I protest.

On compromise.

I've got a lot to say here and I don't know if I can actually say it all. To begin with, though, I've now gone past depression regarding the outcome of the election and am now angry — nay, furious — and determined. I'm furious that the bigot vote won the election and that the fool in the White House claims that this gave him a "mandate." I'm furious that his idea of "extending a hand" to people like me is to spit in our faces. I'm furious at slimy little buggers like Adam Noshida who want to stamp out people like me entirely. I'm furious at the religious Right that want to return us to the days of illegal abortions, illegal birth control, women as chattel and death at the hands of butchers. I'm furious at the bigots who demand that gay people — their brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, sons and daughters, even their mothers and fathers sometimes — disappear. Bigots who, far from embracing the tolerance their so-called "saviour" preached, want ten percent of the population to simply vanish.

I'm furious at the crowing of the Right at their "victory," a victory in which fully half of the population of the United States stated categorically that the Right has failed. It is only in the eyes of the ignorant and deluded that the Bush administration has succeeded, and even then that "success" is measured not in concrete terms but in religious and "moral" terms. Yoshida and his kin may demand that I and those like me again "get over it;" they may insult and excoriate us for being "shrill" or adversarial, but after the recent assault not only upon the Left but upon moderates, I'll stop being adversarial when hell freezes over. David Neiwert puts it very well in Heal This:

Most of all, I'll think there might be something to this civility thing when I see actual conservatives start standing up for basic human decency -- which at one naive time in my life I actually believed conservativism stood for -- and publicly repudiating these people.

But when I read and hear these things, and I look around for supposedly decent conservatives to say something, what do I hear?

Silence.

That speaks all the volumes that need be spoken between us. And will be, for the foreseeable future.

Emma at The American Street asks several very good questions in What is the Middle of the Road?

Regarding gay rights:
WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN FULL CITIZENSHIP AND SECOND CLASS STATUS?

Regarding abortion:
WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN A FREE WOMAN AND AN INDENTURED SERVANT?

Regarding religion:
WHAT IS THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BETWEEN A REASONING HUMAN BEING AND A FANATIC?

Emma is right, it is a culture war, and while we didn't start it, it is quite definitely up to us to finish it. As for me, I have never been angrier, nor more determined to stop these fools. My considered response is one of heat, not light. We as liberals did our best to shine light upon the lies of the Right and of the Bush bunch and it didn't work. Some fifty-one percent of the voters didn't want light! They want to blindly follow the people who tell the pretty lies, the lies that make them feel good.

A lot of people seem to think that if we embrace this "culture war" we lose more or less by default, by letting the Right set the terms of the conflict. I disagree. I think that we have no choice but to embrace the culture war, since it is here whether we embrace it or not. If we do not fight it we will lose it. Conciliation, compromise and appeasement don't work; just ask Chamberlain. It's time for Churchill, not Chamberlain; it's time to "go on to the end," to fight "on the seas and oceans … whatever the cost may be," to "fight on the beaches, … on the landing grounds, … in the fields and in the streets, …," to "never surrender."

Because if we do not fight, we will face the return of the unthinkable. From The Village Voice, No Choice by James Ridgeway:

The administration already has sought to limit a woman's access to abortion and contraception; to shut up clinics, individuals, and providers of abortion around the world; and to cut funds from women's reproductive health services.

Now it's time for more. Here's a partial listing put together by the Center for Reproductive Rights:

• Get rid of Roe v. Wade through new Supreme Court appointees who think like Thomas and Scalia can knock out the ruling when given the chance. Bush will also fight lawsuits challenging the partial birth abortion law.
• Promote federal statutes and regulations that use the term "unborn child" to describe the fetus — opening the prospect of murder charges against doctors and their staffs engaged in abortions and women who have them
• Push for enactment of the so-called "Child Custody Protection Act" (CCPA), which would prevent teenagers from crossing state lines to get an abortion, and once enacted, enforce it, the Center says, "with intrusive investigatory techniques such as issuing subpoenas for private medical records, and aggressively prosecuting aunts, grandmothers, religious counselors, and physicians who counsel minors or assist them in obtaining abortions"
• Deny Medicaid funding for abortions
• Place new restrictions on funding abortion in cases of incest, rape, and where a woman's life is at stake
• Restrict access to contraception and push new legislation to withdraw contraception coverage for federal employees (including military personnel)
• Continue to deny over-the-counter status to emergency contraception claiming it amounts to an abortifacient

None of this is anything new, of course. This is the way it was, before Roe v. Wade and earlier rulings by that Supreme Court. Those were The Bad Old Days:

In Connecticut, where I grew up, birth control was illegal. … In 1958, fresh out of college and unworldly, I moved to Cambridge to get a job and share an apartment with my friend X.

Birth control was illegal in Massachusetts, too. X announced that she was pregnant and that neither her psychiatrist nor her gynecologist would arrange a therapeutic abortion (essential for mental or physical health).

X was fortunate enough to have an encounter with Dr. Spencer of Ashland, PA, who was

the beloved town doctor, protected by the police, and a hero to women around the nation. He's in all the books about illegal abortions, and is the subject of a new documentary, "Dear Dr. Spencer: Abortion in a Small Town." His file of requests from desperate women and thanks from women he helped (some still put flowers on his grave) is an education in itself.

Still,

I was married in NY in 1959. Though illegal, birth control was available in NYC, where I had a traumatic visit to Planned Parenthood, which required a doctor's note affirming I was getting married. Feeling like a loose woman and a liar, I also brought my newspaper engagement notice. If you're stunned at that, a friend's story tops it. After being fit for a diaphragm, she watched the doctor poke a hole in it so she could use it only for insertion practice, and return for a new one a day before her wedding.

It wasn't until 1965 that

the Supreme Court threw out Connecticut's contraceptive ban, interpreting the Constitution to give married women the right to privacy in such matters. (yes, 1965 and married women only.) In 1972, the Court let single women in on it, and a year later, January 22 1973, ruled in Roe v. Wade that the privacy right included abortion.

That's a relatively nice and mild story from the Bad Old Days to which the ignorant imbeciles want to return us. Another story is the one of Gerri Santoro, who died in 1964

at age 27 in a Connecticut motel room after a botched illegal abortion. To anyone with their priorities straight, this photo should be far more disturbing than any photo of scraps of post-abortion fetal tissue, of the type waved by anti-abortion protestors outside clinics. No fetus was ever the beloved sibling of fourteen brothers and sisters, as was Gerri Santoro. No fetus was ever the loving mother of two daughters, as was Gerri Santoro. No fetus ever endured the verbal and physical abuse of a spouse for the sake of the marriage, as did Gerri Santoro--and then left the marriage for the sake of the children, as did Gerri Santoro. No fetus ever put her life into grave peril to try to keep her husband from taking her children, as did Gerri Santoro, when she heard her estranged husband was coming to visit the girls-- when she panicked at what he might do when he found she was pregnant by another man. And no fetus was ever left to die alone in a motel room by the man that operated on her using borrowed medical implements and a textbook.

Gerri Santoro was, at the time of her murder at the hands of a viciously self-righteous system of laws, only four years younger than my mother. (Some may claim that the real problem was the abusive husband, not the pregnancy, but they would be wrong. Not because the abusive husband was not a problem, but because the society of the time cast women as second-class citizens at best, with little if any control of their own bodies and lives. Not only was abortion illegal, so was contraception!) Santoro was by no means alone, either, but it's odd that among all those pictures of aborted fetuses the antiabortionists like so much to show, there isn't even a single one of the women who died trying to terminate her pregnancy. The problem with making abortion illegal is that, like all other forms of prohibition, it only harms the weakest. (And don't give me any bullshit about a fetus being "the weakest," because if you do, you pretty obviously prefer the life of an unformed, unthinking, uncommunicative potentially-human piece of meat to the life of a thinking, feeling, communicating adult woman.)

If you want to learn a little more about the Bad Old Days, try Reflections of a Provider Before and Since Roe. That was when the ignorant religious bigots had their way and that is the time to which the modern religious bigots want to return us.

Yes, I hold them in contempt. You bet your ass I do, because their beliefs are contemptible, because their ignorance is trivial to cure and yet they cling to it not only despite the evidence but despite common sense and their own individual best interests. They would rather believe in "pie in the sky by and by" than to take control of their own life now and do something about their troubles. You know, I started out poor. I'm not, now, and not because I believe in some kind of invisible being that's waiting to punish me for making mistakes. My success is due to hard work, sometimes a little luck, and not settling for easy answers. Of course, the ignorant masses aren't the only problem. As the Pinko Feminist Hellcat points out in "I might be a hellcat, but I won't sell my soul, thanks:"

You want to talk about contempt, how about the contempt of Alan Keyes who has repeatedly bashed gays? What about the contempt of the people who cheer on Fred Phelps as he pickets funerals and wakes of gays with charming signs that say "God Hates Fags?" Very Christian, that. You want to talk about contempt, how about the utter contempt shown by the right towards anyone who is at all different from them--don't bother being part of the big tent if you're gay, if you're moderate, if you're in disagreement about the war, if you're pro-choice, if you wear a pro-civil liberties T-shirt to a Bush rally, or if you're a deficit hawk.

It's not time to pander to the ignorant. It's not time to adopt the "values" of the religious right. It's certainly not time to compromise the principles that make us what we are. Unlike the Right, we are inclusive. Unlike the Right, we consider the other side and try to make room for dissenting opinions. Unlike the Right, we tolerate contrary views. Unlike the Right, we value diversity. Those and values like them are the characteristics that make us better than the lying, blinkered, pig-ignorant idiots like Adam Yoshida, Alan Keyes and George W. Bush, among many, many others. We don't have to change who and what we are, we just have to change what we do. The truth is exactly what the Right doesn't like, since it contradicts their lies, so we have to trumpet it as loudly and continuously as we can. (And it's not like we haven't been doing that — and it's working! We very nearly won this election and we did win lots of local races in places like Oregon and California, among others.

The anti-abortion crowd likes to call us "baby-killers." So let's call them "murderers." That's their intent, is it not? The murder of hundreds or thousands of women by making abortion illegal and thereby forcing society back into the mold of the past. They know what the cost will be, and they don't care. Anti-abortionists are murderers by intent if not by action. Where are the pamphlets full of pictures of women who died from botched illegal abortions before Roe v Wade, to match the pictures of aborted fetuses? Where are the pictures of those women's parents and children, husbands and siblings? An aborted fetus was never a person, but a woman dead of a botched abortion was. Let's remind people of that.

So the ignorant idiots are afraid of seeing two men kissing? So let's show them even more. Put it everywhere they look. Show loving couples that just happen to be of same sex. Show pictures of the people dead of so-called "gay bashing" attacks. Show pictures of people's fathers, brothers, sons, daughters, sisters, mothers, all of whom just happen to be gay, even though their relatives never knew it. Constant exposure leads to desensitization. (I can attest to that; having grown up primarily in rural areas of the Northwest and South as the son of a bigoted Southerner, I had a lot of prejudice to overcome that had soaked through my skin. It was exposure that cured the prejudice, even more than my intellectual determination to not be controlled by my upbringing.) When you see it enough, it stops being shocking and starts being mundane.

The most important thing is to not surrender. The inmates have taken over the asylum, so we certainly won't be winning very much for a while, but we must keep fighting. The Right now thinks that they can walk all over us. They have a nasty lesson to learn and I will be delighted to help teach it to them. I suspect that they will get a bit of a shock when the "dead" Left suddenly turns in their hand and bites them.

Churchill, not Chamberlain. Resistance, not surrender. The bastards just barely won this time. Next time, let's make sure they lose. In the meantime, as Josh Marshall says, Bush

simply doesn't need Democrats for anything.

And that means approaching most legislative battles not with an eye toward preventing passage or significantly altering legislation, but placing alternatives on the table that the party will be able use as contrasts to frame the next two elections. In other words, their only remaining viable alternative is to be an actual party of opposition.

It's about time.

Posted by Frank at November 5, 2004 10:42 PM