Day five. The man in the denim Jesus cap says I have a choice to go to hell. I scream, filled with the rage of all those who did and did not have an opinion, those 95% of pro-choice folk (statistic penned by david lackey) that couldn’t be there for various reasons of living just enough for the cit-aaaay, YOUR SOUL IS NOT EXEMPT! YOU HAVE A CHOICE TOO! Banging down for emphasis on the newspaper stand, throwing a fuck or two in there. (Not helpful. But they bring you to that point, mommy.) Slinging my quarter-filled vitamin water bottle and neon orange SAVE ME FROM POVERTY poster up in the air, storming across the street flipping him off for interruption’s sake.

If you’re going to heaven, I don’t WANNA go.

Later, here comes Rodney, handing me a hug and a cigarette in the shade I ran to for comfort and calming. Hands shaking, I inhale the Newport like the last breath of an asthma attack.

And we continued on, three days in a row:
CHRISTIAN FASCISTS
KILLING DOCTORS
THAT’S THE WAAAAAAY THEY GET TO HEAVEN
CHRISTIAN FASCISTS
KILLING DOCTORS
AND THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME

THERE’s A WHITE ONE
AND A MALE ONE
AND A WHITE ONE
AND A MALE ONE
CHRISTIAN FASCISTS
KILLING DOCTORS
AND THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME

CHRISTIAN FASCISTS
BLOCKING HEALTHCARE…

Along with
SEXIST
RACIST
ANTI-GAY
CHRISTIAN FASCIST
GO A-WAY

Over his YOU HAVE A CHOICE TO GO TO HELL speech, having the absolute testicles to come to the side of the street we stood on, directly facing us…it was the most preposterous symphony I’d ever witnessed. And as he drowned in his own words, we only got louder.

Not to forget Sir Jesse, holdin it down for the Eric Rudolph Fan Club. Now these folk can deny all they want (omg! Isn’t denying an elementary textbook euphemism for LYING? Oooh, u goin to HELL!) that they have no connections to the crazed death-row fucks that blew up the clinics…but we know better than to believe such a blanket statement. Their world view, though, is entirely black and white (minus the occasional demonic token thought), so I’m not so sure who to believe anymore.

Even the spawns, who already have it set up in their minds that they’ll be submissive to their husbands at 13, since GOD SAID MAN THEN WOMAN and he can protect me…but when discussing healthy sexuality, I guess the homeschool teacher hasn’t gotten to that lesson just yet. When asked what an orgasm is, the girls responded “I don’t know…if I should be learning about this just yet…If you guys are gonna start talking about this, we should go back to the other side of the street.” Now at this point, it’s my duty as an American citizen to reference the Europeans. (In this context, I can dig ‘em). To have healthy, natural conversations surrounding sex and sexuality from a younger age is MUCH more beneficial than, whoa, who woulda guessed? KEEPIN EM IN THE DARK. It keeps their birth and abortion rates low. But here, we just love hoggin onto the puritanical days, as if they’ve ever did anything positive for our country besides confuse and repress and shame us, Scarlet Letter style. Until that promise ring that made waiting till marriage seem SO achievable is snipped off and hurled to the Hefty at 17. Regardless, curiosity’s gonna strike.

And the commercials of kindergartners playing with condoms, to the fine chiseled buttcheeks getting venereal shots, would give any right wing parent the heart attack they hoped would never happen before they saw their child reach the altar.

And for that reason, we were out there TODAY handing out free condoms. The streets ate ‘em up like gum on the sidewalks. Meanwhile, this white-haired fellow who I specifically singled out and called REPRESSED for labeling me as having no respect for myself for having premarital sex, who stated the public FOOL system promotes fornication, who slipped up and called us racist for promoting the death of black babies (see above for what I think of that), though in the same sentence referred to black women as not having respect for themselves for not being abstinent…stands loyally in front of the holocaust/slavery/dead baby slide of their exhibit. We parade around, happily and healthily shouting SAFE SEX SAVES LIIIIVES! Giving out condoms to any and all passers-by. And lube, and dental dams, which were terribly hilarious to demonstrate on. And as their “justice for the unborn” flag waved, we tried to prevent anymore simulated babies from being on their posters by telling folks to wrap it up, b.

*************
And the many others in between the spectrum of completely vulnerable, impressionable, slaves to religion and SOLD off any auction that has God in the title, to the abhorrent, grossed out, faces flooded, coming-over-to-the-other-side-of-the-street-and-thanking us-for-being-SANE…are the reason I do this. I do it for the black women workers who confused us today with being a part of them because of the “SAFE SEX SAVES LIVES” sign…who later hugged us after she realized she aligned us wrongly. I don’t know if any of us explicitly stated that we weren’t with them, she just got a wiff after 5-7 seconds.

I do it for the countless queer brothers and sisters who come past, drive past, skate past, strut past, even stop past to help us out and hold signs with “sex is the standard” on ‘em, who will occasionally snarl at the graphicness of their glowing red arm baby posters, but nevertheless write off the group as deranged, completely disregarding their warm blanket of sweet baby Jesus conversations.

I do it for the older white woman who did this back in ’77 and never budged or broke down to these extremists, and DARED them to touch her nowadays, who came down on her work break to hold up the KEEP ABORTION LEGAL sign, and thanked us for being young and continuing the movement.

I do it for the woman who, after hearing from a passer-by, that our womb is a graveyard, who RAAAAAN with it: oh, it must be Halloween down there…(lifts up leg exaggeratingly) who wants some caaaaan-dy???
And my flailing to the ground showed my enthusiasm.

For the stubborn, conditioned to Eurocentric, southern evangelistic, patriarchial privileged thinking (black) men, who shout “don’t want a baby? Don’t spread your legs”, “Stop killing babies”, “Go eat your cheerios” and whatever else they felt was necessary to spit at us in their five-second passer-by soundbyte…I do this for you too, because you love to hear yourself speak. And will immediately pull the emasculation card if we approach them. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic I don’t feel like exhausting at the moment. I’ll just pose this question instead: how can a slave own a slave?

For the one blonde white young woman in the white jag who specifically gave us the finger, and our running up to her window and shaking the HONK IF YOU LOVE SAFE SEX signs to her…she honked for all the wrong reasons, of course, but we took that as a sign of appreciation.

For the countless hi-fives, hugs, yeeeeeeahs, whoooooos!, honks more than traffic jams on 95 that we received, this lets us know that it’s not us at ALL that are at fault. It’s our lives that are at stake though, truly, and this is why this week is not in vain, but that the work and organizing must only continue. It’s a lifelong struggle, both sadly and thankfully.

But this voice is too deep to ever waver.