Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the 26-year-old extremist from North Carolina, demonstrated his brittle knowledge of the issues surrounding abortion earlier this week as he argued for the reversal of Roe v. Wade on the House floor.
The Donald Trump-style Republican read out an analogy on Wednesday comparing pregnancy to a Polaroid picture in what amounted to a sermon that labeled women “earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God.”
His minute-and-a-half speech came the same day that conservatives on the Supreme Court appeared openly willing to turn back the clock on abortion rights in America by overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion nationwide.
Cawthorn began by inviting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to “imagine you’ve just walked out of this chamber” to see a “gorgeous sunset.”
“You have a Polaroid camera and you snap a beautiful picture, and a great photo prints out the front,” he continued.
“You hold it and shake it, waiting for the picture to appear, but suddenly someone walks by and snatches your photo, ripping it to shreds,” Cawthorn said, describing a task that would be nearly impossible without scissors.
“You cry, ‘Why did you destroy my picture?’” the congressman wailed. The callous passerby then asserts that because the Polaroid “wasn’t fully developed yet,” it was “not a picture.”
“All of us in this room realize how asinine that reasoning is,” Cawthorn said, accidentally landing on an apt description of his entire speech.
Among the numerous problems with Cawthorn’s analogy are the facts that human babies ― unlike Polaroids ― require care and feeding, take an immense physical toll on the body, and an immense financial toll on caregivers who may have any number of reasons why they are not prepared to take on such a responsibility, among them a lack of governmental support.
We also have questions: Is the passerby supposed to represent a woman seeking an abortion? Certainly the analogy makes more sense if she is holding the Polaroid camera and making decisions about what happens to the photograph. Or is the Polaroid camera itself ― an inert object with no feeling ― supposed to represent a human woman in Cawthorn’s analogy?
He concluded his weird speech with a heavy dose of apocalyptic imagery: “One day, perhaps when science darkens the soul of the left, our nation will repent.” OK.
You can watch the whole thing below.