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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Was a moderate on the issue fine with some restrictions but changed to total pro-choice over the last year. I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception. Given that I want abortion available as an option, and that past talk of exemptions and the like proved to just be the equivalent of the gun control cake slicing meme, I started donating to pro-choice efforts and voted accordingly to swing the pendulum in the other direction.

Same thing also independently caused a bunch of my friends (Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Banning abortion might be popular in the pulpits of some dwindling denominations and internet forums, but it is highly unpopular outside of specific geographic and religious bubbles that are way out of touch with most Americans. Those in favor of banning abortion punch above their weight in primaries and state house compositions due to unrepresentative political systems, but they were BTFO when it was a straight up popular vote even in Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Montana.

I find your post interesting because we probably have the same actual positions on abortion and directly related issues, but I've mostly taken the opposite conclusion from what happened with the overturning.

My impression overall is that the bottom line is that pro-life leaning people are roughly 50% of the population (including 50%-ish of women by the way). The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, Supreme Court, all of that stuff, is meant to cover things we have more like 90% agreement with as a society. In this view, Roe v Wade was always an ugly hack. There's nothing about it in the Constitution and it's ridiculously stunted reasoning by abortion activists to get their preferred point of view enacted as court precedent and thus immune to legislative processes. Keeping it in place only serves to ensure we are constantly fighting Holy Wars over Supreme Court nominees over whether they will or won't swear to keep the ridiculous charade in place at all costs.

The Constitutional Amendment process is very tough for a reason - only things that we have very broad and long-lasting agreement on in our society should end up enshrined at that level and protected by court rulings. If we desire to have abortion granted that level of protection, it should be done right - by passing an explicit Constitutional Amendment about it. If there isn't the support level needed to do that, then abortion doesn't belong there and issues around it should be resolved by state and federal legislation, the way it was intended to be. That's why I think this is a good thing - states where pro-life is strong will now be able to pass and enforce the legislation they wanted to, hopefully without bothering people outside their state much. States where pro-choice is string will continue to be able to have abortion on-demand. People with strong positions on the wrong side of one of those lines will be able to move somewhere that their preferred policy is in place. Democracy in action!

Bottom line, pro-life is a solid segment of our population and they aren't going away. If your political position is that their policy preference must be absolutely suppressed at all costs, then what you're advocating for is not Democracy.

I lean red overall politically, and I am aware that this may have cost red team / Republicans some degree of the gains they would have expected in the recent midterms. I think that's a reasonable price to pay to get this issue off of the national stage. Let the states make their preferred laws, let them sneer at each other, and keep the courts for things we aspirationally have broader agreement on.

I mean, the reality is, with the advent of mass media, people will only put up with what they see as people within their coalition being hurt by people outside of their coalition, and being told they can't stop it because of some lines on a map. That started, at least in the US, w/ Uncle Tom's Cabin, and has only expanded with the advent of radio, TV, and now social media. People at least get nations are nations - the argument over state's rights was shot in Appotomax, and then put into the ground at Selma.

Not to bring Civil Right's into it, do you honestly think the 60's and 70's would've gone better if interracial marriage stated illegal until the early-to-mid 80's, which is when it crossed 50% approval in Gallup polling?

We're a representative democracy bounded by a Constitution that guarantees rights - we've never been, and nobody close to power has ever really advocated for total legislative supremacy or direct democracy.

I get your first point, though I suppose that's something that all movements of any sort will have to live with in the modern age.

On the second, I don't think I agree. I'm saying we need to make a reasonably good-faith effort to follow our constitutional processes in the intended ways. As far as I know, nothing that could reasonably be described as that took place with respect to the civil rights conflicts. I think Roe v Wade is pretty far from that.

Safe legal and rare was never a compromise, though, because there never was a compromise. There’s been one side imposing its values on the other for 50 years, sometimes with more moderate rhetoric.

Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Who is this supposed to endear these people to? Racism and 4chan originated conspiracy theory adherence are vices that the pro-life religious group puts up with to get the policy they think will end the baby holocaust, not the other way around. To the degree that these people vote against pro-life measures they are not allies of the pro-life movement.

It's a description, not a personal endorsement of racism or that Qanon conspiracy stuff. Those individuals are separate from people I'd count as friends, though I realize now the wording was somewhat ambiguous.

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

https://civiqs.com/results/abortion_legal?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&choice=Illegal%20in%20all%20cases&party=Republican

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.

If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.

It's not advice, it's a description of the recent votes having unusual line crossing.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception.

Some on the pro-choice side took the mask off about rare before that:

Despite the Democratic Party dropping “safe, legal, and rare” from the party platform in 2012, politicians are still repeating it nearly a decade later to signal their moral superiority and supposedly commonsense position on abortion. Even Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband President Bill Clinton, is credited with popularizing the phrase, eventually stopped saying it, opting for “safe and legal” during her 2016 presidential campaign. Yet some pro-choice politicians can’t let it go.

...Demanding abortion be “rare” is stigmatizing at its core; it posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make, and if they do, it must be in the direst of circumstances. This messaging tells those of us who’ve had abortions that we did something wrong to need an abortion, and we shouldn’t do it again. It unfairly stigmatizes people who will have more than one abortion, which is nearly half of abortion patients.

Hillary gets mentioned here as well:

Clinton used this language in her 2008 presidential campaign; Bill Clinton, meanwhile, had introduced it into Democratic politics back in 1992. The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be “rare” placed stigma on people who seek it.

“There’s a fundamental notion of bodily autonomy that we’ve been fighting for as advocates and activists on this issue for years,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of the All* Above All Action Fund, a nonprofit that works to expand abortion access, told Vox. Saying abortion should be rare “completely negates all the work that we’ve done to really make this about the ability to decide what’s best for your body, for your family, for your community,” she said.

1 in 6 of anything is in no way shape or form rare. There are about 6 million pregnancies per year in the US, about 1 million are aborted each year and about 1 million end naturally, with only 4 million ending in a live birth.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare"

I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.

So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.

2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.

Ya I do not see the masks coming off it’s just that they won. And Roe let’s be honest was a constitutional issue which a lot of scholars on the left disagreeing with the reasoning. That wasn’t legislation.

If anything I think the Pro-life people have moderated since Roe ended. From memory the legislation they went for at the federal level was closer to the moderates position of having federal rules similar to the rules in Europe. I think the left just played the politics well to make you think they went extreme - when a lot of GOP politicians moderated their public positions after.

The story of the parent poster does not sound like it is adequately summarised by "people who disagree with us push back"; these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them. Being able to offer a compromise and stand by it, rather than always trying to seize a bit more, seems to be an ability that is tragically lost on all sides of the culture war.

these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them.

But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.

So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.

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