On Friday’s episode of the Jim Bakker Show, right-wing religious activist Janet Porter and Ohio State Rep. Ron Hood were in jubilant moods, expressing their joy over the passage of Ohio’s “Heartbeat Bill.” And like so many other anti-choice bills before it, SB23 prohibits women who are more than five or six weeks pregnant from obtaining abortions. This is tragic because many women don’t realize they are pregnant this early on.
Porter, who’s been a religious activist for years, has been instrumental in promoting a spate of heartbeat bills, extremist anti-choice measures that ban abortion if a fetal heartbeat is detected, writes Kyle Mantyla for Right Wing Watch.
Hood was one of the sponsors of the Ohio bill and he worked in cahoots with Porter to make sure it passed. On Bakker’s show, he claimed those who oppose these bills “are being oppressed by Satanic spirits.”
“This is a spiritual battle,” Hood said. “It’s God’s people and it is the powers of darkness and the enemy and that’s what we’re up against. That’s what we’re going to have to continue to fight. But we have to remember who the enemy is. It’s spiritual. The enemy is Satan. These people full of hate? These people are victims, they’re under spiritual attack and they need [to be] freed. They need our prayers. They need to be freed from this spiritual attack and that’s why they’re on the side they’re on. They’re deceived.”
Porter launched a campaign in Ohio in 2011, hoping to convince the legislature to pass a measure that she called “The Heartbeat Bill,” which mirrored the one that finally did pass. This bill, she boasted, would outlaw abortion “before the mother even knows she’s pregnant. But her long-term goal has always been to outlaw abortion completely.
And for years, she remained stubbornly committed to pushing the legislation, but it died every time inside the legislature. But her stubbornness eventually won out, managing to overcome opposition from state legislators and anti-choice organizations whose leaders believed the bill was too radical and unlikely to survive challenges in the local courts. However, even though the legislature finally passed it, former governor John Kasich vetoed it twice.
All that changed when Mike DeWine (R) was elected governor in 2018. He pledged to sign the bill and did just that in April 2019. He just didn’t want her to show up for the bill’s signing.
DeWine wanted to steer a wide berth around Porter probably because of her radical right-wing Christian views. Porter is the founder of Faith 2 Action and uses her daily radio show and weekly column to promote conspiracy theories and warn of the upcoming “criminalization of Christianity.” Like Trump, she’s a birther who spreads nonsense about former President Barack Obama — asserting his election was the result of a Communist conspiracy and other foolish things.
But if she was disappointed by not being invited, she seemed happy to celebrate with Satan-hating Hood, who’s every bit as right-wing as she is. And perhaps just as loopy.
“Our enemy is Satan,” he said on Bakker’s program. “Satan is a liar, so let’s not be surprised that they lie. We’ve got to get over this shock and awe and pick ourselves up off the ground and realize we’re in a war. There is a reason why we have to put on the whole armor of God because we are in a war. It is a spiritual war. Our weapons are not carnal. There is evil out there. Those that we fight in the flesh and blood, those are people that are being oppressed by Satanic spirits. They need [to be] freed, they need the Gospel, they need Jesus.”
These two make quite the pair, don’t they?
Featured image courtesy of the video above
