Labor Day, Part 2

Here's a chunk of highly rational thinking:

http://sluggerotoole.com/2014/08/29/on-abortion-why-it-should-be-a-womans-decision/

They argue about this in Eire as well as in the United States. Here, however, it seems that all the old, once obvious premises, have been forgotten, and women defending their constitutional right to a choice in the matter of pregnancy--a right grounded in a fundamental Supreme Court decision, Roe V. Wade--have tended to search for an appealing victim. This tack, unfortunately, gains little ground with the majority of the "pro-life" crowd--a cohort who are fine with murdering doctors, harassing and shaming pregnant women and their supporters, and these days devising patently disengenuous legal obstacles to women's health providers which toss all rationality and logic to the winds in order to achieve a predetermined goal. "Pro-Life" is, in a word, bad faith. It is a lie even in its name, and avoids the truth with a monument of further lies, no matter the general cost to our overall view of law and democratic governance. (It's somehow not surprising that the strong "pro-life" former Governor of Virginia is willing, with the compliance of his wife and daughter, to mount a defense of his patently obvious corruption of his former office as being somehow all the fault of his "weaker" half. This is the ultimate practice of the "wives must submit" doctrine instituted by the Southern Baptists some years back.)

As the cited post states:

For most it [abortion] is a difficult and emotional decision ultimately made for pragmatic reasons in the cold light of rationality. It is within this context that debate on abortion should be based. The fear that women may choose en masse not to become mothers suggest a problem with that status in the first place, and is in contrast to society’s imposition of the mother role on women as a natural state only to be avoided by the deviant or unique women.

Until the ground of debate shifts away from the woman as the ‘other’ to woman as a fully formed autonomous human being, control of women’s reproduction will remain in the hands of the misogynists. People, such as those who designed the abominable Eighth Amendment in the South and whom are trying desperately to further restrict abortion in the North have for too long framed the debate to their liking.

It is time for women to take control of the conversation and to look these people in the eye and say, ‘I choose abortion because, I choose abortion’.

Perhaps we need to go back to a fundamental defeat--the failure of the United States to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The implications of that failure are as enormous for women as the adoption of the Southern Strategy is for persons of color. And as with the Southern Strategy, the piecemeal collapse of a defacto presumption that women and men are equally citizens and equally protected under our system of law is dangerous for everyone, male or female--because we're all subject to the law.

It serves the interests of power to keep everyone else in a state of tragic muddle. After Roe V Wade there were some years of agreement, amongst nearly all parties. Then the Republican Party took the view that "Pro Life" was a fundamental tenant. Along with the Southern Strategy--really its paternal twin--these two evil children have led us to a state of profound disorder, where one major political party aims to destroy logic and governance in the democratic fashion, by any means whatsoever. It's all of a certain piece: science denial, the destruction of fundamental rights, the "war on women."

This is a Labor Day to see where we stand. Here in NC, a confirmed "pro-lifer," Tom Tillis, runs against a capable and female sitting Democratic Senator, Kay Hagan. I'm hopeful that there are still enough clear thinking women in our electorate to keep Ms Hagan in office. Democrats are a jumbled, confused lot. They are frequently frustrating, and sometimes wrong. They have not, however, embraced confusion and outright insanity wholesale. These are the choices we have, Labor Day, 2014.