Hey, Fetus People, Leave Irish Coach Alone

Unrest in the University of Notre Dame community over the pro-choice views of new football coach Brian Kelly tees up Amanda Marcotte for a screed against what she calls the “Fetus People.” Where sportswriters ask what abortion has to do with college football, the Fetus People “haven’t met many issues they can’t make about abortion,” Marcotte writes for RHRealityCheck. “When abortion is everything … it’s the perfect tool for power-hungry reactionaries to use when trying to change elections, stifle freedom of speech of maximize sadistic authoritarianism over every aspect of your flock’s life.”

Among the key factors the right-wing movement aims to use in “this sex panic poor Brian Kelly has set off by wanting to coach some football”: campus sexual tension; converting Catholics via their anti-abortion stance; misogynist males attracted to sports; and anti-intellectualism, “nearly as important to the anti-choice movement as misogyny.” And irritating as it may be to Kelly, she concludes, “if the Fetus People really do picket his offices and games, that will just reinforce the public’s understanding that they’re the new McCarthyites.”
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