Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Photo: Flickr page of hbimedialibrary)
In an expression of moral rage, Rep Tim Huelskamp of Kansas said this morning, while speaking of his own adopted children, that Planned Parenthood is “an organization that exists to kill children that look just like mine.”
“I am incensed that this President pays money” to such an organization, he said.
Huelskamp, a member of the anti-immigrant movement backed House Immigration Reform Caucus, was speaking before the audience gathered at day one of the anti-gay, anti-abortion Family Research Center’s annual Value Voter Summit in Washington, DC.
Rep. Huelskamp went further, though, framing his speech and his own political life as stemming from the spirit of John Brown-like Christians who made arduous journeys to his home state, all of who were prepared to offer their lives in order to abolish slavery. Vowing to protect the freedom and sanctity of religion in similar ways, he singled out President Obama’s health care initiatives as evidence that Americans’ freedoms regarding faith are under attack.
It’s “a tax on religion,” Huelskamp said of the President’s HSS Contraception Mandate, declaring that the government has no right to force anyone to purchase or use abortion drugs. He warned that any hospital or medical professional who refused to the follow the mandate would be “sought out and fined by 10,000 new IRS agents.” Further underscoring his point by adding that professionals and Christians who choose to stand in defiance to such policies will be “persecuted just like those Kansas abolitionists.”
Brazenly, the Congressman continued: “Besides slavery abortion is the other darkest stain on our nation.”
“The time for manners is over,” he continued, urging the audience to mobilize themselves in the spirit of those 19th century abolitionists during the run-up to the Presidential election on November 6. “They put word into action, and we should to.”
True, but the spirit Huelskamp invoked is far more in-line with radicals and violent fundamentalists—such as Randall Terry, John Bray, Joan Andrews, Eric Rudolph, James Kopp, Paul Jennings Hill, Scott Roeder, and Peter James Knight—who were born from the extremist-end of the religious Right’s anti-abortion movement.
For a group of speakers who spent portions of the morning arguing that America’s war on women is actually a war on religion, Rep. Tim Huelskamp succeeded at nothing more than arguing that the inverse of their messaging is actually true.