Last week's House Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion access featured, shall we say, some interesting moments. Such as Catherine Glenn Foster, president of Americans United for Life, testifying that aborted fetuses help power streetlights in Washington, and Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina trying to create a gotcha moment by asking women to define the word "woman."
Now, throughout history, both Republicans and Democrats have used hearings of this nature to score political points, so the partisan grandstanding wasn't unexpected. Still, given what's at stake, I was hoping for more substance and fewer theatrics. In retrospect I was hoping for the impossible, especially given that the hearing was held just four days after the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.
By now we all know the details: the racist nature of the attack and the 180-page manifesto attributed to the accused. It seems clear his motives were shaped by some of the same rhetoric repeated by far-right figureheads and politicians. The "great replacement theory" — the fear that white Christian Americans are systematically being replaced by immigrants, people of color and non-Christians for political purposes — is something that has been echoed by Republican politicians and Fox News personalities like Tucker Carlson for years.
