Via MAX BLUMENTHAL I see that ABC is going to allow that psychopath James Dobson to advertise his S&M child training techniques on their network, when they refused to allow the United Church of Christ to air its “controversial” ad. No no no — if you’re going to start making these kinds of judgements, you don’t get to allow sick fuck animal and child beating fundamentalists to advertise either.
Obviously, it’s time to let the good people of this country know who they are dealing with in Mr Dobson. His book, “The Strong Willed Child” — the precepts of which will be featured in the Focus on the Family “program” being advertised on ABC’s “Nanny” show, features the following little vignette, which many of you have already read here, but which deserves to be read by everyone, particularly those at ABC:
“Please don’t misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.
“The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn’t realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.
“At eleven o’clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.
“On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater…”
“When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie’s way of saying. “Get lost!”
“I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.”
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!”
This is the basis of Dobson’s child rearing advice. He thinks of children as animals and he believes that animals and children should be beaten. He believes that nine month old babies should be switched on the bare legs. He believes they should be pinched hard, on the neck, so it will hurt. He believes in things that could get parents arrested in many states in the union.
Yet his program is considered to be more wholesome and less controversial than a church that allows gays to be a member.
Max Blumenthal has the addresses and phone numbers of the various ABC offices to which you can lodge your complaint. I think this one is worth fighting. Dobson is real menace and he should be marginalized as quickly as possible.
The day after he won a second term in November, President Bush offered his view of the new political landscape.
“When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view,” he said, “and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.”
Six months ago, this comment was widely viewed as more than just a postgame boast. Among campaign strategists and academics, there was ample speculation that Bush’s victory, combined with incremental gains in the Republican congressional majority, signaled something fundamental: a partisan and ideological “realignment” that would reshape politics over the long haul.
As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.
Where do they come up with this stuff? Of course he has a mandate. Of course it’s been a sweeping realignment. He won 51-49, a completely unambiguous indication of huge popular support, particularly for the centerpiece of his campaign, his social security plan. Why would anyone think otherwise? I thought we all understood that the vast majority of the country are social conservatives who support overturning Roe vs Wade, a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and remaking the courts in the image of Tom DeLay. Nothing could be clearer.
Now the press is wondering if that interpretation of the last election is wrong. In the article, of course, they claim that’s the administration’s interpretation, but we all know that administrations tend to exaggerate their mandates, so it’s up to the media to properly put these things into perspective. And, needless to say, they were convinced from the beginning that Bush could claim support for anything he chose to do, given his “impressive” victory in November (which was impressive only in comparison to his previous “impressive” showing.) And the Democrats, properly chastened by their embarrassing defeat would support it also, because they are losers and wouldn’t have the nerve to stand up to the codpiece collosus.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. And the press is scratching their little noggins and wondering if maybe Karl Rove’s talking points didn’t quite capture the limits of Bush’s victory. Certainly, one could have interpreted a 2% win in the presidential race as something less than a validation of the president’s most extreme positions, but why dwell on the negative?
Nobody in the mainstream press bothered to consider for even one moment that Bush might not be able to get support for the destruction of what was up to now known as the third rail in politics or that the public did not support the notion of fundamentalist preachers involved in the government. They just assumed it would be so.
Among the press it has been as if Bush has magical powers. He and Uncle Karl are thought to be so spectacularly gifted, in ways that they can’t even comprehend, that they can accomplish the impossible. Apparently, they think that cutting taxes and lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked is some sort of difficult task — completely misunderstanding the true difficulty of governing which is to not run deficits and keep the people from lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked. It was never going to be difficult to talk the country into taxcuts and killing after 9/11. That they gave Karl and George credit for something really courageous in that is a testament to their shallowness. President Britney Spears could have gotten that done.
After 9/11 (or maybe even before, when they anointed him in 2000 and told the rest of us to “get over it”) they never once gave up the idea that Bush was a popular, extraordinary leader who only a few hippies in Hollywood and a couple of stiffs in New York didn’t like because he talked funny. We had to fight that every step of the way in 2004 and still we came extremely close to winning.
There is no realignment. We are in a period of pure political combat in which the power could change dramatically in each election. There is no real middle, there are only two opposing forces. Nothing is predictable and anything could happen. The Republicans hold institutional power by only the most tenuous means, despite all their bluster about political dominance. And their biggest achilles heel — as it has been forever — is hubris. Clearly, that is the story that one would have thought the press would see from the beginning; an administration that overreached its non-existent mandate in an intensely polarized political climate.
Better late than never, I suppose. Still, it would be nice, if just once, the media could play this administration straight. They are always given the benefit of the doubt at the least, and portrayed as masterful political players most of the time — and then the ditzy media is surprised when Bush and Rove gamble and lose. It happens over and over again. For reasons I will never understand, the Washington press corpse invested itself in Junior’s success early on. It’s past time they woke up and realizes that the Republicans aren’t political wizards.
Without 9/11 Bush wouldn’t be president today. It’s all he has, and all he ever had. No mandate, no realignemnt. No nothing. Karl Rove is not a genius.
Kevin at Catch links to Little Green Footballs so I don’t have to. While gingerly tip-toeing through the dreck, I came across the dumbest, dumass rightwing post of the week (and you know how tough the competition is for that.)
Reacting to a quote from Al Gore’s speech last week (which was, btw, just great) one of the tiny chartreuse pee-wee players said:
“This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place,” Gore said as many in the audience stood and applauded.
Another thing that gets me about this statement is the hypocracy of it. I get told by Leftists all the time that this nation was founded by enlightened folks who wanted to create a secular nation. Does anybody else see the logic error in stating that religious zealots wanted to create a secular nation?
I read these Wonkette excerpts of Laura Bush’s speech at the WH correspondence dinner last night and I thought it was satire. But I just saw the tape and it’s for real:
“I am married to the President of the United States and here is our typical evening. Nine o’clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I am watching Desperate Housewives. With Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentleman, I am a desperate housewife. I mean if those women on that show think they’re desperate, they ought to be with George. One night after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales….I won’t tell you what happened, but Lynne’s Secret Service code name is now Dollar Bill.”
“George always says that he’s delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney. He’s usually in bed by now. I’m not kidding. I said to him the other day, George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you’re going to have to stay up later.”
“The amazing thing is that George and I were just meant to be. I was a librarian who spent 12 hours a day in the library, yet somehow I met George.”
“I’m proud of George. He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.”
Now that I see it again, it really does have the ring of truth.
Thank goodness she’s such a good Christian or someone might get the idea she’s alluding to equine hand jobs, thong stuffing and a very limp husband. I’m sure James Dobson would interpret these comments correctly as her desire for her husband to take his proper leadership role. And, of course, if she doesn’t respond to his leadership George can always take a belt to her as if she’s a dauchshund.
Did anyone happen to notice if FauxNews covered this little story?
By the logic of modern journalism, in which they are considered to be “getting it right” if both sides of an issue criticize them, we now know that James Dobson is a moderate on gay rights:
Gay rights supporters from around the country, angry at James Dobson’s stance against homosexuality, are expected to converge Sunday and Monday on his Focus on the Family headquarters.
A second demonstration is also set for Sunday by a handful of extreme anti-gay activists from the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan.
Ironically, both groups will be protesting the stand taken by Dobson and his ministry on homosexuality. The gay rights advocacy group Soulforce accuses Dobson of “spreading lies about same-gender families.”
Phelps’ group says Focus officials are headed to hell because the ministry is soft on homosexuality.
One’s too hot, one’s too cold and this one’s juuust right.
A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.
[…]
The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.
[…]
Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.
“The kid was sitting there as I’m describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he’s thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re talking about my burrito.'”
Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.
“He said, ‘I think I’m the person they saw,'” Russell said.
The burrito was part of Morrissey’s extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.
“We had to make up a product and it could have been anything. I made up a restaurant that specialized in oddly large burritos,” Morrissey said.
I know that most of you probably read The Howler and don’t need any reminding, but this one is a particularly good observation and I haven’t heard anyone mentioning it. Tim Russert has turned his show into a religious seminar for the last month and a half. Last week really was the final straw. Here’s Sommerby:
THROUGH THE TUBE DARKLY: Refresh us—when exactly did Meet the Press become an openly Catholic program? Last Sunday, for the third time in the last five weeks, Tim Russert devoted his entire show to a religious discussion. Early on, Russert popped this question to Father Thomas Bohlin, U.S. vicar of the conservative Catholic group, Opus Dei:
RUSSERT (4/24/05): Father John McCloskey, who was also an Opus Dei with you, was on this program. He has a Web site where he predicted basically in 2030 that the number of Catholics would go from 60 million to 40 million; almost a smaller and purer church. Is that, do you think, the vision of our pope? [Russert’s emphasis]
No, Russert’s emphasis didn’t make sense, but it was quite pronounced. Moments later, we heard from Joseph Bottum, one of two other guests whose bull-dog conservatism made Bohlin seem like a poodle. Bottum responded to the claim that the Catholic hierarchy needs to consult with Joe Sixpack more often:
BOTTUM: I’m not sure that there’s any solution in all of that… I’m not sure it’s any solution to the problem the church faces addressing the concerns that arise in a democratic experiment like the United States. We have characteristic abuses, as I said, that are going to happen in these places. And the church needs to be to some degree countercultural, to stand against that and to speak out and say, “We can’t kill our babies.”
Did we say conservative? Yes, when Bottum discussed the “characteristic abuses” that occur “in these places,” he was referring to democracies—to “places” like the U.S.!
Question: Were we the only ones who gazed with surprise at Sunday’s Meet the Press discussion? Who wondered what this odd debate had to do with the American news agenda? Who wondered why we were hearing this on NBC’s one weekly news hour?
SISTER MARY AQUIN O’NEILL: I’m grateful for an opportunity to return to the question of truth. Truth is another name for God and so it cannot be something that we possess. It’s something that we hope to dwell within. The truth is always larger than we are, greater than we are. And it is not something that we can attain by ourselves.
Say what? O’Neill seemed like a very nice person, but were we the only ones wondering why this rumination was occurring on Meet the Press, which was once a well-known news show? In fact, we found ourselves puzzling again and again as the conversation veered into the weeds. For example, why was Father Joseph Fessio, siting in Rome, saying this on a one-time news program?
FESSIO: The point is if Jesus Christ is the bridegroom of the church, if God has sent his son to us as a man to unite himself in a marital act, a nuptial act to his whole people, to make us one flesh and one body with him, there’s something very deep and mysterious about that. It’s what the church has always taught is that, not that men are better than women, not that men should be given more honor than woman, but that men image forth the bridegroom because Christ is essentially someone who’s married to us, and therefore you can’t have a woman who gives that iconic image of Christ who’s the bridegroom of the church.
But why exactly is that “the point” on a weekly news program? And why exactly was this a topic for such a weekly show:
O’NEILL: Frederic Herzog wrote many years ago that the two things that distinguish Catholicism are the sacraments and the Blessed Mother, Mary. They are both under siege right now. And the sacraments are in trouble because we don’t have ministers. That’s the question for me. We must find a way to solve that. The people are hungry for the sacraments, and without the sacraments, we don’t have the church.
That’s a perfectly fine conversation—but what was NBC News presenting it? O’Neill continued, but what was the connection between her rumination and the traditional Meet the Press?
O’NEILL: I believe that one of the most important things for this church now is to really act on Christici Fidelis Laici, where we were told there’s a complementarity between the laity and the ordained. Complementarity means one cannot trump the other. And so, in all the questions that the church faces, the lay-people and their experience and their insights have to have an equal place at the table with those who are ordained.
Of course, you know how these news shows can be. Once one guest opines about Christici Fidelis Laici, everyone has to spout off:
BOHLIN: I think there’s another way of looking at this whole issue, which is the way that John Paul II has looked at it, coming out of Christici Fidelis Laici, the great document on the lay-people in the church, which is that, really, talking about priests, bishops, Catholic professionals, is talking about an infinitesimal portion of what the church is, and really, the forefront of the battle of the church is waged by every baptized person. And that’s what’s has to be—that’s the battle. That’s where the battle is, where those people are.
For ourselves, we don’t have a view on this great document. Meanwhile, why would the Meet the Press audience have a dog in the following hunt?
RUSSERT: But if you’re a sacramental church, you need priests to administer the sacraments. And if there’s a shortage of priests, what do you do?
Why can’t “our pope” just figure it out, then tell us what we should do in “these places?” In the meantime, why couldn’t Russert spend a few minutes on the actual news, which might affect the actual American people, the people who live in such lands?
But enough of the negative! In the good news department, the very ’umble Parson Meacham was there, preaching the gospel according to Newsweek:
MEACHAM: If you are a person of faith, particularly in the United States, you live in hope. You live in the hope that one day there will be a God who will wipe away all tears from your eyes and there’ll be no more pain, an image from Revelation that’s drawn from Isaiah. And if people of faith are to play a role in the public square, they must, I believe—a humble layman’s opinion—they must practice humility and be—understand that the peace of God does passeth all understanding and that no one has, I believe, a monopoly on truth.
Of course, this ’umble layman is always inspiring. Just consider this earlier bite, where he ’umbly impressed with his detailed knowledge of every known item of scripture:
MEACHAM: You know, in the words of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, we are all seeking the means of grace and the hope of glory, and the road by which we—the road we take to attempt to do that can be different and obviously have been throughout history. I would draw a distinction between the teachings of the church and ultimately the broader force of Christianity. There is a sense, I think, of—as God said to Job in the Old Testament in the longest sustained monologue from the Lord in the Bible, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” So he should not be presuming to act as though we know everything and that we understand all truth.
In fact, St. Paul said, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. Now, I am known in part, soon I will be known in full.” So we are all on a journey. St. Augustine defined this as the soul’s journey back to God. And my sense is, the more that Benedict XVI can speak in the spirit of the past week as opposed to the past generation, he will become a force for at least an ecumenical spirit if not reconciliation.
Let’s face it—Meacham really isn’t the man to be talking about “longest sustained monologues.” Or, as we normally paraphrase Meacham, Blah blah blah blah harrumph zzzzzzz.
Meachum is, of course, the dunce who wrote:
The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.
Hookay.
I was rather stunned by Russert’s show this past week-end. It was, after all, Justice Sunday, a “religious” event that was actually newsworthy. Russert spent the hour talking Catholic theology instead. And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t just spent five long weeks with wall to wall religion on all the networks covering every possible issue that could be of interest to anyone who hadn’t actually taken vows — which I’m expecting to see Little Russ do any day now. That priest shortage is a big problem. His pope needs him.
Matt Yglesias over on TAPPED makes a good point about the new parental notification law. It pretty much clears up any remaining notion that repealing Roe vs Wade will solve the abortion issue once and for all so we can put all that unpleasantness aside as various progressive states will do as their constituents require and everybody will live happily ever after.
Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They’re not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they’re happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws.
That is correct. I don’t know how long it’s going to take Democrats to understand that those who vote one way or the other on that issue alone cannot be finessed. We can try to sound sympathetic to the “ick” factor and whittle away at the rights of women over time until there is only the most bare right to abortion if the woman’s life is threatened and it won’t make a difference to those who believe it is a fundamental issue of morality. We have to fight this one on the merits.
This reminds me of an interesting article by Paul Rogat Loeb in USA Today from a while back in which he writes that one of our problems with abortion is that we have not told personal stories:
Even if you’ve heard enough about Terri Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why President Bush’s political grandstanding in her case backfired. More than 70% of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration’s disregard for local control, the rule of law and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.
Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For 20 years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace. You’d think this belief — that the most difficult decisions must be our own — would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn’t. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.
The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell, and those we keep hidden. Many families have wrestled with end-of-life choices. But they’re brought on by the illness and aging of loved ones, not by our own actions. No one judges us for having a sick parent as they might for our sexuality. So we’re likely to talk in public about such choices.
But most women don’t publicly discuss their abortions. Although a third of all U.S. women have abortions by age 45, they’re more likely to view the dilemma as a product of their own failures — to use adequate birth control or to have the financial or emotional resources to afford another child. They’re more likely to feel shame.
When the movement to legalize abortion began, advocates talked about the human costs of prohibition. They told the complex stories of why women would choose to value their own lives, choices and possibilities over the potential life of the fetus. They framed abortion as an act of compassion. We see this in the recent film, Vera Drake. Its working-class protagonist in postwar England views her actions “helping young girls in trouble” as part of the same ethic of caring as looking after her aged mother. Pro-choice activists eventually told their stories powerfully enough to convince America that its abortion policies had to change.
Since Roe, these voices have been neutralized by those speaking for the humanity of the fetus. Some oppose abortion from compassion and conviction. The motive of others, who also campaign against sex education, access to birth control and financial support for poor families, seems more like punitive vindictiveness. As the stories of the women involved faded, the reasons why women have always made this difficult choice, and will keep doing so, got told far less often.
Schiavo was a soap opera that everyone could understand in narrative terms. And most people underestood that it was a complicated story in which all of the characters were drawn in various shades of heroism, love, selfishness and grief. The discussions around the Easter table in many homes, I suspect, were characterized with sighs and stories of “remember your Aunt Millie’s first husband Bill back in Baltimore? She had to pull the plug and her son wasn’t happy about it at all” kind of dialog. “Morality” was probably not the way in which this topic was overtly discussed because the morality of the issue was so complicated.
Abortion, I think, has always been difficult to talk about because it had to do with sex — and therefore, in some people’s minds, sin. But I do remember back in the day that one of the things that made abortion finally come out of the closet was the willingness of people to talk about the issue. The stories were of the horrors of the back alley abortions they endured and the complexity of circumstances that led them there. For instance, here’s just one example from Gloria Feldt’s book “Behind Every Choice is A Story” of a complicated situation and the horrible way the women was forced to deal with it:
In 1970 I had a back-street abortion. I had a young daughter of 18 months at home and was separated from an abusive husband. When I found out I was pregnant with another child right after finally having the courage to leave an abusive man, I cried and cried. This was before abortion was legal. I told a close friend who said she knew of a doctor who performed these abortions.
I went to his clinic, which was dirty and sleazy underneath an underpass in Metairie, Louisiana. I was treated as a criminal and so were all the other women in the room. You had to give $150 in cash before they would even speak to you. I was led to a back room where there was no caring or anesthetic to be found. It was very painful and I threw up immediately and kept throwing up for over an hour after the procedure. My girlfriend who went with me was worried as I did not come out right away as others had. She inquired about me and was led to the back room where she saw that I was in pain and throwing up. She held my hand and got a washcloth to wash my face and help me. She asked the nurse if there wasn’t something wrong and she replied “this is how some of them get.” My girlfriend was horrified at the coldness and uncaring atmosphere of the place. We left sometime after and she drove me home and called a friend who was an intern at the time. He came to the house and prescribed some antibiotics and pain medication. He was very kind.
This ABC News poll says that 81% of the public believe that abortion should be available to rape and incest victims. That is not an absolutist “culture of life” position. However, 57% of the public believe that abortion should be illegal if the reason is to end an unwanted pregnancy. The question, of course, is what does “unwanted” mean and who decides? If you were to tell that personal story, a woman with a toddler already and an abusive husband she is trying desperately to leave, would 57% agree that this particular unwanted pregnancy should be dealt with in that horrible back alley situation? Should she have been forced to have this child under those circumstances? I doubt it.
Certainly, a fair number would say “tough” — that women should have to carry the preganacy to term and give it up for adoption. But suppose that meant that the abusive father would have the right to take full custody? And, after all, how easy is it to give the sister or brother of your two year old up for adoption? And what about money or health care or legal fees? People don’t want to think about the practical, financial aspects of having a child under stressful stituation, but it is likely to be a primary concern of the person who is going to have to pay the price. I know that in the discussions I had about the Schiavo case, the issue of cost was somthing that came up in every single conversation. Who pays and where will the money come from are things that real people talk about when they deal with these issues.
I understand the impulse of those who say “I’m not sorry” as a way of expressing their right to dominion over their own bodies. As a knee jerk civil libertarian, I am very sympathetic to a straight forward expression of individual rights. But from a political point of view, it makes far more sense to present this issue as one of complicated morality which individuals see differently in different circumstances and which politicians are much too craven and self-interested to intervene.
There are probably cases in which large numbers of people would see abortion as repugnant on some level. But there are many, many cases that would evoke the dinner table conversations that happened around the Schivo case if people knew the stories. 16 year old girls who made mistakes and 34 year old struggling mothers of two whose birth control failed and women who have no money and low paying jobs and medical students with a mountain of debt and a year to go. These stories may or may not meet every single person’s criteria of what constitutes a “good reason” for having an abortion. But every single one of those women might very well decide that the circumstances are so dire for them that they will take their chances with a back alley abortion if a legal one is unavailable. That is the stark, dramatic choice that this country faces in this debate. And as Matt says, don’t count on being able to just drive to California or Canada (even if you can come up with the money) because repealing Roe vs Wade will not be the end of it. They will not stop until it is outlawed nationally.
It is important to introduce back into the dialog the fact that this is not an abstract moral issue, but a multi-dimensional, intensely human dilemma. When people understand things in those terms they are far more likely to want the government to step back than step in. It seems they know instinctively that the blunt instrument of government in the hands of moral absolutists is a bad idea.
Update: And yes, it would have been very helpful if people knew the horrible situations in which some of these young girls affected by the new parental notification laws find themselves. Parental notification laws do not hurt the healthy familites that just want to help their girls make a good decision. Those kinds of families can deal with complexity and have probably built up a lot of trust over the years. These laws hurt the girls whose families are cruel, violent and authoritarian. Many adult women have had their lives ruined because they were forced to bear the burden of their parents’ obsessive religious or political zealotry.
Ezra notices this Andrew Sullivan post and argues with Sully’s complaint that Democrats just love raising taxes for its own sake. He makes the observation that Democrats don’t really care how we raise the money, we are interested in how it’s spent. He contrasts that with the Republicans for whom cutting taxes is a virtue, no matter how much is being spent — leading to George W. Bush. (I’m pretty sure that Democrats prefer to raise money from filthy rich plutocrats who should be patriotic enough not to begrudge the country that gave them everything a little piece of the action, but maybe I’m wrong on that.) In any case, it’s true that Democrats see taxation as a tool that must be used to ensure a stable and prosperous society, while Republicans see it as evil in itself — or more precisely, they like to market it as evil in itself while they spend like Paris Hilton.
I have noticed this new singular reliance on the tax and spend canard among Republicans who are appalled at the current warm embrace of bigoted theocrats and/or inchoate, messianic global adventuring. It seems to be the last GOP identifier these people have and they are rather desperately clinging to it.
Sullivan says in this unusually (for him) confused article in TNR:
Retreating to the Democrats is not an option. Small government conservatives are even less powerful within the opposition’s base than in the GOP’s. Bill Clinton’s small-c conservatism was made possible only by what now looks like a blessed interaction with a Republican Congress. The only pragmatic option is to persuade those who run the Republican Party that religious zeal is a highly unstable base for conservative politics: It is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of the very mechanisms that keep freedom alive.
Good luck with that.
All that remains of Sullivan’s Republicanism is a knee jerk conviction that Democrats love taxes and big government for its own sake. But the truth is that most of the time Democrats are forced to raise taxes to fix the messes that Republicans have left us in. For decades we’ve been bailing out these reckless bastards. And when we have the opportunity, we like to put some brakes on their future rash and irresponsible economic performance by creating some social insurance so that average Americans don’t get ruined every time these assholes take power. Ezra is right; we don’t believe in “government” and “taxes” as some sort of values in themselves. They are the necessary tools to mitigate the excesses of the market — and most often these excesses were exacerbated and enabled by Republican governments in the name of individual economic freedom. We just don’t think that freedom from taxes trumps the gritty reality of being well and truly economicaly fucked by Republican policies. I guess that’s just the difference between us.
Yes, we would like to roll back tax-cuts on the rich because somebody has to pay for all this and they are the ones with all the money. To ask that they pay a higher percentage of their already huge incomes is simply not an outrageous request — particularly since they are mostly GOP cronies who financed and benefitted from raping the treasury in the first place. We do not believe that rich people are morally superior because the “market” rewards “productivity” with wealth, so they must be more productive and, therefore, more important to a successful economy. (Paris Hilton creates jobs, but I don’t think the kind of “jobs” she creates are what we have in mind here.) We believe that the backbone of the economy is a thriving middle class and we believe that the government has to offer some support to make that happen.
Sadly, Democrats are undoubtedly going to have to spend a generation cleaning up the horrible mess the Republicans are creating right now. This is why it’s so important that we preserve the social safety net and enhace it in the areas of health and job retraining. People are going to need it. They always need it after the Republicans come along and wreak havoc on the economy.
“Small government” whatever that really means, is a chimera. Nobody actually does it. The way you tell the difference is that the Democrats pay their way honestly and then clean up after the Republicans once they’ve spent the country into oblivion. Who are the grown-ups again?