To Bobo – and Not With Any Love

Ok, so David Brooks, a/k/a Bobo, has the most egregious editorial yet in today’s NYTimes, here.
I think he should be buried in irate email. I’ve written to him, and I probably could have done better if I hadn’t been so damned mad when I wrote. But for better or worse, here’s what I have said:

Mr. Brooks:
Justice Blackmun damaged our democracy? Could you possibly be any more wrong? You assert all kinds of conclusions about what “America” wants, and you do not back them up with any facts or evidence at all. What you are is the mouthpiece for a small, vicious minority that seeks to cram it’s personal ethics down the throats of the majority in this country. That is entirely backwards, just like your Bobo-logic is.
No one has ever tried to force anyone to have an abortion, Mr. Brooks. People who find abortion immoral are free to avoid having one. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow a bunch of Pecksniffs who argue from the standpoint of raw emotion to tell the rest of us how we should behave. It is none of their business and it is none of yours. It is up to the individual and her doctor and her God to come to terms with what is a very personal decision and act.
You want ruin? Make choice illegal and you will have it, just like we used to. Alleys will be full of ruin, as will dumpsters and bathrooms where infants will inevitably die. Those will be infants who actually drew breath, Mr. Brooks. And there will be women dead, bled out from botched, illegal abortions at the hands of butchers, just like it used to be. Women have died to make choice legal.
Were you born yesterday? Were you prevented from noticing that over a million men and women marched in Washington D.C. in support of choice? How you can imagine for one second that you know more than a million Americans about what is best for this country is beyond me. But then, you are always mind-bogglingly ill-informed in your opinions.
You know nothing about young women today – nothing. Whatever you may have picked up from reading and listening to Rush Limbaugh was constructed in cloud-cuckoo land. Abortions have increased under this administration. The number went down when Clinton was in the White House. How conveniently you forget real facts in your rush to pre-judge everything from your fixed viewpoint. So let me remind you of something – this is my body. The government has no damned business telling me what I can and cannot do with my internal organs or my sex life. That’s exactly what most conservatives used to believe – before they became the party of the underwear sniffers.
Stay out of my uterus and my ovaries and my fallopian tubes, my cervix and my vagina. They are none of your damned business and they are none of the religious right’s damned business. You American Taliban have just about overreached to the point where the backlash just may come after your penis and your testicles.

You too can tell Bobo what you think. Send him an email at: dabrooks@nytimes.com.