On the other blog, a post about the connection between hate, hateful speech, and violence.
Another Shooting
This time it’s at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The first news reports say no one was killed, but three people (including the suspected shooter) are being treated for gunshot wounds. The suspect is an 88-year-old man named James von Brunn who has a record of white supremacist writing.
Update: I’m hearing from MSNBC that a police officer was killed. Terribly sad.
Update: OK, this is weird. You might remember that the DHS report said right-wing groups would likely try to recruit military veterans because of their military experience. The report also said “those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists.” However, the small number of military veterans who do get mixed up in extremist organizations tend to be among the more dangerous members, which makes it advisable to keep an eye on the small number of military veterans who do get mixed up in extremist organizations. Right-wing pot-stirrers willfully misread the report to mean that all returning veterans constitute a threat to national security and had to be watched, which is not at all what it said. Dave Neiwert explains.
According to this right-wing blogger, Fox News is going on and on about how the shooting vindicates the DHS because the accused shooter is a veteran. He’s a World War II veteran, for bleep’s sake. This is, like, wrong twice. Yeah it vindicates the DHS report, but not because of the shooter’s veteran status.
Update: Debbie Schlussel is blaming Muslims and 9/11 truthers for today’s shooting. I’m serious. Pardon me if I don’t give her a link.
Update: Malkin is saying the shooter was neither right nor left, just loony. See Dave Neiwert for rebuttal.
Life in Post-Bush America
Americans are traveling to India, Singapore and Thailand to get low-cost surgery.
Scientists say global climate change already has changed the oceans.
America has a growing food crisis.
We’re still taking measure of how badly the Bush Administration ran the country into the ground.
The Senate room most likely to hold the Sotomayor hearings has been blessed with prayer and oil.
What a country.
Unbelievable
A right-wing blogger, responding to my last post on abortion, wrote,
And this notion of “underground abortion providers” is a myth in the U.S. There are untold clinics in the U.S. providing abortion services.
Let’s see if I can explain this simply enough so that a garden vegetable, or maybe even a rightie, can grasp it.
Abortion is still legal in the United States. So, there is not much in the way of an underground abortion industry here, because women prefer to get abortions in nice, legal clinics and hospitals. In countries where abortion is legal, generally there are little or no “underground” abortion services.
However, in countries where abortion is illegal, abortions are performed by “underground abortion providers.” This was true in the U.S. before Roe v. Wade. It is still very much true throughout Latin America, which has higher rates of abortion than the U.S. even though abortion is illegal nearly everywhere in Latin America.
It is true of all countries in which abortions are illegal. Well, except maybe Ireland, where women can just take a ferry ride to Britain. I’m not sure about Ireland.
If abortion were criminalized in the U.S., there would be a thriving underground abortion industry in no time, just as there was before Roe v. Wade.
I hope that is clear.
Ross Douthat’s “Stricter Legal Regime”
Today’s New York Times column by Ross Douthat begins sanely enough. He acknowledges that the late-term abortions performed by the late Dr. George Tiller were done for hard, and heartbreaking, reasons — “women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on ‘women’ who were really girls of 10.”
Then he goes south a bit, insinuating that Dr. Tiller also performed abortions for frivolous reasons, even though Kansas law requires two independent physicians to sign off on a late abortion to prevent that from happening.
And then Douthat gets into the heart of his argument — women must not be allowed to have abortions unless the government decides they have a really, really good reason.
Yes, many pregnancies are terminated in dire medical circumstances. But these represent a tiny fraction of the million-plus abortions that take place in this country every year. …
… The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule. Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women’s lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.
No, the argument for legal and medically safe abortions — which would still be regulated, as is any medical procedure — is that there are times when pregnancy and childbirth would place an unbearable burden on a woman’s life, and so women will seek abortions. Their reasons are as infinite as the details of their lives. If abortions are not legal, they will either abort themselves or they will find underground abortion providers, medically trained or not.
And if the worldwide statistics on abortions in countries where abortions are illegal tell us anything, they tell us that making abortion illegal has little impact on the rate of abortion, just on how they are done. Instead of a medically regulated clinic, women take black market drugs, or perforate themselves with sharp objects, or flush themselves with caustic chemicals, or have themselves bludgeoned in the stomach. They take their chances on abortion providers who may have little training and even less interest in antiseptics.
And we know this is true because it happens in many parts of the world, every day, in places where legal abortion is not available.
Douthat continues,
[T]he law is a not a philosophy seminar. It’s the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense. And it can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons.
No, the purpose of law is to maintain conditions that allow civilizations and societies to exist and function, not to enforce morality. As I’ve argued elsewhere, many things are immoral that should not necessarily be illegal. Most of us consider adultery to be immoral, for example. But as a people who respect personal freedom, we generally think that matters involving sexual acts between consenting adults are not the government’s business. Lies (except under oath in a courtroom), envy, and countless other matters are between an individual and his spouse/friends/God/karma.
There’s a tacit understanding that some matters of morality are to be worked out in peoples’ private lives, and others are regulated by law. What’s the difference? The difference is whether an act creates a civic burden. Without enforceable contracts, for example, we’d still be living in caves. On the other hand, civilization tolerates adultery fairly well.
It so happens that most stuff that’s illegal also is generally considered immoral. Since morality is about how people relate to each other, it figures that law and morality overlap. (The venn diagram above is flawed because the blue area ought to be bigger, but I made it from the best blank venn diagram I could find.) But the purpose of law is not to enforce morality; nor is morality an argument for creating law.
One of the most fundamental requirements of a functional civilization is that there must be some restriction on killing other people. This has less to do with “sacredness” and more to do with the fact that people can’t very well live in social groups if they all can kill each other without penalty or compunction.
Through most of human history, few if any societies have banned the killing of humans outright. Rather, there were rules about who could kill whom. A nobleman could kill a serf, but a serf couldn’t kill a nobleman, for example. The notion that the life of every person is worthy of legal protection just because it’s human life is relatively recent and has little to do with how homicide came to be a criminal act.
Abortions, however, do not create a civic burden. Abortions have been practiced throughout human history. Although you can find some very old laws that restrict late abortions, there was little interest in banning abortion altogether until the 19th century. Civilization soldiered on, somehow.
So, I reject the argument that law is “the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense.” I’m not sure what “custom” Douthat refers to, since abortion has long been customary even where it is illegal. And my definition of “common sense” is “stuff I think is right even though I can’t think of an argument for it.”
Indeed, the argument that some abortions take place in particularly awful, particularly understandable circumstances is not a case against regulating abortion. It’s the beginning of precisely the kind of reasonable distinction-making that would produce a saner, stricter legal regime.
Translation: We can ban abortions and then make women petition government tribunals to receive legal dispensations in extreme cases.
Alternate translation: Hello, coat hanger.
This is “saner”?
If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions — Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? — is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.
No, the reason there’s so much fierce argument about abortion is that there are some among us who do not respect women and cannot abide the thought of permitting women to be their own moral agents.
And I love the way Douthat keeps saying he wants to “regulate” abortion. Again, abortion is regulated. It is regulated to maintain safe medical standards, for example.
What he’s really talking about is not regulating abortions, but regulating women.
If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do –would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.
Douthat is hallucinating. There will be no peace as long as there is a violent, extremist movement determined to ban all abortions, including first-trimester abortions, and as long as politicians cater to that movement. I would be very happy if we as a nation could come to some sort of firm decision about a gestational limit on elective abortion, as long as it’s not absurdly early and doctors are given broad discretion in matters of medical need. What’s standing in the way of that is the so-called “right to life” movement, not Roe v. Wade.
Do you want to talk “compromise,” Douthat? The only acceptable “common ground” is encouraging contraceptive use to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
For a sane view, be sure to read Marie Cocco.
Nearly two decades ago, Bill Clinton said he believed abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” The “rare” part was supposed to come from greater support for birth control and better sex education for young people.
Here is how the anti-abortion movement and its supporters in Congress responded: They carried out a campaign, which continues to this day, to curtail women’s access to birth control and severely limit teenagers’ access to comprehensive sex education.
Working first through the Republicans who took over Congress in the mid-1990s and then through the Bush administration, they blocked access to emergency contraception, birth-control pills that are taken after unprotected sex. They continue to promote state legislation and a movement among anti-abortion pharmacists to allow druggists to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. They wish to expand the current “conscience clause” allowing medical professionals who have ethical objections to abortion to cover birth control and abortion referrals for rape victims who might be pregnant. They spent billions on abstinence-only sex education that has been proved, time and again, to be ineffective at keeping teenagers from having sex.
When the original House version of the economic stimulus bill included a bureaucratic change to make it easier for state Medicaid programs to offer family planning services to poor women, Republicans caused such a fuss that Obama prevailed upon Democratic congressional leaders to remove it. His gesture won not a single Republican vote for the stimulus package in the House.
“The common ground is family planning,” says Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. Yet Maloney has spent much of the past decade in the forefront of congressional efforts to push back the right-wing assault on family planning.
It is time to stop hoping that somehow, through pleasing rhetoric or even genuine efforts to build bridges, those who oppose allowing women to control their reproductive lives can be persuaded to some other view. Continuing the pretense on this point isn’t naive. It’s cynical.
Pull “The Trigger”
Certainly President Obama’s health care proposals fall short of what most of us want — national single payer — but at least there’s a public insurance plan that promises to provide coverage for many Americans now locked out of private insurance, either by lack of money or a “preexisting condition.”
Although I expect many Americans would still fall through the cracks and remain cut off from health care, I believe the public option would be a great help to millions who don’t have health insurance now. If that option is removed from the reform package, however, what’s left will amount to feeble tweaks of the current system that would make little tangible difference to anyone. Well, anyone but health insurance executives.
Naturally Republicans are fighting the public plan tooth and nail. Now there’s a “compromise” option championed by “moderates” that effectively would remove the public plan without officially killing it.
My definition of a “moderate” in this context — politicians who vote against the interests of their constituents not because of lunatic right-wing ideology, but because they’ve just plain been bought off.
“Moderate” Republican Senator Olympia Snowe came up with the idea of a “trigger” that would postpone the public plan to some hazy place in the future unless private insurance fails to meet certain benchmarks. Then the public plan option would be taken off the shelf and put into effect.
This means there never will be a public plan, except on paper. Even if private insurance misses the benchmarks, you know that Congress will come up with fine excuses for them so that the public plan doesn’t happen.
Ryan Grim reports for Huffington Post that a pack of Blue Dog Democrats are backsliding on earlier pledges to back the public plan and are coming out in favor of the trigger. Although the Blue Dog Coalition (click here for member list) hasn’t officially declared support for the trigger, it may be heading in that direction. If enough Democrats sell us out for the “trigger” option, health care reform is dead.
And, once again, the Democratic Party will have failed us, and once again, special interests and not the people will set public policy.
Lost
At the New York Times, Monica Davey gives us a glimpse into the whacky world of the Fetus People. Apparently the murder of Dr. George Tiller has confounded the vocational jerks who have besieged his clinic for years . Now they literally don’t know what to do with themselves.
I take it there are people who actually moved to Wichita just so they could picket Dr. Tiller’s clinic. I suppose some of them have spouses who work to earn a living, but one does wonder if they’re being paid.
This is noteworthy:
“There’s so much disagreement,†said Mark S. Gietzen, president of the Kansas Coalition for Life. Mr. Gietzen spent his time last week juggling calls from volunteers who wondered what would come of their regular shifts outside Dr. Tiller’s clinic, where they planted rows of crosses each day and tried to talk to women going in.
“If you went to a meeting, sometimes you would think the enemy was other pro-life people, not abortion,†he said.
Not all anti-abortion advocates, he said, favored the bloody “truth truck†(“Abortion is an ObamaNation,†it reads) parked outside his house or agreed on what protesters should call out to women going inside the clinic (obscenity-filled insults or offers of help) and how loudly.
Even now, Mr. Gietzen said, they were not of one mind about statements many groups here have issued condemning the killing of Dr. Tiller. “You can’t be pro-life and go around killing people, but some people are really mad at me for saying that,†he said.
In other words, it’s a culture in which hate and murder are always on the table.
Some of them don’t believe Dr. Tiller’s clinic is really going to close; or, at least, there are no immediate plans to re-open it.
Despite the family announcement about the clinic’s uncertain future, some here seem convinced that it will secretly reopen on Monday. On Sunday, Mr. Gietzen said some of his more than 600 trained volunteers already were organized in shifts for a new week, in case visiting doctors were flown in.
Picketing that clinic was their purpose in life. In some ways, they may miss it more than anyone else. I opened Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer at random and found this (pp. 14-15)
The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
If Dr. Tiller’s clinic really doesn’t re-open, eventually some of the protesters will drift away to other clinics. Some may eventually attach themselves to another cause — Hoffer believed mass movements were interchangeable, since they “draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind.” Either way, when Dr. Tiller died they lost the center of their lives. How can they go on?
The suspect, Scott Roeder, claims more such murders are “planned,” but this may be wishful thinking on his part. One anti-abortion leader called Roeder “a fruit and a lunatic.” Dude, if he’s the fruit, you’re the tree.
No Magic in the Marketplace
In 2006, Massachusetts mandated health insurance and initiated subsidized insurance for people who couldn’t afford private insurance. This suddenly gave a few hundred thousand people access to standard health care who didn’t have it before. However, Massachusetts now has a shortage of primary care physicians to tend to those people.
There are several reasons for this, but a one is that young doctors at the beginning of their careers carry whopping student loan debts, which inspires them to gravitate to higher-paying specialties like surgery. Another is that primary care physicians tend to have higher administrative costs.
(BTW, I’ve seen the primary care physician shortage held up as a reason to avoid universal health care — if everybody can see a doctor, then there will be waiting lines. Like in Canada. I know you love that argument as much as I do.)
At the Boston Globe, doctor and novelist Stephen J. Bergman writes,
THE REASONS for the shortage of primary-care doctors have been clearly described: low pay, long hours, the crossword puzzle of insurance forms required to get paid – which leads to three administrative assistants for every doctor. But the issue is being framed using a classic tactic of the private insurance industry: in order to make ends meet, cut payments to higher-paid specialists and redistribute to primary-care doctors. This pitting of doctor against doctor is a classic tactic of the disastrous healthcare system in which we find ourselves
I would add that if the only way supply can meet demand is by artificially tweaking the system — either by redistributing pay or by keeping large numbers of people uninsured, thereby suppressing demand — does this not tell us that a “free market” solution to the health care crisis will not work?
I want this paragraph on a lot of billboards —
The issue isn’t that primary-care doctors get paid less than cardiac surgeons, but that the system of healthcare rests on insurance companies and their CEOs making huge profits. No amount of cost-cutting can save enough money to support a for-profit system. The only solution is a universal, government-run healthcare system. Surveys suggest that a majority of Americans and doctors desire this. Any plan that puts private insurance in anything other than an optional, “concierge” system for the rich is just whistling past the graveyard of American healthcare.
See also Robert Reich.
National Review: Somebody Help Them
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The National Review wants to make fun of Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark, so they dress her up like a Buddhist monk? And make her look Asian? Let’s see, how many insulting stereotypes can be jammed into one picture?
I can’t see the details of Buddha Sonia’s right hand, but if her thumb and forefinger are touching, this is called the vitarka mudra. It represents teaching and discussion of the dharma.
Update: I agree with Matt Yglesias; this isn’t so much racist as deranged.
Update Saturday: Ann and Cara say the caricature reveals that to the National Review, there are two races — white and nonwhite. Could be.
I’m still befuddled that the National Reviewers chose an iconic image of a southeast Asian Buddha to represent “wisdom.” It’s something of a back-handed compliment, I suppose. However, since the intention of the cover image is to ridicule, are they saying there is something ridiculous about Buddhism? Wasn’t there an iconic image from western culture they could have used? They could have dressed her up as Justice holding the scales, for example.
Consider also if the National Reviewers had used Christian iconography to ridicule Sotomayor — dress her up as the Blessed Virgin, for example. How many nanoseconds would pass before William Donohue was all over mass media screaming about anti-Catholicism?
No Lone Gunmen
The Justice Department said today that the feds are investigating the murder of Dr. George Tiller.
The agency “will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law,” said Loretta King, an acting assistant attorney general at the department.
I’m hearing from various sources, none official, that suspect Scott Roeder had long and more-than-casual association with a number of right-wing groups, in particular Operation Save America, which seems to be some kind of offshoot of Operation Rescue. Hmm.
Ellen Goodman produced a powerful piece of writing on the “myth of the lone shooter.”
IT IS believed that the shooter acted alone. … But Michael Griffin also acted alone when he killed David Gunn in 1993. Paul Hill acted alone when he killed John Britton in 1994. John Salvi acted alone and so did Eric Rudolph and James Kopp. This suspect is hardly lonely in this murderous cast of lone actors.
It was an isolated incident.
So it was. There was no grand scheme of assassinations. But it was also an isolated incident when Tiller’s clinic was first bombed in 1986. It was an isolated incident when he was shot in both arms in 1993. Each anthrax threat, each invasion, even the vandalizing that took place last month at his Wichita clinic were all linked in a daisy chain of “isolated incidents.”
As Goodman says, after each of these isolated incidents the major anti-reproductive rights organizations react with shock and denounce the murder or threats. But they don’t denounce the extremist groups or the rhetoric that validates violence against abortion clinics and staff.
It seems to me that people like Michael Griffin and Paul Hill were not isolated at all. They are cocooned in an extremist culture that permits — nay, encourages and celebrates — thoughts, words and actions that hurt abortion providers and intimidate their patients. And any part of the anti-reproductive rights movement that tolerates that culture, that refuses to condemn it, is feeding the passions that lead to murder.