Crazy for God (41 page)

The so-called evangelical leadership—Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, and all the rest—also played the pro-life community for suckers. While thousands of men and women in the crisis pregnancy movement gave of themselves with tremendous and sincere sacrifice (to help women and babies), their evangelical “leaders” did little more than cash in on fund-raising opportunities and stir the pot so they could keep their followers motivated. That way, the evangelical leaders could represent themselves as power brokers to the politicians willing to kowtow to them.

To the extent that the Republican Party benefited from the pro-life movement, my efforts and those of my father contributed to making the Republican congressional majorities of the 1980s and 1990s possible. We also indirectly helped make the elections of Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. possible.

Bush Jr. was the “Christians’ ” president. So it was bitterly ironic that Bush Jr. was personally responsible for, amongst other self-inflicted horrors, the persecution, displacement, and destruction of the one million, three hundred thousand-person beleaguered
Christian
minority in Iraq. They had fared much better under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein than they did once Bush Jr. unleashed the Islamic militants.

It bears repeating: Bush Jr., the Bible-believing, born-again president, delivered up his Iraqi
fellow Christians
to be destroyed. They fled, died, or went into hiding because a “faith-based” evangelical American president stupidly unleashed a civil war. And of course Bush Jr. was also responsible for the killing of countless other innocent civilians caught in the sectarian strife.

The puny “president” I indirectly helped elect sent my son John to an ill-conceived, ineptly carried-out war, a war where my son’s friend Alex Del Rio got his legs blown off, where Mark,
the only son of my friend Mindy Evnin, was killed. And Bush Jr. was elected with the help of millions of evangelicals that Dad, Koop, and I—directly or indirectly—helped galvanize.

How could such a little man—a towering mediocrity—so clearly overmatched by the job ever have become president? One reason is that single-issue politics deforms the process and derails common sense. It facilitates the election of leaders just because they are “correct” on “my issue.”

Roe v. Wade
has given us more than thirty years of culture war. The results have been tragic. For one thing,
Roe
has given us some terrible leadership. This works both ways. The Democratic Party has, until recently, also limited itself to candidates who are rigidly correct “theologically” on abortion and other social issues.

It seems to me that by demanding ideological purity on abortion (and other single issues as well), both parties have worked to eliminate the sorts of serious smart pragmatic people who make competent leaders. What we are left with are those willing to toe the party theological line, who are talented at kissing the asses of their party’s ideologues, raising money, and looking good on TV, but not much else.

But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone “purity,” is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity?

Logically there was no forgone conclusion that the left would take the pro-choice side. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, had called abortion murder and, following her
lead, so had Planned Parenthood in their literature, right up to 1968. But since the left (and hence the Democratic Party, at least the public’s perception of that party) embraced the sexual revolution, the way it fell out was that the right, especially the so-called Christian Right, became the “defenders of unborn life.” And we did this while often supporting capital punishment. And the Democrats supported abortion on-demand, while often being against the execution of convicted criminals, and while the Democratic Party included a strong traditionally pacifist wing.

America was entering an ethical twilight zone of contradictory theological absolutism that bled into all walks of life and into many unrelated political issues. Both sides were relying on their respective “faiths,” feminist purity of heart on the one hand and so-called biblical ethics on the other. America was involved in yet another “church split” masquerading as politics.

Meanwhile, the left (and hence the Democratic Party) seemed to be encouraging abortion, even the abortion of the same “imperfect” babies who, on other days, liberal Democrats, were legislating on behalf of, to have ramps built giving the handicapped access to libraries, hotels, and restaurants.

One would have thought that some on the left might have noted these inconsistencies, or at least been a little nervous about abortion being made legal for any reason at any time in pregnancy, in view of the exploding potential of genetic screening for “undesirable” humans that might someday include screening for the “gay gene” or the “criminal gene” or even the “hyperactive child gene.” In fact, some civil libertarians, like
Village Voice
editor Nat Hentoff, spoke out vehemently on the pro-life side on just such grounds, and he quit the board of the ACLU over its lopsided support of abortion advocates.

If it had been the other way around and the left had championed the unborn, perhaps against corporate medical industry interests, or in the name of equality—or because of the lessons taught by the rise of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, or because of being queasy over a recently slave-owning society once again deciding who was more equal, even more human “legally” than others—my father would have been embraced as a religious leader on the left. And if Dad had been allied with the left, it would have ultimately been a much better fit for him—and for me.

The battle lines were drawn when
Roe
not only became the law of the land, precluding further debate and democratic process, but also became the most permissive abortion law in the world, outside of what was then the Soviet Union. What Dr. Koop, Dad, and I helped start was a slow-motion civil war of reaction that has morphed into “red”- and “blue”-state America.

We Americans—secular, religious, of the left and the right—like to think of ourselves as good. This national delusion is our real religion. We think we know something special about virtue, the way the French believe they have the inside track on food and wine. When we do bad things, we like to dress them up and call them good, for the same reason no Frenchman will admit to being a bad cook. We can’t just hit an enemy, we have to call it “spreading democracy.” We can’t just abort a baby, we have to call it “reproductive rights.” We can’t tolerate human frailty, we have to fight to outlaw all abortion as “murder,” declare victory over “evil,” and leave some young woman paying the price for our self-righteousness.

For most Americans, thoughts about the rights of the unborn were blessedly fuzzy before
Roe
and allowed plenty of room for hypocrisy of the kind that makes life bearable. They
would have preferred that some abortion be legal and be done quietly, but that there be a line drawn that would provide us with moral cover, something to feed our delusion of goodness.

Roe
was too extreme for our American sense of the virtuous self, and it provided no moral cover, say of the kind most European governments provided when it came to legalizing abortion, by strongly discouraging abortion past the earlier stages of pregnancy.
Roe
was too sweeping. It was absolutist—and bad public relations, too.

To most Americans—including me these days—it is gut-check self-evident that a fertilized egg is
not a person,
because personhood is a lot more than a collection of chromosomes in a Petri dish or in the womb. To most Americans—including me these days—it is also gut-check self-evident that an unborn baby is
mighty like one of us,
and that a lot of fast talking about reproductive rights and choice or a woman’s mental well-being doesn’t answer the horror of a three-pound child with her head deliberately caved in lying in a medical waste receptacle.

Perception is reality in politics, maybe in ethics, too. And to many Americans, the Democrats, at least in perception, adopted an absolutist pro-choice platform, guaranteed to alienate many reasonable and compassionate people. When it came to defending
Roe,
the Democrats seemed to have replaced the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with the right to fucking.

Roe
was an answer to the “by-product” of sex, and, most particularly, of the ’60s sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was just one example of the individualistic “I want” replacing the moralistic “you should.” But as the sexual revolution part of the “I want” revolution was overtaken by AIDS and by an STD and teen-pregnancy epidemic, it started to look idiotic.

It turned out that personal preference is not always the best guide. And there were plenty of women of all political and religious persuasions who, post-
Roe,
woke up to the fact that male sexual “ethics” now separated sex, commitment, and responsibility into watertight compartments. A lot of people had the uneasy feeling that things had gone “too far.” That included many liberal parents who were appalled by a culture wherein it was considered “normal” that their young teenage (even preteen) daughters dispensed casual oral sex to cement “friendships” with boys they hardly knew. In the public mind, this moral slide was somehow linked to a loss of moral focus, and (fairly or unfairly) the legalizing of abortion was perceived as a big part of that slide.

Up to the 2006 elections, the Democrats were saddled with the public’s perception of being the party that had aggressively gone to bat for
Roe.
Then in 2006, when the Democratic Party began to include a few outspoken pro-life candidates in their national congressional races—and some won—they seemed to be correcting an error, because it wasn’t long ago that Democratic candidates who did not pass the pro-choice theological litmus test were barred from even speaking at Democratic Party conventions.

Where the pro-life movement seemed nutty when saying that a fertilized egg is fully human, at least pro-life nuts had genetic science on their side. But when the pro-choice proponents found themselves trying to explain why a six-month-old unborn baby deserved no protection, and was a mere “part of a woman’s body,” subject to her “choice,” they defied both common sense and science. And how could a country hooked on notions of its own goodness feel warm and fuzzy about “procedures” involving the killing of almost-viable, sometimes even viable, babies?

Defending such horrors was awkward. It pushed otherwise moderate people to extremes. The extremes persist. After the Supreme Court upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act (April 18, 2007), the next day the
Times
reacted predictably saying that to ban even extremely late-term abortions, “severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded women.” The paper also stated that the decision “threatened the rule of law.” What the editors didn’t mention was that all the Court had done was to bring American law a bit closer to European and other countries’ less extreme abortion laws.

A paper like the
Times
looks philosophically unimaginative and ethically challenged when it doggedly sticks to the party line at the extremes of the argument. They look as silly and theologically dogmatic as the nutcase pro-lifers who want to hold funerals for fertilized eggs and ban stem-cell research.

How do we make our society better when it comes to protecting the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This is about more than one issue. For instance, it seems to me that capital punishment is a terrible idea. Our society would be a better place to live if the state could rise above acts of vengeance. Symbols matter. On the other hand, if a policeman is dealing with a criminal who has taken hostages and has started killing them, and will not surrender, I hope the cop shoots him before others are killed. This is not an act of vengeance but one of need, to protect society when other means aren’t available. And I’d rather live in a society that is willing to sometimes kill out of necessity than follow some theological “sanctity of life” ethic to an absurd extreme.

It seems to me that there will always be a need for some abortions to terminate some troubled early pregnancies. But
this is no small thing. It is a sad reality. But compassion for women facing a tough pregnancy has to be balanced by the greater good. Sometimes compassion for the innocent means saying no to a couple that wants to abort their child because their unborn daughter is going to need surgery to correct a harelip and they want a “perfect” designer baby. Sometimes it means saying yes to a thirteen-year-old who has been molested or raped.

I think there is a difference between killing in cold blood, when there are other alternatives, and killing out of necessity. And I don’t think this difference is always clear. But executing a criminal who is no longer a threat to anyone is different (practically and symbolically) from shooting a hostage-taker who is about to kill innocent people. Fighting Japan after it attacked us was different from attacking an Iraq that was no threat to us.

I want to live in a society that is willing to
struggle
with these balancing acts. I want to be in a society that values human life, because I am human, and far from perfect, and I want to be valued.

What I
don’t
want to live in is a culture that makes sweeping and dismissive secular or religious “theological” one-size-fits-all decisions that oversimplify complex issues. And ideas of the good life based on perfection are a trap, a trap that prophetic books like
Brave New World
gave us fair warning about, and that films like
Blade Runner
explored. We have been warned.