I'll get you, my pretty

A big high-five to the city of Baltimore for enacting a law that requires centres offering advice and counselling for pregnant women to clearly state up-front which services they do and do not provide; specifically, that if they do not under any circumstances refer women for abortions or offer guidance regarding birth control they should say so.

On the face of it this is all eminently sensible and uncontroversial; the fact that it has prompted squeals of protest and even legal action from local Catholic groups is one the one hand hilarious and on the other hand profoundly revealing of how these people's mental processes work, and what they're really up to.

You see, you would think that on the face of it an organisation like the Catholic Church, which makes no particular secret of its opposition to sensible birth control and abortion, and indeed sex (sex with young boys excepted, of course) and women's rights in general, would be only too happy to trumpet these policies as publicly as possible. Not in this case, however, and for the same reason that I'd guess these Catholic-run "centres" probably tone down the old crucifix and Virgin Mary stuff on the signs as well: because their intent is to deceive, i.e. lure vulnerable women through the door with vague promises of "health advice" and "counselling" and only once they're safely inside reveal that this "advice" basically boils down to ABORTION IS MURDER and YOU ARE A WHORE and ONLY THROUGH JESUS CAN YOU BE FORGIVEN FOR YOUR WHORISH WHORISHNESS and so on and so forth.

Now clearly you can't make that argument in court, i.e. stamp your little feet and demand that you must be allowed to lie to people - or rather, you can't make that argument without adding a further layer of lying and obfuscation and claiming that it's a freedom of speech issue. Which it is in exactly the same way as the fuss over the right to be an evil homophobic bigot was, i.e. not at all.

This is the sound of squeaking rodent-y protest at floorboards being ripped up and cleansing daylight being cast into previously hidden nooks and crannies (I recommend reading Stephen King's short story Graveyard Shift for a nicely gruesome extension of this idea), or of Dracula melting away into dust in the first rays of the morning sun, or, my personal favourite, the Wicked Witch Of The West's demise:

Look what you've done! I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world!