A Tale of Two Speeches

It makes a kind of sense that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton gave speeches to two very different groups this Friday--they are two very different candidates and they do not substantially share a worldview. Donald Trump spoke in front of the Faith and Freedom Conference, where he was protested (because I think he might actually being paying protesters at this point to attract cameras and further the idea that he is an exciting and dangeous candidate, if you want to know what sort of things I think about this weird Potemkin campaign)  Hillary Clinton spoke in front of Planned Parenthood, the embattled reproductive health provider that has faced actual existential threats from the very sort of people who attend the Faith and Freedom Conference.

That right there strikes me as very different! For what it's worth, the Faith and Freedom shindy is an event at which a sitting US Senator who isn't even especially known as a firebrand suggested that it was funny to pray for President Obama's death--a joke which isn't even especially new. It's also a nice place for small-child hijacker and fetal snuff porn aficionado Carly Fiorina to assert that she is a feminist--in what way I guess we just have to imagine--who does not support Hillary Clinton. Well slap my ass and call me cynical! I could have called that one, Carly Obvious. (She can go sit next to Jill Stein and they can chat about how Hillary is a bad mother.)  Trump made people wait for his insubstantial Telepromptered speech, where he mostly avowed how he would support Christian Americans and appoint pro-life judges.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in front of Planned Parenthood, and talked about how reproductive justice is a part of human rights. She understood the economic, social, and government policy implications of women taking charge of our bodies and reproductive rights. That means a lot to me. She understands that the personal is political. She represents a part of that movement where we as women came of age knowing that our very bodies were not assumed to be our own, but the possessions of men, or government, or churches. And where women were raised to accept that decisions should be made on our behalf for us, because our lady-brains shouldn't be trusted with making the choices that as adult women, we needed to make for our very own survival and for the success of our own children.  The ideas, after all, that were expressed by folks at the event Trump spoke at. She is keeping score of how our rights as women and our ability to access reproductive justice is regularly clipped by religious right haters.

She gets it--Trump never would. He gives his lip service to the religious right as an obligation to his party--but I think Clinton opposes it as I do--because it is specifically harmful to me and the people I love. This matters. It matters an awful lot.