[Billy Corgan Voice] Shakedown 1972

I stumble across the world's first anti-abortion fashion line

As you can see above, longtime G.O.T.H.S. fan favorite Abby Johnson criticized the Pope on Twitter last week and I was drafting a piece about it, focusing on how her “scriptura sola” tweet, paired with her “fide sola” tweet from earlier this summer (below), meant that Ms. Real Traditional Good Catholic had backed her way into accidental Lutheranism, and how that makes sense because Abby Johnson actually doesn’t know anything about Catholicism, is a big dumb idiot, and really has never had any convictions or sincere desire to learn or gain anything from religion other than sitting in a community that already agrees with her politically, and how that is borne out by her two previous conversions, and how she says as much herself in this unwatchable 2014 interview with EWTN. I do think there’s a good piece there, although maybe not a funny one.

So, instead, I’m going to write about the funny thing I discovered while putting that other piece together. Here’s Johnson speaking at the RNC in August:

You can see the ‘1972’ pin on her left lapel, which - because my brain is broken - I immediately recognized as a callout to the year before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. I thought, at the time, that this was an incredibly inside reference that only the most hardcore anti-abortion people would even recognize (although I suppose that’s who Johnson’s audience was). I just thought it was a very long way to go for the reference, that you were getting a custom fancy-looking ‘1972’ lapel pin made. But, of course, as I found out, it wasn’t custom. It’s a whole clothing brand, and you’ll never guess who just launched her own branded line under their umbrella.

Culture of Life 1972 (COL1972) is the official clothing line of women who think they’re going to end abortion by asking to see its manager. Founded in early 2019 by the D’Addesi family in Philadelphia, COL1972 is indeed named after the year before Roe; as one of the founders put it, “1972 Is the final year we enjoyed a culture of life in the United States of America. In 1973 the supreme court ruled that are tiniest Americans did not have the right to life. Since 1973 61 million Americans have been denied the right to life. We would like to get back to celebrating all life as we did in the year 1972,” presumably referring to the time when Americans were so committed to a culture of life that they were still choosing teenagers by lottery to go murder Vietnamese people. All of COL1972’s profits go to their 501c3 arm, which seems to do things like charter buses to the March for Life - which we’ve explored before as an explicit Republican political rally, so see if you can guess this family's political leanings. I'll give you a hint:

Carla, the matriarch of the family - oh man, brace yourself for this - stood for an RNC delegate slot for Trump in 2020, also happens to be a former conservative columnist and radio host, and in an interview with a right-wing blog, she “explained that her family is big into boycotting companies and corporations that have violated the moral principles of her family.” Boycotts can certainly be a powerful tool for activists, and I hope D’Addesi is using her purchasing power to advocate for union rights or higher wages or just kidding it's this: “They won’t shop in Target because of the organization’s transgender bathroom policy or refuse to buy Nike clothing because of its advertising with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, the number of companies that her family can in good conscience purchase from is decreasing.” Rest assured that D’Addesi also said in the same interview that “Models for the company’s website and social media pages are not going to be shown in promiscuous poses...You are not going to see two boys together or two girls together. You are not going to see a boy dressed in girls clothes or a girl dressed in boys clothes. We celebrate women for being women and men for being men.”

Her bio on the COL website is pretty sparse, but if you spend five minutes looking on the Internet, you learn that Carla D'Addesi is also a former reality TV mom, appeared on TLC's "Surviving Motherhood" series in 2007, and has been hustling for far-right cash ever since, through media appearances, podcasts, and endless posting. That said, D'Addesi does seem to have erased her entire social online presence earlier this year: her blog, Twitter account, and Facebook page are all deleted, but you can still find her horrifying series of children's books on Amazon, including "Julia Learns How to Marry Wisely":

I don't want to spend too much time on D'Addesi's career, as this is a short piece and I think we all have a pretty good handle on what her deal is. It's hard to imagine a more perfect business partner for Abby Johnson. The real question, of course, is: how are the actual COL1972 products? The answer for most of the products appears to be "fine". Some of the pieces carry weirdly oblique anti-abortion messages (imagine wearing this anywhere except the March For Life):

But some of it is just normal Bitches Love Fall material:

And most of it would just be indistinguishable from most mid-tier women's clothing:

And look, I know that every single model in the above screenshots happened to all be the same race, but COL1972's model roster is not entirely white, it's merely overwhelmingly white. Models of color are also on the site showing off some athletic leggings, a hooded sweatshirt, and none of the business attire, which is about what I'd expect from the fashion line founded by the woman boycotting Nike for hiring Colin Kaepernick. COL1972 also has a limited selection for men, and this is the non-promiscuous pose the male model chose:

He’s not the only male model, there’s also this guy, who’s not like other anti-abortion guys he’s a cool anti-abortion guy:

For some reason, leopard print also seems to be a very big motif here, and essential to the brand - one notch below Jesus, two below caffeine - even though leopard print does not belong to the anti-abortion movement, having already been claimed exclusively by suburban women trying to fuck their son’s best friend:

All of that, however, is mere prelude to the AbbyJ collection, "for the mom, wife, business woman, and life advocate who is on-the-go!"

The collection is mainly focused on business attire; it looks like you're paying less than what you would at Banana Republic, so maybe that's good, whatever. But there was one eye-catching offering in the AbbyJ collection:

I'm not sure how COVID masks ended up in the AbbyJ collection, given Johnson's public and ongoing opposition to masking. In my original piece on Johnson, I looked at her anti-masking screed that ran in far-right blog The Federalist, and also pointed out that she was calling for a blood-soaked 'herd immunity' strategy as late as mid-May, as shown below:

Of course it's not entirely fair to throw an old tweet from May in Johnson's face. Things have changed since then. We're heading into another spike in cases, and it's entirely possible that she's changed her view on the pandemic, and wouldn't have done something as late as October 9 like tweeting directly at her governor pleading to end her state's mask mandate. However:

So there's been no change in my original assessment of Abby Johnson, as there's been no change in her belief that millions should die in order that she not experience an inconvenience; still, if that inconvenience is gonna happen, she would at least like a cut of the profit. Abby Johnson, the face of the 'pro-life' movement in the Republican party and the right wing of Catholicism, does not give a shit about life nearly as much as she cares about selling movie tickets or speaking engagements or, now that she has found a kindred spirit in Carla D'Addesi, pencil skirts and leopard-print masks. As she keeps finding ways to rake in cash, she also takes the time to criticize the Pope for saying something as radical as "greed and poverty are problems"; at this point she likely considers this criticism to just be brand-building. I originally wrote this about Abby Johnson back in August:

"She wrote that the only hope for the anti-abortion movement lay in prayer and humility and a willingness to listen, but if you’re prayerful and humble and willing to listen, you sure as shit aren’t going to get interviews at Fox News or freelance gigs at The Federalist or a biopic produced by Pure Flix. When you sign up for the anti-abortion movement now, it turns out you are signing up to embrace Donald Trump, and you are signing up to drink in stupid conspiracy theories, and you are signing up to spout racist talking points and buy a MyPillow out of spite."

COL1972 is just another instance of this. If you don't want to support brands that has given money to Planned Parenthood, that's allowed, but that also means you have to give money to the TLC housewife who thinks Colin Kaepernick is too uppity and bathrooms are a key front in the war for America's soul and you should buy a book telling your daughter who to marry. It is absolutely no surprise that Abby Johnson is supporting this family and this brand, especially since it represents another income stream for her.

The real reason the original piece on Abby’s “accidental Lutheranism” fell through is because I don’t think it’s right to draw a comparison between Abby Johnson and Martin Luther, considering how insulting that would be to Martin Luther. Luther was actually an intelligent theologian with a famously acidic sense of humor, who turned his moral outrage on what was, at the time, the most powerful institution on the planet. The church in Luther’s time was running on greed, corruption, and authoritarianism, and he spread a message that the church leadership could fuck right off with that, and I’m only lightly paraphrasing. Abby Johnson embraces greed, corruption, and authoritarianism. It’s why she sold her memoir's film rights to a studio that turned it into an explainer on how Planned Parenthood was George Soros’ personal eugenics company. It’s why she praises white supremacists and denounces clergy of color on social media. It’s why she said her own son was more likely to be a criminal because of the color of his skin, and that it's okay if police keep killing Black people like him. It’s why she actively campaigns for Donald Trump’s re-election. She is, in one person, the embodiment of the complete moral vacuum at the center of the anti-abortion movement in 2020. None of that is funny at all, but goddamn it, selling leopard print bullshit along the way definitely is and I needed a laugh this week.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.