Emily brings it home on reproductive rights:

I think it’s helpful to be told flat-out that this is what we’re battling. Many anti-choice activists may honestly believe that they’re acting to protect children (though I might argue that if they really want to protect children, they might consider the needs of the fetus after it becomes a baby, but I digress), but leaders of the anti-choice movement are acting to protect what they know to be the Divine order. [...]

One party that is working — however fitfully, however imperfectly — to protect the right of half of this country’s citizens to be legally recognized as humans with autonomy over their own bodies, and one party working to declare zygotes legal people, to require physicians to lie to patients about the established medical facts of abortion, and to allow hospitals to deny abortions to women even when their lives are in immediate danger.

This is not about the medical procedure called “abortion.” This is about the separation of church and state, and it is about allowing women to be human.

I was brought up in a pro-life family, though I fell away from that (and most conservatism) in high school. And the reason I did so specifically in the case of the pro-life stuff was because the pro-life movement is so manifestly sleazy that it thoroughly disgusted me. There were people who would, at times, stand outside my high school with pictures of mangled fetuses, counting on shock value when logical arguments couldn’t penetrate.  No doubt they lost points that day, because kids can spot manipulation like that with great ease. For alleged moralists who hate relativism they’re shockingly relativist, figuring that lying to women via Crisis Pregnancy Centers is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff. And if you’re willing to trade honesty away, then you can’t lay claim to the reform mantle. You’re something else entirely.

This is ultimately why the occasional Will Saletan “we need to respect the pro-life movement’s integrity” thing doesn’t ring true to me. By their deeds shall you know them. A purportedly reformist movement that seems to recognize no limits or norms when it comes to waging political combat is not a reformist movement. A movement that cannot answer basic questions on what comes next after their thing is achieved is not a reformist movement. A movement that cultivates such barely covert ugliness is not a reform movement. Martin Luther King didn’t take fat envelopes of money under the table and then systematically lie to people in order to promote civil rights, and neither has any other successful reformer in history. There are, to be sure, quite a few pro-life individuals of good will, I don’t deny it. But the movement itself is creepy even if viewed with the most superficial of glances. Something tells me that plain moral concern isn’t what’s driving people like Mourdock and Todd Akin.