The makers of an adult party game are using profits from Wyoming customers to support pro-abortion causes, the game company announced this month.
Cards Against Humanity is a 2010 game in which players try to win the most votes from other players by combining phrase-bearing cards to create risqué, offensive, funny or incongruous sentences.
The makers of the game announced Aug. 9 that for game orders from states with anti-abortion laws, they would send all profits to the National Network of Abortion Funds.
“Your state sucks,” begins the public statement, which then addresses customers in Wyoming and 22 other states with pro-life legislatures.
The game makers announced the release of “new packs,” or new versions of the game.
“But while the packs were being printed, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and your state immediately turned itself into a dystopian forced-birth hellscape,” the statement reads, later calling the Supreme Court justices who overturned the historic abortion-rights case “ghoulish theocrats.”
A link embedded in the press release leads to additional information, including surveys from pro-life states regarding how citizens in those states reportedly perceive abortion and various sex issues. That page concludes by urging the reader to vote “this fall,” then says, “Okay, time for some casual sex.”
‘Just Evil’
To one of Wyoming’s leading pro-life legislators, the statement by Cards Against Humanity seemed to go against humanity.
Rep. Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, helped craft Wyoming’s trigger ban which would outlaw abortion in the state. Neiman has petitioned Teton County District Court as an intervenor to defend the abortion ban in a lawsuit against it. The court paused the law Aug. 10, and is contemplating whether it the ban will be allowed under the Wyoming Constitution.
Neiman said the idea of a lewd card game using its profits to expand abortion access strikes him as “abhorrent.”
“Why do people have to be so nasty? It’s just evil,” he said. “Is there always a potential to find a new level of low in how we treat women and human beings in general?”
One of the tenets of Neiman’s intervenor request is an argument that abortion actually harms women, rather than helps them. He said the Cards Against Humanity announcement merely galvanizes his mission to protect the state’s trigger ban.
“It just reminds me how important this is – what we’re standing up for,” he said. “It tells me we have a very real battle here and we need to continue to stand up for what’s right, what’s just, what’s pure and what’s true.”
The other states addressed in the Cards against Humanity announcement were Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin.
Nine of those have total abortion bans, that is, laws against abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. Those are Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin.
Wyoming’s trigger ban contains exceptions for rape and incest, but those exceptions may have crippled the state’s arguments in defense of it.
One of the attorneys arguing against the abortion ban told Teton County District Court Judge Melissa Owens on Aug. 9 – the same day the game makers’ statement was issued – that the state couldn’t defend the ban by arguing for a fetal right to life, because the rape and incest exceptions would make the concept of inherent, universal fetal life rights illogical.
