WASHINGTON, D.C., July 22, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After she delivered a speech on the importance of humor in social media communications to a conference in Washington, D.C., numerous media outlets reported that Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins had told pro-life advocates to “make abortion funny.”
Alex Seitz-Wald started things with a story on Salon.com. The feminist website Jezebel wrote, “GOP Plan: Appeal to Hip Millennials With Hilarious Abortion Joke.” The Washington Post's humor columnist, Gene Weingarten, wrote a sarcastic column of abortion jokes that he offered for pro-lifers to use.
The trouble, Hawkins said, is that she said nothing of the sort.
Hawkins was speaking in a breakout panel at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference on the topic of effective communication strategies for pro-life activists in reaching millennial voters. But rather than suggesting they make abortion funny, she says she was suggesting they make abortion activists' radicalism funny.
“We need to make being pro-choice funny; something to be laughed at and dismissed,” Hawkins told LifeSiteNews.com. “Their position should be exposed for just what it is – a minority that is so extreme it is laughable.”
“When the pro-abort side is screaming hysterically about the GOP’s ‘War on Women,’ that shouldn’t be taken seriously,” she said.
Citing the “debacle” when an outcry over the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s defunding of Planned Parenthood led to its abrupt about-face, Hawkins called the nation's leading abortion provider a bully.
“What is the best way to cut down a bully?” she asked.
“Make them the butt of a joke,” she said.
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The tactic, she noted, had been advanced in Saul Alinsky’s handbook for community organizers, Rules for Radicals, which says, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition who then react to your advantage.”
President Barack Obama, a former community organizer, used to teach Saul Alinsky's tactics and has deployed ridicule as a regular weapon.
“While some wish that white papers and academic appeals to reason were the best way to reach young people,” Hawkins added, “we know that's not the reality.”
“We have to adapt to the way this generation consumes news and culture,” she said.