Last night I learned that Pat Buckley, wife of conservative giant William F. Buckley, Jr., had passed away. By all accounts, she was a truly remarkable woman.
[Open full post]Meaghan Wims of the Newport Daily News has the details of the Portsmouth’s school committee’s budget proposal for next year…
The School Department is proposing a $33.4 million budget for the 2008 fiscal year, which begins July 1. The tight spending plan represents a $1.3 million increase over current-year spending and falls within the state’s 5.25 percent cap on tax-levy increases in fiscal 2008.Once again, we see a Rhode Island community planning to raise taxes and cut programs at the same time. And the problem is not that Portsmouth has a history of underfunding its school system. As Keith Kyle and Thomas Wigand of the Portsmouth Concerned Citizens organization have documented, Portsmouth increased its school budget by about 50% between 1997 and 2007. Yet despite a decade of increases, one budget proposal made last year by the Portsmouth school committee involved a 9.1% tax increase coupled with eliminating 12.5 teaching positions. Why the Portsmouth school department is consistently unable to afford its existing educational baseline is a question in need of an answer.
To keep expenditures balanced, the school board voted this week to close Prudence Island School after this school year and to change Portsmouth Middle School to a grades 6-to-8 configuration, with fifth-graders being housed in the community’s three elementary schools.
The school district also has cut a third-grade, a fifth-grade and a special education teacher, plus supplies, special education tuition and building maintenance costs.
To reiterate the often mischaracterized position of “fiscal conservatives”, it’s not an inherently bad thing to raise taxes to pay for good schools. But constantly having to raise taxes and cut programs at the same time, repeatedly demanding that citizens pay more and more to receive less and less, is a sign of a structural problem within the education bureaucracy that is a bigger threat to the quality of education than is the total funding level. Perhaps Mr. Kyle and Mr. Wigand say it best…
The Portsmouth School Department appears to have a management problem, not a budget appropriation problem.[Open full post]
At the risk of confirming suspicions of conservatives’ reactionary squeamishness, I have to admit to huge, visceral aversion to this sort of thing:
Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today.
Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue.
The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.
But the results also raise the prospect of being able to take bone-marrow tissue from women and coaxing the stem cells within the female tissue to develop into sperm cells, said Professor Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Creating sperm from women would mean they would only be able to produce daughters because the Y chromosome of male sperm would still be needed to produce sons. The latest research brings the prospect of female-only conception a step closer.
On first look, it would seem that neither the standard pro-life nor the standard secular community objections apply, but where does that leave one’s sense that we are on the cusp of changing human society in irrevocable ways and with barely a thought of the consequences. Of course, Christians believe, in the words of Mel Gibson’s character in Signs, “that whatever’s going to happen, there will be someone there to help them.” The optimistic pragmatist, with whom I often feel a certain intellectual sympathy, might feel that nothing that is fundamental in humanity will change. And there are certainly liberals who, in their variously motivated advocacy on behalf of homosexuals, will throw themselves behind any “advancement” that allows those folks to more closely simulate normal lives.
Still, I can’t shake the sense that all of these modern permutations to society will fall on us all at once in their aggregate magnitude and our society will jerk and sputter in a new, disassociated direction — perhaps under constant attack from true reactionaries from foreign cultures. We who believe that humanity has long had all that it needed, really, no matter the comforts that progress might provide may find ourselves unable to avoid the tremendous questions that the next couple of centuries will pose. Properly seen, it seems to me that such a predicament is more a blessing than a curse.
I have intended to keep up my end of the same-sex marriage conversation with Matt of Unlikely Words, but various factors have delayed my doing so. For one thing, life keeps trying to trip me up (in ways stated and hinted on Dust in the Light and in ways kept private). Perhaps a more significant, specific reason is that, having argued this subject for so long and from so many angles, it’s difficult to muster motivation to repeat arguments that are readily available should one search Anchor Rising or Dust in the Light (or the Internet, for that matter) with a few well-chosen keywords. Rhetorical constructions of the type “I have yet to see an argument” evoke in me an especial weariness; anybody who’s looked ought to be better able to restate the actual opinions of those who oppose SSM. Lastly, if I’m to make due admission of pride, I find unnecessary usage of the editorial “sic” — as if to imply that I do not write as carefully as I ought — discouraging. But Matt has offered his position eloquently and with clear intention of fair discourse, so I’ll try to do the same, and I do apologize for taking so long.
The place to start is the heart of the matter. Matt is flatly contradicting himself when he writes that “any religious person should be free to decline to… acknowledge any marriage that offends his or her beliefs.” Earlier, when differentiating between discrimination against gays, in not being considered eligible to marry each other, and that against Christians, in not being able to conduct their business or charity in keeping with their belief that marriage is fundamentally a male-female relationship, he wrote:
I’ll grant that, in a world where same-sex marriage is legal and discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal, the invitation company might not be free to refuse to print invitations to same-sex marriages. Let’s also grant that, if they take public funds, the Christian agency might not be free to decline to place children into households where both parents are of the same sex. Their definitions of marriage would suddenly come into conflict with that of the state and, indeed, they would be guilty of legal [sic] discrimination.
It may not make a significant difference, but it’s worth noting that the Christian adoption agency faces a more essential repercussion than simply the loss of public funds; at least in Massachusetts (from which state my example derives), organizations offering such services must register with the state, and the Catholic adoption service found that it could no longer perform its function at all. Matt may take the position that the loss of a license is merely the reasonable consequence for refusing acknowledgment of same-sex marriage — which the agency is still free to do, in the abstract — but I imagine that I’m not alone in thinking that the coercive power of threatening a vocation (in both professional and religious senses) is tantamount to a denial of freedom. At the very least, that argument takes the same form as an opposing one, that homosexuals are merely not able to register their “marriages” — into which they are still free to enter on a private basis — with the state.
If Matt’s “rubric to decide which [instance of discrimination] is worse” entails “evaluating the harm done to the class or individual discriminated against,” I wonder what scale places public recognition of a relationship above the ability to enter into a field of work. Would it be worse to deny homosexuals a right to redefined marriage or to bar them from becoming (say) teachers. Matt may argue that the Christians are still free to provide adoption services, just under a rule that conflicts with their beliefs, but again, that statement takes an identical form to my argument that homosexuals are not barred from marriage — they just prefer to form relationships with those to whom they are sexually attracted (a preference that is certainly understandable).
Why is it a violation of “a simple question of civil rights” to state that marriage’s meaning, at least inasmuch the government is justified in dabbling in it, involves something other (and more) than committed sexual intimacy, thereby excluding homosexual relationships by its nature, yet it is not a violation of the Bill of Rights to insist that Christians must be barred from placing children with adoptive parents in accord with their beliefs? In what way is more harm done by disallowing gays from redefining an age-old institution than by disallowing Christians from shaping their society in accord with their beliefs?
People can reasonably accept or refute these various arguments, whether they are of the same or different form, but if we are to work together to determine the best directions in which to develop our society — rather than manipulating the law and plying politics to force our own views to the fore — then we must seek at least the empathy that comes with understanding how the other side has arrived at its conclusions. And if we are to construct our own arguments in a way that is comprehensible to those who begin from different worldviews, then our examples and analogies must compare like to like. On topics related to homosexuality, comparisons with racial discrimination seem usually to shirk this imperative. Writes Matt:
… I don’t consider the imposition of equality to be discrimination. Was the decision in Brown v. Board of Education discrimination against segregationists? Surely not. Of course, the two cases are not entirely parallel. The distinguishing factor seems to be that the objections are motivated by religion rather than some other value system.
Actually, the cases are not entirely parallel because, in Brown, the court was imposing equality, while SSM imposes a definition of “marriage.” The parallel would be if, in the name of racial equality, the Supreme Court had redefined “school” in a way that would increase the ease with which underprivileged blacks could acquire diplomas. Similarly, and more germanely, comparisons of SSM with miscegenation elide the fact that people of all races could enter into marriage, as it was understood by all, with the dispute being over whether a male of one race ought to be able to marry a female of another. The point is that the traditionalists in my examples are not discriminating against gays qua gays, but in favor of marriage under their definition, and since marriage is a cultural institution with implications for the society’s health, such discrimination is legitimate.
It’s worth noting, here, that the discriminatory definition of marriage is not “the traditional religious view,” as Matt would have it, but the traditional religious, historical, cultural, and legal view. Moreover, it is not the case that traditionalists are trying “to make it the law” (therefore necessitating “extra-Biblical justification”). It is already the law, and legalistic obfuscation aside, everybody knows that it has always been the law. The burden is on those supporting a redefinition to explain why, now, all of a sudden, we must treat the legal meaning of the word “marriage” differently.
Back in 2004, Andrew Sullivan attempted to address this problem by arguing that coupling is now “the de facto meaning” of marriage for a majority of people who are married. As I pointed out at the time, that’s simply not true. It is safe to say that almost all married men and women already or will have children. Matt offers a few “marginal cases” to prove that “defining marriage as a procreative pair cannot be sustained”:
Can a heterosexual couple who are (independently or mutually) infertile be said to be truly married under this definition? What about a married couple that abstains from sex? And do we want the state to invalidate marriages that do not produce progeny, or require fertility and genetic testing before validating a marriage certificate? Do we want the state to compel married couples to attempt to conceive?
Addressing infertility (with reference to an older post):
- Infertility is most commonly seen as a problem within marriage precisely because it makes it more difficult to fulfill a central role of marriage. It therefore cannot be said — as I said of SSM in the quotation to which Matt is responding — that it will “erode the institution’s utility.” If anything, it affirms the procreative emphasis of marriage.
- It needn’t invalidate a marriage, because infertility is not sterility, and most infertile couples do not ultimately prove to be sterile. (I know I did the research on that, once, but I can’t find my resulting writing at this time.)
- Couples will not generally know that they are infertile, much less be able to give therapies a chance, until they are attempting to have children, and it is precisely the attempt to have children that our society wishes to encourage taking place within the context of marriage.
That last point leads to a more fundamental one, of which it is easy to lose sight in a debate that has as its focus achieving marriage rights for homosexuals: Marriage isn’t positioned in our society as a form of reward. (That credit card commercial in which the king declares the dragonslayer eligible to marry his daughter comes to mind as contrast.) Rather, marriage represents an arrangement into which we wish to usher those pairings that are likely to create children. Therefore, raising barriers such as fertility testing and affidavits of procreative intent would generate disincentive.
I’ll rephrase for emphasis: The essential idea behind public encouragement of marriage is to draw people whose behavior makes conception likely within its structure. This is what we who oppose same-sex marriage are trying to preserve. We do not, as Matt apparently misconstrues, see marriage as a route toward procreation; indeed, pushing people into lifelong monogamous relationships would seem likely to decrease the rate of childbirth. Incorporating homosexuals into marriage would erode the notion that marriage and potentially procreative relationships ought, in principle, to be synonymous in a way that including sterile and abstinent couples does not for the prima facie reason that the former requires said notion’s explicit rejection. If one does not accept the proposition that even abstinent couples — in their conspicuous incongruity — affirm this link, then at least it can be said that the opposite-sex aspect of marriage’s definition, which abstinent couples do not threaten, is sufficiently specific for society’s purposes. (And besides, abstinence is not an inherently permanent state; some might even call it tenuous.)
Indeed, it is advocacy for same-sex marriage that leads Matt to wonder, “Where, in any of this, should gender matter?” — “this” being “the strengthening of familial and societal ties, the establishment of persistent kin groups and affinities, and the financial stability of combining households, benefits, and assets,” which he acknowledges as social benefits of marriage. Well, absent the expansion of those familial ties into future generations via procreation, where in any of that should number matter? Or preexisting relationships, such as exists between siblings?
To accept those subsequent claims to the “civil right” of marriage would be to make marriage essentially meaningless. To reject them would require a form of discrimination substantively no different from that of which traditionalists are accused when it comes to homosexual marriage. Actually, I take that back; it would be different — more capricious, more invidious. Matt’s correct that “not all discrimination is equal.” Some discrimination is advisable, as between good and bad clams, as between productive and wasteful activities, as between classics and popular fiction, and as between relationships that tend toward childbirth and those that inherently do not.
Mike Stanton of the Projo confirms the names of two more Rhode Island legislators being investigated as part of operation Dollar Bill, State Senators Stephen Alves of West Warwick and Daniel DaPonte of East Providence…
Last fall, a lawyer for a local union pension fund came across a puzzling entry on the fund’s federal tax return — a $100,000 commission that had reportedly been split by Daniel DaPonte and Stephen D. Alves.[Open full post]
DaPonte and Alves, Rhode Island state senators and financial advisers who worked at UBS Financial Services, didn’t handle any of the pension fund’s investments. So why, the fund’s trustees wondered, did the return say that they had each received $50,000…
“The $100,000 payment,” responded [Prudential Financial] in a letter written last fall, “was a one-time finders fee” to UBS for “introducing Prudential to the possible opportunity at [International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers] Local No. 99 Annuity Fund.”
That came as news to the financial consultant who oversaw the process in which Prudential was selected and says he was not aware of UBS’s involvement or the $100,000 payment. The lawyer for the pension fund says he was also unaware.
The Prudential letter did not elaborate on how UBS earned its finders’ fee or what role DaPonte or Alves played…
During the 2005 session, which opened a few months after UBS received the $100,000 payment from Prudential, DaPonte was a co-sponsor of two more bills affecting electricians.
[Local 99 business manager Allen Durand] testified on behalf of one of the 2005 bills, which would have forbidden apprentice electricians with out-of-state certificates to work in Rhode Island. The bill passed the Senate and died in the House.
Durand also registered as a lobbyist for the other bill, regarding electrician’s licenses, which passed the Senate and the House and became law, without the governor’s signature.
Fellow Cranstonian Kiersten Marek of Kmareka offers some poignant commentary on Mayor Michael Napolitano’s proposal to raise taxes in Cranston by 5.25% while giving the school department a 0% increase…
This act has marked you, Mayor Napolitano. In my mind, it has marked you as someone who deliberately does unreasonable things in order to provoke a reaction. You can protest until the cows come home about how much you care about education, but it just doesn’t ring true when your budget does not allocate one single dollar in increases for the actual acts of educating children in our city. You have effectively alienated your core constituency.Ms. Marek helps identify the common ground shared by many liberal and conservative citizens — we can agree that raising taxes while not improving essential services is a bad idea.
But of course, pols sometimes have interests that are different from the interests of citizens of any ideological stripe.
I have less faith than Ms. Marek does that the Mayor’s budget proposal isn’t a cynical ploy to force the school committee to sue the city for more money, allowing the Mayor to disavow responsibility for any associated tax increase or other financial consequences. Beyond that, the only other thing I have to immediately add to Ms. Marek’s prose is a bit of haiku…
The budget disgrace
of Mike Napolitano.
A case for recall.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Commenters “Perry Ellis” and “Oz” let us know that the Cranston City Charter does make all elected city officials subject to recall (section 2.08). The basic rules are…
- 20% of registered voters must sign a petition to force a recall election.
- Removing an official requires a 2/3 majority of votes cast in the recall election.
The connection between the fall of Don Imus and the restoration of the fairness doctrine hits the mainstream media today, courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News. Remember, the following excerpt is from a news story, not an op-ed…
Radio has gone unbridled since the relaxing of the fairness doctrine in 1987, which required stations to present fair and balanced political viewpoints.Translation: The government should limit the expression of certain viewpoints, in order to promote civility.
Since then, [Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Manhattan’s Columbia University] said, radio networks have been governed by “the capacity to collect eardrums without any regard for veracity let alone civility.”
Some points to ponder…
- What would Brad Kava, the reporter who wrote the excerpt at the top, think of a news story that stated — as an unchallenged fact — that American newspapers have become increasingly “unbridled” over the course of their history because the government has not required them to print fair and balanced viewpoints?
- How exactly is the connection between regulating broadcast content and promoting civility supposed to work? For example, more Al Franken on the radio might help meet restored fairness doctrine requirements, but it wouldn’t promote civility, because a) Franken is not a bastion of civil conversation and b) no one would be listening anyway. So where’s the connection?
- What would be the reaction if George W. Bush or Dick Cheney argued that the content of electronic media had to be more strongly government regulated in order to promote “civility”? Should the reaction be any less when other public figures call for increased content regulation of the media?
- Step 1: Restore the fairness doctrine.
- Step 2: Tell a station like WPRO that it can no longer run 13 hours of John DePetro, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Yorke, and Michael Savage (no offense intended to Jerry Doyle, but I don’t listen his show enough to comment on his content) as its weekday lineup, because there aren’t enough hours in the day left to provide the legally mandated balance…
- Step 3: …but also tell WPRO that it can help satisfy its fairness doctrine requirements by dropping one of its existing programs and broadcasting Al Sharpton’s show instead!
In case you’re wondering where the Imus debacle is leading to, Sheldon Drobny of the Huffington Post gives us a hint…
Imus is another example of the degradation of talk radio that has been going on since Rush Limbaugh started this in 1980. Rush was another failed DJ that got lucky in 1980 when talk radio and the AM signal were in deep trouble. So they experimented with a show that had no boundaries as to the kind of racism and hate mongering that could be disseminated in talk radio.You see, we need stronger government mandates on the content of talk radio (which Reverend Al Sharpton openly called for on the Today show this morning) so that the government is in a better position to clamp down on improper speech before it occurs.
This was followed by the other right wing haters with a mix of the “shock jocks” like Howard Stern and Imus. The fairness doctrine was killed by the Reagan Administration, which was followed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by President Clinton. That is the short history of why hate and racist talk radio is the rule rather than the exception.
Expect proponents of the fairness doctrine to try to use the Imus debacle to advance their agenda of getting the government to limit the broadcast expression of certain viewpoints, i.e. if people don’t want to tune in to Air America or Dave Barber on their own, then government should subsidize them, at the expense of other broadcasters, until people do. [Open full post]
Contra Ian Donnis, you can make this stuff up:
Mohler began by summarizing some recent research into sexual orientation, and advising his Christian readership that they should brace for the possibility that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven.
Mohler wrote that such proof would not alter the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, but said the discovery would be ”of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.”
He also referred to a recent article in the pop-culture magazine Radar, which explored the possibility that sexual orientation could be detected in unborn babies and raised the question of whether parents _ even liberals who support gay rights _ might be open to trying future prenatal techniques that would reverse homosexuality.
Indeed, anybody who took the initiative to find out what conservative Christians actually believe, argue, and proclaim wouldn’t have to make anything up; it would be more accurate to say that they could predict it as a matter of straightforward analysis. As Rev. Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University and editor of Ignatius Press, explains:
”Same-sex activity is considered disordered,” Fessio said. ”If there are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of children in the womb, and a way of treating them that respected the dignity of the child and mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of science.”
For those with disorders of a different sort, I’ll put it simply: we right-wing fanatics simply believe that unborn children are in fact human beings, worthy, at the very least, of a right not to be killed. It is not the womb that is inviolable, but the individual, and to the extent that a treatment is legitimate for those outside of the womb, it is equally so within it. I’m not saying that some magnificently speculative procedure to treat a condition that may or may not originate in the womb is legitimate, let alone desirable, but if one is not surprised that an Evangelical would support medical treatment for homosexuality, then it betrays ignorance to level accusations of hypocrisy in this case.
Unfortunately, another thing that needn’t be made up because it is so predictable is the utter inanity of liberal reactions, of which Mary Ann Sorrentino’s is a fine example. In keeping with the apparent bigotry by which all conservative Christians are merely mind-melded drones — or “hordes of so-called Christians,” if you prefer — Sorrentino evinces the above mentioned ignorance:
Mohler belongs to the same faction that has opposed pre-birth medical tampering in the past. Gender selection, in vitro fertilizations, even some pre-birth surgical procedures have all been deemed wrongful interference in divine territory. Now that these people see a way to diddle with the sexuality of the unborn, however, many of them are all over that possibility.
For the most part, the only “medical tampering” that raises substantial opposition from this so-called faction is that which involves death as its objective. That, indeed, is the primary objection to in vitro fertilization: that it requires the creation of embryos who will not be brought to term. Similarly, gender selection has largely been an issue — a real one, actually in practice, as opposed to the speculative brave-new-world version — because the “selection” takes the form of culling. As for “some pre-birth surgical procedures,” I’m not sure what Sorrentino is talking about, much less who specifically objected to them, but her vagueness is typical.
Then, as if adhering closely to the guidelines of some rhetorical propaganda instruction manual, Sorrentino follows ignorance with laughable plying of emotional strings — describing a Hollywood movie that features a gay-therapy version of Clockwork Orange treatment and wondering darkly, “Is this the kind of thing that ‘people of God’ really support?” (I love the quotation marks around “people of God,” as if she cannot even bring herself to countenance the sincerity of believers, even as she attempts to manipulate their good will.) This stratagem could only be followed with a faith-based elevation of homosexuality’s existential essentialness beyond even genetics:
If Mohler is allowed to have his way, and society begins to tamper with the sexual preferences of about-to-be citizens still floating in the womb, the probable result will be a generation of would-be heterosexuals who eventually revert to their preferences for same-gender lovers.
Well, I suppose that, in an argument that brushes past two layers of speculative outcomes and transforms a villain’s out-loud thinking into an assertion of “a way,” it isn’t out of place to declare the probability that all will be for naught. Similarly, it is not out of place for the author of such manifestly empty-headed rhetoric to read the minds of people with differing opinions and know — just know — that they are all about hate.
[Open full post]Ian Donnis rather wryle points out that “one of the country’s top evangelicals, Kentucky-based Albert Mohler, has suggested that pre-natal treatment to change homosexuality in the womb would be biblically justified.” Donnis also directs us to a recent piece by Mary Ann Sorrentino on the same topic. Writes Sorrentino:
The same gang that for decades has warred against any invasion of the womb in which a developing fetus (which they call an “unborn child)” resides now hopes to put a fetus on a sure road to heterosexuality.
As interesting as the concept of a gay fetus may seem, the image of hordes of so-called Christians fretting about the sexual orientation of the not-yet-born boggles the mind. Yet the Reverend R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, claims that in utero gays can find salvation through hormonal interventions that might make them straight from the moment when the obstetrician whacks their newly born bottom.
Mohler belongs to the same faction that has opposed pre-birth medical tampering in the past. Gender selection, in vitro fertilizations, even some pre-birth surgical procedures have all been deemed wrongful interference in divine territory. Now that these people see a way to diddle with the sexuality of the unborn, however, many of them are all over that possibility.
Indeed, it’s apparently the hypocrisy of it all that is bothering people:
”What bothers me is the hypocrisy,” [Jennifer Chrisler of Family Pride, a group that supports gay and lesbian families] said. ”In one breath, they say the sanctity of an unborn life is unconditional, and in the next breath, it’s OK to perform medical treatments on them because of their own moral convictions, not because there’s anything wrong with the child.”
Rev. Mohler is clearly making a distinction between pre-natal hormonal treatment and genetic manipulation (maybe it’s too fine a point, I don’t know). And Chrisler seems to be willingly conflating the meaning of “sanctity of life” to serve her own rhetorical purpose. There can be little doubt that Mohler is being consistent in his stance against abortion, as he also said “he would strongly oppose any move to encourage abortion or genetic manipulation of fetuses on grounds of sexual orientation.”
This is part of a deeper debate, as outlined in this article:
Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy….Pro-choice activists won’t be spared, either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?
I think Rev. Mohler’s stated belief is representative of a majority of Evangelicals (I’m not one, by the way) and thus answers the first question: having any child–gay or not–is preferable to aborting one. On the other hand, Sorrentino has consistently framed the abortion issue as a matter of “choice.” So, if she doesn’t want to be, you know, “hypocritical,” does that mean that we can assume she also endorses a woman’s right to choose to abort a fetus because it may be gay?
And that takes me to an even wider discussion. A couple years ago, I came across this touching piece by Patricia Bauer, the mother of a child with Down Syndrome. The parallel to the above discussion is obvious:
Margaret is a person and a member of our family. She has my husband’s eyes, my hair and my mother-in-law’s sense of humor. We love and admire her because of who she is — feisty and zesty and full of life — not in spite of it. She enriches our lives. If we might not have chosen to welcome her into our family, given the choice, then that is a statement more about our ignorance than about her inherent worth.
What I don’t understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no value. I’d like to think that it’s time to put that particular piece of baggage on the table and talk about it, but I’m not optimistic. People want what they want: a perfect baby, a perfect life. To which I say: Good luck. Or maybe, dream on.
And here’s one more piece of un-discussable baggage: This question is a small but nonetheless significant part of what’s driving the abortion discussion in this country. I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families {here’s an example–ed.}. The abortion debate is not just about a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby; it’s also about a woman’s right to choose which baby she wants to have.
As far as I can tell, Sorrentino is perfectly fine with that.
Sorrentino has done admirable work in the gay community, but has she ever wondered if those whom she’s helped through the tragedy of AIDS would have been better off if their mothers had aborted them instead?
That’s a pretty tough theoretical, I know.
I suspect that Sorrentino was so delighted to hold up the mirror of hypocrisy in front of Rev. Mohler’s face that she failed to look into it herself. Dealing with these deeper issues–instead of taking the easy, facile “hypocrisy” angle–is a much more difficult task. After she’s seen the strength and grace of humanity amidst the tragedy of AIDS, I wonder how she can support giving carte blanche to those who may one day seek to preempt what they’d deem an imperfect life. Does she have personal reservations about unfettered abortion rights or does she subscribe to a universal, abortion-on-demand ideal–regardless of circumstance–because it’s an individual choice?
In the end, I’m left with the impression that it’s the right-wing, Evangelical zealot who is more likely to protect the right to life of an unborn gay child than a liberal, pro-abortion radical.
Get your head around that.
