Rep. Mike Moon is over the moon about Governor Greitens’ special anti-abortion show boat session. Moon is the sponsor of a bill to ban abortion in the state so he is in tune with Greitens aspirations though he wants to go even further and ban abortion entirely, to hell with the legalities suggested by Roe v. Wade.
Moon, though, seems to have confused abortion with meat processing. After killing and eviscerating a chicken on camera, he had this to say:
… “God gave man dominion over life. He allows us to raise animals properly, and care for them, and then process them for food so we can sustain life,” he said. “And that’s what I’m doing here.”
He then switched gears and seemed to compare abortion to the chicken heart, “the heart of the matter,” he had extracted. He later tweeted disdainfully “some people seem to be freaking out about the chicken video. I wonder if they know what an abortion is?” Which dodges the question of whether or not Moon knows what an abortion is.
I think that, if I can follow the logic, Moon thinks that abortion has something to do with chicken processing and food production.
In which case, I’m put in mind of the the late 17th and early 18th century satirist, Jonathan Swift. In “A Modest Proposal,” Swift parodied the indifference and cruelty of the Mike Moons of his time by suggesting that the problems of poverty and widespread starvation in Ireland cold be solved by breeding and selling the children of the poor for food. Especially relevant to Moon’s performance is the fact that Swift writes that breeding babies for food might resolve the situation wherein women too poor to feed their children resorted to abortion:
There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us! sacrificing the poor innocent babes I doubt more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pit in the most savage and inhuman breast.
Alas, though such irony may be lost on Moon, he is no stranger to bizarre and mean-minded rhetoric. He has recently distinguished himself by calling on Congress to repeal Obamacare with “manly firmness” . A couple of years ago, he called for a special session of the state legislature to stop the “Islamification” of Missouri by keeping out Syrian refugees, whom he also seems to regard as potential – but undesirable – food items, claiming that in his experience “a practicing Muslim comes in all flavors (black, white, brown, yellow American, African, European, etc. etc.).”
Is Moon maybe trying to out-Swift Swift?
*Slightly revised for clarity (11:34 am 6/14/2017),