[icopyright one button toolbar]
I have recently started to use satire to illustrate, accentuate and exaggerate what I feel are outrageous stances on social and political issues.
Often I quote my favorite satirist, Andy Borowitz, but sometimes I try my hand at it — admittedly a risky undertaking when there are so many well-known and excellent satirical publications and web sites.
Since so many of our Republican politicians, pundits and activists say and do things that are stunningly absurd and moronic, it takes very little effort on the part of “The Daily Show” or the “The Colbert Report” or “The Onion” to satirize such statements and actions.
Perhaps the most salient examples are Tina Fey’s parodies of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, where Fey often uses almost verbatim quotes to lampoon Palin.
One of the most memorable is of course “I can see Russia from my house!”
We have come to expect and take for granted so many preposterous outbursts and pronouncements from our friends on the right that it sometimes seems that life is imitating satire, compelling writers to warn readers that what follows is indeed satire.
But sometimes it is also necessary to tell readers that what follows is not satire, but rather the unvarnished, “un-accentuated,” “un-exaggerated” truth.
This is one such story.
As we know, U.S. the Supreme Court will hear arguments this week “in a landmark gay marriage case that many legal experts believe will pave the way for same-sex couples to wed in all 50 states.”
Same sex-marriage has been an intensely debated and fought issue and has attracted more than 100 briefs, many based on religious and moral beliefs and principles, tradition, family values and societal “concerns,” such as its impact on procreation.
However, an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by a group of 100 conservative lawyers and university professors argues in part “marriage equality will cause 900,000 abortions over the next 30 years.”
Former Antonin Scalia clerk Gene Schaerr, who served as the brief’s author, summarizes the brief as arguing that “a reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women,” says Candida Moss at the Daily Beast.
In other words, same-sex marriage causes abortion.
Read more about this non-satirical attempt at conflating correlation and causation here. It reads like a piece in The Onion, but is not.
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
