In Praise of Responsible Motherhood

As I type, the US Senate is engaged in debate about the coverage or lack thereof that will be provided for abortion services under proposed health care reform legislation. As I listen to Orrin Hatch and his colleagues wring their hands over the prospect of American tax dollars being used in a way that some American citizens may find morally offensive, I am struck by two things:

1) What an incredibly, laughably weak argument this is.

2) They’re going to get away with making it, because the weakness of the defense of abortion rights is even more striking.

The reason for this is simple: there is no voice out there defending abortions. Not one. There are many pro-choice groups, but nowhere will you hear or read a defense of abortion itself.

Well, not quite nowhere. Read on.

Abortion is a wonderful thing. There are few things a person can do that can so change the trajectory of a person’s life for the better than, under the right circumstances, having an abortion. If women are allowed to choose – in cunning imitation of rational, independent human beings – whether or not to bear children, they have the power to control the circumstances under which the next generation of Americans comes into the world.

Do we approve of homeowners who decide to buy a house that they can’t afford? Do we approve of incompetent professionals who try to perform jobs they don’t know how to do? Then why on earth would we approve of (forget about insisting upon) a woman bearing a child without the means, competence, or desire to take care of it? There will always be lousy parents – must we put ourselves to the trouble of making more?

On the other hand, is it possible to speak too highly of the good mothers of this world? Does anybody do more to help a child grow up healthy, happy, economically productive and socially functional than a caring, competent mother? Three cheers, then, for every tool that we as a society can put at her disposal to make her job easier. In life, as in comedy, timing is important. Abortion gives American women the ability to make the most important decisions they make exactly that: decisions.

Finally – and let us say this loud and proud, and all the more so because it is demonstrably true by any reasonable standard:

An abortion is only a big deal if you need one and can’t get it.

It’s between a woman and her doctor for the same reason a prostate exam is between a man and his doctor: it’s uncomfortable, potentially embarrassing, and nobody else’s business. Sure, some people have decided to object to it on moral grounds; in this respect, abortion can get on the bus with meat-eating and hip-hop. You’re entitled to your moral objections. Just don’t expect us to pay much attention to you. Because if we’re smart, we won’t.

An open letter to the Trench Potatoes

Every American schoolkid has been compelled at one time or another to write a letter to Congress. Then, it was for our benefit; now, I think it might be good for them. I address this to those legislators who, waist-deep in Capitol Hill mire, may need a little bucking up. A little inspiration. A little perspective. A boot in the rear. Here’s the text that – amended to include a few specifics – I’ll be tossing into a few Congressional mailboxes.

Dear Representatives of the American People,

Perhaps our most tragicomic instinct as human beings is to seize control over little things when all other control is lost. Survivors who escaped the towers on 9/11 have described hovering near their desks as fire alarms blared, calmly and intensely deliberating and then, finally, picking up a book to carry with them down the emergency-lit stairwell. They didn’t need the book, or want it – they just needed to make a decision for themselves, at a time when all decisions were being taken away from thousands of their fellows.

When nothing can be done, we feel the need to do something. But when something must be done, and we have the power to do it, all too often we stand by and let the moment pass.

In the towers, people who never asked to face danger made choices that saved or ended their lives. These are the same kind of choices that a soldier in a trench might have to make – simple choices with profound consequences. To stand up and shoot, or to duck and cover? Neither option guarantees safety, and when you’re sitting in the mud with bullets singing overhead even the act of lighting a cigarette is neither easy nor without significance. Once you’re in the trench, the decision to “go over the top” – to force your nerveless body up and into no-man’s land – is one that humans are not designed to make.

That’s why you make that decision before you set foot in the trench.

Hard decisions are one thing, decisions under hard circumstances quite another. C.S. Lewis describes ‘courage’ as not itself being a virtue, but rather the form of every virtue at the testing point. Courage of conviction can be as simple as pure, bloody-minded obstinacy, a determination to do what you came to do no matter how different things look when you arrive. That’s not an easy quality to develop, especially once you come under fire. However:

THIS IS A TRENCH YOU CHOSE.

You chose to fight. You fought to fight. Every one of you sits where you sit now because you campaigned, you struggled, you battled, and you were victorious. The trench is your prize. You could be making more money, working shorter hours, and taking less abuse if you went back to your legal practice or took a corporate job. But you are where you are because you chose it, and you chose it for a reason: you, along with a scant handful of your fellow citizens, are in a position to fight for the future of your nation. Your constituents picked up the one rifle they had and handed it to you.

That doesn’t make the decision to fire any easier; therefore, remember that it’s a decision you’ve already made. I won’t argue that fortune favors the bold, or that the warriors who stand up in the face of controversy tend to outlast those who seek safety. I don’t have to: it’s self-evident, and it’s not the point. The point is not the medals you may earn or the speeches you may make, though both will be brighter for being harder-won. The point is that we, the people, didn’t accept your application for a spot in the trench so that you could sit in it. We want you to fight.

So, fight.

Eating the Teacup

“I’d rather live free than die with health care,” the sign said.

Last Thursday, shortly before noon, I was on Capitol Hill chatting with two little old ladies. We’ll call the LOL1 and LOL2. They’d been struggling to take pictures of the podium, and I’d offered them the benefit of my height advantage; they were very grateful, and we chatted amiably about the relative merits of being unusually tall vs. unusually short. They wore American-flag visors, and had come up from Virginia on the Metro. We talked about the weather, and about whether their digital camera was the best kind for taking pictures; LOL1 thought so, LOL2 thought perhaps not.

Then ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ stopped playing, the first speaker approached the mic, and it was time for me to unroll my sign. I’ll be the first to admit, it wasn’t the most impressive sign anybody ever made – just marker on poster paper – and the message I’d written was hardly earth-shattering. Last month, the Washington Post and ABC conducted a poll, and my sign highlighted one of that survey’s findings: that roughly 23% of Americans oppose the creation of any type of public health insurance program.

LOL1 looked at my sign, looked up at me, and told me that somebody should kill me. LOL 2 said I wasn’t worth it, and led her friend off to another part of the crowd.

By the time Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s rally was over, my sign had accumulated a pretty fair collection of reactions from my fellow citizens. I was jostled, shoved, elbowed and poked. Somebody threw a wad of chewing gum, which adhered to the first ‘I’ in the phrase “NOISY MINORITY.” I was called a commie, a traitor, and a “gay apricot” – at least, I think that’s what the gentleman said. A woman in a green sweater patted me on the back and said that she liked my sign; fortunately, the adhesive on the anti-health care reform bumper sticker she’d affixed to my jacket was not strong.

Other people with signs moved to stand in front of me and behind me, blocking me out. I sidestepped, they followed suit. I raised my arms as high as I could (as I mentioned, I’m unusually tall) – they jumped up and down, and called over other demonstrators with signs on poles. I congratulated them on their American spirit. They called me a faggot. Eventually the event ended, all the signs came down, and everybody went home.

Let me be clear: at no point did I ever feel that my life or bodily safety were in danger. The fight that the folks who gathered for the ‘High Noon’ demonstration on 11/5 wanted to start was not with me, or even with supporters of health care reform in general. To some HCR seemed almost an afterthought (no doubt it’s hard to focus on the minutiae of regulatory policy when your president is a stupid Kenyan impostor who’s trying to socialize abortions).

I will coin a term for this kind of political ecumenicalism. I will call it ‘eating the teacup’.

There was an astonishing amount of teacup-eating going on last Thursday. The tea being drunk at this party was a complex brew indeed, a mixture of many different and largely unrelated causes. The demonstrators drank it with gusto, cheering equally for school prayer, congressional filibusters, the Pledge of Allegiance, anti-abortion legislation, accusations of socialism, and anything else that the various speakers stirred into the murky ideological sludge they were offering. They drank it all, and then ate the cup. That’s what happens when you’re so determined to fight you cease to care about what you’re fighting for.

“I’d rather live free than die with health care,” the sign said. I think that just about sums it up. To one whose goal is war the battlefield is immaterial, and these warriors honestly don’t care whether or not all their slogans make sense. They are the Noisy Minority, a movement without a meaningful direction. They are a very interesting phenomenon, emotion without substance, and in the coming weeks I will be putting together a playbook for taking the wind out of their sails. In the meantime, I just wanted to deliver a report from the trenches. It’s getting ugly out there.

Lunch with the Noisy Minority

I have the luxury of living in Washington DC, and consequently of having a season pass to our nation’s finest circus: democracy in action. Political demonstration fascinates me – it brings out the best (and occasionally the worst) in the citizens of our great nation. This year we’ve seen a bumper crop of rallies on a variety of topics, and today we’re set to reprise the 9/12 Tea Party with:

TEA TWO: High Noon

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has called a rally to take her message into the halls of power today, with a rally at noon followed by (supposedly) a flood of demonstrators invading the Capitol. Exactly how many people will turn up remains to be seen, but rest assured, I will be one of them. I will be on hand to help keep things in perspective, to serve as the Voice of Context. The Tea Partiers have managed to get a vast amount of media coverage in their brief tenure, but when you rally on Capitol Hill you’re participating in a celebration of democracy. And in a democracy, the majority rules.

You can't shout down a democracy

It’s great to be vocal, it’s wonderful to be passionate, but at the end of the day the Tea Partiers represent a very small fraction of the American electorate. They are a “noisy minority” – and while they have every right to express their views, it can’t be forgotten that those views lie well outside the mainstream of American political sentiment.

I won’t use this space to go into exactly why our government should provide its citizens with a public health insurance option (you can read about that here, or watch it here). Today’s a day for standing up and being counted – and when you count up the opponents of health care reform, they simply don’t add up to much. Not because they’re not good, sincere Americans. Not because their leaders are screwy (although if Glen Beck and Michele Bachmann are the sharpest knives in your drawer, you probably eat a lot of soup). But because there just aren’t that many of them.

Only 23% of Americans oppose a public option. By contrast, 34% think that George W. Bush was a better President than Obama is.

You might think that those numbers speak for themselves. I’m not going to risk that – I’m going to go speak for them. If you’re in DC, why don’t you join me?

My Testimony to the City Council

Yesterday I gave testimony before the DC City Council regarding Bill 18-482, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009, authored by At-Large Councilmember David Catania and supported by the good Phil Mendelson. It was a great experience, although the public witness immediately preceding me took the opportunity to propose to his boyfriend. Congratulations to both of them, but still … that’s a tough act to follow.

My testimony (link to video will follow when available):

I’d like to thank the Council for this opportunity to speak. My name is (x). I’m a longtime resident of the District of Columbia, an American citizen, a taxpayer and a voter. I am a patriot; I believe in principled government, in law and civil order, in strong families and the values that help them prosper. I am a heterosexual. I am also a son and a grandson and a brother.

I have a duty to my country, my community, and my family, to support them and protect them and stand up for them. That’s why I’m here today. To speak on behalf of my family, and all families.

I said that I’m a brother. I’m actually a big brother, and that’s has responsibilities of its own. With regard to my little sister Charlotte, I have always had two jobs: to give her a hard time, and to stand up for her against anybody else who might try to do likewise. Since I was four years old I have had a very specific expression ready for any boy who might think about breaking my baby sister’s heart. If you have little siblings, I think you know what I mean: an expression that says “nobody messes with my loved ones except me.”

I’ve never gotten to use that expression.

My sister and I fought, squabbled, and grew up. We both had crushes and heartbreaks, and she was always there for me during my bad times and after my bad decisions. But I never got to use my warning death-glare, and I never will, because I don’t have it in me to intimidate a pretty, intelligent girl who loves my sister with all her heart.

I got this in the mail last week [hold up wedding announcement]. “The honor of your presence is requested at the wedding of…” I never understood these things. They seem like an expensive way to tell me something I already knew. My sis is getting her master’s degree, and her fiancée is doing Teach for America; I don’t know how they can afford the pretty stationery. I guess it’s romantic to want to make something beautiful to announce something beautiful. And I guess it’s cheaper to have the printers call a wedding a wedding, rather than a ‘commitment ceremony’ that, if hardship strikes, could be worth less than the pretty pink paper this is printed on.

I’m addressing the Council today for two reasons. First, because I’m going to have to give a wedding toast pretty soon, and I need practice. Second, because it’s my job as a big brother to stand up for my sister, to make sure she gets treated fairly by everyone except me. My sister is smart, funny, deeply obnoxious, incredibly loving, and her relationship with her partner is … pretty ordinary. They argue, they fight, they like Japanese art, and they want to visit all fifty states. I love them, but they’re already a boring old married couple. I’m jealous. They – and everybody like them, everybody who’s found time in their lives to meet someone who makes the world a simpler and happier place – deserve nothing more than to be allowed to make the best of it. The legal right to marry won’t give my baby sister, or those like her, the happily-ever-after they’ve always wanted and always deserved. But it’s a wonderful thing, and it’s the least we can do.

I thank the Council for its time.