Meet the veterans fighting a new enemy: progressive abortion dogma
Many consider the pro-life movement in the US to be characterised by religious types, typically found clutching rosaries outside abortion clinics.
But a lesser-known advocacy group is using satire to call out what it deems disingenuous debate around abortion and what the Left euphemistically calls “reproductive freedom”. It’s military veterans, especially combat veterans, and they’re feeling pretty grumpy about what is going on.
One example is Joel Berry, a United States Marine Corps (USMC) veteran and managing editor of The Babylon Bee, a popular conservative Christian website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events and public figures. It is particularly withering in its coverage of abortion.
I would wager Berry did not vote for Kamala Harris, who made abortion central to her self-consciously “inspiring” and “joyful” campaign.
Another veteran, with over 70,000 followers on the same social media platform, goes by the name of @HarmfulOpinion and describes himself as: “Respiratory Care Practitioner. Board certified adult critical care specialist. Father. Husband. A salty combat veteran and a ‘very okay dude’.”
In a recent post following the US election, he commented on Harris’s loss, saying: “I guess killing babies in the womb wasn’t the political platform they thought it was.”
This particular “salty combat veteran” also has a strong track record of pushing back against modern liberal orthodoxy and its attendant ideologies.
This highlights another reason why veterans are wading in. It’s well established many veterans struggle to assimilate back into civilian society. It’s estimated about 22 veterans commit suicide every day in the US.
Today’s veterans often served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby earning, as an ex-British Army friend reminds me, the dubious honour of losing two wars. In addition to bearing that, they returned to a civilian realm that began to take aim at “toxic” masculinity, alongside embracing the ideological garbage of the so-called culture wars.
Blue and pink-haired women screaming obscenities about the vital need to “terminate” pregnancies represent a very different sort of person and creed from those that veterans encountered in the military.
Progressive identity politics was turbo charged by the Biden-Harris administration. As a result, according to a Pew Research Center survey in September, about 61 per cent of registered voters who served in the US military or military reserves said they supported Donald Trump, while 37 per cent backed Harris.
None of this is surprising if you think about it: many of these guys were involved with the killing of women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan, usually as collateral damage, as I experienced during my tour in Afghanistan.
Recently, there has been growing research around so-called moral injury, which shares some of PTSD’s symptoms while being distinctive from it in other ways.
“In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations,” explains the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
An apt example is “collateral damage”, the remnants of which the Afghans helpfully collected and brought by cart to the forward operating base to remind us of “reality”, something that “reproductive freedom” warriors often appear out of touch with.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs continues: “Moral injury is the distressing psychological, behavioural, social and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events. A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviours that go against an individual’s values and moral beliefs.”
Due to its “spiritual” dimension, moral injury is often referred to as an “injury to the soul”. Many pro-life campaigners argue that some women who have an abortion afterwards suffer something akin to the type of moral injury experienced by too many veterans. It’s not hard to see why, but even with the parallels, it’s not an easy or indeed seemingly permissible subject to discuss.
Leaving aside the “Is this what we fought and died for?” cliché, what ultimately blows many veterans away, as with all progressive ideological cant, is being told what to think on such an important issue that, if it is clear cut, is as clearly cut for many veterans in a very different way to that pushed by the mainstream.
The result is that, as with situations we found ourselves in during Iraq and Afghanistan, when we are expected to go against what our hearts and moral compass tells us to be true, we get a little salty.
James Jeffrey is a writer, assistant online editor for the Catholic Herald and a Camino guide