Archive for May, 2009

“”When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die”: of a doctor, an usher, and the answerer of a call

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 31, 2009
in Abortion, Christianity and Favorite Posts 2009
. 65 Comments

It’s been years since I’ve been as shocked by an assassination as I was by today’s cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller. I’d followed Dr. Tiller’s career since his town of Wichita, Kansas, became “ground zero” for the anti-abortion movement in the early 1990s; I knew he had been shot before, faced harassment and death threats. I knew he had also persevered with quiet dignity to provide late-term abortions and other reproductive services to women in his community and from across the country, often at little or no cost. I knew he was tops on the “target list” for those who were willing to kill abortion providers. And yet I was still stunned and heartsick when I saw the news this morning.

But here’s one thing I didn’t know. Dr. Tiller was a Christian, active in his local Lutheran church. It was at that church where he died this morning, ushering just as he had done on countless Sundays before. I had no reason to suspect he wasn’t a church-goer, of course. As a Christian who has wrestled mightily with my own views on abortion before coming to what is today a staunchly pro-choice position, I know full well that it is possible to believe in a loving sovereign God (as the Calvinists always put it) and to believe in a woman’s sovereignty over her own flesh. (I belong to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, and have heard that good Dr. Tiller did as well.) Dr. Tiller gave hope and comfort to women who were often in desperate, medically dangerous situations; far from being a craven Dr. Death, he was a gentle, dignified man who did what he did out of a profound commitment.

That commitment was to his patients, but it was also clearly to his faith. He had faced death so many times, faced trials and lawsuits and threat after threat. Where did he find the strength and the courage to continue to do what he did? Did he find it in a sense of an ethical obligation to women who had nowhere else to turn? Certainly. Did he also find it in his belief in a loving God who had called him to do something hard, something that many would not understand, something that would cause him to risk his very life? I suspect he did. Lutherans are famous for their sense of “calling”; it was Luther himself who first began to emphasize the idea that each of us has a “calling”, a vocation, outside of our role in the church. And it was another Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote the famous Cost of Discipleship, with its devastating line: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Bonhoeffer, of course, was martyred by the Nazis for many reasons, not least because he stood up for the dignity of creation in the face of the monstrous evil that was the Third Reich. George Tiller was martyred today, not least because he stood — and stood publicly and openly — for the God-given dignity of women in the face of a movement that seeks to deny women their full humanity.

(I am well aware that today, some loathsome folks have dared compare Tiller’s murderer to Bonhoeffer; the latter, of course, was involved in the plot to kill Hitler. Some see abortion as akin to the Shoah, and an attack on Tiller as akin to the less-successful one on Hitler. But these bloggers have it back-to-front. It was Tiller himself who was far more like the gentle German pastor, and his assassin far more akin to those who martyred him.)

According to the Wikipedia entry on his life, Dr. Tiller had originally planned to be a dermatologist. Few emergencies or controversies in dermatology, after all; his life would have an easy and untroubled one, no doubt far more lucrative to boot.* But something changed, as he himself said:

In July of 1970, I planned to start a dermatology residency. On August 21, 1970, my father, mother, sister and brother-in-law were killed in an aircraft accident. My sister had a 12-month-old boy, Maurice. They had written out a will in longhand the evening before the airplane crash, that I was to raise Maurice. So we took charge of my sister’s boy and we moved back to Wichita. My game plan was to spend six months here, close out my father’s huge family medicine practice.

We Christians know a lot about game plans. As we say, if you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans. Tiller:

And I found out that in 1945, ‘46, or ‘47, a young woman for whom Dad had already delivered two babies came to him pregnant again right away, and she said something to the effect that, “I can’t take it, can you help me?” That is apparently the way you asked for an abortion from your regular doctor before abortion was legal. Dad said, “No. Big families are in vogue, by the time the baby gets here, everything will be all right.” She had a non-healthcare provider abortion and came back and died.

I can understand how upset my father was. I do not know whether he did 100 abortions or 200 abortions or 300 abortions. I think it may have been something like 200 over a period of about 20 years, but I don’t know for sure. The women in my father’s practice for whom he did abortions educated me and taught me that abortion is about women’s hopes, dreams, potential, the rest of their lives. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.

When it became legal and my patients began to ask for it, I’d say, “Sure. It’s a legal process.” I was a service provider. I was a physician. The patients needed abortions, and I did them. It is my fundamental philosophy that patients are emotionally, mentally, morally, spiritually and physically competent to struggle with complex health issues and come to decisions that are appropriate for them.

Bold emphases mine. God didn’t want George Tiller doing facial peels, removing basal cells, and comforting the be-pimpled. God had something else in mind for him, something that in the end George was one of the few to do. Dr. Tiller heard a call in the midst of a family tragedy, and answered it. He lived and — died — in a very Lutheran way. Christ called Him, and George said “yes.”

George Tiller died today while ushering. Ushers quietly and unassumingly help folks to find their place in God’s house. Ushers, in many churches, are the first to tell a visiting newcomer that he or she is welcome. Dr. Tiller did that at his church on Sunday mornings, and he did it at his clinic all week long when he welcomed in women who had nowhere else to turn. And he was murdered in cold blood today as he did this precious work. I have not peeked at the Lamb’s Book of Life; but I say this with all the certainty that my rebirth in Christ has given me: I think George Tiller’s name is in that book, and that he has been welcomed today with love and rejoicing on the far side of the Jordan.

When I first heard the news, I prayed. I got angry, very angry. And then I donated money, as that seemed the only tangible way I had at my disposal to strike back against this act of evil, this killing of a righteous man who knew how to do what was needed in the face of so much danger and hatred. I give monthly to Planned Parenthood, but at Heather Corinna’s suggestion, gave a large donation today to the National Abortion Federation. I gave a smaller donation to Medical Students for Choice, which works to raise up the next generation of abortion providers. I gave in memory of Dr. Tiller, of course, but also in the name of my wife, my daughter, my mother, my sisters, and all of the women in my life. As I’ve written before, any lingering sense I had that I might still place a foot in the anti-choice camp ended the day I saw my wife give birth to our daughter. I pray that my daughter will never be in the situation that so many of Dr. Tiller’s patients were in. But if she should be, I pray a doctor of his decency and caliber will be there for her.

Please check out a list that Jill has put together at Feministe. Many suggestions for where to give in Dr. Tiller’s name, and more in the comments.

Any comments here suggesting that what was done today was somehow justified will obviously be deleted.

I am George Tiller. If you support the thug who killed the good doctor, know that I stand with Dr. Tiller and give time and money to support his work. Come for me. And if you stand for a woman’s right to choose, even if it is a hard choice, then say it and repeat it: I am George Tiller. They can’t shoot us all.

*Update: Having had time to sleep on this post, I stand by all of it — save my unfair mischaracterization of dermatologists. I have dear friends who are dermatologists, and they do far more than I suggested in this piece. My apologies.

Harvey Milk in WEHO

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 30, 2009
in GLBTQ
. 0 Comments

If you live in Southern California and have the free time, do consider attending The Legacy of Harvey Milk in West Hollywood next Saturday, June 6. Click the link for details. (Alas, I’m booked, but look forward to reports from others.) Sponsored by PEN USA and the City of West Hollywood, the story behind the man who inspired a movement and a movie and many other things deserves ever more study and celebration.

On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2009
in Faith, Favorite Posts 2009, Hygiene and Politics
. 22 Comments

I’m a big Nicholas Kristof fan, and very much enjoyed his piece in this morning’s grey lady: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal . Kristof writes about the phenomenon of disgust, its evolutionary role in protecting us from harm, and its usefulness as a predictor of political views. An excerpt:

…conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

I’m not a neurologist or an evolutionary biologist (though my contempt for the usefulness of the latter profession as having much to contribute to the study of contemporary gender roles knows almost no bounds). I’m intrigued by the notion that disgust manifests differently in folks who lean right as opposed to those who lean left. And it occurs to me that one of the things that is essential to my own liberalism is a sense that disgust is, more often than not, a moral failing to be overcome rather than a righteous response to the genuinely contemptible. Continue reading ‘On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust’

Dan Whitmarsh on pro-life policies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2009
in Abortion
. 4 Comments

Last week, I put up a brief challenge to those who oppose abortion rights: what are your policy prescriptions? What legal penalties, for women and for physicians, do you propose? The pro-life community owes us clarity; if they want us to be conscious of abortion as a moral wrong, they must also be explicit about what they regard as the right consequences for seeking or providing an abortion. Dan Whitmarsh, a pastor and blogger, takes up my challenge in his very thoughtful post. He invites more responses, with the caveat that his thread is not the place to discuss abortion itself, but the policy prescriptions that the anti-abortion movement ought to put forward.

If you comment, respect his blog and his thread, please, with the civility for which you are already much celebrated.

Thursday Short Poem: Szymborska’s “Love at First Sight”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2009
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

I’ll be back to lesser-known poems from lesser-known poets soon enough, but want to post this week this Wislawa Szymborska classic. My mother read it to me this past weekend, and I hadn’t thought of it (or Szymborska, for that matter) for a year or two. It’s worth an appearance, because plenty of folks don’t yet know it. Hurrah indeed for love at first sight, and for all the sightings that precede and follow love.

Love at First Sight

They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways -
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?

I want to ask them
if they don’t remember -
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.

They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.

Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.

There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday

a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?

There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.

Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream
grown hazy by morning.

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

“Feminism made women too picky”: more on male rage, sexual entitlement, and backlash

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2009
in Men and Masculinity, Money, Relationships and Working
. 154 Comments

I can never figure out the blogosphere. I start blogging less frequently, and my traffic — and comments — go up. May 2009 has seen my highest number of visitors this year, despite a notable reduction in the number of posts. Go figure. Perhaps less is more?

Lots of discussion below last Thursday’s post, much of it both civil and thoughtful. I’m appreciative. Once again, the theme of male insecurity has been raised and discussed; once again, we find ourselves discussing the topic of feminism’s impact on men. Reading the comments, however, I’m struck by something that seems both logical and ever more apparent: one source of the resentment so many men seem to feel towards feminism and what it has wrought lies in their perception that it has made women less, rather than more, sexually available to them.

We recently debated the “problem” of men “never feeling hot.” Commenters of all sexes shared painful stories of feeling unattractive and unwanted. No question, it’s hard to live with the sense that one is physically undesirable, particularly in our beauty-obsessed culture. The psychic toll that sense takes on men and women alike is real and undeniable. But where it gets really ugly (intended word) is when we see flashes of male entitlement, part of what is often called the “Nice Guy” syndrome. That entitlement manifests as the angry, indignant claim certain men make that women “should” see past their physical shortcomings and their social ineptness: Why can’t they see what a nice guy I am? Why are women such superficial bitches? Many women have been on the receiving end of hostile, sometimes whiny tirades such as these. Whatever sympathy might be possible for the unlovely and the awkward vanishes utterly in the face of such astounding entitlement.

I wrote last fall against the tired old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” thesis peddled by an array of social conservatives from Brad Wilcox to Kay Hymowitz. The thesis is that men “need to be needed”, and in the absence of feeling needed (by women) they will behave badly. Therefore, women need to make themselves vulnerable and dependent, forcing men (or giving them the opportunity) to take charge, to play the role of the knight-in-shining-armor, to feel indispensable. To listen to the right-wingers tell it, once men are given the sense that they are indispensable, they will shape up and fly right, illegitimacy and crime will vanish, the rise of the oceans will cease, and all God’s children will say “Amen.” Or something like that. Of course, in order for men to feel indispensable, women will need to surrender, become docile and nurturing rather than independent and ambitious. We’ve heard this hooey a million times before, but like supply-side economics, this belief in the “responsibility for vulnerability” transaction remains a difficult bogeyman to slay. Continue reading ‘“Feminism made women too picky”: more on male rage, sexual entitlement, and backlash’

“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 26, 2009
in Academia and Teaching
. 4 Comments

As my students know, I don’t lecture from notes. When I’m teaching a new class, or one I haven’t taught in a while, I’ll show up with a few specific facts or dates scribbled on the back of an envelope, but nothing more. When I first started giving lectures as a TA (lecturing as a TA was very common at UCLA) in 1991, I wrote out my lectures in longhand; that quickly proved both tedious and unnecessary. By the time I came to Pasadena City College two years later, I wrote out bullet points for myself on lined yellow paper, but not complete sentences; the last time I used those legal pads to prompt myself was perhaps 1995.

I continue to “read in my field”, as it were. I’m a medievalist by formal training, but don’t teach my subject here at the community college level. Here, I’m a generalist, offering lectures on Hammurabi and Homer, the reign of Charles II, Puritan notions of the erotic, the First World War, the rise of the gay rights movement in 1950s Los Angeles and the theme of dysfunctional families in western literature. It would not be entirely uncharitable to describe my interests as running a mile wide and an inch deep; teaching survey courses in umpteen different subjects is much more appealing to me than taking one or two areas and exploring them in painstaking detail. And so my reading lists are eclectic as I struggle to stay somewhat current in so many different fascinating fields. The ever-growing horde of books unread might be depressing if I allowed myself time to reflect upon all that I still do not know! Continue reading ‘“I Have No Idea Where I Got That”: the perils of being a workaholic ENFP generalist’

Friday Random Ten: 6×7 birthday Edition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 22, 2009
in Friday Random Ten
. 4 Comments

Mississippi John Hurt sang a song that was on my mother’s old Newport Folk Festival records; referencing turning 21, the lyrics went “You’re 3×7, you know what you want to do.” Half my life time ago, I didn’t know, not really. Now I do. These are the songs on my iTunes Party Shuffle this week, as I turn 6×7 today.

1. “Ghost Repeater”, Jeffrey Foucault
2. “Blood and the Ram”, The Gourds
3. “This Heart of Mine”, Wailin’ Jennys
4. “One Tree Hill”, U2
5. “But the Days and Nights are Long”, Cheryl Wheeler
6. “Little Tornado”, Aimee Mann
7. “Holiday Inn”, Elton John
8. “Don’t Go Easy”, Jill Barber
9. “Willin’”, The Flying Burrito Brothers
10. “Change”, Tracy Chapman

Bonus Track: “Martyrs and Thieves”, Jennifer Knapp

The New Second Sex, or Architects of their own Adversity? A response to Christina Hoff Sommers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2009
in Male feminists, Men and Masculinity and Youth
. 76 Comments

There is much both to lament and praise about the new women’s site, Double EX, but it does have the virtue of being readable. Yesterday, noted anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, whose public career seems largely based on her willingness to peddle the theory that our society is at war with boys and all things male, offered up Are Men the Second Sex Now? It’s not nearly as reactionary as some of her other pieces, but it still serves Sommers’ larger agenda of delegitimizing the contemporary American women’s movement. Others will find plenty with which to take issue, but I wanted to note these paragraphs of hers:

In (Betty) Friedan’s day, women were clearly the second sex. Not so today. Yes, many women are struggling with the challenge of combining family and work. But men do not have it easy either. They are increasingly less educated than women. They are bearing the brunt of the recession. The New York Times recently reported that “a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men.” Reuters referred to the surging male unemployment rate as a “blood bath.” Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “FastStats” show that men are less likely than women to be insured—and more likely to drink, smoke, and be overweight. They also die six years earlier than women on average.

Why are there no conferences, petitions, workshops, congressional hearings, or presidential councils to help men close the education gap, the health care gap, the insurance gap, the job-loss gap, and the death gap? Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men’s studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.

Few feminists I know dispute that men die earlier, are more likely to commit suicide and engage in risky behaviors, and are increasingly less likely to seek out advanced degrees. This isn’t feminism’s fault, of course, and to her credit, Sommers isn’t saying it is. But she implies that boys and men are suffering because they are being overlooked by feminist thinktanks, and that’s a serious misrepresentation of the crisis. Continue reading ‘The New Second Sex, or Architects of their own Adversity? A response to Christina Hoff Sommers’

Thursday Short Poem: Justice’s “Map”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 21, 2009
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

Haven’t had a Thursday Short Poem up in a while, but on my birthday eve, wanted to share Donald Justice’s fine offering:

A Map Of Love


Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to I while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

Of little girls and liberal goals: daddies, daughters, and left-wing politics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2009
in Parenting and Politics
. 3 Comments

There’s been a lot of research done over the years on the impact that becoming a parent has on one’s political preference. The common wisdom has generally been that becoming a parent, particularly to a daughter or daughters, would push that parent rightward in his or her politics. Indeed, back in my own youth, I heard some variation on this line from several sources: “What’s the definition of a conservative? A former liberal with a teenage daughter.” It “sounded” right, and not being a parent (but being quite left-wing), I was prepared, however reluctantly, to believe it might be so.

My student Hilary sends me a link, however, to this post at the wonderful FiveThirtyEight: Having Daughters Rather than Sons Makes You More Liberal. 538 provides a link to a PDF file of a forthcoming paper which summarizes a number of recent studies, all of which indicate that the presence of daughters in father’s lives (more so than in mother’s) tends to move men leftwards. This trend is true in both the UK and the USA (the two nations studied), and true both for ordinary voters as well as for politicians. For example, the study cites the work of economist Ebonya Washington:

By collecting data on the voting records of US congressmen, Washington… provides persuasive evidence that congressmen with female children
tend to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues such as teen access to
contraceptives. (She also) argues for a wider result, namely,
that the congressmen vote more liberally on a range of issues such as working families
flexibility and tax-free education. Her data — compiled partly but not wholly
from voting record scores compiled by the three interest groups of the National Organization of Women, the American Association of University Women, and the
National Right to Life Coalition — cover a cross-section of 828 members of four
congresses of the US House of Representatives for the years 1997 to 2004. As her
final sentence puts it: “Not only should we consider the influence that parents have on
children’s behavior, but we should acknowledge that influence may flow from child to
parent”.

Read the whole study, the comments at 538, and check out the fun graphs and charts. A statistician’s delight!

I argued in March that “strong public institutions which offer alternatives to traditional family structures and allow for maximum personal autonomy and responsible self-expression are a key way to promote a feminist vision on a macro-economic level.” That was and is my view, but it’s interesting to see that having daughters seems to lead other men (politicians and ordinary voters alike) towards that same position. It’s not the case that those who have girls are automatically more liberal; it’s difficult to argue that on most issues, Dick Cheney was somehow made more progressive by having two daughters and no sons! One shudders to think how much more extreme he might have been had he had “Larry” and “Mark” instead of Liz and Mary. (It’s worth noting that his nuanced and moderate position on gay marriage, rare for a right-wing Republican, was certainly influenced by having a lesbian daughter.) Continue reading ‘Of little girls and liberal goals: daddies, daughters, and left-wing politics’

Pro-life in private, pro-choice in the voting booth: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2009
in Abortion, Pasadena City College and Voting
. 25 Comments

I posted about Obama, abortion, and irreconcilables yesterday. As coincidence would have it, a major anti-abortion campaign has descended on Pasadena City College this week. At strategic points around campus, activists have erected massive billboards depicting the fetus at various stages of prenatal development. Several dozen young people, clean-cut and mostly white, clad in shorts and t-shirts, are manning the displays with literature and a willingness to talk. Yesterday, these huge set-ups attracted large crowds, drawn to the brightly colored, highly controversial images. As I walked on to campus this morning, the displays were being erected once more; this is presumably part of a week-long campaign.

(UPDATE: I’ve learned that our visitors this week come from the Wichita, Kansas outfit called Justice for All. Their website — with exact reproductions of the images they have on campus this week – is here. Warning: May be triggering for many. A visit to the JFA site makes clear they are tied to conservative Protestant evangelicalism, advocating abstinence until marriage. JFA is closely linked with Stand To Reason, the Southern California apologetics group; STR’s statement of faith is here. JFA has been sued before over their displays, and a lawsuit is ongoing in Texas after a display at UT Austin.)

This often happens this time of year. Christian colleges and universities that finish their terms in early May free up committed young activists to descend on public colleges and universities that won’t finish up until June. What a fine thing it must be to be able to tell one’s friends that one is spending the summer campaigning and witnessing for life, bringing the “truth about abortion” to the ignorant, the misled, and the Great Unsaved! I’m a bit snarky, but also empathetic. I’ve been part of similar marches and campaigns, and unlike most people, have adult experience with being on both sides of the abortion issue. (Pro-choice, pro-life, and pro-choice once more.) I know how easy it is to move from passionate conviction to righteous indignation to dehumanization of one’s opponents.

On a day like today, I have no interest in wading out onto the quad to engage one-one-one with these folks. My main concern is for the emotional welfare of my students, particularly those who have had abortions. (I can think of four young women currently on this campus who have confided in me that they have made that particular choice. I’m under no illusion that everyone who has had an abortion shares the story with me, and as a result, can only assume that a substantial percentage of my students have terminated a pregnancy.) The activists have set up their displays in such a way that it is difficult to enter or exit our main buildings without seeing these graphic and troubling images; I am eager to make myself available (and I know I speak for my feminist colleagues when I say that they are also available) to students who want to process through their feelings.

If I were to engage with the activists, I wouldn’t debate the issue of when life begins. The answer to that question is so weighted with theological conviction and emotional intuition that the chances of achieving a happy universal consensus are nil. (See yesterday’s post about the inevitabilty of irreconcilables.) Rather, I’d prefer to focus solely on policy. What laws do they want changed? What punishments would be appropriate for women who seek abortion? What punishments would be appropriate for doctors who provide abortion? What expectations do these activists have that ending legal abortion will also end illicit pregnancy terminations?

President Obama rightly pointed out that most Americans have contradictory views. Many Americans, an increasing number, are “pro-life.” The anti-abortion movement is winning the battle to convince folks that a fetus is a human being. But they aren’t winning elections; just last fall, pro-life propositions were resoundingly defeated in Colorado, South Dakota, and in California. The reason for this apparent disconnect is that a great many people find abortion abhorrent, but are reluctant to ban the procedure in all instances. Most Americans can imagine their own daughters or little sisters getting raped, after all; few Americans would want to force a woman to carry such a pregnancy to term.

So the question I would have for my pro-life friends is about policy. What specific policy recommendations do you call for? If doctors continue to perform abortions once it has been made illegal, what charges do you intend to bring against them? What crime do you think a woman ought to be charged with if she seeks an abortion? If you believe that women are “victims” of abortion, do you see them as emotional children who cannot be held accountable for their actions? Do you think penalties should be enhanced for women who seek more than one abortion over the course of their lifetimes?

The issue of when life begins is, I think, more or less a moot point. Even if we concede (and I do not concede this) that life begins at conception, what specific policies and coercive tactics ought to be adopted to protect that embryonic life? In the public square, those of us who hold strong views need to bring tangible policy solutions to the table. And this, of course, is where the pro-life movement loses traction with the American people. 51% of Americans may describe themselves as pro-life, but that doesn’t mean 51% of Americans want abortion to be outlawed, or want clinic workers charged with murder. Americans, in other words, seem to be increasingly pro-life in their private moral views and resolutely pro-choice in terms of their views on public policy. (This explains why parental notification initiatives have failed three times in California, despite the fact that most Californians think teens should talk to their parents before seeking an abortion.) We lean increasingly to the right philosophically, but increasingly left in terms of practicalities.

But today, my thoughts are not about politics or philosophy. My thoughts are with the young women on this campus (statistically, on a campus with more than 15,000 women, there are thousands who are have had or will have an abortion) who will come face to face with these graphic displays today. My prayers are for them, my office door (as I told my women’s studies class this morning) is open to them. And I’m choosing to remain cheerfully civil to those whose views are different from my own.

Barack Obama, Isaiah Berlin, and the wisdom of honoring irreconcilables

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 18, 2009
in Abortion and Politics
. 24 Comments

We were in the Bay Area until yesterday afternoon, and stayed at our host’s home in San Francisco long enough to catch President Obama’s remarkable — and controversial — commencement address at Notre Dame.

I have not hesitated to be critical of the new president when I think criticism is warranted; his refusal to embrace the cause of marriage equality, and his administration’s reluctance to use its powers to protect grey wolves and polar bears have been serious disappointments. But it is in the nature of leaders to disappoint their most ardent followers, and I accept that. It is in the light of these recent disappointments that I watched Obama give his speech to the Notre Dame community, and I was as impressed as ever with his seriousness, his thoughtfulness, and his commitment to changing the tone of contemporary discourse.

The full transcript of the address is here. There is much within his talk that others are discussing, but I wanted to note my favorite bit. Referencing our long and seemingly never-ending public fights over abortion and other divisive social issues (such as same-sex marriage) the president said:

Now, understand — understand, Class of 2009, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.

Bold emphasis mine.

I liked that very much, largely because most politicians on left and right (and, I confess, this blogger) tend towards a crude but honest triumphalism. We sing “We Shall Overcome”, and quote (or misquote) Dr. King’s line about the long arc of history curving towards justice. In the animal rights world, many of us are confident that we will reach a point where eating the flesh of other sentient beings is as abhorrent as eating the flesh of our own children. My pro-life friends speak constantly of a coming moral awakening; my gay activist friends expect — within their lifetimes — to see all opposition to same-sex marriage fade away. To some extent, staying involved in any kind of activism requires this faith that your cause will triumph someday. Who among us — across the political spectrum — doesn’t thrill to King’s sentiment in that final speech of his in Memphis, when he tells us he has seen the promised land from the mountaintop? Like MLK, many of us know (or fear, or suspect) that the promised land (the end of abortion, universal acceptance of gay marriage, the end of animal agriculture) will not be reached in our lifetimes. But the bittersweet sense that we, like Moses, will not live to enter what has so long been sought often gives rise to sweeping denunciations of those who are impeding the path of progress. And it was to that triumphalist worldview that President Obama so capably addressed himself yesterday. Continue reading ‘Barack Obama, Isaiah Berlin, and the wisdom of honoring irreconcilables’

Special May 19 election endorsements

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 12, 2009
in Endorsements
. 10 Comments

For you early voters here in California, some quick endorsements for next week’s special election before I leave on my trip:

1A: Yes, with ambivalence
1B: Yes, with ambivalence
1C: No
1D: No
1E: No
1F: Leaving it blank, as it’s a silly bit of misguided populism of the most vulgar sort.

And off again…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 12, 2009
in Blogging
. 1 Comment

I’m in hiring interviews all day today, and off to Northern California tomorrow — speaking at a small conference in Oakland (at the Oakland Museum) on Thursday. No posting until next Monday. I’ll try to moderate things as best I can.