Musings Of An Indie WriterScreeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
“If You Can’t Be Careful…”
April 26, 2004
Several commentators, your Curmudgeon among them, have expressed the opinion that the sole ideological commonality that unites the Democratic Party today is fidelity to the absolute, unrestricted right to abortion—for the indigent, at taxpayer expense. Events such as yesterday’s pro-abortion-rights march on the National Mall, which appears to be the strongest of the current animations behind the presidential candidacy of John Kerry, provide confirmation of this thesis.
That American politics should be so sharply cloven along this particular line has baffled many. The absolutism of the pro-abortion-rights activists and their opposite numbers in the pro-life camp explains it somewhat. When the middle ground in a political debate is systematically ignored by the highest-profile contributors and the news media that cover them, the sense of an unbridgeable gulf can be hard to dispel. Yet every American of any persuasion must know that the middle ground exists—indeed, that there’s lots and lots of it, and that many people are standing on it.
Nevertheless, at this time the Democratic Party’s public coloration is taken principally from this stance: no restrictions whatsoever on abortion, and public funding to those who can’t afford them. The party’s leadership is so unbending about this that it has used physical force to prevent pro-life speakers from addressing the party’s last few national conventions.
But who is being castigated as extremists in this matter? Not the Democrats. It’s the Bush Administration, for daring to submit the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act to Congress. Worse, all those bills have become law.
It would seem that, just as one man’s unborn baby is another’s fetus, one man’s moderate is another’s extremist. Or is that all there is to it?
Single-issue interest groups are normally controlled by those most ardent about the issue: the no-compromise, no-retreat activists, the ones whose language and deeds are most dramatic, and who therefore get the most air time and column-inches. Look at the behavior of the environmental groups, and compare the amounts of attention they get, and ask if the pattern doesn’t hold.
If the Democratic Party is not yet a pure single-interest group, it’s not far from becoming one. The party’s other major animating cause would seem to be regaining federal power. What else are we to make of the torrent of “Anybody But Bush,” “Bush = Hitler,” and “Bush is the worst president in history” rhetoric, in the face of the demonstrable facts?
The general American public is unlikely to respond well to such a stance. Yes, there were several hundred thousand marchers on the Mall yesterday. Yes, there were a number of high-profile politicians and celebrities who spoke there. And yes, the event drew substantial coverage from the major media. But there’s a term in the equation that one must not overlook: pro-lifers don’t march.
The amount of noise, often stippled with grotesque insult and imputations of evil motives to one’s opponents, that the abortion issue has added to national political discourse has had an unbalanced effect. It’s acted primarily to silence the opponents of unrestricted abortion rights. With a few gaudy exceptions, we who hold that the current abortion regime is immoral and untenable have ceased to speak to the other side, or to the Old Media that has enlisted with them.
We speak to our children instead. And our children have been listening.
In preparing their adolescent children for the challenges of life as sexual beings in a sexualized world, parents largely fall into two groups:
- “Your fun bits and what comes from them are no business of mine.”
- “Be good. If you can’t be good, be careful. If you can’t be careful, name it after me.”
Group 1, however uncomfortable its members might be about their children’s blossoming sexual natures, essentially signs off on the matter. Group 2 makes some attempt to enfold sex and its consequences in a moral envelope. Current indications are that Group 2 is waxing and Group 1 is waning.
Behavior and attitudes have significant reciprocal effects on one another. Aristotle said as much 2300 years ago, so it’s not exactly news. It’s one of the working postulates of behavior-modification psychotherapy, and it does appear to work most of the time. Therefore, if adolescents come to maturity and independence after some years of practicing well-reinforced sexual restraint and caution, they’re likely to see these things as right and beneficial. They’ll frown on assertions that sexual restraint is “bluenosed,” and that sex ought to have no irrevocable consequences—the position of the abortion uber alles camp. And in the sweet rushing fullness of time, they will pass their attitudes along to their own children.
Thus, while abortion itself will remain a contentious topic whenever it’s brought into the public eye, legal abortion’s practical effect on sexual behavior, which is diminishing at the moment, could diminish even faster over the coming decade. The abortion issue’s effect on political behavior—that is, the behavior of the electorate in choosing executives and legislators—is likely to weigh against the Democrats.
Even some who hold that abortion should remain legal at all times are turning away from the Democratic Party. Your Curmudgeon spoke to one such young man a few days ago. He was unabashed about his pro-choice stance, but he was appalled by how the Democrats had “given away the rest of the store” out of its absolutism on this one topic: “They’ve stopped being careful about who they offend.” He plans to investigate Republican attitudes in the near future, and hopes to find them less strident.
There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.
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