Portrait of an Activist Banging Head Against the Wall:
Those dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade have enacted a whole series of legislative acts at the state level to try and make life difficult for women seeking to get an abortion. Mandatory waiting periods before an abortion, having to read scripts to the patient, or forcing the mother to see a sonogram or hear the heartbeat of her fetus. Or conservative states pass laws whereby doctors performing abortions have to have admitting privileges at a local hospital — even passing a law saying that abortion facilities must have hallways wide enough to allow hospital beds to move in them. The Supreme Court has decreed that states or Congress can pass such laws as long as they don’t place an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Pro-life activists and like minded legislators have passed bills after bill to make it more difficult for women to get abortions, even as none of these are medically important and/or necessary. The federal government protects the right of a pregnant woman to abort her fetus for any reason whatsoever until viability. So states pass weasel laws to try and get around Roe v. Wade. State laws constantly test how far they can get with the federal courts in terms of “undue burden.” None of these laws have any real medical basis.
Supposedly, the idea in Alabama and five other similar states now is to confront directly Roe v. Wade and get it overturned. Thereby, it would roil the country even more, pouring gasoline on to the simmering coals that is American politics presently. Self-styled “abortion abolitionists” don’t seem to care if they plunge the country into another civil war with this provocative legislation. They want to defeat the other side and drive them into the wilderness. Social conservatives, in my opinion, are to blame for this. These “heartbeat bills” are blatantly unconstitutional, but that is the point. “This bill is about challenging Roe v. Wade. This is the way we get where we want to get,” claimed Alabama Rep. Terri Collins. These anti-abortion activists don’t care what the law says. “The advice of lawyers is of less concern than it has ever been in the pro-life movement right now,” said Missouri anti-abortion lobbyist Samuel Lee. “They don’t care. Social movements sometimes take on a life of their own.” These anti-abortion zealots are fixated on their maximalist goal of outlawing abortion and care little what those on the other side of the issue think. They feel they are closer to their goal than at any point since 1973 when abortion on demand first became the law of the land. Feminists and other “reproductive rights” supporters are up in arms in defense of Roe v. Wade.
This same inflamed political passion travels in the other direction with gun control. The 2nd Amendment protects the ability of Americans to buy and possess firearms, although that right is subject to “reasonable” regulation. But liberal states, like California and New Jersey, pass similar weasel laws to annoy gun owners and make it difficult to purchase guns or ammunition. I have met few who would argue with a background check, as almost nobody wants felons getting easy access to guns. But 10 day waiting periods, limits to buying one gun per month, a roster of approved guns that can be sold, trying to zone businesses to make it impossible to operate a gun store, tracking and/or limiting the sale of ammunition, limits on magazine capacity, special emergency gun confiscation orders — I am unconvinced any of this does much to prevent so much of the drug and gang murder that makes up most gun crime (although emergency gun confiscations may be valuable in some cases). The Ventura Star, my local newspaper, publishes the names and arrest photos of those caught carrying firearms illegally on their local crime page. They are almost always the usual suspects. It is obvious none of these people are getting these guns legally. None of these gun regulations prevent them from acquiring and using these guns illegally. I can’t see where these laws lower the crime rate.
Like those laws that harass women getting abortions without ultimately preventing them from aborting their fetus, California gun laws make it harder to get a gun or ammunition without actually preventing almost anybody from doing so. Gun owners with clean criminal records have the 2nd Amendment. Californians can exercise their rights and buy guns and ammunition, but the politicians throw up the roadblocks that pass constitutional muster. California has a “roster” of approved guns that require make believe “microstamping” and make it illegal to sell recently released handguns (unless you buy them from law enforcement in a private person sale), but you can buy most guns just a few years older. Laws like this annoy gun owners without really preventing them from buying one. I don’t see how almost all these laws make us “safer.” California gun control measures are weasel laws, in my opinion. They are passed my legislators in liberal states who want to be seen as “doing something” by angry voters, even if it is more noise than substance. They cannot pass the laws severely restricting gun ownership like they want, so they pass what legislation can pass constitutional muster, even if the laws don’t do much. Similar to abortion laws in conservative states. Even Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown thought the legislature had gone too far in 2013 with CA SB374 when it tried to extend an assault rifle ban to every semi-automatic rifle in the state. Brown vetoed the bill, explaining his actions thusly:
The State of California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including bans on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines.
While the author’s intent is to strengthen these restrictions, this bill goes much farther by banning any semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine. This ban covers low-capacity rifles that are commonly used for hunting, firearms training, and marksmanship practice, as well as some historical and collectible firearms.
Moreover, hundreds of thousands of current gun owners would have to register their rifles as assault weapons and would be banned from selling or transferring them in the future….
I don’t believe that this bill’s blanket ban on semi-automatic rifles would reduce criminal activity or enhance public safety enough to warrant this infringement on gun owners’ rights.
Even in liberal California, the adult in charge (Governor Jerry Brown) can see the nuance and appreciate the competing interests of public safety and individual rights. Will Gavin Newsom, the Chief Executive of our state now, be such a mature “adult in charge” with respect to gun control? We shall see. I have my doubts. And has any conservative governor similarly vetoed a blatantly unconstitutional anti-abortion bill passed by their state legislature? Not that I know of. Are conservative governors in “pro life” states less interested in balancing the privacy rights of a pregnant woman with the right to life of an emerging human life (a very tricky balancing act that!) and more interested in getting their way and vanquishing “ the abortion industrial complex” in Planned Parenthood? Do liberals in New Jersey and California want to greatly reduce the amount of guns in their states without caring too much about the 2nd amendment rights of gun owners, and to defeat the “merchants of death” in the NRA? It is all demagoguery.
I suspect the ardent gun control types ultimately would like to get rid of the 2nd Amendment, or change the nature of the courts to gut its interpretation, so as to allow a state (or the entire nation) to get rid of almost all private ownership of guns or severely restrict them — and they don’t care if such a resolve would result in violence, which it would. They want their way, and they don’t care if it would lead to more division (or even violence). Banning the sales of guns and allowing almost nobody to own one legally would change things, but with some 240 million guns out there in America not much would change in my lifetime. But, like “abortion abolitionists,” advocates are looking at gun control as a multigenerational social movement to change culture and then politics with respect to guns and gun ownership in the United States. I have heard liberals claim they can control gun sales and gun violence by working at the margins of the 2nd Amendment, but they are doing so because they see how hard (impossible?) it would be to change the Constitution and amend or abolish the 2nd Amendment. Any honest effort to change significantly gun ownership numbers in the United States would need core changes to the 2nd Amendment. But Roe v. Wade is in much more legal jeopardy than is the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” That is not going to change anytime soon.
No matter. Political activists at the state or local level militating against abortion or gun ownership are hitting their heads against a wall. Those are protected activities at the federal level. But it does not stop gun control or pro life partisans from trying.
What really strikes me, however, is the lack of nuance and candor in the discussion of these controversies. Gun control and abortion are just two of many culture war flash points where the goal is to vanquish the opposite side. The arguments are heavily emotional, and they are directed as much at defeating the other side as in trying to make the country better. It is like America is having an identity crisis, and the empowered and loud extremes of the Democratic and Republican Party want to wage war to make the other side unacceptable to the rest of the county. Because there really are two sides to almost every story. Both sides have to share the country. Why do we Americans let the extremes hijack the conversation?
And it is precisely because the arguments of the extremes are set in such an emotionally superheated fashion that make them so hard to discuss, not to mention compromise about. They have been set in the context of identity — ie. liberals should hate guns, conservatives should hate abortion. It is who you are. It is what your party does. But how many liberals, in real life, own guns? Or don’t mind if their law abiding neighbor does? How many conservatives can see situations where an abortion is the best of several bad options for an unhappily pregnant woman? The recent Alabama anti-abortion law makes no exceptions for rape or incest? Really?!?
NUANCE!
It is like adult America is a country of fifteen year olds who have child-like arguments about important, complicated subjects.
And it is not only on social media or on political talk shows where, I suppose, one would expect such polarizing language. This dumbing down of the complexity of the discussion — this shouting past one another, this readiness to see the worst in the other — has entered fully into college campuses, and even high schools. It is as if America forgot how to have a mature discussion; the overwrought seem unable and/or unwilling to agree to disagree, and America is not big enough for the two sides to coexist peacefully, or so it would seem.
Sigh.
In my most frustrated moments, I see America as a nation of incensed halfwits who spout simplistic slogans to rally the already converted. Much of the discussion seems like this, especially online. Americans are enraged and raw about politics and they feel with their heart much more than they think with their head. Or more to the point: they would not recognize nuance if it fell out of the sky and landed on them. Maybe it is just that it is hard for a person to think clearly when they are enraged.
Take, for example, the issue of these recent “heartbeat” abortion bills. Recently the Republican legislature passed a clearly unconstitutional state law that ban abortion at all levels, even in cases of incest or abortion. The legislation outlaws abortions at every stage of pregnancy and criminalizes the procedure for doctors, who could be charged with felonies and face up to 99 years in prison. I suspect the Alabama legislators know it will controvert Roe v. Wade, the settled law on the issue for over 25 years. These emboldened social conservatives desire to get an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, where they hope precedent will be struck down and state legislatures can ban abortion or not according to the popular will of their constituents (as gun control advocates hope with to do with the 2nd Amendment).
“Pro life” (or “anti choice”) partisans will say that life begins at conception and so to end a pregnancy through abortion is the murder of a human being.I came across this video the other day from a firearms instructor who decided to move outside of his area of expertise and weigh in on the abortion debate.
A baby is a baby is a baby in this view. A “baby” (fetus) in the earliest stages is no different than an unborn baby the day before delivery. They is no consideration of the major developmental changes that take place between conception and birth. But such a view is red meat to social conservatives in parts of the country, so they are willing to push the issue, no matter how polarizing or destabilizing it is to the body politic.
John Lovell, the man making that anti-abortion speech, is from Georgia. I remember I saw him talk elsewhere about how he had trouble finding anyone against the 2nd Amendment where he lived. But not everywhere in the USA is like Georgia, believe me, Mr. Lovell. He might respond that not everywhere is like coastal California where I live, and Lovell might also add that he has a right to his opinion. He would be right, of course. Interesting how abortion and gun control (among many other issues) can divide our nation geographically, as much as ideologically.
Notwithstanding Lovell’s speech, If there is any controversial issue that has complexity and nuance, it is abortion. It is like no other: one human being, or at the very least a developing human being, living inside another. But both sides substitute examining the complexities and real life trade offs about abortion by simplifying it into a clash of absolute rights: a fetus and its right to live, and a woman and her right to control what happens inside her body. Each side denies the other has any grounds at all to argue. But both have solid claims. In fact, it is enormously muddled and complex.
So we have this gun expert inexpertly delivering a sermon on YouTube about abortion in a uni-dimensional exposition an eighth grader could have written. Like so much in American politics, it is all about the emotion — the righteous anger. It is bumper sticker stuff. Social media posts. “My body, my choice.” “No uterus, no opinion.” Puerile. As if there were not plenty of women who, after having thought it through long and hard, were against abortion.
Then, the next day, I saw this headline on the front of CNN’s webpage. My first response was this: Why does anyone care what some nitwit TV comedian thinks about abortion? This is front page news? But then I remembered it was on CNN, and they were probably looking for a sensational headline to garner attention and get readers exposed to their clickbaits where they could earn ad revenue. The typical cheesy American journalism that presents some attention getting lead that is much less important than what it seemed at first glance. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Apparently, Leslie Jones, an actress I had never heard of, claimed in a Saturday Night Live comedy skit turned into this political sermon —
“This look like the mugshots of everyone arrested at a massage parlor,” Jones said.
“Why do all of these weird-ass men care about what women choose to do with their bodies?” she asked, referring to the 25 male Alabama senators who voted for HB 314. “The fact that nine states are doing this means this really is a war on women—and if you’re a woman out there, and you feel scared or confused, just know that you’re not alone.”
Jones wears one of those farcical dresses from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — that ridiculously far-fetched catnip in the form of a novel which feminists read to scare themselves.
Ms. Jones does not refer to that unanswerable and highly relevant question about when a “fetus” becomes a “baby.” When in our early development as humans do we gain personhood? When there is a heartbeat? When the creature has a developed nervous system and can “feel pain? In the third trimester when it is viable outside the womb? The moment it leaves the mother and can breath on its own? These are incredibly complicated questions. Why broach them? I guess it feels good and is easier to engage in a rhetorical sucker punch on national TV.
Leslie Jones has a right to her own opinion, but why indulge it on what is ostensibly a comedy show? Why would Saturday Night Live engage in an emotional rant that is red meat for liberal viewers? Because it feels good? Jones had to vent? She just had to speak out? A form of talk therapy and communion for abortion supporters? I suspect so. All emotion, little thought. Feeling, not thinking.
Of course, this is easier than acknowledging the complexity of the issue. For example, most readers will eschew my prose and go straight to the YouTube videos where the “action” and fireworks are.
Too much of our politics have become “entertainment” in the age of Donald Trump. I scratch my head and wonder about the Marvel comic book series that have been made into some twenty movies over the past decade and have earned so much money. I asked my wife last week who in the world would go see these comic book adventure movies. I have not seen one of them, even as I was told the latest Avengers: Endgame movie earned 1.2 billion billions dollars in the first weekend of its release. Really? A movie about a comic book? “Is the average American moviegoer like a 15 year old kid?” I asked her.
“Yes, they are like 15 year old boys that smoke lots of pot and like to play video games and watch superhero movies,” she replied.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps I should watch some of those movies. Maybe I am missing something worthwhile.
I don’t know.
But I do know that conservative states like Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Mississippi would love to press the issue by passing state laws that directly challenge Roe v. Wade. There is that hope that the Court might reverse itself and create a true political crisis in the process. I am for Roe v. Wade until approximately 24 weeks of gestation, and the aborting of a fetus in the earliest stages of pregnancy troubles me little. On the other hand, the aborting or a fetus deep into the third trimester better have a very good reason. At that point it is not only about the mother and her body — there is a viable baby inside there, and handcuff the expectant mother who wants to abort in such a case to a gurney with a police guard until birth, I say. Unless the life of the mother is in danger of some other very good reason.
Nuance.
But those same outraged ideologically committed liberals would love to ban almost all private ownership of forearms, as New Zealand sought to do last month in the wake of the Queensland shooting. They would pass similar state laws that come perilously close to violating the 2nd Amendment, chipping exactly the same way abortion laws seek to do a run around Roe v. Wade. They are until now more cautious about doing so since the District of Columbia v. Heller overreach was such a disaster for gun control advocates.
So I guess it depends on whose bull is being gored. Certain social conservatives would love to watch liberals wail in agony and cause a true political crisis which Roe v. Wade being overturned would create. Certain ideological liberals would love to overturn the 2nd Amendment and severely restrict or outlaw almost all private gun ownership, a move that almost for sure would prompt violence and bloodshed in the United States. The extremes of both parties WANT the culture war. They want to drive the other side into the wilderness. Politics as more than struggle but zero sum combat where one side wins and the other is vanquished. It is like the horseshoe theory of politics where the extremes of both sides of the political spectrum come to resemble each other in tone and in tactics, if not in message. As Damon Linker wrote last week:
Rather than ending in a decisive victory for the left or the right, it [the culture war] has metastasized, with points of division multiplying and new fronts constantly being opened up. Immigration, guns, Israel, trade policy, violent crime, climate change, tax rates, government regulations, free speech, college tuition — seemingly every point of political disagreement has been recast as a cultural clash pitting comprehensive and incompatible views of the world against each other. It’s a full-spectrum smackdown between the liberals and the fascists. The effort to hash out a compromise, to reach consensus, is over. In its place is tribal warfare, an endless series of zero-sum conflicts over inches of ideological territory.
It is “inches of territory” won when a state legislature passes some weasel law that makes gun owners pass a background check everytime they buy ammunition, or a woman who wants to have an abortion is forced to see an ultrasound of her fetus. It does not do what it really wants to do: stop a gun owner from having the means to shoot a gun, or prevent a women from aborting her fetus.
As for me, I believe that a woman who is unhappily pregnant — something that nobody has convinced me will ever stop happening — should be able to abort her fetus relatively quickly after conception. The sooner, the better. Abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” (although in reality it is a common procedure). But the closer to the third trimester, the less I support the “right” to kill a fetus living in your body. I support Roe v. Wade. It is the established law of the land. Keep it. Why rock the ship? I am far from alone in this.
And I believe citizens who pass background checks should be able to buy most firearms. If you can pass a stringent background check, undergo requisite training, pass a basic marksmanship test, and get a license to carry, you should be able to carry a concealed weapon. These licenced carriers are not the ones who shoot people in drug deals gone bad, gang conflicts, or psychopathic murder sprees. You almost never hear about the many millions of them. I despise so many of the California gun regulations that simply annoy gun owners without doing much to stop criminals from committing crimes with guns. They are passed by California legislators to show voters that “something is being done” without really doing anything — just like abortion laws in states like Georgia or Mississippi. California gun laws are passed because that is what Democratic politicians in Sacramento can do, with the 2nd Amendment in place. But I don’t believe much in “open carry” of firearms or allowing just about anybody to have a concealed weapon permit, as some states proudly allow. A gun owner myself, I support universal background checks, as well as bans of machine guns and sawed off shotguns. How about that, NRA? Nuance anyone?
But there is remarkably little room for nuance in the country today, where political debates begin to resemble the emotional rants of college students who lack life experience and perspective on how complex the world is. It is all emotion, little thought. Maybe even the details of even a wise and effective policy get lost in the emotional symbolism of coming on strong against the “enemy.” Gotta “own the libs” for dogmatic, doctrinaire conservatives. Gotta defeat the “patriarchy” and “white supremacy” for a certain kind of liberal.
I am semi-checked out from the zeitgeist. At 51 years of age I have a much more “live and let live” ethos. I object less to firearms or abortion or immigration than I do to the carnival barkers in politics who refuse to see any complexity in these issues. Again, It is like America has become a nation of halfwits who speak in social media bromides fit for bumper stickers. I know well what his game is about, and so do you think I am actually going to spent my precious time and energy to look up and read President Trump’s tweets myself?
I still pay some attention to politics, but emotionally I don’t allow myself to get too into it. And I take faith that there are plenty of Americans like me who don’t foam at the mouth on Twitter with a take-no-prisoners attitude with the other political party. Who would like to see politicians find that which we can agree on and to compromise, letting the extremes of both the left and the right to wander in the wilderness. Most of my adult life has been this way.
I think there are a lot of us. Millions and many more millions of us. We are sick and tired of Trump’s pouring gasoline on the fire, and his opposites in the “progressive” Democratic Party suffering endless temper tantrums in response. We want a return to moderation. To civility, or some sense of it. To the adults in the room running things.
And we vote.
Or at least we did before 2016.
We shall see.
I see signs that people want something different than what that arch-demagogue Donald Trump offers, or what Sanders, Warren, and Harris offer in a similar sort of response.
Time continues on. One era passes into another. The history teacher in me is attuned to this. But will the next era be better or worse than the current one? That is the question.
I will hope better.
I apologize, dear reader, for troubling your ear at too much length about the latest culture war front in America via comedy sitcoms or YouTube channels.
I will strike out for more fruitful topics next time.
Peace.
by Michael Wear
