So you’re working at your office, and you hear gunshots outside. Looking into the hall, you see a young man out there and let him into your office so he doesn’t get caught in the crossfire. A couple of minutes later, the army bangs on your door. You let them in, and they arrest the young man, who they say is a terrorist.

Do you now deserve to be bulldozed? You do according to Meryl Yourish, who reports that someone the Israeli Army claims is a terrorist was arrested in the offices of the International Solidarity Movement, the organization Rachel Corrie worked with. The Jerusalem Post article Meryl links to doesn’t bother describing what happened from the ISM’s point of view, but the New York Times article does:

As far as I can tell, Haaretz didn’t even consider this story important enough to report on, but anti-Palestinians all over the blogoverse are crowing about it.

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- Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, U.S. Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945. (Via Hegemoney).

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Then this post at Pedantry is a must-read. Sam argues that change comes from the participation of both radicals and moderates; the radicals make the issues hard to ignore, while the moderates provide a “reasonable” face that can be negotiated with. A sample:

Go read Sam’s whole post - it’s really excellent.

I tend to agree with Sam’s analysis, but unfortunately it’s hard to discern a solution. We need to make “liberal” a non-dirty word, but how can we do that? Kevin thinks the answer is restraining the extremists, but I see two problems with that. One, as Sam argues (and as I argued earlier), extremists are necessary in creating worthwhile social change. Getting rid of extremists is simply a bad idea, if you want progressive change.

Two, it can’t be done anyway, because reducing the numbers of “extremists” won’t reduce their prominence in the news (which is what Kevin really seems to want). If you hold a gay Pride march with 100,000 folks dressed in jeans and tank-tops and one person dressed in a sequined cape and pope hat, the news media will always focus on the person in the pope hat. (You can really see this at the anti-war protests; the cameras flinch from any demonstrator with an intelligent analysis, but if a drunken idiot shouts “we’re gonna shut this city down!” he’ll be put on the air every time).

Do I see a solution? Well, for extremists like me, I think our task is to try and build ourselves into the largest, most annoying, least compromising mass movement we can. I’m actually pretty optimistic about the movement that’s building… we’ve got a sort of “serial monogamy” approach going, where the issue changes from year to year (1998 anti-WTO, 2000 pro-Nader, 2002 anti-war) but the movement continues to exist and grow. The louder and more extreme we can be, the more moderates can take liberal positions while seeming reasonable and centrist.

For moderates like Kevin, I guess it’s not really my business what they do. I don’t think the “give in to the Republicans on everything” approach Democrats used before the 2002 elections was very successful. My favorite strategy for liberal moderates is for them to concentrate on building the kind of intellectual superstructure Seeing the Forest is always talking about… we need lefty counterparts to the Heritage Foundation, providing an endless stream of authoritative-sounding reports and talking heads, and we don’t have them.

The other huge problem liberal moderates face is the enormous anti-Democrat bias of the mass media. In the 2000 cycle, centrist Democrats refused to call the media on their bias, while the Republicans were unrelenting in their criticism of the “liberal media”… with the result that the media bent over backwards to avoid criticizing Bush, but felt free to slam Gore relentlessly. If Democrats don’t find a better way to handle the media by 2004, they might as well give up on the White House right now.

There’s a little debate going on between Avedon Carol and Kevin Drum in Pandagon’s comments section. I can’t resist commenting on Kevin’s last, so very wrong paragraph.

Let’s examine Kevin’s first claim: that there was a PBA ban in 1997 which would have passed if it wasn’t for those dratted liberal extremists.

The Senate voted on two alternatives to the Republican-proposed PBA ban in 1997. The better-known one, proposed by Tom Daschle, would have banned all post-viability abortions except to protect the life or health of the mother. It lost 36-64. 34 Democrats vote for it, 11 voted against it. (Democrats who voted against it included not only “extremist liberals,” but also right-wing Democrats such as Senator Breaux.) And if every Democrat in the Senate had voted for it? Then it still would have lost, 47-53.

The other alternative bill, proposed by Diane Feinstein, was similar, but used broader wording to protect the health of the mother. This proposal was creamed, 28-72. If 100% of Democrats had voted for it, it would have lost 46-54.

So Kevin is mistaken to blame the loss of the 1997 bills on “extremist liberals.” No matter how many “liberals” had favored these bills, they still would have been defeated by a strong Republican majority in the Senate. (And if by some miracle they passed the Senate, they would have had even less chance of getting past the House.)

Second - and more importantly - Kevin argues that if those bills had passed, we would not have a “real ban” today. (Kevin is being a bit hyperbolic; PBAs haven’t been banned yet. But they probably will be, depending on who replaces O’Connor in the Supreme Court.) But even that seems doubtful. The pro-lifers in Congress don’t want to merely ban late-term D&X abortions; if they did, they could have passed their legislation long ago, merely by writing a provision into the legislation making it clear that their bill wasn’t intended to ban pre-viability abortions or D&E abortions.

Instead, Republicans (on the federal level) have refused again and again to put such provisions into their bills. Why? Because their goal isn’t to ban late-term abortions and one abortion procedure; their goal is to use vague, broad language to ban as many abortions as possible.

What would have happened if Daschle or Feinstein’s version had passed? Republicans would have dismissed them as worthless non-bans (that’s what they called the laws at the time), and would have put forward largely the same bill they put forward this year, saying that their bill is a “real” PBA ban. And since “partial birth abortion” isn’t a term with a firm meaning, who could say they’d be wrong?

In short, Kevin - who I respect on many issues - doesn’t know his elbow from a hole in his hat when discussing PBAs. Sorry, Kevin.

One more point - the PBA ban that passed the Senate this year passed because it was supported by most republicans and by centrist democrats. Had the “centrist” democrats who voted for the ban voted against it instead, it would have lost 48-52. So as long as Kevin is casting about for Democrats to blame the PBA ban on….

Kevin at Calpundit sets his sights on his real enemy: extreme liberals. Other folks have already rebutted Kevin (Body & Soul, Atrios, and Mac Diva).

Personally, I’m very unconcerned. Moderates like Kevin have always been with us, sensibly telling us not to rock the boat, to wait, to be patient. We mustn’t make people uncomfortable!. That’s what they told Alice Paul when she was doing a hunger strike for women’s suffrage; that’s what they told Martin Luther King when he was locked up in jail; that’s what they told liberals who supported gay rights in the 1970s. Don’t go too fast, don’t ask too much, don’t do anything that would make the mainstream folks nervous.

But although they’ve always wanted to get rid of us, they never have. Which is a good thing, because every good idea liberalism has ever had has come from people who were extremists in their time. (If gay rights activists had listened to moderate, concerned heterosexuals like Kevin Drum, they’d still be waiting for the Stonewall Riot to happen someday.)

P.S. Although perhaps I’m not such an extremist after all. In this post, Kevin links to this internet quiz, which he says is “not too bad as a quick and dirty test of where you fall in the political spectrum.” The quiz dubs me a liberal of the non-extreme variety, which probably says more about the quiz’s defects than my politics, alas.

Update: Be sure to read Kevin’s response.

I’m a few days too late on this one, but I just wanted to point out that Tish at Fatshadow totally rocks. Lately, she’s been responding to a San Francisco “resolution to create a task force on childhood obesity.” You know, get those kids in school to exercise, that sort of thing. Tish had planned to make a speech before the SF rules committee, asking them to change the emphasis from obesity to health. She put the text of the speech online… here’s a sample:

It turned out they had already changed the language, probably due to the email campaign Tish and other fat activists have had going. So, hooray for Tish! You’re my hero today.

In a follow-post today, Tish is already seeing things to regret in her victory…

I definitely agree with Tish here; I was the kid who would rather curl up with a book. But let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good - what Tish and others did will potentially make life less painful for a whole lotta fat kids in San Francisco, and that’s very cool.

(And while you’re there, read Tish’s post on civil disobedience, too.)

Blueheron is pleased by Gunn’s interracial one-night stand on Angel:

As one of Blueheron’s readers points out in comments, Blueheron isn’t very aware of TV outside of fantasy and science fiction, or he’d know that interracial romances are now relatively common. In fact, there’s even been at least one instance of backlash: Eriq LaSalle, who played Dr. Benton on E.R., demanded that the show write a positive romance with a black woman for Dr. Benton. As LaSalle told Ebony:

I agree with Blueheron that it’s screwed up for Star Trek to insist on intra-racial couplings; in a universe where it’s seemingly common for humans to date Vulcans, Klingons, Changlings, and all the other races with funny ears and forehead ridges, it seems odd that the characters are so fussy about skin color. But I’m not so thrilled with Gunn’s multiple inter-racial romances on Angel; I can’t help but suspect that the reason he only has romances with white folks is that Gunn’s the show’s one and only non-white character.

Of course, if they brought in a black actress just to be Gunn’s love interest, that would be problematic as well… since it would be clear that they hired her only to give Gunn a black love interest.

There is a way around this, of course, which is to create minority characters all the time, incorporated into the universe. What if there were multiple characters of color on Angel, who appeared on the show in every single episode? What if, instead of being a show about a white guy, his five white assistants (one in green makeup), and his one black assistant, it was a show with seven lead actors, and several of them weren’t white?

I know, I know… that’s just crazy talk.

Matthew Yglesias responded to this post of mine back in February. I was discussing the one reason I came close to favoring our invasion of Iraq (and still the outcome I most hope for): that the sanctions, and their accompanying humanitarian disaster (350,000 children under age 5 killed, etc), will be ended.

Matthew argued that I should favor the war, since of the politically viable options, having a war and ending sanctions is better than no war and neverending sanctions. He then went on to comment:

It’s curious that Matthew connects the sanctions question to the 2000 election. I wonder if it’s occurred to Matthew that, from the perspective of “consequentialism” and sanctions (and with hindsight’s benefit), the candidate I should have voted for in 2000 was George Bush?

After all, in Matthew’s opinion, a war on Iraq does less harm to innocent Iraqis than continued sanctions do. Doesn’t that mean that Bill Clinton’s policies (sanctions) were worse for Iraqi innocents than George Bush’s policies?

Before 9/11, you’ll recall, some Bush administration officials - mainly State department types - were pushing to reform the sanctions policy (aka “smart sanctions”). President Gore couldn’t have allowed that, because he (or any Democrat) would have faced relentless right-wing criticism for being soft on Saddam. (Republicans, who are perceived as tougher in foreign policy, have more leeway; aka “only Nixon could go to China”).

More recently, of course, Bush has declared war on Iraq - and, horrible as that is, it seems likely to end the sanctions policy. I doubt that we would now be at war with Iraq if Gore were president; therefore, had Gore been President, the sanctions would continue.

No matter how you look at it, the best chance of ending the sanctions in 2000 was George Bush winning the election. So, according to Matthew’s logic, my mistake in 2000 was not voting for George Bush.

Maybe. But I’m not a consequentialist. Or, rather, I am a consequentialist, in that the main thing I care about is outcomes; but I’m not a fortune-teller. In 2000, I was faced with major-party candidates who both seemed certain to continue Iraqi sanctions, and no crystal ball to tell me about the forthcoming Iraq invasion.

Faced with a system in which all viable candidates favor mass murder of Iraqi children, what is the reasonable response?

I don’t think that’s a simple, or easy, question. One answer - I suppose consequentialism’s answer - would be to give up on ending the Iraqi sanctions. Those children are as good as dead already, and nothing the American voter does will change that. A policy option of non-genocide towards Iraqi children is not on the table. Therefore, to care about Iraqi children at all while voting is mistaken.

The other answer is that when tragedy is extreme enough, taking a long shot is better than taking no shot at all. Do I think that a long-term Green campaign to reform the Democrats from without - and by “long-term,” I’m thinking 20 or 30 years - is likely to put better, more humane policies on the table? Is it likely to create a political reality in which being against the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians is a realistic policy option?

No, I don’t think it’s especially likely. But I think it offers better odds than simply giving up opposing genocide as politically unviable, which is what “consequentialism” seems to call for. When the problems one faces are extreme enough, going for the long-shot solution is better than giving up altogether.

Matthew might call this another example of my favoring “personal ideological integrity over the suffering of others.” (How voting for Al Gore, who favored the sanctions, is an example of caring about the suffering of Iraqis is beyond me.) But I think Matthew’s reading of me is not only unkind but inaccurate.

In 2000, I saw two bad options. In one case, I could vote for the “lesser evil” Gore. The advantage of this is that, although I’m giving up on most of my long-term goals (ending sanctions, promoting fair trade practices, electoral reform, etc), I might gain short-term advantage on some goals that seem less important to me, but are still very important (tax policy, etc). Then again, I might not; I could vote for Gore and he might nonetheless lose the election, or I could vote for Gore and find that Gore supported policies I abhor.

In the other case, I could vote for Nader. This had the advantage of at least presenting a possibility of long-term reform in many important issues; not through winning the election (that won’t happen), but through - ideally - forcing the Democrats to co-opt some Green positions over the course of the next two or three decades. But it had the disadvantage of making it more likely that Bush will win the election, which could lead to all sorts of bad outcomes (and did).

In neither case is my goal seeking “personal ideological integrity.” Like Matthew, I want to reduce suffering; but unlike Matthew, I’m not sure which strategy will best accomplish that goal. In the short term, I think the best way to reduce the “suffering of others” is supporting lesser evils like Gore; but in the long term, failing to work on reforming the system - failing to put “opposing killing Iraqi children” on the table of viable policy options - causes far more suffering than four or eight years of President Bush can.

I reluctantly decided it was better to work on long-term strategy than to resign myself to a lifetime of lesser-evilism. Am I certain I made the right choice? No. As I said, I have no crystal ball. (And when I think I have a crystal ball, I’m frequently mistaken. In 2000, I honestly thought that if Bush won the election, at least the Democrats would do well in the 2002 elections.)

But I’m not certain I made the wrong choice, either. Bush is awful, but I don’t know that he’s worse than Gore would have been (if, as Matthew seems to think, Bush’s war will end the sanctions, then that alone may make Bush better than Gore). When you’re contemplating a long-term movement for substantive change, I don’t think it’s useful to try and judge success or failure based on just a handful of years.

I do think that a system which puts forward two candidates who agree on a policy as horrible as the Iraqi sanctions is awful beyond measure. In 2000, I voted for Nader because fighting that system was, for me, a higher priority than fighting George Bush. If I had it to do over, I’d probably vote the same way, and with as little certainty.

Hey, since I seem to be in the mood to discuss third-party stuff, let me just say to all you Green-bashers: welcome. Feel free to post in the comments, just be polite. I’ll try and encourage folks to be polite to you in turn (except for Amy S., who gets a free pass from me. After you’ve been a friend of mine for nearly 20 years, you’ll get a free pass too). This is a subject folks can legitimately disagree on.

Just one thing: Please, no long (and somewhat condescending) explanations of how Nader could never, ever win a presidential race. We know. Really. No Green Party candidate will win the a presidential election in the foreseeable future, and probably not ever - this is obvious. All you convince me of, by explaining this again and again, is that you’re incapable of listening to arguments, so you just knock down straw men.

The intent of the Greens isn’t to win by winning elections - I mean, that would be nice, but it ain’t happening soon (except, of course, for the many Greens who have won local elections, but that’s another subject). If anything, the Greens are attempting to do something like the Eugene Debs model. Debs, as you’ll recall, ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (running from inside a prison). He never came close to winning an election.

Arguably, though, Debs did affect policy. According to Debs, “the program of socialism” he was running on included “old-age pensions” (aka social security), “the minimum wage,” “industrial insurance” (also known as unemployment compensation), weekends, and “welfare of labor” (the welfare system). He also campaigned for laws against child labor, eight-hour work days, and “securing for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.”

Did Debs ever win an election? Not even close. Did he eventually get his favored policies enough attention so that the mainstream was forced to take some of them seriously? Arguably he did. It didn’t take winning an election - but it did take sticking with the program, decade after decade, until the Democrats co-opted parts of his platform to take the wind out of Socialist sails..

So if you want to argue that the Greens can never get anything they want, go ahead: but please don’t argue it by arguing that we can’t win the White House. We know that already. Winning national elections has never been our strategy.

The American media largely limits its view of politics to questions that are at issue between the big two parties. Abortion is a major issue of contention between the two parties, therefore it is discussed. Monica Lewinsky was a major issue of contention between the two parties, therefore it is discussed.

Where the parties agree, there is no discussion in major media. The benevolence of so-called “free trade” is agreed on by the two parties, so is not discussed. The idea that “social security is in crisis” is agreed on by the two parties, so the alternative (that social security is in pretty good shape) is not discussed. Real election reform is opposed by both major parties, so cannot be discussed in the mainstream press; only faux-reforms like the ridiculous McCain-Fiengold bill can be discussed.

If you had asked me in 1999 what the single most important issue was, I would have said “the sanctions on Iraq, which have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children”; but since both Democrats and Republicans are (or were) pro-Iraqi-child-killing, the sanctions were not an issue the media ever discussed.

One thing which particularly infuriates Democrats about Nader is his oft-quoted claim that the two major parties are identical. I never thought that was true (still don’t), but hell, it was a political slogan. (”It’s the economy, stupid” wasn’t exactly a substantive analysis, either). Nader’s point - as he said over and over in interviews - wasn’t that the parties were alike in every detail, but that from the Green Party’s point of view the two major parties are alike in substantive and important ways.

To some extent, I think how much people are capable of seeing that depends on how much they get their thinking about what is and isn’t important from the major media. In 1999, I thought the most important issues were Iraqi sanctions, “free” trade versus fair trade, and comprehensive universal childcare. (Or maybe free universal healthcare. Or maybe AIDS in Africa. Or maybe real election reform. I waver on what the third issue is, to tell you the truth.)

The point is, most of the issues I give a damn about aren’t talked about much in the major media, because the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties are largely in agreement on those issues.

Are there significant differences between the Republicans and the Democrats? Of course there are. But are their differences more important than their agreements? Well, that depends. If you think the issues I care about are unimportant, then the differences between the two parties are more important. From my perspective, the opposite is true.

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Last week, Senator Bob Bennett cracked a joke, suggesting that his colleague Ben Campbell (the only American Indian in the Senate) fix a drought by performing a rain dance.

I initially wrote it off as a harmless joke, but - as I said in an earlier post - Susan Harjo’s reasoning changed my mind:

In the comments to that post, Kevin Drum (aka Calpundit) wrote:

Now, I have a lot of respect for Kevin - his politics are too far right for my tastes, but he’s very smart and means well. Nonetheless, I think he’s made an error here.

I need a name for this fallacy, because I sure see it come up a lot. For now, I’ll call it the White Guy’s Fallacy (I’m a white guy, so I’m allowed to make fun). The way it goes is that a person (not always a white guy) thinks, “well, would I be offended if someone say the same thing about me?” The answer is often “no,” and the initial complaint is thus judged (and dismissed) as “hypersensitivity.”

The problem is, the comparison is usually irrelevant. Take Kevin’s example. Ignoring the fact that Senator Campbell is not, so far as I know, a shaman (which is the closest counterpart to “chaplain” I know of), the fact is that Native American culture and spirituality has, for centuries, been a fairly constant subject of white mockery and disdain. For a powerful white man to make jokes like that on the Senate floor is calling to mind, and perpetuating, that history of dissing Native Americans.

What Kevin’s chaplain example does, in effect, is to say “suppose we take what Bennett said, and divorce from it all the context that made it offensive. Then it’s no longer offensive, right?” Right, but so what?

Kevin’s comment that “hypersensitivity… sometimes has a political agenda of its own” is interesting, because it seemingly presumes that having a political agenda is always a bad thing.

But is it really? I think there are many worthwhile political agendas that are served when minorities and women demand respect (”demand respect” is, I realize, a loaded term; but so is “hypersensitivity”).

1. When the nation’s leaders speak in public, they are setting the tone for the rest of the culture. If Senators and Congressmen felt comfortable referring to “kikes” and cracking Jewish jokes in public, then that indicates that doing so is mainstream and polite; and anyone who objects would be out on the margins (and perhaps even hypersensitive). Policing how leaders talk in public is a legitimate political agenda.

2. A marginalized group that can’t even command minimal politeness in public - that can’t, for example, reasonably expect that its sacred rituals won’t be publicly mocked - has much less chance of having any more substantive policy agenda put through.
3. Respect and courtesy are legitimate political ends to seek, in their own right.

Finally, I should point out that it’s not Susan Harjo making a big deal of this - it’s Bob Bennett. If he had done the right thing at the start, by saying “I apologize for my careless remark; it was never my intent to offend,” then that would have been the end of it.

When I step on someone’s foot, I don’t complain that their toes are overly sensitive, nor do I make elaborate explanations of how I came to step on their foot (”you have to understand, where I meant to put my foot was…”). I apologize and move on. Most of the time, inadvertent racism (homophobia, sexism, etc) should be dealt with the same way.

And for folks like Senator Bennett, who are so adverse to apologizing when they give offense… well, would it be wrong if I suspected them of hyperinsensitivity? And if I suspected that hyperinsensitivity (so common among, although not unique to, straight white men) of having a political agenda all its own?

While I was poking around the excellent Indianz.com website, I ran across this funny post by Steve Russell, predicting what will happen if the forthcoming BIA (Bureau of Iraqi Affairs) is modeled after the current BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs).

There’s more - click here to read the whole thing.

Update: Question for readers: So the writer says he wrote this “from something Pax Riddle sent me and I recognize that he rewrote it from an old spoof of the BIA that was around years ago…so I think we have the classic folk tale, growing like a snowball, not to “belong” to any one person…” Does that mean it’s okay for me to swipe this idea for a comic strip?

Bob Bennet, Republican Senator from Utah, is being called on by American Indian leaders to apologize for a racist remark he made on the Senate floor. Bennet was discussing drought in the Western U.S..

When I first read this story, it seemed like a harmless remark to me (which doesn’t reflect well on me). But I think Suzan Harjo has a good point. It would be unimaginable for a Senator to make a remark making light of Jewish religious ceremonies, or Catholic religious ceremonies. Bennett’s remark reflects a long history of bigoted jokes at Indians’ expense (think of how Indians are presented in “Peter Pan”), and he should apologize.

Last September, I blogged about Judge Royce Lamberth adding Gale Norton to the list of Interior Department officials held in contempt of court for their persistent mismanagement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since 1887, the federal government has forcefully “managed assets” on American Indian land, and is legally required to pass the profits on to the legal owners (mostly individual Indians but also some tribes). Instead, the government has withheld billions of dollars, and has kept records so poorly that it can’t even say how much money is owned, and to whom. (For readers unfamiliar with this story, LiP magazine’s summary is pretty good).

Not much has changed since September… the BIA remains the single most incompetent and corrupt part of the Federal government, and their court-ordered efforts at reform continue to be as ineffectual as they are insincere. But there have been a couple of blackly funny quotes in the press lately. I laughed out loud when I read this bit, about Interior Department Assistant Secretary Steven Griles. Griles (a man whose political career defines the term “conflict of interest”) was explaining to a skeptical House of Representatives panel his request for an increase of $183 million to the funding for fixing the accounting problems (for a total of $554 million). The Billings Gazette reports:

Frankly, if that were all at stake, I’d say send him to jail - he probably deserves it.

Another interesting new development since September happened this January, when the Indians suing the government “attempted to quantify their loss.” According to the New York Times:

In fact, there’s a ton of evidence. Maybe Griles would know more about it if his agency wasn’t so prone to illegally destroying evidence. According to LiP, “From 1998 to 1999, at the same time government lawyers were telling the court they were searching for relevant accounting records, the Financial Management Service of the Treasury Department actually destroyed 162 boxes of such records.” And Neal McCaleb, who last year resigned from his position as chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has “violated court orders and federal law by destroying individual Indian trust records with impunity,” according to Alan Balaran, the court-appointed special master overseeing this mess.

Finally, the Supreme Court recently handed down decisions in two Indian suit cases, which the Bush administration was hoping would defuse the trust lawsuit. The cases ended up being split - the Navajo Nation lost their suit, but the White Mountain Tribe won theirs - but Elouise Cobell, the person more-or-less running the trust lawsuit, seems optimistic about the effects of the rulings.

If you’re even slightly an economic geek, you’ll enjoy this funny post by Brad DeLong, discussing how different economic thinkers would react to rich folks paying poor folks to wait in line for them. Then, to extend the fun, you can go read this (unintentionally?) hilarious article by Steven Landsburg, arguing that lines would be more efficient if newcomers went to the front of the line, rather than the back.

Continuing to quote from John Swomley’s March 1988 Humanist article. Mr. Swomley’s article gives something you don’t see too often - real-life examples of women who have had “partial birth” abortions, who would be either forbidden from having abortions at all, or who would have to choose more dangerous procedures, if the pro-lifers have their way.

According to pro-lifers, we can’t have a health exemption because “a mother could go to her doctor and say that a baby would interfere with her homework, and the doctor could then list the reason for the abortion as ‘mother’s health endangered.’” By telling each other campfire stories like that, pro-lifers refuse to deal with the reality of the ways their laws, if enacted, will cause grave injury to real life women. Here’s the reality: Women are not the hateful monsters pro-lifers imagine (”I’ve got to do homework - guess I’d better kill my baby!”). Women’s choices are typically made for good reasons - unlike the decision to block women from getting the medical care they need.

Note that under the terms of the “partial birth” abortion ban the Senate just passed, Maureen’s doctor would legally be forbidden from cutting the umbilical cord, since that would be a “discreet act” killing the fetus. If the “partial birth” ban becomes law, the doctor would face a choice of allowing Maureen to be badly injured, or committing an act which could cause the doctor to lose her/his medical license and spend up to two years in prison.

Out of millions of American women, it’s possible that one or two exist who might have a late-term abortion for an entirely trivial reason. But that’s no reason to block off 100% of American women from medical help they may someday need to prevent real danger to their health and well-being. There is absolutely no excuse for the pro-life opposition to health exemptions to abortion bans.

This post, bending “fair usage” to the limit, quotes extensively from a Humanist article that is not (so far as I can tell) available online. It’s from the March 1998 issue, and written by John M. Swomley, professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology.)

As I’ve pointed out before, it’s not clear that what the so-called “partial birth” abortion law bans is late-term, D&X abortions. What the language describes is not necessarily late-term, and could include many types of abortion other than D&X.

Nonetheless, even if the ban was limited to only D&X abortions, I’d still oppose it unless it made an exception to protect the health of the mother. So why are D&X abortions sometimes better than the alternatives? This passage from Swomley’s article is virtually a FAQ answering that question.

Compare this to the pro-life lie that “partial-birth abortions are never elected for medical reasons, but rather convenience.”

It’s true that women can get abortions even without using D&X. But in some circumstances, other types of abortions risk injuring the mother, and eliminating her ability to bear children in the future. The best way to protect women’s health and lives is to give women and their doctors the freedom to choose what is best, based on the individual needs of each patient.

Unsurprisingly, the “partial-birth abortion ban” passed the Senate 64-33. I’ve blogged some about this bill earlier this week, and I plan another post or two on the subject this weekend.

In the meanwhile, a few links you can check out:

• Who do you trust to make your medical decisions; Senator Rick Santorum or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists?

• In a similar vein, this LA Times article focuses on doctors’ objections to the ban. (Via How Appealing.)
• Check to see how your senators voted. Update: Via Tom Tomorrow, check out the list of Democrats who voted for the PBA ban.
• Jesus’ General has a proposal for protecting fetuses once and for all: “it’s time to arm Fetus-Americans. It’s the only way we’ll ever be able to guarantee their safety.”

So what happens next? The ban goes to the House, which will pass it, and then it’ll be signed into law by Bush. Then someone sues and we all wait to see what the Supreme Court makes of it.

Trish Wilson discusses the Bush administration’s beef against the Violence Against Women Office, and (being Trish) makes many interesting connections that I hadn’t even thought of. (Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Trish!)

So reading Trish’s post got me thinking about the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) VAWA is one of those acts that can easily be derided as sexist - i.e., “so where’s the Violence Against Men Act?” I’ve actually got some sympathy for that question.

The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. The majority of criminal violence against men is “stranger violence”; men are assaulted in bars, attacked by muggers, raped in prison. For women, in contrast, the majority of violence is “intimate violence”; women are beat up by husbands, raped by acquaintances.

Before feminist-led changes - including the Violence Against Women Act - the criminal justice system in the US was, by default, a Violence Against Men Act. Our courts and our cops have been designed mainly to prevent stranger violence - which is to say, the kind of violence that happens mostly to men. VAWA isn’t adding bias to a sex-neutral system; it’s an attempt to correct the flaws of a system which has for centuries been biased towards the needs of men.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that men always have it easy. For the minority of men who are serious victims of intimate violence (men battered by their partners, male victims of rape), support services are even harder to come by than they are for women. And our culture’s complacency with rape in prison - where most of the victims are male - is shameful.

Via the Supergeek comes this PopPolitics “roundtable” discussion of the current (and final) season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All the participants are enjoying season seven (although one of them is, like myself, profoundly bored with the Spike/Buffy relationship), so those of you in the “Buffy sucks why don’t they do the good season three stuff anymore?” crowd might not enjoy it. But I really enjoyed it - one of the most intelligent discussions of the current season I’ve seen, but not so rigorous that I can’t enjoy it when I’m half-asleep (like right now). :-)

Anyway, here’s round one; here’s round two; and here’s round three, which came out shortly after it was announced that this is the final season of Buffy.

Having said that, I’m going to ignore the substance of their discussion, instead going off on my own tangent. In round two, one of the participants says “Riley was a nice jock who never had a hope in hell of really understanding Buffy.”

Riley? A nice jock?

Really?

I disagree. By the time the character left the show, Riley had become a misogynistic jerk (not that I’m complaining; Riley’s misogyny and general creepiness was the most interesting thing about his character). In a way, season-five Riley was where Buffy writers began seriously examining misogyny among ordinary men, a theme that continued with the character of Warren in season six.

Consider how Riley starts his vampire habit; not with prostitutes, but by picking up attractive female vampires at bars. With at least one female vampire, Sandy (and maybe more we didn’t see), he flirted with her at a bar, went someplace private, and then…

If his victims were human, we’d call Riley a serial killer.

Of course, she’s not human; she’s a vampire, demon, evil evil evil. But so what? Buffy’s behavior towards Spike in season six was wrong because cruelty, malice, and using other people without regard for what it does to them is inherently bad; and it is bad despite the fact that Spike the mass-murderer surely deserved all that suffering and worse.

Riley then switched over to prostitution, and the set design made it clear: Riley was not using happy, well-off callgirls a la Sam’s girlfriend in the first season of West Wing. He was exploiting what looked like the poorest, most miserable vampires imaginable; finding a “relationship” where he could pay a powerless woman to give him what he wanted, and all the while blaming it on his girlfriend for not opening up enough to him. To be attracted to that situation at all requires, I think, a fairly significant level of woman-hating.

I actually enjoyed this plotline - every character should have a dark side, and making the nice jock also a creepy misogynist certainly made the character more interesting. It was also compatable with what we had already seen of Riley’s character. Riley, after all, appears to be one of those guys who has no female friendships at all other than 1) his mother-figure and 2) his girlfriend. In general, guys who actually like women have some women friends who aren’t moms or lovers.

What bothered me is that some of season five’s writers - and in particular, Marti Noxon - seemed to take Riley’s side in the dispute: Buffy was in effect blamed for the end of the relationship and for Riley’s disgusting behavior. Remember, for instance, Xander’s speech to Buffy towards the end of “Into the Woods?“

But Riley has been holding back, in huge and significant ways (for instance, by not mentioning his habit of being sucked by vampires for pleasure). And insofar as Buffy has been unable to trust Riley entirely, that may simply show how sharp her instincts are.

Fortunately, Buffy also had some fairly impressive anti-misogynist episodes, such as “I Was Made to Love You” - a Jane Espenson scripted episode that, by ripping apart the “live for your boyfriend” ideology, played like a rebuttal to “Into the Woods.” (Unfortuately for my theory, Espenson seems to endorse the it’s-all-Buffy’s-fault interpretation in “Intervention,” but oh well.)