Left Side of the Aisle #46 - Part 2

The Virginia state Senate killed the "personhood" bill and passed the bill forcing women to have an ultrasound before they can terminate their pregnancy. How the right wing mainstreams extremism.

Last week, in an unexpected move, the Virginia state Senate killed the state's "personhood" bill.

That bill would have conferred the status of "personhood" on what the right wing keeps calling and for some reason the media keeps parroting "unborn children," including not only fetuses but embryos and even zygotes.

Let's get something straight: There is no such thing as an "unborn child." If it's not born, it's not a child. Calling a fetus an unborn child makes precisely as much sense as calling a caterpillar an unborn butterfly, a tadpole an unborn frog, or an acorn an unborn oak tree.

I can understand a pregnant woman and her partner thinking of her fetus as an "unborn child," establishing the emotional connection to what will be, if all goes as hoped, their child. But we can't let that emotional tie be the basis for a legal meaning and we can't let it cloud the scientific reality. There is no such thing as an unborn child.

The bill had already passed the House of Delegates and was expected to pass the Senate on a tie-breaking vote, but to the surprise of many, the Senate agreed to a motion to put the whole thing off until next year.

While clearly a victory, this doesn't mean the idea is dead - it could drag its zombie butt out of the grave next year. But it is a victory.

At the same time, it's rather a bitter victory, because the Virginia legislature has passed that bill you heard about that would require women seeking to terminate their pregnancy to have an ultrasound - apparently because the thinking was that pregnant women, the poor ignorant dears, need to have what it means to be pregnant explained to them.

Amendments that would have made the procedure optional, forced insurers to cover it or the state to pay for it, and would have exempted women who had no insurance coverage all were defeated. So not only does the woman have to undergo an additional and unnecessary medical procedure, she has to pay for it entirely out of pocket.

This is also the bill that in its original form required an intravaginal ultrasound - and that's exactly what you think it is - in cases where the fetus was too undeveloped for a regular ultrasound to be revealing.

In the face of understandable outrage, the bill's sponsor supposedly amended the bill to remove the state mandate for the intravaginal ultrasound - but left in the requirement for the information it would yield, leaving doctors in the position of either forcing women to undergo the procedure, forcing them to wait until later in the pregnancy, not getting the information, thus violating the law and risking prosecution and loss of their licence, or simply refusing to perform the procedure altogether. That is, the mandate to force women to submit or else had simply been shifted from the state to the doctor. For the women, it was no change at all.

Still, the failure of the wingnuts to force through yet another restriction on women's choices - the "personhood" bill - is a victory and should be embraced as such. And it has some significance because of the fact that it comes amid a flurry of state-level proposals on reproductive rights, where we find ourselves having to re-argue issues that rational people thought had been settled long ago.

So bear in mind that when I talk here about reproductive rights, I'm not just talking about abortion, I'm talking about birth control.

I mentioned this two weeks ago, noting that advocates of choice have long insisted that abortion was only the opening salvo in an assault on women's rights and that increasing restrictions on abortion would be followed by attacks on contraception. A lot of folks laughed at them for that, but that's exactly what we're seeing now. The religious fanatics have never forgotten the not-so-long-ago good old days when contraception was illegal even for married couples - and the right wing fanatics eager to exploit them for their own ends have happily joined in the effort to roll back time.

Just consider the response to that federal mandate that employees of religious-affiliated employers must have access to contraception coverage in their health insurance even as those employers do not have to pay for it. That move - of course - generated howls of phony, carefully orchestrated, ginned-up outrage that this is an attack on religious freedom, indeed on the very concept of religion. Because it is an attack on religion to say that a Catholic school can't interfere with the ability of a Jewish employee to obtain birth control by forcing them to pay for it entirely out of pocket.

And it's not just the Catholic bishops who continue to pompously bloviate about their "deep moral concerns" about contraception - as if they had any standing to have moral concerns about anything after enabling pedophiles for decades. Nor is it just the most obviously loopy groups like the American Family Association or the most obviously wacko politicians like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium and Newt Grinch who blather, froth, and rant about a non-existent "war on Christianity" - it's also ones like our own Senator Scat Brown, who has a radio ad going on about how that federal insurance mandate is an assault on religious freedom.

In some cases, such as Scat Brown's, the driving force at least appears to be blatant political opportunism, the old tradition of abandoning any trace of self-respect in order to suck up to a potential voting block. But for others it is quite literally a matter of conviction - they literally believe that church law should inform if not outright determine public law.

For the obvious example we go back to Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium, who first attacked President Hopey-Changey a couple of weeks ago on the grounds that the legendary Mr. O did not address world problems through the lens of a Biblical theology and then followed that up a week later by declaring that the separation of church and state is not absolute because while religion is to be free of the government, the government is not to be free of religion - or, to use Ricky boy's revealing term, the government is not to be free of "the church."

To make sure that no one could misunderstand him, he doubled down on his declaration from last fall. He said he had read John Kennedy's 1960 speech where JFK went before an audience of I think if was Baptists to assure them that he would not take orders from the Pope - which was a real concern for some at the time, they really thought that having a Catholic as president would mean the Pope would be determining US government policy - and that he did believe in separation of church and state. Rickyboy said that made him "want to throw up."

What's important here is to realize that even though he tried to walk back the "throw up" comment, he means it. This is not pandering. In fact, the walk back was more pandering than the original statement.

And this guy has been winning elections. Even after more attention has been paid to his extremism, he nearly won Michigan and is ahead in some states for "Super Tuesday." Now, I don't think he has any real chance of winning the GOPper nomination and even if he did, he has no chance in hell of winning the general election. And frankly, I don't think he thinks he has a chance, either, for reasons I'll get to. The important point is that he has shown that there is a real constituency, in the US, today, for this kind of religious extremism.

Several days ago, columnist David Sirota had a piece referring to progressives who think that the longer the dragged-out GOPper primaries continue, the better for progressives because it shows people how nuts the right wing is. Hang on, he suggested, not so fast.

The problem, as he sees it - and I agree or I wouldn't be bringing this up - is that the longer the primaries go on, the longer that very extremism is on display, the longer the wildly reactionary nitwit ideas are bandied about, the longer the jaw-dropping inanities get spewed, then by that very same token the longer that very same inane, reactionary, extremism is given a mainstream platform, is treated as a collection of serious positions that deserve serious response from other candidates, and so the more it becomes part of normal political discourse in the country and society.

On some TV show or another, I saw a couple of progressives asked about this and they both dismissed it out of hand, embracing precisely the sort of "everyone will see the GOPpers are nuts" happy-talk group-think that Sirota questioned. But their failing was that they were thinking strictly in terms of Republican prospects in the 2012 presidential election. Sirota was looking beyond that: In his conclusion, he said this may help in the short term, but what about the long haul.

We've seen this over and over - this is how reactionary ideas get mainstreamed: Some flake like Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium spouts off and just keeps spouting off until what he's saying just doesn't sound so weird anymore, if only because it's familiar. After a while, some not-quite-as-flaky wingnuts pick up on the ideas and amplify them and eventually instead of being dismissed as they deserve, they wind up getting treated as legitimate positions deserving of reasoned discussion.

Sirota refers to the Goldwater Principle, which for those of you too young to remember, refers to the GOPper presidential campaign of right-winger Barry Goldwater in 1964. He lost so badly to Lyndon Johnson that there was a question if the Republican party itself could survive. The Goldwater principle suggests that while he lost that election, the attention given to his ideas helped permanently shift what constitutes the “center” of our public debate to the right.

For my part, I've been talking about this literally for three decades. I call such races "successful losses" - I can cite several - and I have talked about them here before.

The thing is, everyone would agree that the political debate is this country has moved way over to the right over the past decades. And this is how it works - this is how it's done. This is how right-wing ideas move from the margin to the center, from mocked to mainstream, from spooky to serious, from ridiculed to reasonable. Birth control is just the latest example.

Go back to Goldwater - in 1964 he lost so badly people wondered if the GOP could survive as an institution. Four years later, Richard Nixon was elected. Richard Nixon, who now would be regarded as too liberal to get the GOPper nomination. And twelve years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected and GOPpers got control of the Senate for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Our political debate has moved far enough to the right that, as Sirota notes, Witless Romney can call Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium "Big Labor’s favorite senator" without being laughed off the political stage.

And it happens because the right wing has the confidence and the patience to say what it really means, what it really wants, for the sake of long-term victory. This is why I don't think Rick IShouldBeInASanitarium actually thinks he can win the presidency. Maybe he dreams of it, I'm sure he does, but I doubt he honestly believes he can win - he may be a flake but he's not a dope: He can read the numbers.

The thing is, he's not thinking 2012. He's thinking 2016. He's thinking 2020. He's thinking about how he can move the debate while what passes for most of the left in this country can't seem to think past the inaugural parade in January 2013. The fact is, the right wing thinks strategically, something at which we have failed miserably - and we ignore that reality at our peril.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/virginia-personhood-bill-defeated-senate_n_1297463.html
http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/30/birth-control-could-it-be-illegal-again/
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/afa-obama-war-on-christians-a-battle-between-freedom-and-tyranny-equal-to-1776-revolution/politics/2012/02/28/35471
http://www.necn.com/02/28/12/Va-Senate-panel-kills-Medicaid-abortion-/landing_politics.html?&apID=fdd68d8674c54e57b05ed7ff69ef33fb
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57386357-503544/santorum-argues-for-religion-in-government/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/santorum-church-and-state_n_1302246.html?ref=mostpopular
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57381029/santorum-obamas-worldview-upside-down/
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/22/the_danger_of_an_endless_gop_primary/singleton/
http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2007/06/electioneering-chapter-three.html