Any English major would know that dead writer Flannery O'Connor would support South Dakota's anti-abortion bill. Duh!Jon Schaff over at S.D. Politics (http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com) but not the one who's an NSU Hardy Boy, has elevated the abortion debate so high that even I, a proud English major awarded departmental honors at Washburn University of Topeka, can't even understand it.  Jonny's post:

Try A Little Tenderness

This post on abortion made me think of a particular line from Flannery O'Connor that serves as the theme of Walker Percy's last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. I found it summed up online in this Claremont Institute article:

[O'Connor] was also pleased that Kirk was about to launch a conservative journal (Modern Age), and she favorably reviewed his Conservative Mind. In her copy she marked the words, "Abstract sentimentality ends in real brutality." She may have had that passage in mind when she wrote in her finest essay,

If other ages felt less they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.... [But when] tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.

Her friend and fellow Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy made "tenderness leads to the gas chamber" the leitmotif of his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome.

So, given my municipal university education, I guess that means ol Flannery would be for the new Women's Anti-Health and Enslavement Act that the geniuses in Pierre passed last week.  Also the same for this Walker Percy dude/dudette* (see, I don't even know who the hell they are--damn my public school education!)

So, who could we on the other side bring out as against this idiotic bill who are literary giants?  My suggestions:

• Dante, he of Inferno fame.  He knew a thing or two about hell, or as I call it, the S.D. Legislature's thought process.
• William Faulkner.  Pregnant women who read his long, complicated sentences have been known to spontaneously abort. 
• 
  A pro-choice John Steinbeck? Would he have written "The Fallopian Tubes of Wrath?"John Steinbeck.  If alive today, he would write The Fallopian Tubes of Wrath.
• ee cummings.  If alive today, might write, "The only problem with a South Dakotan is that/He grows up to take away all your rights."  Sorry, it doesn't rhyme.  That's why he's in poetry anthologies and I'm not.

So kids, add your own favorite authors to the fray.

*Ok, he's a guy.  I'll take Schaff's word for it.  Still haven't heard of ol Percy.