Abortion, a Right, a Wrong, or Both?

If human life begins anywhere, it begins in the creation of an individual genome and a protoplasmic being at the moment of fertilization, so it is morally wrong to abort a pregnancy. Because a human is a special being, we rightly consider it wrong to end the life of one. But if being a free person means anything, it means that we have the right to control our own body, so it is morally wrong to force an unwilling potential mother to continue a pregnancy she does not want. Because a human being is a special being, we consider it wrong to take away the freedom of one.

Given the contradiction between the interests involved, it is understandable that an unwanted pregnancy is something of a legal and ethical battlefield. It might seem that a public compromise to the fact that abortion is ethically wrong, but legally necessary, could create consensus, but there are practical and political issues that prevent such a social accord.

On a practical level, to hold that abortion is morally wrong means that as a society we should try to do all we can to reduce their numbers. But where abortion is rare the infrastructure needed to make it available to women who choose it tends to diminish or disappear. In our polarized views of the issue we tend to create geographic zones where abortion is provided in a dignified and readily available fashion and where it is not. Another practical issue that is just as critical is money. There are close to 2,000,000 abortions per year in the US (several states, including California, do not report abortion statistics, so the actual number of abortions is unknown), and two-thirds of women who have abortions report that economic resources are a factor in their decision. (This figure is no doubt higher for African-American women in light of racial disparities in income; in 2002 Black women had 32 percent of all abortions in spite of making up 12 percent of women.)

The ongoing impasse in the abortion debate, and the possibility that the new Supreme Court could radically upset current law and policy, call for fresh attempts to resolve the conundrums of abortion. Maybe a compromise between conservative pro-life women and liberal pro-choice women is possible. For the pro-choice, the right to abortion must be guaranteed before they are willing to bother promoting the idea that abortion is wrong, because their instinct rightly reminds them that heretofore any equivocation on their part will be used to limit this right. For, pro-lifers a recognition from their opposition that abortion should truly be rare is a prerequisite to serious engagement.

One package of policies that both sides might be able to find in common could include: 1) an open admission that abortion is ethically unsound as regards the interests of the fetus and a related campaign to reduce the number of abortions, 2) a nationally-guaranteed and subsidized right to a safe and dignified abortion in every community, and 3) subsidies for women who want to give birth and adopt out and for those who want to raise a child (obviously welfare re-reform will be a hard sell). Liberals would be much more willing to discourage abortion if there was a guarantee that it would still be available everywhere, and any policy which could put a dent in the one million abortions motivated by financial factors would be attractive to right-to-lifers.

Paradoxically, and in what would have to be a deliberate suspension of supply and demand, a new policy framework 1) could make increased abortion availability go along with a reduction in the number of abortions, and 2) would require ensuring the supply of abortion services while at the same time working towards a reduction in the demand for abortion. The policies under consideration have the potential to build ties between feminist and socially conservative women: they are feminist because they would guarantee not just as an abstract right, but as a practical reality, access to abortion services, and they are conservative because by guaranteeing special rights to women they recognize that they, women, are, in fact, different from men.

Given that in most times and places men have owned women’s bodies, it is understandable that feminists feel particularly protective of their infant legal status as equal to men and of their concomitant jurisdiction over themselves. And the reality of legal and moral reasoning about abortion will always be different from the more immediate reality of being a woman in a body that is pregnant. But if women worked together, across political lines, a set of solutions that could both increase access to and reduce the numbers of abortions are possible.

On a sidenote, economists insist that we need the one million Mexicans who illegally enter the US each year in order to maintain our economy and our Social Security system, so maybe a policy that birthed a million new Americans could help resolve more than one of the conundrums of the moment.

The Last Straw?

The November 19 Haditha massacre by US Marines, and the subsequent official attempts to cover it up, could be one insult too many for the new Iraq government. All available evidence points to a cold and calculated set of revenge killings by a team of soldiers who themselves had been pushed over the edge by one IED too many. The soldiers will certainly face courts martial, and the charges will probably include murder.

Assuming the truth of the allegations, the military proceedings will be one significant step towards justice. But the military chain of command should also be held accountable. In tort law, when multiple parties take part in action which causes harm they are held to account on a “joint and several liability” basis. For example, if two people throw rocks at a window and only one rock causes damage, they will both be held responsible. Like most crimes, the Haditha case presents two sets of blame: one for the individuals who committed the act and one for the social framework in which they acted. Just as a typical instance of crime is, from the largest perspective, the joint responsibility of the criminal and the society that produced them, the Marine Corp and the military in general should not escape blame.

In addition to military proceedings, the soldiers could conceivably face murder charges in an Iraqi court. Even though the military would no doubt decline to bring its Marines back to Iraq to face charges, a decision by the Iraq government to charge them could represent the tipping point to open hostility between their government and ours. At the various stages of transition to sovereignty for Iraq, the US sought a “status of forces agreement” (SOFA) from the Iraqi (proto-) government. Generally, our military will not operate in a foreign country without a SOFA, and one key element is always the granting of immunity for actions of soldiers committed in the course of their service.

But we were never able to negotiate a SOFA, so this line of defense to an Iraq prosecution is closed. Instead we placed a purported absolute immunity for our troops in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 17, part of the hybrid colonial-transitional law instituted by the US after the 2003 invasion. It is an open question whether this Order is binding on the Iraq government that is now being formed. If not, or if Iraq argued that the massacre was outside “the course of service,” charges could be filed in an Iraqi court. As the facts about this case and the apparent cover-up attempt percolate around the world, the killings could become the last straw in the relations of the US and Iraq governments.

Losing Ground in Afghanistan and Iraq

Iran-friendly Shi'a fundamentalists control oil-rich southern Iraq; Sunni fundamentalist Taliban claim control of southwestern Afghanistan.

The Political Spectrum

If liberalism is the philosophy which holds that a society should strive for the maximum freedom and flourishing for all of its members and conservatism is the philosophy which holds that society is much more complex than our limited minds can understand, then a policy of slow social progress could unite the two without contradiction. But since there are many other ways to define these concepts, they manage to often come into conflict.

The expression of these philosophies, along with that of their analogs “left” and “right,” changes over time. The later terms originated in the assemblies of revolutionary France, when the monarchists sat on the right and the representatives of the bourgeoisie sat on the left. The former wanted to conserve traditional ways and power, and the latter wanted to adopt policies of free markets and political freedom that would liberate modern capitalism.

By 1900 these concepts had changed meanings. Now, the status quo was capitalism, so to be conservative was to support the maintenance of this system. Arguing that in a society based on an urban and industrial market economy the flourishing of the individual required adjustments of the harshest of the market’s outcomes, liberals by now advocated what we would recognize as progressive economic reforms. Hence today’s neoliberalism is true to the original concept of economic liberalism. (Neoconservatism refers to both the fact that many of its adherents were new to conservatism and to the fact that their pro-big government and pro-war philosophical combination was new, or at least newly explicit.)

One helpful pair of parameters for thinking about today’s political spectrums are 1) economic conservatism, which favors smaller government and fewer restrictions on the market, versus economic liberalism, which calls for ongoing reform of free-market capitalism to create a fairer society; and 2) social conservatism versus social liberalism. And while the two often go together, with George W. Bush and Al Gore circa 2000 representing more or less pure versions, they often do not. Libertarians, who tend to be economic conservatives and social liberals, represent the most common blended ideology.

The “pure” versions of liberalism and conservatism contain some basic contradictions. Liberalism depends for its moral authority on much that is traditional in Western political thought, the dependence on individual rights being a good example of this. When surveying the state of the world, liberals often use rights as the basis for an ethical judgment against social practices, such as in the civil rights movements. But if these types of critiques fail to acknowledge the fact that the society and culture that they are criticizing are also the source of the rights they invoke, they are effectively hypocritical and aesthetically shrill.

Conservatives are faced with another contradiction: while social conservatism calls for a celebration of the past, maintenance of tradition, and a preference for a slow pace of societal change, economic conservatism and a minimally restrained free market lead to rapid changes in how people are expected to and required to live. The free market may dictate, for example, moving manufacturing overseas, but this movement will radically alter the way of the life of the workers who lose their jobs.

To be continued...

Madonna Part II

On reflection, I think the Madonna-on-a-cross image is more ambiguous than I first imagined. Anonymous convinced me that I was too quick in judging, and that this spectacle may be a spiritual feminist statement. That's what I get for being a male chauvinist.

I think the Virgin Mary on the cross is not a totally offensive thing, but there was something in the delivery that seems tacky, which, while not a major crime, is a little incongruent with the spiritual content. There is that slight dance-around-the-golden-calf feeling to the image, but then I suppose that dancing around the golden calf now and then is not, necessarily, a bad thing.

Re Marx, he said that religion was the "sigh" of an oppressed creature, not "sign;" “sigh” being much more sympathetic and nuanced.

The argument that since hunter-gatherers both a) had religion, and b) were not oppressed, ipso facto this means that oppression is not a necessary condition for religion, is interesting. Point b) is open to debate, at least in that the first people probably became aware of a new, mental life, and aware in a way different from other animals that they were mortal, in the very process of becoming human. To have human consciousness is to be aware that there is an inner and outer world, and to be aware of coming hardships, small and large, in a way other animals never were. Ergo, while not necessarily being oppressed by a sub-class of the group, the first people, I would argue, developed what has been called alienation, though it is fair to guess that these people had less of it than we do. In sum, the first person probably sighed, and maybe that was what made them turn to spirituality and religion.

Regarding Anonymous' resort to social science and the "angry face," this is similar to other methodologies that give false positives on the "discrimination" register. Maybe women are, by nature and especially by social conditioning, subtler in their expressions. Then viewers of the pictures would be right to discount the male responses to a degree, and in bringing their real-life experiences to bear they would not be discriminating. A feminist might say that this begs the question of why women should put up with social conditioning that arguably limits their allowable expressivity. But then men, with their innate and conditioned anger, go to prison, etc. in greater number than women. So, even if there was a historical moment when being a hysterical man became more acceptable than being a hysterical woman, it does not necessarily mean that it redounded to the benefit of men.

How Far is Too Far?

Michael Savage, a strange Lenny Bruce-Pat Buchanan hybrid, has as a major theme of his 8,000,000-listener strong radio show “The Savage Nation” the argument that our anything-goes cultural attitude leaves us in the position of the Weimar Republic. If we continue down the road of the ever-more-transgressive art and culture of the “Porn Belt,” he argues, we will eventually inspire a Fascist response from the “Corn Belt.” While this thesis is clearly hyperbolic, it brings into focus some interesting issues.

While bad taste should certainly be legal, should it also be rewarded? What are the ethical parameters of acceptable cultural expression? One rule of jokes is that it is ok to make fun of the strong but not the weak and that generally it is ok to make fun of people and things that deserve it. So, for example, in the USA circa 2006 it is measurably more decent to make fun of White people than it is to make fun of Black people. Measured by net worth and global reach, the Catholic Church would certainly qualify as strong. But Madonna strapped to a Las Vegasy cross still strikes one as somehow wrong. We know that the Islamic equivalent would induce extreme violence. In our “PC” universe, we have learned that insulting people based on status is harmful, and if Madonna had made her dancers put on traditional Black face there would have been a response adequate to stop or modify her show.

So what are the pros and cons of mocking the Church? With the Inquisition and both Gay-burning and pedophilia on its rap sheet, it might seem worthy of abuse. And often religion does serve the powerful by substituting supernatural concerns for natural ones. But both the legacy and the present reality of Catholic Church, and of Christianity in general, inveigh us to temper our disdain. A good argument can be made for the proposition that our rightly revered modern concepts of individual rights and individual dignity, and therefore our important institutions of Feminism and legal racial equality, owe their lineage to the Greek concept of citizenship as historically channeled through the Christian idea of the soul. The values of secular humanism owe a lot to the Christian idea of “goodness.”

Presently, religion serves many functions, and not all of them are bad. Marx called religion the sigh of an oppressed creature, Durkheim held that it was our way of honoring our society, and Feuerbach argued that God was a picture of our own consciousness. There is truth in all of these characterizations. On a more practical level, religion means a lot to a lot of people and helps them to lead authentically ethical lives. So by what calculus do we form an opinion about the crucifixion of the material girl? If we use the criteria that transgression, even if funny, should be both serious and taken seriously by the transgressor, Madonna gets an F grade.

Dick Morris Goes to Mexico

Dick Morris got an early start in politics, running Jerold Nadler’s campaign for class president of New York City’s Stuyvesent High School. He is best known as an advisor for Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, and currently he is a conservative political commentator and strategist. Nicknamed “the snake,” Morris’ resume includes Clinton’s successful 1978 run for Governor of Arkansas as well as work for Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, Pete Wilson, and George W. Bush.

Morris had a low-profile role in Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and was brought back in 1996 to help get him out of his various troubles. Morris came up with the “triangulation” strategy, and has said that getting welfare reform passed was among his proudest achievements. In September of 1996 Time magazine called him “the most influential private citizen in America.”

Within a week of his Time magazine profile, Morris had to leave the Clinton campaign when his ongoing affair with a prostitute was revealed. The relationship was established by the lady in question and by photographs of the two on a hotel balcony. Morris apparently let her listen to calls with Clinton and shared intimate details of his work, and he was reported to have a sexual preference for toe-sucking.

Today, Morris’ activities include promoting Condoleezza Rice as a presidential hopeful and advocating for school choice. He also operates on the international stage, with clients including the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party and the Ukraine’s US-backed and privatization-minded Viktor Yushchenko.

_______________________________________________________________

The frontrunners in the July 2nd Mexican presidential election are Felipe Calderon, the conservative free-trader candidate of Fox’s PAN party, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO), the soft-leftist former Mexico City mayor and PRD candidate. Calderon is calling for lower taxes, denationalization of the oil industry, and a fiscally conservative approach to government spending. He also opposes abortion rights and quotes the bible during speeches. For two years, AMLO has led in polls, and his victory would be yet another success for left-populism in Latin America. In a recent turn-around, Calderon has taken a small lead, but it must be noted that Mexican polls do not have a reputation for veracity.

Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution says, “Foreigners may not involve themselves in any way in the political affairs of the country,” but that has not stopped Morris from becoming a regular participant in Mexican electoral politics. He has bragged of his work for Vincente Fox, and all indications are that he is deeply involved in the Calderon campaign. Assuming that the new polls are accurate, there is evidence that it is Morris’ advocacy for both negative campaigning and US-style electioneering in general that is responsible for the turnaround. Using focus groups and other paraphernalia of modern “scientific” campaigning, Calderon has branded AMLO as dangerous, intolerant, and ideologically twinned with the unpopular-in-Mexico Hugo Chavez.

Dick Morris’ advocacy for Calderon has not been limited to Mexico. He has written opinion pieces in the US titled "Menace in Mexico" and "Mexico's Hugo Chavez" in which his status as an advisor to Cardenas is conspicuously absent. His words of wisdom have included the claim that, “Lopez Obrador could be the final piece” in a “grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.”

Turning to the subject of migration, AMLO has recognized that it is a bad sign that so many people want to leave his country, and he has called illegal immigration "Mexico's disgrace." In the meantime, Morris has been arguing that any hardline immigration bill will contribute to an AMLO win. He has praised Bush’s recent immigration speech, and he is calling for earned-citizenship (apparently for those already here), a guest worker program (for everybody else), and a wall.


A guest worker program is probably the worst idea out there on the immigration issue. Illegal immigration opponents are unhappy with it because it will both keep wages down and deepen the divide between Mexican nationals in the US and mainstream Americans. Pro-immigrant activists are unhappy with it because it will formalize and worsen a “two-tier system.” We can think of it as the apartheid solution. As a nation we are going to have to come up with a solution to the issue of illegal immigration, and we will need both common practical and moral reasoning and honesty in our debate in order to do this.

For example, we should call amnesty amnesty. To say that people who have lived here for at least two years can stay, and eventually obtain US citizenship, is to grant those people amnesty. And we need to find reasoning that can lead to a consensus. Many on the left feel that since we acquired much of Mexico in war, it is unfair to prohibit Mexicans from crossing the border. But this way of thinking is just too idealistic for the real world. Many others, across the political spectrum, would agree with a recent statement by Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute that we need immigrants “to grow our economy.”

This logic, that we should excuse law breaking for purely practical reasons, is just too cold and utilitarian to sit opposite the scale from what many or most Americans see as willful and deliberate lawbreaking. Jacoby, in spite of her dubious employer, also offered one of the best articulations for a justification of amnesty: the “wink and a nod” theory, or what the legally-minded might call equitable estoppel. Our government, and by extension all of us, and our business community have in effect conspired to promote illegal immigration. We have chosen not to enforce our immigration laws; since this could be relatively easy through the use of tough anti-hiring laws and tough enforcement, we should probably be “estopped” from now, suddenly, choosing enforcement.

This reasoning does not apply to anyone who comes here during a time of serious enforcement of the law. As this analysis shows, you create a moral mess when you don’t enforce a law. So a relatively simple solution presents itself: super-aggressive enforcement of current law starting tomorrow, and amnesty for those here now. The remaining question would then be how many new immigrants do we want? Since there are seriously-held arguments on both sides of the debate, with some arguing that immigrants lower wages and create more social change than our society can accommodate and some arguing that we have an economic need for more people, it makes sense to keep our current legal immigration quotas and defer any increase in legal migration until it is known how amnesty, a frank social experiment, works out.

NSA, AT&T, and the FCC

First we heard that AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon were giving the NSA access to all of their calling records. Several days later Verizon and BellSouth came out with Clintonian denials: Verizon said they were “not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records from any of these businesses (wireless telephone, wireless and directory publishing), or any call data from those records.” I'm guessing that this means they let the NSA tap in to the data so they wouldn't need to "provide" it. Also, Verizon excluded its MCI company from the denial.

Likewise, BellSouth said that an internal review had "confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA." (emphasis added.) President Bush offered, “We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” but otherwise seemed to concede the existence of the phone records program. And maybe this is his way of saying that we are spying on tens or hundreds of millions of innocent Americans...

AT&T (which owns SBC) has said that it "does not allow wiretapping without a court order nor has it otherwise given customer information to law enforcement authorities or government agencies without legal authorization." Of course "wiretapping," or listening to calls, is not what's at issue here. On a sidenote, AT&T’s lawyer used to represent President Bush and currently advocates publicly for a “robust” view of the executive powers.

The (il)legality of the NSA program(s) is hard to pin down. The Supreme Court has held that we have no Fourth Amendment interest in our phone records. So we are left with a mess of potential statutory violations and lawyerly exceptions. Orin Kerr makes an argument against the legality of the program, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps is calling for an investigation, and BellSouth, Verizon, and AT&T are all being sued in federal court.

The needs of our economy

Bush closed his speech with an exaggerated version of his patented one-corner-of-his-mouth-going-up-and-one-corner-of-his-mouth-going-down expression, so it is hard to tell if he was satisfied or not. I predict he won’t be satisfied at all with how this issue shakes down. Increased border security will give fuel to the left’s righteous hatred for the president. the amnesty proposal will turn a confused base into one that is actively hostile. And Bush’s economy-worship should alienate all but committed Neoliberals and simplistic libertarians.

A progressive critique of the speech would point out that it means a lot of poor people will be locked up, and that any mention of locking up employers was conspicuously absent. A conservative critique would point out that Bush’s claim that he is not proposing amnesty is insulting. Bush insisted citizenship was “not automatic” because payment of a fine was required. Doesn’t applying for citizenship always involve a fee? And it is telling that bush never told us what the “grandfather” period would be for currently illegal aliens...

Progressives and cultural conservatives should find common ground on the key passages of the speech. Bush said “Our nation needs an immigration system that serves the American economy....” and at one point he referred to the “needs of our economy.” This prioritization of the economy, implicitly a deprioritization of our society, will win bush no points from either quarter.

In a new phraseology, bush said immigrants do work “Americans are not doing,” but in the transcript, at least, he fell back on referring to jobs “that American citizens are not willing to take....” He also said:

Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and economics: some of the jobs being generated in America's growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling.

and

[I]mmigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country.

Americans aren’t filling the jobs at issue because the pay is too low and/or the conditions are too lousy. Pay could be increased and conditions could be negotiated upon. But Bush sees the economy as an independent entity that has its own needs; the jobs it creates on any given day are a simple fact of nature.

p.s. The democratic response brought up the fact that the National Guard was both overburdened and needed for reserve in the face of inevitable natural disaster and terrorism. Seems like we are facing a crisis crisis: too many crises for our crisis management capabilities to handle...

media phone records under scrutiny

first, phone records were only going to be used to catch terrorists, now they are being used to catch leakers. what next?

coalition of the fed up?

thomas eddlem argues for a left-right coalition in his antiwar.com piece:

The issues the Right and Left are already working together on are related to the Constitution: (1) Exposing the Bush administration's policy to eliminate the right to trial, as in the case of Jose Padilla, (2) Stopping the Bush practice and advocacy of torture, (3) Ending the administration's unnecessary Iraq War, (4) Eliminating unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping, and the most objectionable parts of the PATRIOT Act, (5) Stopping multilateral trade agreements such as CAFTA, renewal of the WTO, and the upcoming Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

In (1)-(4) it is a civil liberties left/libertarian right coalition at issue. but (5) seems like it is based on a newer (potential?) coalition between the anti-globalization left and the anti-globalization right. while libertarians and neoliberals tend to agree on the benefits of an international free market (or of what passes for one), there is a lot of overlap between the economic nationalism of pat buchanan and the humanist internationalism of global exchange. both can see that global capitalism, a world-wide economic system that is not nested in any world-wide society, doesn’t respect or protect people’s way of life or their power to control how they will live in the future...

bush to enforce the borders?

sounds like bush is going to announce some aggressive border enforcement in his speech monday. even though it goes against his planned open-the-borders-so-we-can-have-cheap-labor policies, this is about the only thing he can do get back some of his paleo-conservative base. politics may trump the policies, but this enforcement will then bring to light some major contradictions/confusions. There are several reasons why "the system" wants immigrants. the immigrants will work for lower wages, under worse conditions, than US Citizens, so capital will have found a way around 100 years of the labor movement. Social Security and other elder costs won’t add up unless we find some more people to pay taxes.

in a nutshell, the fundamental assumption of both our economy and our thinking, that GNP should grow, is no longer politically viable. average americans may start realizing that kicking out the illegals would also require re-imagining how we should gauge our well-being. personally, i think borders are like individualism and private property: overcoming them may be a worthy goal, but we just aren't there yet. just like we aren't ready for opening our homes to the homeless we aren't ready to open our borders to the masses. maybe rather than being just xenophobia the anti illegal immigrant movement stems from our desire to take a modicum of control over our situation...