Responding to Hate in Your Most Vulnerable Moments
When I was in high school, I was the most radically liberal I’ve ever been. I was a feminist before Beyoncé created it — a particularly dark time.
What made me different was often used against me — as the story goes for most teenagers. The louder and more open I was about societal issues, queerness and feminism, the more uncomfortable people got and eventually ceased their attempts at harassment. When I realized that such topics made conservative kids at my school so uncomfortable, I obviously thought it was ridiculous and began to poke fun right back at them. I took advantage of their lack of awareness in their own absurdity and gained leverage.
Broadly released a video of the the Satanic Temple protesting for abortion rights in front of one of the country’s most hateful protesters — the anti-abortion movement. Abortion and the choice to carry it out may be one of the most vulnerable and sensitive issues in a woman’s life. For such a serious and personal issue to be bombarded with harassment in the name of dogma is obscene.
As the Satanic Temple has proven in the video above, the best way to counter obscenity is with more obscenity.
"There’s no way we could come there and have a logical discussion or argument and so… we don’t want to give them credit for this absurdity.” — Jex Blackmore
Jex Blackmore is the director of the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple and she blogged about her abortion before the counter-protest in the video above. To create a satirical performance that exposes the obscenity of the pro-life movement was a big way to reclaim the power that those pro-life protesters wanted to strip her of.
Indeed, there’s a reclamation of power in demonstrating absurdity and obscenity through performance, as the Satanic Temple in Detroit has done. They have elicited the same response from anti-abortionists that the anti-abortion protesters do — although the protesters in the anti-abortion movement are often unaware of their own absurdity and obscenity. They don’t know that feeling shaken up from someone in a baby mask making crying noises in fetish wear is ridiculous coming from the person who holds up horrific images and makes women feel unsafe. The blind following of dogma that creates such a lack of awareness for anti-abortionists is something the Satanic Temple takes advantage of in their counter-performance.
For any person who fears being attacked by hate at their most vulnerable moments: it becomes so much easier to fight absurdity with absurdity than to reason or converse with those willingly blinded by ignorance and firmly planted in their own stupidity.