A Message To Fellow Liberals About Abortion (long)

[Merlin]

Let me be blunt. Abortion is killing the entire progressive agenda. It’s dragging us down like a lead anchor. It is time we consider alternatives to opposing the reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The Democratic Party does not exist to defend abortion. It exists to govern the nation.

In November, a majority of white women voted to elect one of the worst Presidents in our history to a second term. It is a startling fact revealing that enlightened women have evidently not been successful in educating other women about the importance of abortion "rights." It appears they have left that burden to be borne by Democratic politicians. But a politician can never lead public opinion. She/he must either follow it or lose, absent extraordinary charisma or special circumstances.

With a Bush second term a reversal of Roe v. Wade may be inevitable. But all is not lost. Having Roe overturned may wake up a lot of sleeping sisters. Or maybe not. When white women vote for a born again right wing ideologue, we must pay attention to what they are implicitly saying. They obviously feel Roe is not that important to them. Who are we to claim otherwise?

If and when Roe goes down, abortion will still be legal in all the blue states and even a few red states. So it will not be nearly the situation we had before Roe with back-alley abortionists--at least not in the populous and more enlightened areas of the country.

The big question now may well be: Will the Republicans really deliver the defeat of Roe in order to feed that evangelical tiger they are riding into the void? Or will they instead do everything in their power to keep Roe in place, knowing that abortion is the greatest thing that's happened to the Republican party since slavery?

For Republicans, the abortion issue is the gift that keeps on giving. Why would they want to give it up by overturning Roe? It's entirely possible we will see one excuse after another for why they can't dump Roe. Arlen Specter may simply be doing his party's bidding by appearing to block its escape from its Roe briar patch.

The abortion issue has allowed the right to claim God and Jesus for its own, to demonize liberalism, energize fundamentalists and cement an unprecedented alliance between mainstream Catholics and Protestants -- all of them lined up solidly against us and everything that we stand for.

Without abortion, they would be unable to form such important alliances or whip up anything like the fervor they now enjoy. Oh sure, they'd still have gay marriage to rail against. But that's a much more manageable issue. Gays don't need gay marriage. What they need is civil unions. Civil unions we can successfully defend, and that defuses the issue on both sides.

Thinking, sincere religious people share the vast majority of their values with liberals. Jesus, after all, was the first and is still the most prominent liberal. His teachings of tolerance, peace, and helping the poor, the sick and the elderly fly in the face of the Bush agenda. The abortion issue’s potency, more than anything else, has driven these thoughtful, well meaning, decent people into the right wing’s web.

We must keep in mind that Republicans can not win on their primary agenda alone. They don’t even campaign on their chief objective, which is to further enrich the powerful, further suppress the middle class, and further tighten the noose of corporate-oriented media dominance around the neck of American democracy. Their real goals would never gain the support of the people. So instead they scratch open and hype up divisions within our society to shift the political focus onto feigned morality and away from effective, good governance. This is the only viable strategy they have to claw their way into power. Fortunately for them, they have the money to pay an army of think tank gurus and talking head blowhards to demonize Democrats and galvanize the gullible.

Many with deep-seated moral values who despise the practice of abortion have no idea whatsoever that they are being manipulated by Republican strategists into voting against their own best interests. They are true believers when it comes to their religion and their politics. They don’t understand their role as pawns. What keeps them glued to the right wing is wholehearted opposition to the mass murder of what they believe are tiny human beings.

Without the abortion issue to ride, Republicans would no longer own the faithful. Democrats would be free to earn back the support of Catholics and farm belt states, which always voted Democratic before Roe. Our party could work to re-claim a clear majority of the US electorate. Their party would be in shambles.

In many ways, abortion is similar to the slavery issue. Then, too, the Democratic party was slow to grasp the power of a determined religious movement. Then they were called abolitionists. Today, even liberals see most of them as heroic and correct. As a result of its failure to respond to the moral movement against slavery, the Democratic party lost control of US politics for 50 years at the federal level, from 1860 to 1912, except for 2 terms. Are we in the midst of a similar--or worse--run now?

We have today what is undeniably a zealous Christian movement against abortion. Some of us ridicule and deride and condemn true believers. But that is an arrogant and foolish view. These folks are not idiots. Go into any church in the country on a Sunday morning and take a good look at them; listen to their voices. Hear their songs and prayers. Observe their expressions. These people are like us. They believe deeply in their cause. They are middle and lower class Americans. Many are articulate. All are fervent. And they are, by and large, truly convinced that abortion is morally indefensible.

Whether abortion is morally defensible or not depends upon one’s interpretation of the scientifically obscure point at which “human life begins.” I don’t personally agree with those who say it begins at conception. But I accept the legitimacy of the argument, that—in the absence of scientific certainty—we ought to err on the side of moral caution.

I do think that abortion is politically indefensible. The only defense we are able to offer is that a woman should have control over her own body. But that argument sounds as hollow to abortion opponents as the claims of slave-owners that they should have control over their own property. In both cases the issue is whether a specific type of living being should be considered human life or not.

If a fetus is seen to be human life, then “a woman’s right to choose” is a lame justification for its willful destruction. The American people are constantly shown pictures of fetuses with identifiable human form, and led to believe such tiny humans are representative of those being aborted regularly and by the millions. Billboards and TV commercials and newspaper ads and direct mailings and books and magazines and windshield flyers and super market handouts all flash these pictures around constantly throughout middle America. There is an army of anti-abortionist activists out there. But we have simply ignored them. The result is that we have lost this issue in the court of public opinion.

With abortion to defend, we cannot win. Without it, we cannot lose. Without it we are free to reclaim the allegiance of those whose religious beliefs and moral values naturally incline them toward the principles and agenda of the Democratic party. Without abortion, the right wing doesn't have a prayer. Pun intended.

So either we have to make some accommodation to reality, or we will continue to get our butts kicked. We can either see our agenda empowered, or we can, like stubborn donkeys, insist we will never compromise any of our positions, and stand on the sidelines while the right wing dismantles every damn thing that enlightened human beings have ever achieved in this country.

Well, if you're offended, I'm sorry. But somebody needed to say it.

Now, excuse me while I duck out of the way. I expect the ripe vegetables to start flying any second now.