Julius Streicher strikes out

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Aug 18, 2004

Planned Parenthood's campy and scurrilous Choice Chick video has been coming in for some well-deserved abuse in the Catholic blogblatt. As a desultory student of political caricatures, I find it wryly amusing that PPF's hate-mongering should falter on the question of race. One of the monsters pictured in the cartoon is an anti-choice hydra draped in judge's robes, from which the heads of Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist, and Clarence Thomas issue snakily. Justice Thomas, whose own siblings called him "America's blackest baby," presents an ideological dilemma for PPF: how do you make him hateful without incurring the charge of racism? They decided to render him unrecognizable: a thin-lipped man scarcely distinguishable in skin tone from his kindred villains. This poses an interesting question about reverse racism: if your inhibitions will not permit you to despise a man as he is, can they permit you to respect him should he come to believe what you want him to?