Lying to themselves at you
by Tom Sullivan
One hears repeatedly that questioning people’s motives is rude. Impolitic. Impolite. Paul Waldman a few years ago posted that motive questioning is toxic because it is akin to calling people liars and bad people. Then again:
I’m not saying that on certain occasions it isn’t reasonable to question someone’s motives. In fact, voter ID laws offer one such case. The idea that all these Republican legislatures set out to address the non-existent problem of people impersonating other people at the polls just because they care so deeply about the integrity of the ballot, and did so in a way that purely by accident has the potential to significantly reduce turnout by some of the people most likely to vote Democratic, is more than a little hard to swallow. I’ll absolutely grant that Democrats dislike voter ID laws primarily for the same political reason, because it means their voters may find it difficult to vote. But on the substantive merits, Democrats also happen to be right.
Perfect example. In fact, on several occasions federal courts have questioned the stated rationale behind passing these laws as without substance, including just days ago in the Texas case. But one of the most frustrating things about attempting to engage “a Republican argument” is precisely how often the arguments seem disingenuous. It is not as if rank-and-file activists are actively lying about their motives. It is that they have never questioned them themselves. They have simply heard and regurgitated the talking points so often that they believe their own bullshit and are beyond questioning it. The frustrating thing is not that they are lying to you. It is that in effect (to borrow a Colbert construction), they are lying to themselves at you.
Likely, most True the Vote activists really believe that on Election Day — unlike honest, decent, Real Americans — hordes of would-be felons stand in line at polling places waiting for their chance to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison, just to add a single extra vote to their candidate’s total. It’s hard to keep a straight face when they insist that’s why we need to require photo IDs.
Certain topics I seldom comment on because I don’t feel best qualified to. Women’s issues, for example. Making an exception here as it is directly related.
Over the weekend, Margo Kaplan, an associate professor at Rutgers Law School, asked why anti-abortion groups don’t target in vitro fertilization clinics. IVF clinics destroy embryos all the time. Want to donate embryos left over from fertility treatments for medical research? Just fill out a simple form. There are no questions about competence. No waiting periods. No mandatory videos. With rare exceptions, the government stays out of your decision. She writes:
The disparity between how the law treats abortion patients and IVF patients reveals an ugly truth about abortion restrictions: that they are often less about protecting life than about controlling women’s bodies. Both IVF and abortion involve the destruction of fertilized eggs that could potentially develop into people. But only abortion concerns women who have had sex that they don’t want to lead to childbirth. Abortion restrictions use unwanted pregnancy as a punishment for “irresponsible sex” and remind women of the consequences of being unchaste: If you didn’t want to endure a mandatory vaginal ultrasound , you shouldn’t have had sex in the first place .
It’s the non-procreative sex they really hate, writes Kaplan. The same conservatives who rail against abortion also oppose insurance coverage for contraception. It promotes consequence-free sex outside marriage.
IVF patients make less-attractive targets because we don’t challenge the expectation that women want to be mothers. Abortion, on the other hand, thwarts conservative ideals about a woman’s proper role as a wife and mother. This may be why, counterintuitively, I have greater freedom to decide what to do with an embryo in a petri dish than a pregnancy in my own body.
There is much more there involving issues of class and race, none of which appears in the usual anti-abortion rhetoric. Not that anyone would admit in public or to themselves. You should read the whole thing.