The right's war on health has a new target: Children's hospitals
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Amanda Marcotte
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The right's harassment campaign against children's hospitals is modeled on tactics anti-choicers used for decades. But, as hard as it may be to believe, it's even more sinister, because it represents the total break conservatives are having with reality.
salon.com
The right's war on health has a new target: Children's hospitals
Why conservatives are whipping themselves into a frenzy of hate for facilities that mostly treat kid's cancer
11:40 AM · Sep 7, 2022
https://www.salon.com/2022/09/07/how-childrens-hospitals-became-the-rights-newest-target-of-hate/
At first blush, the right's new war on children's hospitals is most reminiscent of the tactics that have been used to harass abortion providers for decades. As Taylor Lorenz, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison reported over the weekend for the Washington Post, "Children's hospitals across the U.S. are facing growing threats of violence" from crazed right-wingers, like fans of the virulently queerphobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok, run by a woman named Chaya Raichik. Raichik keeps pointing her unhinged audience at various pediatric care facilities, resulting in "a flood of online harassment and phoned-in threats" at doctors and hospital staff.
Abortion providers and their allies will immediately see the connection to the throngs of anti-choice militants that gather around family planning clinics to bully patients. Like anti-choice activists, the people attacking children's hospitals are inserting themselves into the very personal decisions of total strangers. With anti-choicers, they're asserting that their religious beliefs about a woman's duty to breed trumps the right of bodily autonomy of patients. With those attacking children's hospitals, right-wingers are all wound up because they heard trans children are getting treatment, and they believe their opposition to trans identities should trump the child's right to gender-affirming care.
But there's one major difference between the two, one that really highlights how the already bizarre world of right-wing ideology has become more disconnected from reality.
Patients who have to run the gauntlet of misogynist hecklers at Planned Parenthood are mostly trying to get abortions and birth control, and the harassers are trying to stop them. But the vast majority of patients at Boston Children's Hospital or Children's National Hospital in Washington — which have both been subject to abuse — are getting care that has nothing to do with gender or sexuality. Conservatives are whipping themselves into a frenzy of hate for facilities that mostly treat cancer, asthma, and other childhood ailments.
It's part of a larger, troubling trend of Republicans growing increasingly hostile to the very concept of science-based medical care.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I don't trust anyone to police freedom of speech. Because some of you have a constrained view of free speech. Because some of you want to take a hammer to freedom of speech. And you know what? Who said the internet should ever be a safe space? If people want to talk, let them talk. Nothing is more important than the first amendment. Free speech is absolute!
So they want to talk? Is anyone really getting hurt here? If we stop them from making threats, they just might turn around and use that hammer against liberals. So quit whining and quit attacking free speech!
The real victims here are the people making threats. They are just speaking their minds. For fuck's sake, we need to hear their side. They're upset. They're offended. And if we stop them, they could take that hammer against us!
Where did any of you get the impression that the internet is a safe space?
Goddamned unpopular trans issues will cost us the election!
ALL OF IT!
(And, no, at no point was I upset at you, Nevilledog. You're awesome. 
)
We know who we can thank for what's going on with the Boston Children's Hospital, of course... I mean besides the usual suspects.
LibsOfTikTok.
They started up the "groomer"/"child mutilation" nonsense a couple months ago. Since then, it's been constant threats in the name of "protecting our children!" First they called for executing doctors there... Now it's bomb threats.
You know why? Because nothing - and I mean nothing - says "I'm protecting children!" like wanting to blow up a hospital with children in it! I mean, this would be like me saying "I want to destroy cancer forever... Here, have some plutonium!" But in their warped minds, they think scaring and harming and blowing up children... protects children. 
Social media has failed us. It really has. I don't know how else to say it, world, but Meal Ticket 6 is threatening us, publicly, with the whole world watching... And getting away with it. Now, sure, you could argue if these sick fucks really wanted to attack this hospital or blow up Keffals or shoot up Drag Queen Story Time, they'd plan it privately... No. The real problem is they are making these threats. Why the hell aren't these social media sewage plants contacting the FBI? Why the hell isn't law enforcement subpoenaing them?
How about arresting these domestic terrorists before someone (a lot of someones) get hurt in a home-brewed 9/11?