Ideas are bursting into my public catch-pocket, since I've nowhere else to put them and their rattling din in my brain is incompatible with sleep.
First, I was very disturbed today. A cordoned off section of UAA's grassy commons hosted a sad group of pro-lifers rallying together. Obviously funded from somewhere, the group was standing awkwardly around a series of large poster-pictures mounted on elevated plywood signposts - dead babies, gore, hand-picked and shallow statistics. I'm a warm fuzzy pacifist, but these things disgusted me and to whatever extent it was their brain-child, so did the people.
Oddly enough, I saw them going to and leaving my Sociology class where the topic today was human sexuality. A statistic I learned there (not exact I'm sure): 68% of Americans these days believe abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. 22% oppose it in all cases. Feel free to correct my numbers if I remembered wrong, but that was the gist.
So now I'd like to speak to them - the Anti-Right-ers. For clarity's sake I'm going to assume that the anti-abortion-rights folks I saw today were conservative, christian, republican, anti-gay or anti-gay-marriage, anti-socialism, anti-affirmative-action, anti-profanity/pornography, anti-cut-and-run (read that as anti-peace), ... and what I have to say (to you anti- type of person) is simple and falls into to categories: either (1) you have allowed your quiet subservience to turn into self-defeating stupidity, or (2) you are obviously more interested in self-righteous power games than saving fetal heartbeats. Let me explain.
1. Self-Defeating Stupidity: The GOP has taken on the mantle of Right-Wing Conservative values. Specifically this means that Rove and his predecessors realized they could get votes and stay in power by targeting a few topics. Ed Schultz says, "Gays, Guns, and God," but a more extensive list would include banning abortion and stem cell research, preventing the institutionalization of gay marriage, pushing back against Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and maybe something about guns now and then (guns aren't really a big issue these days if you ask me). Now, the GOP also courts rich people who want to protect their money from the government giving it to poor people (aka Reaganomics). One clear and easy sign that the GOP is in fact immoral is that their platform rests on this handful of ideologies. Any other legitimate political group would not only have an entire array of political priorities and viewpoints, but would have to constantly strive to unify its members due to their tenacious tendency of being composed of diversely opinionated human beings. Ergo, in my opinion, the GOP is a tool and nothing more. So the anti-women's-rights camp who are stupid enough fall right into a special trap the GOP set for them. The GOP knows the super-majority of Americans favor legal abortions (as does/did the Supreme Court), and yet they tout as one of their top five political battlefronts as banning abortion. The best part for the GOP is that a virtual non-issue such as banning abortion is an incredibly CHEAP way to buy a guaranteed (small) percentage of votes. For further understanding, I hope you'll take this imperfect analogy: say the Democrats wanted to strategically and cheaply pick up some small percentage of voters who are violently allergic to peanuts. So, they talk about peanut legislation, make peanut speeches, hold town hall meetings with peanut conversations, all blasting the damnable nut that kills so many every year. But, once they're in Congress, they sadly have to report that their effort to eradicate peanuts was a failure for now- though they'll say instead that the road to America-without-peanuts will be long and difficult. But, in truth the Democrats would snicker; they know that peanuts are too widespread and important to ever be banned in the U.S. Furthermore, they know that peanuts are heavily favored by beer drinkers, airline passengers, elephant trainers, and choosy moms. So, despite the fact that abortion will likely never be outlawed, your vote has been swept up for pennies on the dollar.
2. The Self-Righteous Power Game: You are a secretly hateful person who can't stand what you don't understand and without knowing it, you're doing harm to the world. While something eats away at your insides, you quietly lash out at the world by holding a racket against one or several activities you've decided to be vehemently opposed to. Abortion, something external and unrelated to you, is much more easily confronted than whatever soul-sickness you share with your fellow anti-lovers. Not to put you on the spot, but.... One of my favorite phenomenon of modern religion is the "born-again" christian. As an anecdote, this is most likely a weak willed or emotionally unstable human being who had a blank spot in their psyche and patched it with someone else's spiritual dogma. The best part about born-agains is that although they're usually pretty cool on the outside - humble, kind, etc. - you KNOW that their entire existence on the inside is predicated on their new-found moral superiority. Badda-bing - you're baptized, you're forgiven, and most importantly, you're not one of the "bad" people anymore. Sad but true: when you're starved of love, a bit of self-righteous hatred feels pretty good.
So why aren't you (1) or you (2) a special little flower for trying to save the unborn children? My evidence for accusing you of being ineffectual is fairly common knowledge among Progressives:
1. the GOP isn't interested in reducing abortions, but they ARE interested in increasing the power of government in the decisions of it's citizens (what better way to save the rich from the poor than to have legal jurisdiction over peoples' bodies).
2. the GOP supports abstinence only education, which is an oxymoron since standing in front of 30+ teenagers and begging them not to do what the media and their own bodies tell them to is a moron's idea of education.
3. research shows that leftist liberal condoms do way more to reduce abortions than the afore mentioned abstinence only thingy.
4. the GOP fears socialism, including paying for women's birth-control, medical insurance, or outreach clinics for the poor.
5. your self-righteousness, knowing no bounds, leads you to ASSUME that the best way to stop abortions is to ban it - like controvertible banned and burned books of old - when reality shows that the more you try to take away rights from someone, the harder and stronger they will fight back at you for it.
6. no one has ever convinced me that banning abortions won't lead to the good ol' dark ages of back alley abortions, where desperate women turn to their last option - maybe not in droves, but in enough numbers to make your recently approved ban seem like a bad idea.
7. your own lack of research into this subject has ejected you from the moral high ground and apparently pissed me off today.
If you still don't believe me, here's an excerpt from an op-ed article in the New York Times (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/opinion/05kristof.html?scp=4&sq=abortion%20and%20Bush&st=cse is the link to view the Nov. 2006 article by Nicholas D. Kristof)
"One reason [abortion's decline slowed in Bush's administration] is that in half the states, family planning spending hasn’t kept pace with inflation. Thus, at last count, 11 percent of sexually active women and girls were not using contraception even though they did not want babies, up from 7 percent in 1995. Half of unwanted pregnancies come from that group.
Then there’s the rise in the poverty rate under Mr. Bush and the increase in the number of uninsured Americans. The number of women who say they need help paying for prescription contraceptives rose by one million between 2000 and 2004."
