144. Abort This.

I was getting ready to do a post on my new veggie lifestyle when I decided to peruse my blogroll before I started writing.  I was two-thirds of the way through when I came across a Slate post on feminism.  The teaser said "Nora Ephron Defines Feminism in a Single Sentence."  How could I not click on that?  And so I did.  The piece actually includes short essays from five different women.  I never got past the second one.
From Ms. Ephron:

I know that I'm supposed to write 500 words on this subject, but it seems much simpler: You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

And that was the end of my veggie post. 

My problem with this statement isn't that it defines me out of feminism (which it does).  It's that it purports to have the single best interest of women at heart and to have exclusive access to the right principle by which one determines that interest.  By this logic, if I understand it, the way to get to women's best interests is to start by securing their right to abortion.  That's the entryway.  As if abortion is the Jesus-figure of women's rights, and you can't get to the Promised Land without it.

That's wrong for the same reason that an immoderate belief in a "right" to abortion is wrong  It is not a rationally defensible argument.  Define feminism however you want.  But don't tie it to a person's position on an issue on which perfectly reasonable and compassionate people can have opposing opinions.  If the only arguments against abortion were religious ones, then okay.  Non-religious people might think the rest of us were ridiculous.  But there are other, perfectly secular reasons to reject the pro-choice argument.  Here are three:

One. The argument that it's a woman's body, and that she can do whatever she wants with it, is just factually inaccurate.  It's not her body.  It's someone else's body, inside of her body.  It's not her brain, it's not her heart, it's not her kidney's that will either be allowed to develop, or sucked out and thrown away.  We're not talking about a woman's right to cut off her own hand, or shred her own appendix.  And if we were talking about that, how many women would be as quick to do to their own limbs and organs whatever is done to a fetus when it is aborted?  Let us please distinguish between a woman's own body and the body of a child whose pain she may or may not feel.  There is a difference.

Two. Just because it's inside you doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.  Even if we concede that the unborn child is a physical being distinct from it's mother, there's still the argument that a woman has a right to decide what takes place inside her own body.  This is also (mostly) false for the same reason that we don't have an unlimited right to do what we want to people in our own homes.

For instance, you couldn't legally send out an open invite to a party, have someone you hadn't expected show up, and then panic and shoot them in the head. They broke no law, they weren't trespassing, they didn't force their way in.  You invited them, the way a person who has consensual sex without birth control invites a kid to be conceived.  Whether or not you desired for them to come is beside the point; you put out the invite and opened the door.  Their presence is your own doing.  You ought not be able to extinguish their existence for your own convenience.

Three. An unborn child is alive.  We can argue about what it means that it can't live on it's own outside the womb.  But at least we can all agree that the little thing taking up food, space, and oxygen in it's mother's womb is alive.  And reasonable people get to disagree on whether or not it's okay to kill living things.  Honestly, if rational, compassionate people can be vegetarians, it has to be okay for them to be anti-abortion.  It doesn't mean that they're putting the interests of the child above those of the mother.  It just means that they think the child's life deserves some consideration, that it has some value, whatever that may be.

Does all of this mean that abortion should be illegal?  From a religious standpoint, the answer is obviously Yes.  From a political one, not so much.  I don't have the heart or the religious conviction to tell rape and incest victims that they have to carry their abusers' children to term.  I also know that curious 14 year-olds make stupid mistakes and that it might be easier if they had a way out of them.  However, none of this means that abortion is a "right."  It only means that sometimes there are compelling reasons to do things we wish we never had to do. 

For those of us who don't fall into either of those groups, those of us who just thought it felt better without a condom, there really isn't a great grown-up defense for abortion.  We know where babies come from.  We know how not to get pregnant when we don't want to be pregnant.  But we're human, and sometimes we cross our fingers and try to get away with things.  When we get caught, we ought to be mature enough to acknowledge that our circumstances, inconvenient as they are, are of our own making.  We ought to be able to admit that it's not necessarily all about us anymore.  And if we decide to have an abortion, we ought at least to be willing to contend with the reality and the value of the life that we're ending, and not imagine and insist that it was nothing.

This is not a backward argument for a woman to make.  It is a perfectly reasonable argument for a woman who loves and respects and believes in women to make.  It is the argument of a woman who believes in the fierce intelligence and integrity of women, and who trusts them to exercise their sexual responsibilities as readily as they exercise their sexual rights.  It is a feminist argument.
 

135. That True Sh*t

I heart Stephen Colbert.  I may or may not be joining him to Keep Fear Alive in D.C. next month.  Haven't decided.  But I've decided that he's hilarious.  This isn't his funniest work.  But it's worth watching.  Truest sh*t he said:

"My great-grandfather didn't travel 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to see this country over-run by immigrants."

Yeah.  Think about it.


 

132. Economy-Size

On a flight last month I chatted up a married couple about where we were headed and what I was doing in school.  Whenever I tell anyone I study politics I'm guaranteed at least five minutes of follow-up questions.  In this case I got about half an hour.  It was interesting stuff.

They asked me something about the economy, not something I study, and got me off on a rant about middle class economics.  The never-ending recession has some folks sweating the lack of jobs and falling housing prices.  But... what if (and I'm totally serious)... the economy isn't technically recessed?  What if we've just been riding a post-WWII growth bubble and it finally burst, landing us right back where we shoulda been anyway?  Or somewhere close to it.

Here's my thinking.  Let's say a bunch of businesses close down and we lose lots of jobs.  On the surface, this is bad.  Because those people need to work to eat (they actually don't, but this post isn't about welfare policy so I'll save that commentary for later).  Conventional wisdom is that we need to seed small businesses and recreate those jobs.

But... Imagine that those small businesses were retail businesses.  Places like Starbucks and The Gap and Pier 1.  And let's say that most of what people bought in those places can be considered "luxury" or "leisure" items, meaning they didn't need the items, they just wanted them.  And let's imagine that some not insignificant portion of the money people spent there was actually borrowed (on credit cards, etc.). 

I don't think any of these suppositions requires a terrible stretch of the imagination.  And if these things were true, wouldn't it be better that those places closed?  If there was never sufficient wealth in the population to consume the goods and services those businesses offered, should they ever have been opened?  They would only have existed to sell people things they didn't need and couldn't afford.  Should we employ hundreds of thousands of people doing that?

Of course not everyone who finds themselves un- or under-employed worked at The Gap.  But that isn't to say that their jobs were any less superfluous.  If you worked in banking in a country where the population actually has very little wealth to manage, or if you built houses in communities where residents actually lacked the financial standing to take on a mortgage, should your job ever have existed in the first place?

I'm not arguing that anyone is supposed to be destitute.  I just think we have an inflated sense of "middle" classness and comfort in the U.S.  What passes for necessity here is rather luxurious when compared to mean standards of living around the world.  The idea that everyone should have a job with a wage that maintains them in their own private home, with their own private car, and their own private creature comforts is a fairly fantastic one when you think about it.  What are we doing to generate the wages that pay for all these things?

It was long ago recognized that we no longer make anything in the U.S.  So what do we have to show for all the 4-bedroom homes and the plasma screens?  Whatever we're doing, we're paying ourselves a lot of money for it, and we're spending even more money than we're paid.  If, as a country, we were forced to live on cash, how would our lives be different?  Already the idea of my own 2-bedroom condo overlooking the lake makes me think I'll spend most of my time psychicly atoning for my privilege.

So what if this is the new normal?  I'm sure it's not.  The credit lines will loosen up and we'll all be upgrading whips and wardrobes soon enough.  But it might be better if we didn't.  We could prolly do without it.

93. Where you from?

Morning, kiddies. This morning's posting takes us into the wonderful world of immigration reform. Ah.... those pesky migrants and their law-breaking. What to do, what to do.

I hadn't heard this but there's a Republican proposal to edit the 14th Amendment to deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegal* immigrants. So a person born and raised in the U.S. whose parent(s) crossed the border without a visa would not have the rights of a citizen.

I've actually thought a fair bit about birthright citizenship. I'm not sure it makes perfect sense in a world where people are as mobile as they are today. Not because I don't want to the children of Mexican migrants to be citizens, but because if my American parents are vacationing in Australia when my mother goes into labor, I don't think it ought to entitle me to access the resources of the Australian government for the rest of my life. So I'm sympathetic to the idea of reform in theory, emphasis on the theory.

In practice, if you're born and raised in a place, you're from there. No two ways about it. So I'm over this part of the argument. But the Slate article I linked to does make some really good points about the parts of the debate we're not having while we're talking about amending the Constitution and building super-fences.

Namely, what about Mexico? It always strikes me that no one talks about what having a significant chunk of it's labor force flee the country must be doing to the (under-)development of Mexico. There's evidence that Mexico's population is aging rapidly because of out-migration of younger people. Africana scholars sometimes talk about the developmental cost that the abduction of so able-bodied African people must have taken on West African communities. There would seem to be similar conversations in Mexico's future.

There's also the question of political cycles and the natural pressure that a discontented population exerts on a government. I wonder what might have become of the U.S. if instead of the Works Progress Administration, instead of new parks and murals and bridges, the Roosevelt Administration had facilitated visas to Canada for unemployed American workers during the Great Depression. What then?

There are answers to these questions. And no doubt they're something more complex (and more interesting) than either "Let them come," or "Kick them out." Apparently the European Union countries have figured out a lot of this. Not of lot of hope that we'll follow their lead, but... I've been wrong before.

-------------------------

* I know "illegal" is a loaded term and some people opt for "undocumented." I make a conscious decision to use this term because I think a) it's accurate, and b) it acknowledges a key part of the counter-argument. An argument that starts with "Yes, John broke a law, but he should be allowed to stay because...", is a stronger argument to me than one that starts with "Let's not focus on the law."

78. Dippin and Dabblin on Oscar Grant

Nope, I'm not back. Still on a blogging vacay.

But I came across a post on the murder trial for the cop who shot Oscar Grant in California and I wanted to comment. Ever since news came that Johan Mehserle would be charged with murder, and not manslaughter, I've been really pessimistic about the outcome.

As I understand it (from watching Law & Order), the difference between murder and manslaughter is that murder is intentional, and manslaughter is not. That is, in either case, someone causes the death of someone else. But a murderer does whatever they did intending to cause a death, whereas someone who commits manslaughter does something stupid or negligent that results in a death.

This is important because Mehserle has always maintained that he meant to pull out his (gun-shaped) taser in the train station, and not his gun. This is supported in some sense by his body language after the shooting. In the video of the incident he immediately raises his hands to his head in full-on "What did I just do?" posture. And if he truly was mistaken, or if even one person out of 12 believes he was, a murder conviction becomes highly improbable. On the other hand, if the charge were manslaughter, it doesn't matter what he meant to do. He committed an erroneous action that resulted in the death of another person. Case closed.

I'm hoping that California is one of the places where "lesser included charges" are part of the process. That would mean that a jury could find a murder defendant "not guilty" of the crime of murder, but still render a "guilty" verdict on the "lesser included charge" of manslaughter. I.e. "You didn't do quite what they say you did, but you did do something." That seems the only realistic road to a conviction at this point.

59. This is What We Were Talking About

I've had mixed feelings about Arizona's new immigration law. I get the part about law & order and needing to enforce laws that the federal government won't. But requiring any number of brown people (and only brown people) to prove they have a right to be here, and giving white officers the power to demand that proof invites a nasty kind of racial profiling.

Since the law was announced, I think most of us have just been waiting for that first instance of a legal citizen being detained so we could say, "This is what we were talking about."

Well now it's happened. In Illinois.

A Puerto Rican man was arrested in connection with a car theft, and police in Berwyn decided it'd be a good time to check his immigration status. Even after he produced a birth certificate, it took 3 days for officials to determine (to their satisfaction) that he was legally in the U.S. An American citizen spent 3 days in lock-up under and was threatened with deportation... to Mexico.

The whole thing is beyond retarded. And it's exactly what a lot of people expected would happen, often, when the law was passed. In an interview on cable news, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona argued that it might be really easy to ascertain who was here illegally because "if they're driving a truck with no license and a dozen people stuck in the back" there's a good chance they're smugglers.

The problem is that it's not really about who's probably here illegally. It's about who police officers with new powers think is here illegally. It's about who looks like an American and who doesn't in their minds. I think the law works in theory. In practice, It's all bad.

51. Idol Hands

Yesterday after touring the homie's new gig (post forthcoming), me and a friend got to arguing about whether we can go too far in celebrating living people. She was all for naming things after living folks because she believes in having living heroes and honoring people while they're alive. I was anti because I don't believe in hero worship. (She'd prolly say "worship" is the wrong word.) I also think "living legends" or heroes border on idolatry.

So we go back and forth and eventually find some common ground. We agree that young people ought to have living, breathing examples of excellence. And young Black people ought to be able to follow the example of someone who hasn't been dead 40 years. So for the most part, she wins (... for the most part).

But just 24 short hours later I walk in the house and my mom informs me of this. My hometown has decided to rename the main street after the 44th President of the United States. WTF?

Recognition is one thing. Support is cool, too. But renaming a frikkin street?! The MAIN street?! I'm snappin. In real life.

To revisit the homie's argument, yeah MLK was great, but he's been dead 40 years, he's over-studied, etc. and so forth. Why do we only f*ck with dead people? Okay cool, let's raise up some living folks. But this? If we honestly think that Barack Obama is deserving of the same kinds of salutations and recognition we bestow on MLK (i.e the Nobel Prize, dedication of streets, etc.), maybe we need to spend more time studying the late Reverend.

This is my beef with black politics. We got integrated and now it's all feel-good, middle-class, psychological power struggles. Forty years ago you had to free somebody (or die trying) to be That One. Now... I'll admit I get a little happy inside every time I see Michelle Obama doing the damn thing as First Lady. But I would never, ever, ever-ever-ever, argue that her being there is actually "doing" anything for a poor black girl on the South Side. That's not a knock on Miss Michelle - she is one of my role models in flyness - but I think it's important to separate what makes me feel good from what saves souls and feeds people. I feel like once upon a time that's what we were about. Now I don't know.

45. Whose Business Is It Anyway?, Part 2

Andrew Sullivan has a great follow-up to the Ta-Nehisi Coates piece on Rand Paul. He lays out the argument I was trying to make, except clearly and with a better sense of the history of the '64 Act.

Quoting Paul in an interview:

INTERVIEWER: But under your philosophy, it would be okay for Dr. King not to be served at the counter at Woolworths?

PAUL: I would not go to that Woolworths, and I would stand up in my community and say that it is abhorrent, um, but, the hard part—and this is the hard part about believing in freedom—is, if you believe in the First Amendment, for example—you have too, for example, most good defenders of the First Amendment will believe in abhorrent groups standing up and saying awful things. . . . It’s the same way with other behaviors. In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior.

I think this is an important, and understandable argument.

More from Sullivan:
I don't agree with Paul on the Civil Rights Act because I believe that the legacy of slavery and segregation made a drastic and historic redress morally vital for this country's coherence, integrity and unity. But was the Act in many respects an infringement of freedom? Of course it was.

To bar private business owners from discriminating in employment would have been an unthinkable power for the federal government for much of American history.

...To my mind, this is settled law and should remain that way. But it is not without cost to liberty... And a real libertarian will feel some qualms about it. Not because they are racists or homophobes (although some may be). But because a truly principled defense of individual freedom will inevitably confront the huge role government now plays in policing fairness in what were once entirely unfair private transactions.

The entire piece is well worth reading.

43. Whose Business Is It Anyway?

One of the great things about blogging is that it offers a quick way to "say" some of the things you wouldn't otherwise have a venue or opening to say. I can run-off a list of my favorite ice cream flavors (something I'm pretty passionate about) in 10 minutes and keep it moving. If I forget a flavor, no biggie. I'll get it in volume 2.

For some things though the "quick & dirty" nature of blogging makes writing a lot harder that it probably ought to be. For instance, I've been wanting to do a post on immigration for a while. But it feels like the kind of think I have to get "right." I can't have an oops when I'm talking about people's rights to work, and study and raise their families in a safe space. I don't want to have to come back and say, "I think I may have gotten this wrong."

So most of my politics posts have been sitting in my brain being revised and edited for accuracy since I started this project last month. Today I think I have a politics post I can bang out pretty quickly.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a piece up about Rand Paul's opposition to parts of the '64 Civil Rights Act. Paul doesn't believe that the government ought to have the right to tell private citizens who they can and can't offer services to. It's a private transaction.

I've actually kinda felt this way for a while myself. I'm all for the Civil Rights Act, but I've always wondered what the Constitutional basis was for telling a private citizen that if she's going to serve anyone she has to serve everyone. There's no law prohibiting anyone from boycotting businesses on the basis of race, and I don't see how you could enforce one. But would it be so different?

Someone told me it was a commerce issue and the right of the government to regulate commerce gave them the ability to enforce non-discrimination in commerce. That makes sense. I think moreso though it's a practicality issue. As Paul said in an interview, he's against systemic discrimination. I think the problem is that the distinction between private and systemic discrimination is a false distinction.

The systems that run our lives are made up of lots of privately owned components. If private grocers and restaurants won't serve black customers, they can't eat. If private employers won't hire them, they can't work. If privately owned banks won't give them credit, they can't buy homes or start businesses of their own. So private discrimination self-arranges into systems of discrimination affecting large populations of people.

Maybe this has always been obvious to everyone else. But it's taken me a while to think through it. And I still think that if one could make a rigid distinction between private and systemic discrimination, a government check on private behavior would be difficult to justify. This seems to be about means and ends. The incursions into the private sphere serve a compelling public interest. That's an unfortunate reality for me. But a necessary one of course.

25. Terror-Musing

The second most interesting thing in politics for me right now is anti-American terrorism. I'm fascinated by the people who carry it out, the people who are its targets, the way that we talk about it, all of the politics around it. Mostly I'm interested in the way we think and talk (publicly) about the relationship between anti-American terrorism and Islam.

One of the most fascinating elements of the "Who is a terrorist?" conversation is the Right's insistence that we profile Muslims and the Left's rebuttal that we don't profile white men when one of them blows something up (which is true). I think racial profiling is one of those topics like abortion and welfare. To be a good liberal you have to take such an extreme position on it that you completely cede the middle ground to the other side. And the truth (at least politically) is almost always somewhere in the middle.

I often wonder what an honest conversation about modern anti-American terrorism would sound like. Like I wonder what honest conversations about abortion and welfare would sound like. I hope to be a part of one someday. In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal has a very reasonable piece on the attempted Times Square bomber. I dug it.

3. "They Want Me With My Hands Up"

Some folks in Chicago are tossing around the idea of using the National Guard to help stem the violence in the city. There have been 100+ homicides in the first 4 months of 2010. The mayor and lots of others are against it, but it's an interesting idea. What do you do when a segment of the population is essentially cannibalizing itself?

I had this conversation recently with someone who was adamant that lack of opportunity was the driving force behind criminal behavior. I.e. if they had something better to do they wouldn't be in the streets. I don't buy it. I'm always struck by the fact that victims of violence grow up in the same neighborhoods, go to same schools, and face the same socioeconomic constraints as their attackers. So how does one end up the shooter and the other the shootee?

No doubt opportunity is part of it. Kids in poor neighborhoods are presented with opportunities for delinquency on a scale that kids in more affluent neighborhoods rarely are. But whether they take that opportunity I think has much more to do with the job their parents are doing than most liberals are willing to admit. As a good liberal, I hate to vilify poor parents, but if a poor white couple raised a bigot in Appalachia, I think we'd have something to say to them about it. We ought to have as least as much to say to poor parents who raise shooters in Englewood.