Dispatches from a Recovering Bleeding Heart: Abortion

I have lots of thoughts about the awful murder of Dr. Tiller in Wichita, Kansas this past Sunday morning, and about abortion in general, but unfortunately no time or energy to get them out of my head and onto my blog.  But I have been so very moved by a series of testimonials at The Daily Dish over the past week called "It's So Personal."  These are emails Sullivan has received, mostly from women, a few from men, describing the excruciating and heartbreaking circumstances that led them to consider, and in many cases choose, a late-term abortion.  You can read them here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Updated:  Sullivan has published one post with a compilation of links to all the posts here, which will make it easier to read them all if you want.

Before he read all those testimonials, Sully was firmly opposed to all late-term abortions. Hearing all those women's stories has him rethinking his position. I am just so moved by all this, and it gives me hope, even in the midst of this terrible moment in the abortion debate.

I never stop being amazed at what happens when people stop lobbing bombs at one another (both literal and metaphorical bombs) and actually start talking and listening to one another.  I don't mean to be naive:  I know that really talking, and really listening, is not enough to change the world, but it seems to me that it is necessary, if not sufficient.  And I don't mean just talking and listening when it's easy; I mean talking and listening when it's really really hard -- being willing to tell your story even when it makes you terribly vulnerable, and having a mind and heart open to being changed by what you hear in turn.  I'm enormously frustrated by how infrequently we let ourselves do that in this polarized culture.  I know for me, sentimentality and ideology are a lethal combination that shuts down dialogue.  That's why I'm a recovering bleeding heart:  I'm pretty sure there's no cure for my tender heart and my passionate sense of justice, and truth be told, I'm not looking for a cure.   But I sure am willing to talk and open to persuasion.

An Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan

In the fall of 2008 I began reading Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish, and was so taken with him that I immediately bought and read his book The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future of the Right, which I reviewed here.  At the time I also sent Sullivan an email detailing my delight in, and my critique of, the book.  The man receives hundreds if not thousands of emails a day; I'm not at all surprised that I never heard back from him.  But an interesting post and thread of comments over at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog got me thinking about this again, and I dug up my letter and decided to publish it here.  

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Dear Andrew:

I'm a fairly new reader of your blog, and a huge fan.  As a life-long liberal who sometimes questions whether liberalism (at least ideological, Democratic Party style liberalism) accurately describes what I believe, I hoped your book The Conservative Soul would help me understand another perspective better.  I just finished it, and it very much has.  It is smart, beautifully written, and very clear even for someone like me who is not at all well-versed in political philosophy.  As a Christian, I find your explication of fundamentalism especially insightful, and your description of the experience of the Catholic Mass quite moving.  Your lyrical description of the conservative temperament as being rooted in loss struck a chord, describing quite well myself and many other liberals I know (indeed, one of my critiques of your book is that I am not at all convinced a conservative political philosophy as you later describe it necessarily flows from such a temperament).  

The first few pages of the book (which I thought were so lovely, I had to read them out loud to my partner Julie) got me thinking about what is at the core of a liberal temperament.  If conservatism is rooted in loss, I would say liberalism is rooted in abundance, and in a sense of satiety in the face of abundance that leads to an impulse toward hospitality.  It's the satisfied feeling you have when you get home from the market, and the larder is full, and you just want to cook something and have folks over for a meal.  And if conservatism suggests (quite correctly, I think) that we are ultimately all alone and unknowable to one another, then liberalism suggests that in our isolation, we nonetheless have no choice but to reach out to one another. We are unknowable to one another, but we are also unknowable to ourselves without each other.  Being left alone, I would argue, is not all we need to be free.

So, thank you for this lovely and thoughtful book.  Not surprisingly, I have some questions.  I'm not interested necessarily in being convinced or converted, merely in understanding.  I also recognize that you must get scads of emails every day, and the chances of your even reading this one, much less having time to answer my questions, is slim.  Still, it has been a useful exercise for me to write this all down.  Here are my main questions/critiques:

1.  You argue, correctly I believe, that maintaining a monopoly on force and securing the physical safety of its citizens is the first and most fundamental role of government:  "Without such security, it is impossible to have the peace necessary to cultivate virtue, apart from the virtue of courage.  Without security, we are all forced to bludgeon human personality into the uniform mold of physical strength or cunning.  Without security, we cannot even afford the luxury of questioning whether we need security.  We are too busy trying to stay alive and intact."  (pp 232-33)  My experience of working with youth in the ghetto in Philadelphia is that the government is utterly failing in this fundamental role.  In my experience, "law and order" conservatives 1) blame this lawlessness on the criminals and thugs, and 2) push for more cops, more guns, stricter laws, fiercer punishments and more prisons.  Perhaps the greatest insight I gained reading your book was that both of these responses are not conservative ones.  If THE first and most fundamental role of government is to gain an effective monopoly on violence in order to secure the safety of its citizens precisely because some people are bad and will behave badly if left alone -- well then, the fact that some people really are bad and really do behave badly cannot become the excuse for the failure of government to secure the safety of large swaths of our cities. Moreover, to propose more cops, more guns, stricter laws, fiercer punishments and more prisons -- when none of those things is currently working -- seems to me the sort of thing conservatives love to accuse liberals of -- throwing more money at the same failed schemes with no accountability.  

Poverty in this country is not primarily an issue of material lack -- most poor people in this country are not starving, are not freezing, are not without basic material resources.  Materially speaking, most poverty in this country looks like vast wealth to the majority of the world's poor.  Rather, poverty in this country is more a poverty of opportunity, beginning with a fundamental poverty of basic safety and security.  Many of the children I have worked with have decent enough homes, enough to eat, clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet; what they don't have is any sense of being part of civil society, any sense that there is something more powerful than the law of the street, which begins and ends with physical strength, cunning, and courage.  They don't even question whether something else could or should exist -- as you put it, they don't have the luxury of questioning whether they need security, because they are just trying to keep themselves alive according to the rules as they know them.  This lack of security which so circumscribes their lives is not first and foremost a failure of culture or of parenting (although their plight may also stem from those failures), but a massive failure on the part of government to do its most fundamental job in any sort of meaningful way.  It seems to me that a truly conservative response would be to seek any and all possible means of securing the safety of all, strict accountability for those charged with getting the job done, and the jettisoning of all schemes that don't work (starting, I would suggest, with the "war on drugs.")   You say that enduring a dictatorship is "life lived as trauma," (p235), and I would argue that life lived in America's ghettos is likewise life lived as trauma -- that's exactly how these kids experience it.

2.  The necessity of government in securing our physical safety is obvious to me, but I don't understand why securing personal property and wealth ought necessarily to be an end of a limited government.  Your conservative philosophy, as I understand it, does not recognize a God-given or "natural" right to private property.  Indeed, it seems to me that if we accept the government's monopoly on coercive violence, there is no "right" to private property outside of the government's ability to enforce that "right."  The conservative notion that government should "leave us alone" to "do what we want" with our property seems to me to miss the fact that any government with a monopoly on coercive violence is always exerting its power over our property, which is, after all, only "our" property because the government agrees that it is and is willing to enforce it.  But under a limited government which, you argue, should be concerned with few and only the most fundamental of ends, why should protecting your property and wealth necessarily be among them?  Owning property is not intrinsic to being human, and I would argue that after a fairly limited baseline of basic needs is secured, there is no positive correlation whatsoever between owning property and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  So why should the government not redistribute your property as a means to ends which might be more fundamental to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  For example, I would argue that there is a far stronger correlation between life/liberty/the pursuit of happiness and one's health than there is with one's property.  Similarly, I would argue that a life of the mind -- supported by a sound education -- is also more fundamental to those pursuits.  So why shouldn't the government use its power over your property to secure universal and effective health care and education, rather than using its power over your property to secure it merely for your personal use?

3.  Somewhat remarkably, in my estimation, you utterly fail to address our government's most fundamental failure to secure its citizens' freedom to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and then to leave them alone except in the most limited ways absolutely necessary for the common good.  That most fundamental failure is NOT the New Deal, or progressive taxation, or any other liberal scheme; rather, that failure is, of course, slavery and its institutionalized legacy which was, inarguably, actively enforced by our government through its monopoly on coercive violence until just a couple of generations ago.  The failure of conservatism to adequately address slavery and its legacy is so baffling to me precisely because everything about slavery and institutionalized racism is so antithetical to conservatism, at least as you describe it.  I'm very open to the possibility that liberals have not come up with adequate ways of addressing this legacy, even open to the possibility that many liberal policies have been well-meaning but misguided and have done as much harm as good.  But the conservative response -- which, it seems to me, boils down to deep denial masquerading as "color blindness" -- is just, well, baffling.  The conservative philosophy of limited government, the only real ends of which are to secure our freedom and liberty and then leave us alone -- that's lovely, but it does not seem to me to be rooted in any sort of reality for African Americans.  The government not only did not secure the safety, liberty and freedom of African Americans and then leave them alone, but in fact it actively used its monopoly on coercive violence to enslave African Americans for a century, and then after emancipation to effectively enslave them for another century.  As I understand your version of conservatism, this is a profoundly un-conservative history.  But in the face of this reality, to call the modern conservative response -- or rather non-response -- merely naive seems way too charitable.  Do conservatives really believe that every generation we simply wipe the slate clean when it comes to freedom and opportunity?  Do conservatives really believe that it is primarily the arguably misguided efforts of liberals to address this legacy, and not the legacy itself, that is the primary problem when it comes to race in this country?  Again, I am quite willing to put all the liberal policies -- affirmative action, welfare, AFDC, etc. etc. -- on the table in any honest effort to unstitch this legacy from the very fabric of our government and society.  But conservative denial that the legacy of slavery and institutional racism have any relevance today -- I just don't get it.

Take good care, Andrew.  You're a good egg.

Best,

Marta

I Just Love These Guys: Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Last fall I was obsessed with political blogs, but come on, who wasn't, right?  The domestic front at Chez Marta-Julie was turned upside down by a basement renovation; I was coping with depression and anxiety triggered in part by the chaos here at home, but mostly by escalating drama around programs for kids living in poverty sponsored by my church in which I had invested way too much myself (note to self: don't do that again) but which, despite my best efforts, were falling apart; and oh, yeah, Barack Obama was running for president!  So obsessively reading political blogs was not only a form of escape, but really, my duty as a citizen of this fine democracy, nu?

So raise your hand if you experienced just a little bit of a post-election slump.  Okay, so I'm not alone? Good.  Anyway, yeah, my own private malaise continued apace, but somehow administration-building-in-the-midst-of-the-next-Great-Depression wasn't nearly as fun as OMG-it-looks-like-we-might-win-Indiana!!!  I finally called everyone's bluff and just quit everything at church (other than going to church, though even that felt excruciating at times), and made my world intentionally small.  Really, really small.  Really, really, cozily, love-a-ly, scrumptiously, stress-freely small.  Oh, and I started seeing my therapist too, which was super smart and helpful.  I even came this close to starting anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication, something I have not done yet, but will definitely do if I ever feel that bad again for any length of time. Fortunately, my depression lifted suddenly, just as I started reaching out for help, and life got better.  But in the meantime, I totally abandoned my political blogs, and stuck with a very small, cozy handful of domestic blogs I have been following for years.

Interestingly, the first to go of the political blogs were the far-left rags.  I was actually getting pretty annoyed with them even before the election, because they were so completely predictable and knee-jerk.  Yawn.  Among the last to go were two of my favorites, The Daily Dish, by Andrew Sullivan, who blogs for The Atlantic, and Ta-Nehisi Coate's self-named blog, also at The Atlantic.  Now that I am once again dipping my toes back into the political blogosphere, these two blogs (along with my homeboy, Radley, who blogs at The Agitator) are, not surprisingly, the ones I am reading these days.  

I love both Sullivan and Coates independently of each other, and I intend to do a full-length Blog Review of each of them some day.  But in a nutshell, I love them both because they are unpredictable and thought-provoking.  Sullivan is a self-avowed conservative, or as he more recently described himself, "a libertarian independent."  I reviewed his book The Conservative Soul here; I tend to sympathize with some of his detractors who question his conservative credentials (or maybe, heaven forbid, I'm becoming conservative myself??)  I do in fact disagree with him in principle about a few pretty fundamental things, but I agree with him way more often than not, and admire his integrity all the time, and even when I think his arguments are just plain silly, I find him so damn charming and sweet and earnest that I just have to shake my head like a doting sister.   Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the other hand, I feel like I'm just getting to know.  I also find him charming, especially in his willingness to jeopardize his street cred with his brazen geekiness.  I haven't found much to disagree with him about, but I think his unblinking honesty and thoughtful openness about the issues of race that he routinely and deftly tackles is just super refreshing.

So yeah, I love both of these guys independently of one another, but what I really really just love so much is the thoughtful, respectful interplay between them on their blogs.  I'm probably being completely sentimental, but there's just something about the obvious affection that this White gay man and this Black dude from Harlem (via the 'hood in Baltimore) have for one another. One of my two biggest critiques of Sullivan is that he has yet to incorporate a convincing analysis of race in America into his philosophy of conservatism (and it strikes me that once he does, the more silly parts of it will crumble), so I'm really glad that he's listening carefully to Coates.  It would be hard not to, since Coates is so passionately spot on when it comes to one of Sullivan's favorite issues, marriage equality for lesbians and gays.  I think we'd all be a lot better off if there were more forums for respectful discourse across the political spectrum; I'm glad that Andrew and Ta-Nehisi are providing at least one.

Here are a couple of their recent posts that so swelled my heart I had to write this little love letter to two of my favorite boys:

Sullivan on Maine's passage of marriage equality legislation (and I agree whole-heartedly with him that legislative strategies are far, far superior to court victories, though I'm not complaining about how Massachusetts got the ball rolling).

Coates on Marion Barry's lonely "No" vote on a D.C. ordinance recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere (!).

And because he was too spittin' mad to get it all out in just one post, another Coates post on Marion Berry and gay marriage.

In other news, life here is richly and happily full of birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, and end-of-the-school-year; and when not engaged in those delightful past-times, it's All Gardening All The Time.  So while my head is always teeming with things to write about, I'm not so sure how much time I will actually have to write in the coming weeks and months.  We'll see.