"Touchdown Jesus:" At Notre Dame, Anti-Choicers Use Abortion As a Political Football. Literally

The University of Notre Dame has a long history of worshipping the sport of football, complete with jokes about their "Touchdown Jesus."  As the university that still can claim the most famous football coach in college football history, Notre Dame (ND) still takes the sport very seriously decades after the fact.  They’re the only college football team with its own television contract, to have its home games televised exclusively by NBC.  The only problem with all of this is that the Fighting Irish haven’t really been that great a team in a long time.  And that’s why it was such a wise decision for them to hire Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly, who turned his unremarkable team into a formidable power, and is believed, with good reason, to be able to do even more with the recruiting abilities of Notre Dame.

This new hire is a big deal in college sports.  No wonder the anti-choicers decided they had to have a part of it; Touchdown Jesus forbids that anything important happen that’s not "All About Them."  Hijacking health care reform isn’t enough, it turns out.  Now the Fetus People have to take on college football.

The hook is that Notre Dame is a Catholic university and Kelly is pro-choice.  Apparently, this is suddenly a contradiction, though the sports world has mainly expressed confusion over why this is an issue.  Hard to blame sports writers who ask the obvious question, which is, “What does abortion have to do with football?”

To ask the question is to miss the point, as anyone who has dealt with the Fetus People can attest.  They haven’t met many issues they can’t make about abortion.  It’s an all-purpose stand-in for everything that right wing reactionaries wish to attack---witness, for instance, Chuck Norris implying that giving people more access to general health care is the same thing as aborting the Baby Jesus.  If mammograms and blood pressure medication are the same thing as abortion, then surely hiring a pro-choice football coach is abortion.

From an outsider’s perspective, the whole thing is silly.  But for the sex panickers, all the necessary ingredients are there in full force: College kids who are surely Doing It, Catholicism (and the right wing’s naked desire to own it outright), masculinity displays, and the hated pointy-headed intellectualism of universities.  It doesn’t have to make sense.  The point is that college football is a powder keg of buttons that right-wingers like to push, and they’re going to use abortion to push them.  This isn’t even the first time that this powder keg has attracted anti-choice nuts.  Saint Louis basketball coach Rick Majerus suggested that he supports abortion rights in public, and publicity-hungry reactionary archbishop Raymond Burke used this as an opportunity to lash out.  When abortion is everything, then that means it’s the perfect tool for power-hungry reactionaries to use when trying to change elections, stifle freedom of speech, or maximize sadistic authoritarianism over every aspect of your flock's life.

Let’s take a look at the ingredients of this sex panic that poor Brian Kelly has set off by wanting to coach some football.  First of all, anti-choicers love to have this sort of thing happen on campus, in part because they want to catch them while they’re young and pliable, but mostly because they can exploit campus tensions over sexuality.  There’s always a handful of kids that resent the great campus sex experiment who give anti-choicers an in on campus.  The Campus Anti-Sex League that was tapped to protest Obama is available and waiting for the next round of lashing out at their more sexually adventurous peers.

The Catholicism angle isn’t hard to figure out. Catholics have traditionally been Democrats, and conservatives see abortion as an issue where they can get massive and permanent electoral switches.  And when reticent and largely pro-choice Catholics don’t get on board with the program, the attempts to persuade them to consider abortion their number one issue turn to force---hanging the loss of communion or, in Kelly’s case, the loss of jobs over their heads if they don’t comply.

The masculinity issue is an interesting one.  Since football is considered an uber-masculine past time, it’s not hard to figure out why anti-choicers would think it’s the perfect home for the misogyny underlying their movement.  When real life turns out to be more complicated---and when prominent figures demonstrate they can love football without hating women---the potential for a right wing backlash is great.

And of course, you have anti-intellectualism, which is nearly as important to the anti-choice movement as misogyny.  Catholic universities such as Notre Dame have a long tradition of respecting and encouraging genuine intellectual involvement in the world, which requires open-mindedness and often leads to tolerance.  You know, like any other university.  And the right has a long-standing grudge match with the intellectual environment at universities.  How better to attack this hated enemy than to use religion to bully a major university to give up on its intellectual aspirations and instead enforce an ugly, anti-intellectual, dogmatic view on its people?  True, starting with a football coach seems an odd choice, but it’s the sort of story that will get national attention and put other people interested in academic freedom on notice.

Since the odds that anti-choice complaints are going to amount to nothing are sky high, there’s a strong possibility that the nuts will show up and start picketing Kelly’s offices.  While this is going to be irritating, I hope Kelly can take some comfort in this: 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, and abortion---like communism before---is just a tool being used to express the sadistic authoritarian impulse.

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