A Former Conservative Friend Used to Trot Out His Dead Child to Win Abortion Debates

But he was instantly dismissive of threats against my children

I’ve been reluctant to write this story because I don’t feel it reflects well on me. It’s embarrassing to get drawn into this kind of conflict. However, if the events that led up to the disagreement were to repeat, I most likely would behave the same way again.

It would be nice if we could get back to the basic understanding that it’s inappropriate to threaten other people’s children. A big part of the problem is that conservatives have taken an absurd, macho, “alpha male” persona and fused it with their fundamental self-image.

They’ve brainwashed themselves into thinking that they are the only ones who care about children, despite the fact that none of their basic philosophies are meant to aid children in any way. They don’t want children to have healthcare, they don’t want children to have a good education, they mock the importance of mental health.

They call us “snowflakes” and “libtards.” They’ll say things like, “Did I trigger you?” and they ridicule the concept of a “safe space”. Conservatives always try to build themselves up as “the tough ones,” so that they can behave like bullies.

But just because somebody is conflict averse over petty issues doesn’t mean they can’t summon a feral rage when their children are threatened. Conservatives are too dumb to recognize this. It doesn’t matter how tough you think you are, when conservatives attack children they’ll bring forth a ferocity they’ll find they’re ill equipped to handle.

Online abortion debates

In another life I used to think that there might be some benefit in attempting to engage with conservatives in reasonable debate. I wanted to learn how they think. The only thing I learned was that such an aspiration was a complete waste of time.

Conservatives always turn the abortion debate into a defiant insistence that only they are willing to speak for the rights of an unborn child.

It’s one of the most dishonest positions in all of politics, and it’s basically the only peg upon which conservatives can hang their fraudulent self-perception of decency.

“Who will speak for the unborn if not us?”

The ironic thing is that conservatives always want to speak for other people. They always want to muscle in there and insist others adopt the behaviors they insist are righteous and moral. When people can speak for themselves, conservatives don’t want to hear it.

They’re only interested in the weak, and if they encounter strong opposition they endeavor to make it weak so that they can impose their will.

My former conservative friend

There was one friend that always ended abortion debates the same way. He’d lost a child, and he’d always bring it up because he knew it meant I wouldn’t engage.

The first time he mentioned it, I simply bowed out of the discussion.

“I’m sorry for your loss, that’s too emotionally charged and I will abstain from commenting further.”

I wrote that as a courtesy to him, but I think he took it the wrong way. I think he took it to mean that he had a right to use his experience of loss as a cudgel to permanently silence me and my beliefs.

I have sympathy for the man for losing a child. However, losing a child does not give him the right to tell my daughters what they can and can’t do with their bodies.

It doesn’t.

To think that is stupid.

He repeated it too often

The first time he brought it up, I was overcome with sympathy. I felt sympathy the second time too, and the third, and the forth, and so on.

However, after years of this, my sympathy started to shift to the child. It seemed to me that this innocent, vulnerable baby was being used.

Does it cheapen the memory of a child to use that memory to win a social media debate on a political issue?

I think that’s a fair question to ask.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have asked him this question out of respect, out of basic decency. I would have gone on bowing out of online abortion debates and I would have probably remained friends with the guy.

But then Trump came along and threatened my children. Not the memory of my children…my actual living, breathing children. He threatened them and this self proclaimed champion of the unborn simply didn’t care.

Trump incited hatred against non-whites

In 2016, I wrote a viral article about how Trump’s candidacy had led to an increase in aggression against my wife and daughters.

We’re a Spanish speaking family. We speak Spanish in public. My wife is from Peru and it’s important that my children have a connection to their cultural heritage.

The second sour-puss, pseudo-tough-guy Trump started riling people up with his hate rallies, we started to hear, “This is America, we speak English here,” a lot more often.

I didn’t hear it. The tough guys wouldn’t say it when I was around. They’d wait to corner my daughters at school. Or they’d follow my wife around in their patrol cars and pull her over for nothing.

The rock throwing incident

The worst moment came in the aftermath of Trump’s infamous “white power” tweet. Conservatives deny this happened, but it can be easily verified that Trump tweeted a video of a man screaming the words. This presidential tweet served as a dog whistle for white supremacists around the country.

Trump took the tweet down, but he didn’t apologize. When he “denounced” white supremacy, it always seemed as if he did it while flashing the “okay” sign.

White supremacists started coming out of the woods.

One day, I took my kids to the beach. They were sitting in water that was about knee deep, building castles, chatting away in Spanish. My wife and I were sitting slightly downriver in a cove that hid us from view.

I started to notice odd splashes in the water near my kids. After it happened a few times, I stood up to look.

Downriver, there were three or four kids who were about fifteen skipping rocks in the direction of my girls. One of them was wearing a Trump campaign shirt.

Now, I’m sure if I had confronted them, they would have insisted that they meant no harm, that they were just being dumb kids. But I don’t believe that. I believe this was a racially motivated attack by entitled white supremacists who were attempting to hit my children with rocks.

It took a level of self-control that I didn’t know I had to get my kids out of there because I knew if I approached the rock throwers I’d be sitting in jail now. I got my kids and we left, but the anger seethed in me for days.

Social media

Throughout the 2020 campaign, I spent my time writing articles in an attempt to convince people that Trump was not the answer for our country. Most of these articles contained evidence of Trump’s behavior with direct quotations, and then examples from my personal life about how I’d seen increased aggression against my wife and kids.

“If you vote for Trump, you’re dead to me. I don’t know how long I’ve known you. I don’t care if you’re family. It’s an attack on my children and I won’t forgive it.”

After writing a comment like this, I was surprised to see a comment from my conservative friend.

He was mocking me. The one who constantly trotted out his dead child.

I’d retreated from online discussions with him dozens of times out of respect to parenthood and the love fathers feel for their children.

But somehow, he thought attacks against my children were funny?

I’ve since deleted the comment thread. But it went through a couple stages. First he denied that the rock throwing incident happened. Then he insisted that it was blown out of proportion. Then he brought out a bunch of non-equivalent transgressions of other politicians and asked why I didn’t hold them to the same standard.

Through it all, he’d use mocking words like “ha!” He seemed to think this whole thing was hysterical. It seemed to me that he wasn’t getting the “threat to child” context. Finally, I decided to put an end to it.

“Why are you attacking me for this? I didn’t attack you over the child that you lost.”

The phrase was designed to hurt him. I admit it. He wrote something back, some reeling comment that indicated he was stunned.

“Not so funny now is it?” I signed off, furious. I didn’t go back online for two weeks.

He needed to get the context that this was an attack on my kids. He needed to take how he felt about his kids and apply it to how I felt about my kids. Attacking a person’s children isn’t funny, and he’d just written a half dozen comments that showed he thought it was. Have a little respect.

How many times do you have to tell people not to attack your kids? You tell them to stop advancing and they take one more step and one more step and one more step until you have to lay them out.

You don’t do things that you’re proud of when you recognize an assault on your children.

This is why I’ve subsequently cut all Trump supporters out of my life.

They’re all a bunch of losers anyway, and I’m right at the red line. I’ve been at the red line for five years. I don’t want to be provoked into physically attacking some idiot. Win or lose, I’d lose. My kids would lose.

My children need me. I can’t let some loser provoke me into a physical altercation that might land me in jail.

The conservative bots attack

When I went back online, I had a dozen comments from his conservative friends that accused me of attacking his child. That’s not what happened, but conservatives always think they’re righteous. People throwing rocks at my kids is fine to them, but if I equate that to the courtesy I showed by withdrawing from a debate when a child was named, somehow I became the bad guy?

I’m convinced most of the conservatives on Facebook are just AI bots. Real people can’t be that stupid. Or maybe it’s not stupidity, instead it’s an intellectually dishonest attack strategy. They like attacking our compassion because they think it’s a weakness. I think they scour the internet for phrases and then send prepared messages. I blocked them all.

My former conservative friend had unfriended me, but he hadn’t blocked me, so I sent him a message. I’d had a couple of weeks to cool down, and I thought that there might be something to salvage from this.

I felt remorse for the brutal depths to which political discourse has descended in our country. The most infuriating part is that conservatives insist their children are untouchable, but they laugh when somebody attacks yours.

They laugh!

They laugh and then when you push back they are instantly appalled. They pass from one extreme to the other without observing any of the scenery along the way.

I avoid conflict, but don’t attack my children

For the year of his primary campaign and the entirety of the Trump presidency, decent people were under constant assault. We had to endure casual attacks on the safety and well being of our children.

Conservatives attacked them emotionally, they attacked them mentally, and, in the end, they attacked them physically.

I’ll endure a certain amount of physical abuse to avoid a Civil War. But I can’t ask my children to endure the same. I can’t watch it and do nothing.

Trotting out a dead child to win an argument is the type of tactic only a conservative would use. It’s because they truly don’t respect the concept. The love a parent feels for his or her child isn’t something you use to win an argument on social media. Doing so cowed me not because I’m weak, but because I’m decent.

“Why are you laughing at this attack on my living, breathing children? I never even considered encroaching upon the memory of your child.”

Why won’t they extend me the courtesy of decency towards my children?

It’s because they think my children are sub-human.

That’s not funny.

Recognizing that renders me incapable of reasonable debate.

If they want to bridge the divide, it’s up to them to renounce their positions and make amends.

I’ve spent my whole life at the point of compromise. I will not go further. I will not reach across.