The Abortion Debate: Purity vs Reality

Remember Jon Kyl's abortion fantasy? In 2011, Kyl (R-Arizona) famously said on the floor of the Senate that Planned Parenthood spends "well over 90 percent" of its time performing abortions. When it was pointed out that the actual number was around 3 percent, Kyl's spokesman responded by saying the comment was "not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions."

Kyl was widely mocked for this, but it did not hurt his standing among pro-lifers. Being right (as in, factual) matters less to them than being in the right—Planned Parenthood is the enemy; providing abortions might as well be all they do. Never mind that it is very little of what they do. The devil is not in the details.

Details, in fact, only get in the way. Cuts to state funding for Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 caused 56 clinics to close and over 130,000 women to lose access to health services in a state that already ranks near the bottom in quality of health care. A 2012 Susan J. Komen Foundation plan to cut grants for breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood would have denied thousands of low-income women access to this life-saving procedure. In subsequent coverage of this issue in the conservative media, the outrage over denying poor women breast screenings is largely edited out; the controversy is framed as an attempt by pro-abortion activists to sabotage Komen for trying to defund an abortion-providing operation.

Why The Lies?

The focus on a pure ideal—abortion is murder—makes it less important to be accurate about what things are than about what they represent. Ideological purity is a great motivator. It strips away doubt and nuance, leaving a clear narrative and focused, single-minded goal. But this is also its greatest weakness, because the real world is full of nuance and complexity, which is why conservatives feel undermined at every turn. Hence the hatred of "mainstream media," "big science" and other culture-war bogeymen, including large swaths of government and academia.

More Impure Thoughts

If abortion is murder, pure and simple, then killing a fetus is equivalent to killing Jews in the Holocaust—a comparison made often by pro-life activists. In reality, this comparison is nonsense. The death of a fetus, however traumatic, is nothing to the death of a sentient, cognizant person. No one, not even the staunchest pro-life supporter, believes a mother should mourn a miscarriage the same way she mourns the death of a child.

In actual practice, purity breaks down.

According to the Old Testament, Exodus 21:22-25, if a woman is killed in the course of a brawl between two people, the one who killed her must be killed. If she is pregnant, and the brawl injures her and causes her to miscarry, the guilty party must pay a fine. Fetuses, in other words, are not equivalent to born people. In this case, for pro-lifers, the purity of an idea must be given precedence over the reality of the Bible.

Given these complications, you would think pro-lifers would have some sympathy for other viewpoints. But purity brooks no quarter for differing positions. It does not allow for heterodoxy, and judges the legitimacy of differing belief systems on their relative similarity to its own. Purity is threatened by change and difference—it's not enough that True Believers are not themselves compelled to support or practice abortion; these practices cannot be tolerated among others, because doing so would taint an inviolable ideal.

Protecting Women From Sharia Law, Here and Abroad

The news today about the protests in Saudi Arabia over the ban on female driving remind me of a response I wrote a few months ago to an e-mail, attributed to Nonie Darwish, about the threat Islam poses to the West. The e-mail read, in part:

In 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in Canada, the U.S. and Britain To elect the president by themselves! Rest assured they will do so. You can look at how they have taken over several towns in the USA -- Dearborne Mich., is one, and there are others. Britain has several cities now totally controlled by Muslims. Everyone in Canada. the U.S. and Great Britain should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! 

My response, in full:

I've seen many things in the media in recent months that attempt to use concerns for women's rights as a cover for far-right positions and propaganda. If you strip away the stories of terrible treatment of women by strict adherents of Sharia law—none of which have been, or will ever be, tolerated in this country—you are left with this: Growing numbers of Muslims in the U.S.—"boogie men"—are part of a secret conspiracy to take over the government, abolish Democracy and establish their own religious law. They have already taken over whole towns and, unchecked, will run roughshod over Christianity if we do not do something now. (What exactly should be done is left unsaid.) They are a moral and physical threat to women and especially young children, who are exposed to the risk of pedophilia as a result of their presence in our land.

Come on, folks, this is Nazi stuff, pure and simple. Substitute Jews for Muslims and you've got Bavaria 1936. Perhaps it would be helpful if "real Americans" made the business owners of Dearborn aware of our displeasure by forming a mob and smashing the windows of all their stores in the downtown business district. This would send a strong message: we aren't going to take it anymore!

Nasty, vituperative nonsense.

I would like to pose some solutions and positive actions that we can all take to safeguard democracy and human rights for all in this great country of ours.

1. Join the ACLU. The ACLU works on the front lines to protect the civil liberties of all Americans, including historic efforts to ensure that Jews are not forced to read portions of the New Testament in school, that black people are not subject to discrimination and political disenfranchisement, that religion is not used to discriminate against women, and that people are not forced to "show their papers" to law enforcement.

2. Join Americans United For the Separation of Church and State. This organization protects the free practice of religion and the authority of the U.S. Constitution, the greatest secular document ever conceived, from the threat of efforts to establish any officially sanctioned state religion. Whether Sharia or the tribal law of the ancient Hebrews (which, incidentally, compares women to Oxen and servants among the possessions of a neighbor a man must not covet), we must be sure to protect our nation's system of justice from outmoded theocratic legal decrees.

3. Lobby for a carbon tax and other measures to wean us off Middle Eastern oil. Oil fuels Islamic extremism the world over and enriches the wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote or drive. The human rights records of other petro-dictatorships around the world are hardly better, and often much worse.

The Ghettoization of the Right

I was disappointed to hear that George Will jumped over to Fox News, following his former colleague at ABC, John Stossel, who left for Fox in 2009. While it may seem tidy to group all the conservative and libertarian-leaning voices under the Fox banner, I think this is a bad situation. We need a diversity of viewpoints across media channels if we are to avoid furthering the "echo chamber" effect on the left and the right.

Sadly, it seems people see this sort of ghettoization as the expected norm. In an interview with Will, the Deseret News states, "Some questioned why he hadn't made the move to Fox News in the past, and he had said it was because Roger Ailes hadn't asked." Or as New York magazine put it, "George Will Is Finally Joining Fox News," where he gets to work with "a team more his speed."

Maybe I'm overstating the problem, since other conservatives (e.g. Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan) do appear regularly on ABC's "This Week," where Will was a mainstay. But losing Will's contribution marks a big change. I doubt we are going to see a liberal with his stature joining the ranks at Fox News anytime soon—and just this week, Sally Kohn, whom the New York Times calls "one of Fox News Channel's most visible liberal pundits," left the network for MSNBC.

Barack Obama, the Moderate Conservative

In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be considered center-right.

This was first made clear to me by Andrew Sullivan, on the Colbert Report and in his blog, and it's undeniably true. Obama shepherded through Congress a health-care law modeled on Mitt Romney's, which incorporates many elements originally recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Obamacare works with private insurers and other existing health care delivery systems and relies on free-market incentives to reduce health care costs—an element of the law that is already working.

Obama is pro business, and pro tax cuts. He lectures African-Americans on personal responsibility. He has allowed Bush-era surveillance and anti-terrorism methods to stand (earning the ire of libertarians and many on the left), and ramped up the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, leading to his killing. He has agreed to unprecedented cuts to the federal budget in an effort to appease hard-liners in the Republican party. The number of public employees under his administration has shrunk, largely due to cuts in federal money for the states. Federal spending is flat since 2009, and has decreased as a percentage of GDP.

Obama is in every rational sense a centrist, and is best understood as taking a center-right stand on most matters of public policy. He is, as Sullivan states, "America's Tory President." Yet the right hates, fears and distrusts him, seeing him as some kind of closet socialist dictator. How can this be?

I think it's useful to make a comparison with Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected a Republican president in an era when liberalism was at its apex, and calls for radical social and political change came most vehemently from the left. In response, Nixon acted in a way that was essentially center-left, supporting the Clean Air Act and the EPA and pushing myriad big-government policies during his tenure. Had he been president today, he would be seen as more liberal than Obama or Bill Clinton. Yet the left of the late '60s and early '70s did not see it this way. To them, he was a right-wing warmonger, a fraud and a disaster for the nation (all this years before Watergate).

Nixon tacked left in reaction to the winds of his time. Obama has tacked right in reaction to the winds of his. Today's right, like yesterday's left, just doesn't see it. In years to come, when Tea Party hysteria dies down, I am certain this will be accepted fact, and I pledge to point it out to my Republican friends ad nauseum.

What Today's Headlines on Obamacare Should Be

It's a shame. This should be a day of excitement and hope. Today we implement a health care law that will cut the number of uninsured Americans by 25 to 30 million. A law that prevents denial of coverage for preexisting conditions. A law that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will reduce the federal deficit over time. A law tested in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts and full of provisions recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation as recently as the early '90s. A law most of us should be able to get behind.

Sure, it's not perfect. So we implement it and work out the kinks as they are revealed in practice. We make it better. We don't shut down the government because a minority of lawmakers dislike it in principle. That's not how our democracy works.

Obamacare is about helping poor and middle class people get insurance. That's what it's for. That's what it does. The ideologues of the Right, who compare their childish escapades on Capitol Hill to the heroism of Flight 93 (I'm looking at you, John Culberson) need to stand down. You failed to convince Americans last year that Obamacare should be repealed, and lost the presidential election. It's time to move on. Fund the government, fix the postal service, pass a farm bill. Do some work.

A Few Words On Wawa

It's shocking, in a way, that I have maintained this blog for so long without commenting on Wawa. Wawa, for all my hypothetical readers out there, is a family-owned chain of convenience stores based near Philadelphia, with locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Florida. I once, long ago, wrote about the "Hardee's-Roy Rogers Factor" in determining whether you were in the Northeast or the South; Wawa holds a similar regional connotation. For millions who grew up, or live, in Eastern Pennsylvania or South Jersey, when you see a Wawa, you're home.

"Wawa," by the way, is a Native American word for the Canada Goose. On Wawa Hoagie Day in Philadelphia, the goose can be seen ambling around Independence Mall, giving out free hoagies to thousands of happy people. Yeah, Wawa is like that.

Respect the goose: Wawa on Independence Mall

I am generally reluctant to get overly excited or partisan about brands, but with Wawa, my loyalty developed early. There's the no-fee ATMs. The good coffee. That it started out as a dairy, so you could trust the milk. Today, my kids crave the sandwiches and mac n' cheese, love the touch-screen ordering, and sing the Wawa Hoagiefest song in the car. All hail the next generation.

I was annoyed by a recent article in the New York Times comparing Pennsylvania's two dominant convenience stores, Sheetz and Wawa. Sheetz was set up as the rural, Pa. heartland market, and Wawa as the tony suburban sandwich shop. I don't know much about Sheetz, but Wawa is a very democratic scene, loved by people from all walks of life. Rather than illustrating the increasing cultural/economic divide, Wawa, I think, represents the kind of no-nonsense quality it's getting harder to find. (NPR commentator Marion Winik once complained of pizza in Texas: you have to choose between "the bad" and "the froufrou." Wawa is neither—this is what I'm talking about.)

So if you find yourself in the Mid-Atlantic, be sure to check out The Wa. You can thank me later for sharing the love.

Public Shaming on Twitter a Nightmare for all Parties

This is really horrible. Two guys at a tech conference are overheard privately making jokes about "dongles" and "forking," which were interpreted as sexist by a woman sitting in front of them whom they did not know. The woman then tweeted a picture of them with comments in order to publicly shame them.

Cue the, at turns, hyper-PC, hyper-insensitive and often nasty Internet, which within hours turned the story into a career and public-relations nightmare for the parties involved, their companies and the tech conference they were attending. What in years past would have resulted in a nasty look or, at worst, a testy conversation between the jokers and the offended party—most likely ending in apologies, a better understanding of each other and perhaps even friendship—has now resulted in the firing of one of the jokers and the offended tweeter herself.

The biggest problem with these sort of viral situations is that things quickly spin beyond the initial issue at hand. Was the tweeter right to publicly shame the men, rather than privately rebuke them? Were the tech guys being offensive or just a bit childish in their banter? What's the proper reaction for conference organizers and others on Twitter to this incident? Instead, we have hateful people tweeting horrible things about the woman. Her employer's website was hacked and shut down. The employer, running scared, fired her, around the same time the employer of one of the men fired him.

It's hard to say what can be done about such things in the wide-open world of social media. Restraint from all parties involved is called for, of course, but perhaps the key missing element here is courage. The offended tweeter could have brought the issue up with the men. The men could have apologized to her directly, or on Twitter, once they knew someone had taken offense (the one who was fired did apologize in a blog comment). The companies involved could have stood by their employees until the furor died down. Most of all, the cowardly Internet trolls and haters could have put up or shut up—they are the ones most deserving of shame.

Putting 'Liberty' Above Life—and the Pursuit of Happiness

If Government's the Disease, is Chaos the Cure?

So, Fernando Antonio Salguero, I hear a police dog detected explosive materials in the trunk of your illegally parked car, and you got arrested by police in New Jersey. The tear gas canisters they found you call "larger pepper-spray cans" (in case of attack by Yeti); the rocket-propelled flares are for distress (presumably on a boat in the open ocean), and the extendable baton, you claim, allows you to break windows to rescue people from burning cars.

"There's no problem [with having a baton] here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but in the state of New Jersey the people are much closer to the slave state. Slaves are not allowed to be armed . . . at all," you told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I'm not anti-cop," you added. "I'm anti-tyranny."

You believe 9/11 was a fix and are a founder of the survivalist group Survive and Thrive. You refuse to fly. You are a self-styled defender the U.S. Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." You think juries should be able to nullify laws.

Like so many of your ilk, you claim to love some mythologized notion of America and have nothing but contempt for what the country actually is. You distrust government and the agents of government, believe in vast conspiracies upheld by armies of drone-like beaurocrats, and expect any day that the forces of evil will attempt to take away all your rights and liberties, enabled by our corrupt justice system.

If you dislike America so much, why don't you go live somewhere else? In Pakistan, you can own fully automatic weapons, live in a gated community, and hire armed guards to prevent your kids from being kidnapped on the way to the movie theater! Sounds good, right?

Of course, you won't leave, and here's why: the United States is a nation of laws, and the powers you rail against are the bastion of a functioning civil society, which you rely on every day of your life for health, security, well-being, safe delivery of goods and services, infrastructure to get to work, and your very job itself, the carrying out of which is predicated on notions of mutual trust, civic standards and voluntary access to private property.

You might appreciate the police a little more if we lived in your paradise of freedom, where government has little power to prevent vigilante justice (the voice of the people!), weapons hoarding and/or mini-fiefdoms created by self-styled "defenders of liberty." I'm not saying you personally are a bad person; I'm sure you mean well and believe you do what's best for your family. But think a bit more about the consequences of your ideology. You may find that is where Scary truly resides.

Damning Evidence of Charter Schools' Cherry Picking

I wrote last year on this blog about how, by building in a bias toward parents who have the means and desire to make their children's education a high priority, charter schools gut the public schools of their best students and make themselves look more effective than they actually are, as public schools are forced to handle those whom private educators refuse to admit, due to issues of behavior, disability or neglect.

More compelling evidence of this dynamic has just come out in a damning investigation by Reuters into charter schools' throwing up barriers in order to only get the students they want. As I mentioned last year, if we continue down this path of aggressive "school choice," we will only increase educational disparity in this country—the single biggest factor behind social and economic inequality. The charter school movement is not the path to quality schooling for all.

Read the Reuters report here.

The NRA's Twisted Vision

As is often the case with ideologues on the defensive, Wayne LaPierre's defense of Second Amendment rights was full of self-righteous moralizing about the "real" causes of gun violence. More important than his attempt to shift the conversation away from high-powered assault weapons, however, was the much-publicized proposal for placing armed guards in every school.

The notion that an armed society is a safe society, that the best way to handle a "bad guy with a gun" is with a "good guy with a gun," defines the essence of what the NRA is about. Reflecting on this idea as it would play out in a real-world mass shooting exposes it as more than just a risky social experiment. It is in a very real sense sick, twisted, and delusional.

Columbine High School had an armed guard, who failed to stop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from murdering 12 of their fellow students in 1999. In a situation such as played out last month in Newtown, Conn., a quick and effective response by the good guys would be very unlikely. People would have died before the shooter was disabled—and that's assuming guards or gun-toting teachers could have succeed in taking down a well-armed gunman possessing the element of surprise and ample time to plan an assault.

Arming school employees would not dissuade determined sociopathic, suicidal or mentally ill persons from planning and carrying out a massacre. Knowing what they would face, such individuals could take steps to safeguard themselves with bullet-proof vests, accomplices, hostages or shields. They likely would expect to die—but not before getting a number of rounds off, going out in a "blaze of glory." They might even relish the fight, looking forward to a Call of Duty-style shootout as innocent victims are caught in the crossfire. 

To even be discussing this is sheer insanity. Essentially, LaPierre is arguing that Americans' right to buy assault weapons without restrictions is worth the lives of a few kids every now and then, or a few moviegoers, or a few citizens assembled to meet their member of Congress, or a few bystanders at a mall.

Banning firearms outright would not succeed in disarming criminals any more than drug prohibition tamps down the drug trade. But, as with alcohol and tobacco, reasonable restrictions are in order. LaPierre's "solution" is a desperation move, a distraction, a red herring that firearm fundamentalists can run—or at least shield themselves—with.

For a voice of sanity, read former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell's recent op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We may never change the NRA, but we can insist they stop bullying lawmakers into doing nothing about a problem for which they have no solution.