May 20th 2020

By Aldous J Pennyfarthing (from the Daily Kos community)

Daily Kos

You might think the most seismic fake conversion of all time was Donald Trump pretending to be a pro-life Christian conservative. (If you sprinkled holy water on him once a fortnight, the resulting chemical reaction could likely provide cheap, renewable energy for a mid-sized American city.)

Well, according to a new FX documentary, Trump’s Constantine-like conversion is not the biggest nor phoniest of the past several decades.

The documentary, AKA Jane Roe, chronicles the public life of Norma McCorvey, who became famous as plaintiff Jane Roe in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which made abortion safe and legal across the country.

However, in her later years, encouraged by a cabal of evangelical right-wingers, McCorvey appeared to hew to the pro-life cause.

The Daily Beast:

[C]onservatives had a field day in the mid-‘90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash, will dramatize McCorvey’s “conversion.”

Sounds inspiring if you believe Adam and Eve road out of Eden on tricked-out velociraptors. But that’s apparently not the whole story.

In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”

“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.”

Whoopsie.

You’d think a movement supposedly predicated on truth, justice, and the American way would be a little more, uh, honest. But right-wing Christians haven’t done honest since … well, I can’t recall when they ever did, really.

And it’s not like they were plying her with coffee and muffins. According to The Daily Beast, the documentary reveals that McCorvey received at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from anti-choicers.

So, yeah, more bullshit from the biggest bullshitters in modern history.

Whether it’s Jim Bakker selling silver solution as a coronavirus cure or preachers paying off an icon to fake the latter part of her life, it’s all part of the same shifty grift.

Now if only Donald Trump would come clean.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Oh, silly Aldous. You cray.

Posted with permission