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Category Archives: Politics
Heading Off the Wrong Kind of Compromise
Human Defense Initiative has published an article of mine.
Dobbs Is Bearing out a 45-Year-Old Pro-Life Feminist Theory
Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine on their blog.
Since I wrote the article on July 8, I have learned about some further developments that had occurred even before that date, along the same lines as discussed in the article, and there have also been some further developments since that time. Here I’ve cataloged all those developments, and at the end of these notes there is a little further discussion of pro-life feminist history as well:
Just after the release of the Dobbs opinion on June 24, Marjorie Dannenfelser was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times and said:
We’ve been working on a particular program for the last few years [Her Pregnancy and Life Assistance Network, or Her PLAN, which aims to help pregnant women find the medical and material support they need to continue pregnancy]. I’ve talked to, so far, 22 governors about the need to meet women where they are and make sure that we are comprehensive in how we serve them.
What we’ve done so far with our allies in four states [Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia and West Virginia], and hope to do in 30 in four years, is comprehensive and massive inventories to make sure that women and children in the first two years of the child’s life have access to seven different points of care. They include serving her if she is addicted, serving her if she has no housing, serving her and her child if she has no healthcare or childcare.
Serving what her particular needs are, without taking the life of her child. Affirming her life and affirming the life of her child by believing in her and helping her build instead of undermining her life.
Also on June 24, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida released a statement:
Lawmakers and the pro-life movement have the responsibility to make adoption more accessible and affordable, and do everything in our power to meet the needs of struggling women and their families so they can choose life.
In an interview just a few days after the June 24 decision, Catherine Glenn Foster, a lawyer and President and CEO of Americans United for Life,
said at 49:34 – . . . we have to work harder than ever before to put into practice what we’ve been doing for decades as a pro-life movement – loving people and providing them every necessary resource, not only to choose life, but to achieve a life of thriving. And so our work at AUL has tripled, quadrupled, plus, because . . . and to put those resources in place so that… women have what they need – they have the support, they have the options, they have the true choice that was lacking for so many of us
And in Congress on July 14, she said, at 1:50 (referring to the idea “Make birth free for all Americans”) – “And I agree . . .pregnancy, childbirth, post-partum care – they should all be free for all mothers.”
In an interview on July 1, Lynn Fitch said at 4:33 –
They [opposing side] definitely want the people to believe that the post-Roe America will be hostile to women. So what we have to continue to act as we have always with humility and respect and compassion, and the hope is that we can all reach across the aisle, and start focusing on empowering women.
Later, at 12:20, she was asked, “How can pro-life individuals across America be a part of creating a culture of life in their own state?,” and replied:
Well, it is an opportunity for us all to step in, to be there in providing certainly love, support, compassion, and prayers, but there are other areas. We have to have some conversation about , and then actually step in and provide support to these pregnancy centers. We have over 30 in the state of Mississippi, and so we’ve been already looking at ways that we can be supportive of them, how we can get people engaged to help them on every level, to help these women, help these children. We had a tax credit that was passed in this last legislative session to entice people to make donations and receive a tax credit, we’ll be looking for other ways we can do that, we’ll certainly be looking to talk with our legislators about other laws that can be passed that’ll be beneficial to the [C]PC’s, and then actually looking at other ways that we can step in, whether it’s upscaling these women, again, talking about the childcare, how we can make that connection, how we can give them more flexibility, and then looking at every avenue that really will empower women, because they’ve just not had that capability, and now everyone can be a part of that, to empower these women and these children.
From a July 6 article by Marjorie Dannenfelser:
Within days, at least a dozen states have moved swiftly to enact broad protections for unborn children and mothers, and more are poised to follow.
In a July 8 video, we learn that “Pennsylvania is stepping up”:
A July 11 article from Ohio:
Senate Bill 226 would allow those who are pregnant to sue those who caused the pregnancy, regardless of the circumstances. A judge could award at least $5,000.
Sen. Tina Maharath, D-Columbus, said this bill is particularly important after Roe v. Wade was overturned, forcing people either to leave the state for abortions or deliver babies from unintended pregnancies.
. . .
The average cost of childbirth in Ohio is $15,000, Maharath said. “Too often, this cost is solely the mother’s to bear, especially in the case of an unintended pregnancy. However, the father shares equal responsibility for the pregnancy and it is only right that he pays equally for it.”
On Friday, Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer announced that his organization agrees.
. . .
Maharath said she was pleased to see that the Center for Christian Virtue supports her bill, which is intended as an immediate solution to a much larger problem: access to abortion in Ohio. “We just have to have something for individuals right now.”
But everyone isn’t on board. Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis called the bill a “gimmick” with “a zero percent chance of passing.”
“Instead of wasting our time and tax-payer resources, abortion supporters should work with Ohio Right to Life to provide actual solutions that protect women and children or simply walk away from the statehouse,” Gonidakis said.
(So though not on board with the bill, Ohio Right to Life too wants to support women and children.)
On July 13, Sen. Lankford introduced a bill and tweeted: “Dads need to step up & provide for their kids—Period. I am working to help moms in every state have access to child support throughout the entirety of their children’s lives, not just after they are born.”
According to this July 15 article, following up on promises that Sen. Rubio first made nine days after the leaked Dobbs draft, Senators Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) introduced a bill Wednesday that would allow mothers to collect child support beginning at conception.
And according to another July 15 article, “Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) introduced legislation seeking to offer expanded resources to pregnant people Thursday, including a website that provides information on the risks of abortion and alternatives to the procedure.”
In this list of developments, we are seeing evidence that the anti-abortion laws made possible by Dobbs, which are reducing abortion on the supply side, have had as concomitants laws on the demand side that have eased the pressure to abort. Hopefully the list will become so long and taken-for-granted that the point will have been made and there will be no need to maintain the list.
Pro-choice and some pro-life feminists agree that women are disadvantaged in the workplace and thus economically if they face the possibility that they may need to gestate a child, and may be under pressures to raise it as well. Feminists of the 1960s divided among themselves on how best to address this potential disadvantage for women.
For the group who became pro-life feminists, this was the solution:
demand a greater sharing of the child-raising role (which would mean in part that women on a more widespread basis would be giving their newborns for adoption), and demand greater rewards and respect for the child-bearing and child-raising role, which would be one way of bringing them equality with men
For the group who became pro-choice feminists, this was the solution:
redistribute the oppression they had historically suffered, and turn their unborn children into a new oppressed group, by legalizing and to an extent normalizing abortion, and as part of the latter option, beginning to refer to the unborn children they sacrificed as “tissue” or “a clump of cells”, in order to justify the practice of abortion.
Since gestation, once conception has occurred, represents the normal functioning of the female body, pro-life feminists say that a society that supports and honors gestation is the goal that is truly feminist. They feel that pro-choice feminists took the bait of a far less desirable solution, a solution that imitates the never-pregnant male body, and employs violence against the creations of their own power in order to achieve it.
Today the legal successes of the pro-life movement seem, as de Jong and others predicted, to be goading society in the direction of the long-ago championed pro-life feminist solution that was never given a chance to be tried.
The Derek Chauvin Case, Race, and Abortion: the Irony of It All
On April 26 we learned this – Minnesota AG tells “60 Minutes”: We didn’t have evidence George Floyd’s killing was a hate crime. The article relates that the CBS “60 Minutes” anchor observed to the Minnesota Attorney General that “the whole world sees this as a white officer killing a Black man because he is Black,” and asked him why that officer, Derek Chauvin, wasn’t charged with a hate crime. The AG’s answer: because though the whole world does indeed see it as a white officer killing a black man because he is black, and people rioted all summer on that basis (and are still rioting for that reason in Portland), and Black Lives Matter’s whole reason for existence and basis for accumulating the influence that they have is that kind of belief, and Democratic politicians are still reaping the political benefits of that belief and happily affirming that belief – a belief that undebatably causes hatred, hatred of police – there is practically zero evidence that it is true. (I think that BLM has done a lot of good conscious-raising about police along with a lot of defamation, by the way. There is much nuance.)
Here I will not say anything in defense of Derek Chauvin, except that, as mentioned, there is no concrete evidence that he is a racist. When most people watch the video, he impresses them as a monster, and he may be. He may also be a racist. But there is no concrete evidence that he is a racist, so anyone who flatly calls him a racist must have some manipulative agenda. Establishing him as a monster confers few political benefits compared to establishing him as a racist.
Anyway, there is a false (or at least unsubstantiated) belief that white officers kill black men because they are black. What may have been the most serious attempt so far to study the subject dispassionately has been that of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is himself black. He concluded, On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.
A lot of data is available about police shootings, but I have been unable to find any academic attempt at all to examine possible race-related differences between rates of police killings by shooting and by other means, and it is not obvious why any racial bias should cause outcomes for the other means that are different than for the shootings. So if we are not to assume that Fryer’s data about shootings (which must account for the big majority of killings) more or less represent data about all police killings as best they can presently be represented, it seems to me that the burden is on those who contest that idea to show why.
But naturally those who hold the unfounded belief will think that those who share that unfounded belief with them have better judgment than those who dispute that unfounded belief; and moreover will think that those who share it are supporting blacks over a valid issue. So there are two corollary unfounded beliefs: one, that Democrats, in that one dimension at least, have better judgment than do Republicans, and two, that Democrats are supporting blacks on a valid existential issue.
Democrats are getting elected due to these two unfounded beliefs, particularly the unfounded belief that Democrats are supporting blacks over a valid issue. That unfounded belief may be providing them the margin of victory in the national power sweepstakes. Let’s suppose that’s true and park that thought temporarily in our minds.
Meanwhile over at the abortion clinic, the black population is being decimated. In New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born alive, which is not nearly true for other races. Nationwide, the outlook for black babies is not so grim, but still the abortion rate greatly outpaces the rates for the unborn of other races. It nears triple the rate for white babies.
So over at the abortion clinic, the decimation of the black population proceeds apace. The above figures are in terms of the average number of abortions in a year for a woman of a given race (stated in practice as the total number for 1000 such women), but we can also look at figures that calculate the likelihood of abortion for any one pregnancy. “Decimation” originally meant the killing of one in every ten of a group of people. The statistics say that about one in every three black babies conceived is aborted, so the incoming generation of blacks is being super-decimated. For white babies, it is about one in four that is are aborted, and for Hispanic babies, less than one in five. (The statistics that I am citing relate to both intended pregnancies and unintended pregnancies, but I found the abortion rates provided only for unintended pregnancies; I am assuming that within each race, the abortion rate for intended pregnancies is low enough not to change the general picture.)
Even with their high number of abortions, the fertility rate (live births per woman) for blacks, including black Hispanics, is presently higher than for whites, including white Hispanics, though only slightly, not enough to increase the black percentage of the population any time soon. But obviously, if there were no abortions, such an increase would indeed occur. So pro-life policies (halting abortions) would result in a significant proportional increase in the black population, and of black voters, in the US. US demographics, and their political impact, would change. (Assuming also that in relation to present proportions of different races in the US, immigration from black countries will not be lower than, or will be higher than, immigration from white countries, which I think is certainly the case.)
Now, in the US there is one party whose platform says We will repeal the Hyde Amendment (among other things), and one party whose platform says we . . . affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution . . . There are long and sordid tales to be told about the half-heartedness, fickleness, spinelessness, hypocrisy, and treacherousness of Republican politicians on abortion, but at the end of the day, the Democrats are clamoring for more and more abortions, while state-level pro-life laws, passed through support that has been overwhelmingly Republican, are saving unborn lives.
So here is the irony of it all, once the tributary stream of an unfounded belief feeds into the longstanding wider stream of the decimation of the black population through abortion: the Democrats get elected by virtue of the unfounded belief that Democrats are supporting blacks on a valid existential issue; then the Democrats take office and accelerate the decimation of the black population.
Now, it may also be true that Democrats in elected office in turn appoint more blacks to powerful appointed positions, and that Democrat voters vote more blacks into powerful elected offices in the first place, than Republican politicians and Republican voters do. But when these things happen, what blacks is it who end up in the powerful positions? It is the blacks handpicked by whites, whereas if there were more actual black voters (achieved by halting abortion), we would have blacks handpicked more by blacks. So even this seeming empowerment of blacks by the Democrats is not a true empowerment.
Just as I have not said anything here in defense of Derek Chauvin, except that there is no concrete evidence that he is a racist, I will not say anything here in defense of Republicans, except that they have been mainly responsible for state-level pro-life laws, and there is plenty of concrete evidence, mentioned above, that those laws have saved some lives. I am not a Republican. If I had to describe my political and economic views with just one word, the word would be “socialist.” On climate, immigration, healthcare (real healthcare), taxation (apart from taxpayer funding of abortion), and most issues, I am more closely aligned with the Democrats. So it is not due to any political bias that my analysis turns out as it does. Analyzing as objectively as I can, it is simply a fact: the Democrats, the party that appears to be standing up for blacks, is standing up for legal abortion (with the exception of a few such as John Bel Edwards and Katrina Jackson of Louisiana) and thereby is actually perpetuating the disempowerment of blacks (not to mention countenancing and financially promoting the direct black death toll of the abortions themselves). By financially promoting abortion they are pro-abortion, not just pro-life, and by forcing people whose consciences cry out against abortion to financially participate in abortion, they are rabidly pro-abortion. But my main point here is their political knee-capping of blacks through legal abortion and, if they have their way, subsidized abortion as well. It is they who perpetuate what is probably the worst systemic racism in the US, and it is the Republicans who oppose that one kind of systemic racism. But the real moral of the story would be to grow a new pro-life party that is better than either of our two political dinosaurs.
© 2021
Is There a Miracle in the Works?
Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine on their blog.
Some further thoughts on the topic:
I wrote in the article, “Ending Roe would be a Godsend, or whatever the atheistic equivalent of a Godsend is, for the psychological health and happiness, and structural cohesion, of the US of A. . . . So I am hopeful that the ‘let Roe go’ time may now have come.”
But in spite of the quick improvement that would then result in psychological health and happiness, there will still, naturally, be a moral rot at the core of the societies in the pro-choice states. If Roe is let go, I predict that that moral rot in the pro-choice states will result in growing decadence and flaccidity, while the fundamental health at the core of the societies in the pro-life states will result in greater and greater flourishing, and that eventually this will become obvious and the pro-life worldview will win. (I say this even though as a starting point, I personally find the pro-life states, more than the pro-choice states, to harbor some views, on issues other than abortion, that I would consider narrow-minded.)
Someone may say that this particular prediction of mine is a little subjective. But let’s see. At the very least, as the article mentions, letting Roe go would save quite a number of small Americans from a quite unnecessary deprivation of the long lives and unknowable possibilities on which they were just about to set out.
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Some future posts:
Life Panels
A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature
Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party
The Motivations of Aborting Parents
Why Remorse Comes Too Late
The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill
Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation
The Woman as Slave?
Abortion and the Map of the World
Pro-Life Democrat Draws out the Well-Rehearsed Dishonesty of a Pro-Abortion Candidate
Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.
You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.
Some future posts:
Life Panels
A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature
Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party
The Motivations of Aborting Parents
Why Remorse Comes Too Late
The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill
Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation
The Woman as Slave?
Abortion and the Map of the World
Bowman Wins Near-Total Legal Victory. Now the Pro-Life World Is on Trial Morally.
Michael Bowman’s trial for alleged failure to file income-tax returns, the latest episode in the long tale of his refusal to be part of America’s abortion culture, has ended in a hung jury. “Over half of them, I believe, were for me, and a few government implants on the jury were against me,” he has ventured in a Facebook post.
Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian has reported: “The government could retry Bowman but hasn’t said if it will.”
Bernstein had recounted in an earlier article that in 1999, 2000, and 2001, Bowman had had dealings with Joseph Saladino, “the promoter of a bogus tax dodge who insisted that personal income in the United States wasn’t taxable.” Prosecutors over the years had used those dealings to claim that Bowman was motivated by money and not truly motivated by his convictions about abortion. But Bowman’s lawyer argued that Bowman is a man who has lost everything. It is common sense that anyone who refused to pay taxes with any kind of worldly gain as a motivation would do it surreptitiously. No one refusing openly, as Bowman did, would expect any worldly gain.
Elephants in the Courtroom
There were a couple of elephants in the courtroom. One of them was Section 3 of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which has entered the United States Code as Title 42, Chapter 21b, Section 2000bb-1. The judge presiding at Bowman’s trial had ruled during Bowman’s earlier trial that allowing the RFRA to be argued as a defense in his case could “[open] the door to an argument that has the potential to go on and on.” Further arguing that “a person’s religious beliefs don’t provide a basis for avoiding taxes,” the prosecution in the latest case cited, according to the Oregonian article, “a ruling from an Oregon tax court judge in May 2005.”
Yet I call the RFRA an elephant in the room because I don’t find the “potential to go on and on” argument against the application of the Act to be at all convincing in any case that involves the government forcing its citizens to participate in killing innocent human beings. As I wrote earlier in relation to Bowman’s case,
While the government could not afford to let all conscientious tax defaulters off, it could afford to let some off, and it seems to me that compunctions about killing human beings are in a class by themselves in terms of most deserving accommodation. There must be no blow to the conscience so excruciating as the realization that one has unjustly killed and cannot undo it.
If the RFRA is not a legal basis, due to religious belief or, by interpretation, non-religious conscience objections, for refusal to pay tax money that is used to kill innocent human beings, it should be such a legal basis.
The other elephant in the courtroom was the organized pro-life movement. Members of the organized pro-life movement were not in the courtroom as spectators. They were not on the sidewalk with signs and banners. They were not in the park opposite the court with bullhorns. For months prior to the trial, Bowman and a friend or two had reached out to the pro-life world for support. Bowman’s attorney, Matthew Schindler, had stated that a crowd at the trial could make a difference. Bowman had stuck his neck out for his pro-life convictions, but the organized pro-life movement was not there for him.
Bowman (and a friend or two) had reached out to at least eight of the pro-life organizations with the biggest reputations for bold actions. They had written emails and had followed up with phone calls, or if no one answered the phone, then with text messages and voicemails. In the case of half of those eight or so organizations, confirmation had been obtained that the appeals had reached people at a decision-making level. Yet the practical response was zero. A director of one of the organizations did reply by email, “Unfortunately, we do not have the funding to send a team all the way out to Oregon.”
More worrisome yet than the lack of support for Bowman is the fact that the pro-lifers of America seem little bothered by being themselves a financial cog in the abortion machine. As I wrote two months ago, out of about 100 million pro-lifers in the US, I know only of Bowman, Kenneth Medenbach and Jon Speed as having done anything to resist being financial accomplices. The rest of the 100 million seem resigned to being a financial cog in the abortion machine. Or am I missing something? They do resist the enactment of such tax laws, no doubt, but once the laws are enacted, they acquiesce totally with their dollars.
About Speed, I wrote in that earlier article,
After the recent Cuomo-led institution of taxpayer funding of abortion in New York State, a bookstore owner named Jon Speed closed his store for one day in order to reduce, by a token amount, the sales-tax revenue available to the state.
On the day before the hung jury and declaration of mistrial in Bowman’s case, LifeNews.com announced,
Now, [Speed] plans to close his business completely and leave the state. In a post Thursday on Facebook, he blamed the “tyranny of the state” for his departure.
“Due to the continued tyranny of the State, we will no longer operate a small business in New York,” Speed wrote. “We cannot, in good conscience, continue to pay sales tax to a state that encourages the murder of its own children with glee.”
He thanked his customers and shared his family’s plans to move to Texas, which has been working hard to pass pro-life laws and defund the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Speed said they plan to continue their work in Texas to “end the slaughter of the most innocent among us.”
Hopefully there is something in the air after all.
The most effective form of anti-abortion tax resistance would probably involve pro-lifers doing significant jail time or being beaten for their convictions. It worked for Gandhi and King and their followers. But to effect at least something, a resistance action need not be illegal. I listed earlier six possible means of tax resistance. Those ideas proceed in order from harder for pro-lifers to commit to, to softer and more palatable. Having observed Bowman’s choices, I wrote up what he had done as number 1. Number 2 – moving to a pro-life state – has now occurred in the mind of Jon Speed (occurred independently of me, of course) and has been adopted by him. For all 100 million pro-lifers, there is a principle to be applied that does not require unattainable saintliness: they should minimize their abortion “footprint” – their money that goes to abortion – at the cost of some degree of sacrifice of comfort and convenience for themselves, preferably in a way that attracts attention to their strong pro-life convictions.
© 2019
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What Is the Cure for Mass Shootings?
American society has become charged with hatred, of which mass shootings are the most spectacular expression.
This hatred did not come out of nowhere. It must have been always there just below the surface. It must stem in large part from our primate tribalism. We have an innate need for us-them thinking and feeling, driven by fear of “them,” and certain circumstances in the last few years have made different groups appear to be, and perhaps actually to be, more of a mutual existential threat than they were before.
Once a person can look within and clearly see that his or her adversarial relationship with another group stems at least partly from his or her own psychological need for such a relationship, the need and the negative emotions will largely disappear.
The way to look within is meditation, so Americans (and everyone) need to meditate more and orient their lives more around the goal of their meditation. With meditation, the negative emotions will largely disappear. When deep in meditation, it is impossible to hate. People who meditate will make better political decisions.
Is Marianne Williamson the candidate of meditation? I think it’s clear that she would indeed promote meditation and psychotherapy, and I think that when she speaks of going deep and treating causes, not symptoms, one deep cause that is likely important in her mind is everyone’s deep psychological need for an adversarial relationship with other groups.
And underlying even that need is the need to cling to our egos, and, as a corollary, the delusion that happiness can be found through a selfish search for the pleasures that the world seems to offer, rather than finding it deep within, deeper than the level of the ego.
I feel that Williamson thinks, correctly, that as president she could advance a “know thyself” agenda. However, the benefits of meditation in terms of political decision-making are not tangible benefits, and I think she tries too hard to portray them as tangible in order to prove that they exist. (E.g., Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes.) Moreover, her admiration for the real insight that various spiritual teachers have achieved may have led her to accept various unscientific things that those teachers have believed.
Those are not fatal flaws. A more serious flaw is her championing of abortion rights. This is not entirely a failure of looking within; there are self-aware people, and loving people, on both sides of the abortion issue. The love that exists within pro-choice people and that they direct toward others bypasses one big human group mainly because of a problem of perception. Nevertheless, when Williamson calls* for “an emotional and psychological uprising,” I think that her ability to lead such an uprising is compromised and that many loving Americans won’t follow her. (See also “The 2020 Election: Is It Love versus Fear?”)
What we need is a pro-life (and perhaps slightly more scientifically-rigorous) Marianne Williamson.
We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, killings, of wars, or of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?
–Mother Teresa of Calcutta
* At 3:10 in the video.
© 2019
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The 2020 Election: Is It Love versus Fear?
On night two of the first Democratic primary debate leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Marianne Williamson gave her closing statement:
I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win.
No one should take Williamson seriously in the Democratic primaries. And some say there are reasons not to take her very seriously as a public intellectual either. But I think that that specific statement of hers was not a reason not to take her seriously. Williamson opened up a few possibilities there of no little importance. Her statement packed some important assumptions. We should try to evaluate the possibilities that she opened up. But in order to do that, we first have to recast her statement, designed as it was to be a soundbite for easy consumption. We have to present her real contentions in such a way that those contentions are as defensible as possible, which means among other things as empirical and falsifiable as possible.
Let’s begin with love versus fear. According to A Course in Miracles, known to be a big source of Marianne Williamson’s philosophy, Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love. And The opposite of love is fear. Enough further understanding of ACIM might give me a different understanding of what the author of it (or channeler of it), Helen Schucman, meant by those sentences, but I will assume that what she meant accords with a view of mine: there is a lot of psychological truth in saying “Love is the opposite of fear.” I think that all fears are mechanisms of clinging to our egos and are the causes of all our suffering. (“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” If one does not fear and resist pain, then it is only pain. This knowledge goes back at least to the Buddha.) Once we are free from our egos and free from suffering, what will remain is the love that is always under the surface, and as part of the process of getting free, that love that is under the surface impels us to overcome, or cast out, fear.
Love is often dichotomized with hate, but I feel that hate, and all negative emotions other than fear, would not occur if we did not fear for our egos. Whereas love is not contingent on anything in a similar way. It is fundamental – it is always there, and it is there to be experienced once we overcome fear. Real love is entirely altruistic, in contrast to what Abraham Maslow called “deficiency love,” and when real love is directed toward a person, the attitude is “Love says that ‘it is good that you exist,’ and insofar as I am able I will contribute to your happiness, your existence, your flourishing.”*
So I think there is a lot of truth, in the context of the psychological realities of any individual person, in saying that love is the opposite of fear. And whether or not it is possible for a person to be all love and no fear, I’m sure there are big differences between persons in terms of each person’s balance of love and fear. I feel quite sure that there were Democratic candidates on that stage those two nights who were more loving than poor Donald Trump, and that Marianne Williamson was one of them.
But Williamson is talking about an election, a form of social struggle. Can love cast out fear in a social struggle?
The psychological mechanism by which love casts out fear operates within a particular individual, working in the framework of the love and fear within that individual. There is no such mechanism by which the love within one voter can cast out the fear within another voter. So I don’t think she is really claiming that that will happen. She spoke of harnessing love and harnessing fear. She was saying that Trump’s voters will be motivated by fear, and hers by love. So what she seems to be claiming is that a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by love will prevail politically (or in the case of a war she might say prevail militarily) – will prevail in any social struggle – over a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by fear.
She does not quite claim explicitly, by the way, that her own internal love-fear balance is more loving than Trump’s, but my guess is that it is. And my guess is also that she would not disagree.
She did not say exactly that Trump had stoked any fears, only that he had harnessed them. But Trump has sometimes been accused of fearmongering, and probably Williamson would agree that, whatever fears Trump voters may already have harbored, Trump has also created new levels of fear that did not exist before.
But at this point we have to look at Williamson’s website. Her website says:
There is a growing consensus in America that climate change is an existential emergency. . . . Due to the nefarious influence of unlimited corporate money on our politicians, our government has become a system of legalized bribery. . . . The situation has reached emergency proportions. . . . Everything about American life today – including the economic pressure that leaves 40% of Americans living with chronic stress over whether they can make basic costs of health care, rent, transportation, and education – contributes to the higher trend of chronic disease. . . . eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.
These are all appeals to fear. So at this point let’s make a distinction. Some of Williamson’s appeals to fear may be to valid fears. And though Trump may have stoked fears of terrorism, for example, way beyond a rational level, Williamson would probably not deny that terrorism is a matter of concern. To a small extent at least, Trump’s appeals also may be to valid fears. Williamson’s objection is not to valid fears, but to false fears.
One more thing can be read between the lines. I mentioned above my own confidence that Marianne Williamson is a person of a more loving nature than poor Trump, and mentioned my guess that she would not disagree. My guess is also that within the framework she subscribes to, whenever there is any struggle in which society is divided into a love side and a fear side, the love side will almost always be led by someone who is personally more loving than the leader of the opposite side.
So I think that if Williamson were to state her contentions more precisely and rigorously than she did in the forty-five seconds she was allowed that night, they would be these (and I might be wrong, of course):
1. A social struggle, including an election, can at least sometimes be meaningfully framed as a contest in which the typical supporter on one side is motivated more by love than by false fears, while the typical supporter on the other side is motivated more by false fears than by love.
2. 2020 will be such an election.
3. The love side has the advantage. That is, in any social struggle where there is a love side and a fear side, if all other variables are equal, the love side will win.
4. The victory of the side whose supporters are motivated primarily by love will necessarily result in better outcomes than would the victory of the side whose supporters are motivated importantly by false fears.
5. Williamson is a more loving person by nature than is Trump.
I think that contentions 1, 3, 4, and 5 must be largely correct. But what about 2?
Contention 2 will be correct only if Williamson has correctly calculated that her supporters will be motivated primarily by love, and that Trump’s supporters will be motivated primarily or importantly by false fears. But let us look at this.
One of her web pages, as I have mentioned, says:
eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.
First of all, “would not decrease their number” is not true. And if she is predicting injuries and deaths in big numbers, based on the past – numbers big enough to justify raising an alarm such as this in her platform – then she is peddling the same misinformation that Planned Parenthood’s president recently tripped over, as revealed by no less than the pro-choice Washington Post. So she is harnessing a false fear, whether she understands that or not. False fears are being harnessed on both sides.
And will no voters on Trump’s side be motivated by love? Again let’s think about the abortion issue. There are tens of millions of Americans who perceive the unborn at any stage as full-fledged members of our human family, that is, who perceive them with love and with an instinct of protection. Yet hardly anyone who supports Williamson’s position on abortion knows anything about love for those young beings. Whatever Williamson’s supporters may know about love seems to enter a vacuum when their gaze falls on the most vulnerable and youthful end of the human spectrum.
If Williamson were indeed to face Trump in 2020, there might be only one issue, the abortion issue, on which false fears would motivate voters on Williamson’s side, and love would motivate voters on Trump’s side. But that one issue is a very big issue, huge in terms of human numbers and disproportionately large in terms of human consciousness.
Note that I have not called Williamson’s supporters on the abortion issue unloving persons. Their love bypasses one big human group because of a problem of perception.
Williamson said in her closing statement, “[Donald Trump]’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done.” Her qualification to be the Democratic nominee, as she sees it, is a keener psychological and spiritual insight than that of her Democratic rivals. Yet those who support her and all her rivals’ absolutist position on abortion will some day be remembered as the side of history that was unable to see.
* Jason Lepojärvi.
© 2019
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How Noam Chomsky Misinterprets the Politics of Abortion
On the morality and legality of abortion, Noam Chomsky seems to have bought into a couple of popular pro-choice arguments that can only be described as profoundly unthinking and anti-scientific (the bold is mine):
“There is a strong debate at the moment with regards to a woman’s right to control an organ of her own body – namely the foetus. There is legislation being enacted in several US states to define personhood as a fertilised egg.
“Pretty soon you can imagine legislation prohibiting the washing of hands because thousands of cells are flaked off that could be turned into a stem cell and you can grow a foetus – so you’re killing a person.”
But on politics, Chomsky is brilliant, and he is brilliant as well on the politics of abortion. In a recent Democracy Now! segment, his argument went like this: The politicians of both major parties primarily, at present, serve the interests of corporations and the very rich. However, the corporate stakeholders and the very rich do not themselves constitute a large number of voters, so the parties have to hoodwink numerous voters, their vote-bank “bases,” into believing that they (Republican or Democratic politicians) sincerely represent such voters on other issues. In the case of the Republican politicians, a key issue that they decided to pretend to care about in 1972 was the pro-life issue. Any Republican presidential candidate who might genuinely care about base issues has typically been crushed during the primaries by the Republican establishment as being too “outlandish.” Of the candidates “rising from the base” whom Chomsky mentions, I think Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum might have sincerely cared about the life issue. Chomsky views Trump as a candidate supported by the base whom the establishment failed to crush. I would add this observation: however opportunistic and insincere Trump may be in his heart about any of the base’s issues, the big pro-life organizations seem to give him credit for having tried harder, at least, on life issues, once in office, than Nixon, Reagan, or either of the Bushes (members of the Republican establishment).
I’m impressed by Chomsky’s argument, as far as it goes. Abortion was not a partisan issue prior to the late 1960’s, and I think it was more likely the Democratic Party and not the Republican that made the first positional move on the issue, whereafter there was an inevitable escalation towards extreme polarization (at least in terms of the parties’ stated policies). Chomsky does not outright deny that the Democrats started it, but seems to suggest that the Republicans moved first. Apart from that question, I’m open to accepting all of Chomsky’s analysis – as far as it goes.
Chomsky is among other things an eminent philosopher, and certainly there must be a rich range of values that he personally holds and that conspicuously underlie all the advocacy positions to be found throughout the whole body of his work. In some of his writings he has probably approached values on a meta level as well, evaluating different values. But in the huge collection of speeches on political topics for which he is best known, I am unaware of concerns about any values other than wealth and power. He is concerned about inequities of wealth and power, and the causes and cures of those inequities. At least, so it is in the Democracy Now! video. He is concerned about politicians’ favoritism toward corporations and the rich over the rest of us.
Within that framework of analysis, his only concern about the slaughter of unborn innocents is not about whether that slaughter could possibly have negative value, nor about whether the anguish many Americans feel toward that slaughter is morally justified or not, but only about how that anguish offers opportunities for political leverage, particularly leverage to the benefit of Republicans – leverage that will affect outcomes not in terms of lives or moral progress, but outcomes in terms of wealth and power balances among Americans. (Or rather, among born Americans.)
I think that Chomsky misinterprets abortion politics by implying that those politics are only important as a mechanism of progress or regress on a materialistic continuum of power and wealth equity. I would submit that the more important continuum we should focus on is a moral continuum of progress or regress in terms of another kind of equity, an equity of dignity. Let’s call that continuum a continuum of humanization. It is a continuum of inclusion or exclusion of all who are rightfully members of our human family. It is a continuum on which I think the greatest inclusivity will ultimately mean the greatest human happiness.
Nothing could be more obvious than that humanity has consistently evolved in the direction of increasing inclusiveness. And it is obvious to me, from changes I have seen in the people around me as that growing inclusiveness has unfolded, that its benefits have not been a one-way street. In the 1960s, it humanized us (those of us who were white) to come to see other races as fully human; it humanized us (those of us who were men) to come to see women as fully human; and it humanized some of us Americans to come to see the Vietnamese as fully human. A decade later, it humanized us (those of us who were heterosexual) to come to see homosexuals as fully human. And around the same time, it humanized those of us who were able-bodied to come to see the differently abled as fully human.
Chomsky clearly doesn’t see the unborn as full-fledged members of our human family, so there was nothing in his presentation that would prompt him to think about the continuum of humanization. I blame him for short-sightedness about the unborn, but don’t otherwise blame him for focusing only on his power-and-wealth continuum. But the omission of the other continuum badly throws off any evaluation of the overall impacts of the two parties.
A materialistic analysis of history is largely subscribed to both on the right and on the left, both by capitalists and by Marxists – and by Chomsky as well, as far as we can tell from the focus of his political presentations. And yet our material well-being, beyond a certain point, contributes notoriously little to that which we really seek in life – happiness.
What does contribute to our happiness is our moral evolution. I think that a society that has outgrown slavery is a happier society. I think that a society that has outgrown rape will be a happier society. And I think that a society that has outgrown abortion will be a happier society. Some historians on the right say that underlying Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, his real concerns were only about naked power and how the loyalty of blacks could contribute to his party’s power, and say that in his heart he remained as racist as he had ever been. And yet laws, out of whatever motives they may come to be enacted, have a tremendous pedagogical effect. Their pedagogical effect is at least as important as their deterrent effect. Laws influence culture as much as culture influences laws. That principle holds whatever the reality of Johnson’s attitudes may have been. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has contributed to a less racist, more moral society. And I would submit that that moral progress is a greater progress than the correction of wealth and power inequities. A more moral society is a happier society.
When we discuss progress on a continuum of humanization, and discuss the aim of eventual inclusiveness of the unborn, we have to notice that humanization of the unborn is related to, but not exactly the same thing as, saving unborn lives. Because of the constraints imposed by Roe v. Wade, a law aimed partly or entirely at saving unborn lives may be, for instance, an abortion clinic regulatory law that unavoidably masquerades as being aimed entirely at the protection of women. Such a law may save many unborn lives by causing the closure of abortion clinics, but such a law cannot pay recognition to the humanity of the unborn, hence will do little to humanize the unborn. And a law from the other side of the aisle may provide social support for pregnant women and mothers, and thus save unborn lives by lessening the pressure to abort. But that law, similarly, will not pay recognition to the humanity of the unborn and hence will do nothing to humanize the unborn. Such a law will make forbearance from abortion more convenient, but will not make it more morally incumbent. As soon as the funding for the program dries up, parents of unwanted children will go back to killing them as usual, because they will recognize their humanity no more than before.
When Chomsky looks at the anti-abortion stance of Republican politicians and applies his power-and-wealth analysis, he is only concerned to point out that the stance is opportunistic and that it wins votes. Whether Republican policy initiatives do in fact save some unborn lives – a fact admitted to recently even on Rewire.News – makes no difference to him. He does not stop to reflect on the fact that a young person who owes his life to the Hyde Amendment, or to some state-level parental-consent law or waiting period, supported by Republicans, might be happy to be alive – regardless of whether she is alive due to sincerity or due to opportunism!
That Republican-supported laws are saving some lives is unquestionable, regardless of the rivers of cynicism on which those laws have no doubt often floated. And when some of those laws save lives, they do so in a way that pays recognition to the humanity of the unborn.
Republican politicians have been duplicitous with pro-lifers, no doubt. And it’s doubtful that the small contribution they have made on the continuum of humanization, in relation to the unborn, has outweighed all the harm they have done on the continuum of wealth and power equity – not to mention the harm that they have probably done even on the continuum of humanization, in relation to groups other than the unborn. But the contribution that they have made, sincerely or not, in relation to the humanity of the unborn should be recognized, and above all it should be recognized that the continuum of humanization is the more important of the two continuums. Failing to perceive the humanity of the unborn, Chomsky seems not to think at all about the continuum of humanization or any continuum of moral progress, and ends up with a materialistic view of history.
© 2019
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