Perry’s Epiphany

Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Perry was watching a movie last week while campaigning in Iowa when he experienced yet another profound religious epiphany – a sudden intuitive insight into the mind of God – which moved him to change his anti-liberty position on the issue of abortion.  

"You're seeing a transformation," Perry later told reporters about it.

Does this mean that the man who wears the badge of Christianity on his sleeve, and has made religion, and religious faith the focal point of his campaign, is now a pro-liberty Republican?

Hardly.

The movie was a documentary about abortion produced by former Baptist minister, Arkansas Governor, and 2008 Iowa caucus winner, Mike Huckabee. After the screening, Perry met with a woman depicted in the film whose mother was raped leading to her conception and eventual birth.

The meeting "started giving [me] some thought to the issue of rape and incest," Perry explained. "When the lady who was in it was looking me in the eye and saying, `You need to think this through,' she said, `I am the product of a rape' and she said `my life has worth,"' … "It was a powerful moment for me."

Before that, Perry’s position was that he would allow abortion in cases of rape, incest or when the mother's life is at risk. Now he piously declares that he has strengthened his opposition to abortion and opposes it even in the case of rape, incest or when the woman's life would be at risk.

Get it? He would allow …

Perry's “transformation” from staunch anti-liberty to ultra-anti-liberty politician comes curiously just one week before the Iowa caucuses, a place where right-wing evangelical social conservatives dominate the Republican Party and where Mike Huckabee just happened to win four years ago in a surprise  upset victory over Mitt Romney.

He also signed the “Personhood USA” pledge, which states that "abortion and the intentional killing of an innocent human being are always wrong and should be prohibited."

Perry is desperately trying to regenerate the overwhelming support he generated from evangelicals when entering the race last summer but lost after a series of horrendous debate performances against his more politically nimble opponents.

All of this has had the effect on me of my own profound rational epiphany -- a sudden intuitive insight into the mind of a tyrant – which leads me to understand even more clearly the cancer of religion upon the body of civilization throughout the history of human consciousness.  

This man, like all other religious and political tyrants throughout history, would have no problem whatsoever with his conscience in forcing all women – in the name of Jesus Christ -- to bear unwanted offspring in every single instance, without exception, no matter what the consequences.

Get it? Now he would not allow…

Forgive me for thinking the unthinkable, but: if Rick Perry’s wife or daughter were, may chance forbid it, brutally raped and impregnated by a filthy evil lowlife criminal cretin; if afterward he had to face the prospect of witnessing his loved one endure nine months of unrelenting emotional anguish while carrying the vile perpetrators offspring inside her body to term; and then the indelible stain thereafter upon her physical and psychological well being for the rest of her life; I wonder …     

Would he just possibly experience another epiphany?