(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Battle Against GOP Rape Culture: Message Matters (aka Part 3) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-08-22
(A continuation of Impact of Reproductive Freedom on the Midterms, Part 1 and Part 2)
I have long had friends for whom Reproductive Freedom was their single issue. And, more than once, when I first discussed this with them, I would detail the very methodical, determined efforts to take away their freedom in the courts. The so-called “Pro-Life” Movement has challenged Reproductive Rights in Message with regard to politics, legislatures, the courts and religion. So when someone like me, in trying to help others understand why conservatives have had success, I always say that anti-abortion voters may be smaller, but their intensity gives them advantage. Visceral Voters always Vote. Every. Single. Time.
Supporters of Reproductive Justice have never had that intensity. Perhaps until now. Perhaps. We know that anti-abortion voters will come out to vote, and, now, Reproductive Freedom voters say they will come out in November. But it remains to be seen. The one thing we know, from knocking on doors in the Senate Swing States since June 2021, is that interest in Reproductive Rights intensifies when the topic is in the mass media.
If you look at the battle in Kansas followed this pattern. Both sides were well-organized and kept the issue in front of voters, especially once the Alito draft was leaked. And Kansas For Constitutional Freedom followed the well-worn Democratic strategy of registering voters, keeping their message at the forefront, and getting out the vote.
Our own efforts, where we register (or re-register) voters at their doors reflects this. In the last two months, 62% of the voters we registered were women. Before the Alito draft, there was no noticeable difference. But we are registering voters at the doors (less than 100k voters up to now), and the Reproductive Justice orgs have much greater capabilities to shape this upcoming electorate.
What I am trying to communicate here, though, is that the Reproductive Freedom side remains less organized, less prepared and, at this moment, totally overwhelmed by the task at hand to reverse Roe and return Reproductive Rights to all American women everywhere.
In this diary, I want to consider why this is so.
In terms of military strategy, conservatives have the advantage of interior lines. They have unity of Message and the different ways that different Republicans and conservatives talk about abortion are mutually reinforcing. That’s a fact we cannot change.
Paul Tully designed the Tully Box or, as it is more commonly referred to now, the Message Box. We use the Tully Box to create Message Arcs in political campaigns but it is equally useful for fighting for political change.
I don’t want to go over this in detail because I want to keep the focus on my central premise: Message Matters and our message on this issue in not only disjointed, it is mixed and not well thought out. Don’t shoot the messenger (but this is why people say that I am blunt).
But I do want to spend a little time on the 4th quadrant “What They Say About Themselves.” Because I think this will convey how united the right’s Message is on the topic of abortion. The right has synthesized it’s message down to a simple theme (‘abortion is murder’), but the message plays out in different ways depending on whether it is politics, legislatures, the courts or religion. But what the good guys don’t do, at least I don’t see being done, is call bullsh*t on that theme. Is abortion murder?
In fact, if you look at the Dobbs dissection of Roe, you will see that Alito completely ignores Roe’s turgid but considered attempted to define when human (as opposed to animal) life begins, to define the point where “potential [human] life” begins and we are no longer just another animal; iow, to attempt a secular definition of when abortion is murder. So when the “pro-life” movement asserts ‘abortion is murder’ they are dictating a set of axioms to which we do not all agree — to which we have never all agreed. The cleverness of the ‘pro-life’ theme is to force you to discuss the subject on their terms.
I know I never agreed to that.
But here’s the thing: that’s exactly what Alito attempted to do in his opinion as well. He glosses (or utterly ignores) axioms he asserts and writes as if they have already been decided. Again, I know I never agreed to that. His opinion is egregiously wrong as well as logically flawed. He thinks by mentioning the controversy around the various, especially various religious, opinions about when HUMAN life begins.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” this is the originalist theme that runs throughout Alito’s flawed reasoning.
“The Court finds that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” This could easily be the most egregious conclusion in human history. The fact is the practice or “right” to abortion predates the written word, predates Christianity, as it has been practiced throughout human history and predates the Constitution. Every culture had their methods for terminating pregnancy and those methods constituted an oral tradition. They weren’t written down. But they are, what we would call in another document, “unalienable Rights.” Life, in this case, specifically Women’s Lives, was the first unalienable Right mentioned.
But this element of Alito’s flawed reasoning is central to the GOP Rape Culture. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion,” but neither does it make reference to women, ladies (or their singular) or female. Alito’s reasoning is a tautology. Since the Constitution makes no reference to women or to abortion, there are no reciprocal rights. This is even more interesting in light of the fact slavery was well-considered by the Constitution.
The originalist argument is very clear: if you are female, or native or even a poor white person, you have no Constitutional Rights save those granted by wealthy white men in power. And if you want those Constitutional Rights, you must fight. The deck is staked against us.
So know that I’ve depressed you, let’s look at those axioms upon which Alito’s flawed opinion and the entire ‘abortion is murder’ theme depends. The First Axiom is that written history is superior to oral tradition. Because the history of abortion is literally pre-historic. John Riddle has written a remarkable history of contraception and abortion, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance:
Riddle’s thesis is, quite simply, that the ancient world did indeed possess effective (and safe) contraceptives and abortifacients. The author maintains that this rich body of knowledge about fertility control—widely held in the ancient world—was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages, becoming nearly extinct by the early modern period. The reasons for this he suggests, stemmed from changes in the organization of medicine. As university medical training became increasingly important, physicians’ ties with folk traditions were broken. The study of birth control methods was just not part of the curriculum. In an especially telling passage, Riddle reveals how Renaissance humanists were ill equipped to provide accurate translations of ancient texts concerning abortifacients due to their limited experience with women’s ailments. Much of the knowledge about contraception belonged to an oral culture—a distinctively female-centered culture. From ancient times until the seventeenth century, women held a monopoly on birthing and the treatment of related matters; information passed from midwife to mother, from mother to daughter. Riddle reflects on the difficulty of finding traces of oral culture and the fact that the little existing evidence is drawn from male writers who knew that culture only from a distance. Nevertheless, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, the author pieces together the clues and evaluates the scientific merit of these ancient remedies in language that is easily understood by the general reader. His findings will be useful to anyone interested in learning whether it was possible for premodern people to regulate their reproduction without resorting to the extremities of dangerous surgical abortions, the killing of infants, or the denial of biological urges.
Riddle himself writes:
This book is an attempt to make sense out of the historical records related to birth control. As I looked at classical and medieval medical records, I was struck by the number of oral contraceptives and abortifacients mentioned. Historians have tended to relegate antifertility agents not to the proverbial “dust-heap called history,” as Augustine Burill called it, but to the realm of nonscience next door. Classical and medieval birth control methods are regarded by us moderns as magic and superstition. Almost universally it is agreed that these agents were not effective because they could not be effective. Over a period of years I learned that our distant ancestors could distinguish between a contraceptive and an abortifacient (which is no easy task) and that they knew more about reproduction than we have credited them with. [p IX]
Even a modicum of knowledge of ancient history and biblical texts is sufficient to dismiss Alito’s understanding of the historical record. Alito is a blatant ideologue making political pronouncements masquerading as legal opinion. And this is the point that we, those who believe in Reproductive Freedom, need to make over and over: Women have a place in the United States, need to be recognized as equal citizens in this country and their history — primarily oral traditions — cannot be so easily dismissed.
Now I suppose there is an argument that could be made to support the First Axiom but Alito never makes it. Alito seeks to divide us, not inform us, calls it “controversy” and then asserts that only the (Male) written history matters. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion.” Just like the Constitution makes no reference to Women. Why would it make reference to abortion?
Now we need a secular understanding of the Message we require to battle the GOP Rape Culture but it is important to understand how the Judeo-Christian texts deal with the reality of which Riddle writes. The Bible makes no reference to abortion. “The Bible was written in a world in which abortion was practiced and viewed with nuance. Yet the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word “abortion” do not appear in either the Old or New Testament of the Bible.” And, in fact, when you look at the Biblical texts where the topic can be inferred, “Exodus 21 [Ex 21:22-25], for example, suggests that a pregnant woman’s life is more valuable than the fetus’s.”
You may want to read that again, because it is not the value that “pro-life” activists suggest is the Biblical value. The Right to Life people behind the Kansas abortion amendment gave it away: “Value Them Both.” This is not the Biblical value, that is the political value of the GOP Rape Culture. That’s why the right pretends that the embryo is a fully-formed person.
That is the Second Axiom for the GOP Rape Culture. The embryo is not only a person (as differentiated from animal) and a sacred person at that. Which, again, the Bible does not support. In the Exodus example above, the punishment for taking of the “potential life” (Roe) was a fine. A fine to be decided by judges. Same as a sheep or a goat. But the GOP Rape Culture does not want you to think about that. They have so warped the Biblical text for their own political ends. Because they can’t have you believe that a pregnant woman’s life is more valuable than that of a fetus. “The fetus is not, in the Hebrew Bible, regarded as a person.” “In Jewish law traditionally and today, personhood is regarded as beginning during birth, with the first breath.”
To bring this home, it is the Woman (the person who is actually a person) that has value. Even at the point of birth, the scales tilt completely towards the Woman:
The second century discussion in the section of the Mishnah called Oholoth states clearly that if a woman is “in hard labour” [difficult labor] then the fetus should be aborted “because her life takes precedence over the life of the child”. This requirement is only waived if the fetus has already been substantially born (defined as “the greater part [of its head] has come out”).
Alito is pulling to wool over our eyes. The definition of Axiom is “a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.” And Alito wants to believe these are true, but that doesn’t make it so.
Let’s look again at the Tully Box, “What They Say About Themselves.” The right is arguing that ‘abortion is murder,’ that they have God on their side, and state legislatures have the obligation to curb the Rights of Women, specifically wrt Reproductive Freedom because (male) written history is superior than (female) oral tradition and the embryo is not “potential life” (Roe) but sacred life. And I’m calling bullsh*t on it all. These Axioms, upon which the “pro-life” movement depends, are not establish, not commonly accepted, not self-evidently true. And, in fact, the opposite is self-evident, at least to me.
But the good guys (gals) have let the right get away with asserting their Axioms, largely without challenge. The 4th quadrant goes unchallenged, and the other three quadrants of the Tully Box are a complete mishmash. The right pretends it has God on their side, and people accept it because… well, who knows? Because I don’t accept it. In fact, rejecting these Axioms is the start of building a case for Female Empowerment and a Message that not only stands up to the right but shows their political slogans for exactly that, political sloganeering.
It is critical to understand that,
The recent decision of the Supreme Court is seen, in legal terms, as a victory for “originalism”: the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to some notion of its “original meaning”. Applying the same criterion to the biblical texts would help to clarify that Christian support for legislation prohibiting abortion is a cultural and political stance. It has nothing to do with the Bible.
The GOP Rape Culture demands conformity. Even as I have failed to get as far as I hoped, let me end with this thought: this Supreme Court is dangerous to our country. And we have to do something about it.
[Parts of this argument is derived from reading the more than 93,004 voter surveys that Hope Springs from Field PAC collected at voter’s door this year. If you would like to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/2022senateswing
Thank you in advance for your support.]
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/22/2118009/-Rape-Culture-Part-3
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
