Month: July 2009

by Conor Friedersdorf

Last week Alternet published a controversial essay wherein the narrator attended a party thrown to raise money for a friend's abortion. Numerous conservative bloggers wrote obligatory posts. The piece took heat from the left too. Tracy Clark-Flory posted a worthwhile example. "I hadn't heard of an abortion party until today. That's despite growing up in the liberal sanctuary of the San Francisco Bay Area and attending a passionately feminist women's college," she wrote. "I've seen women unabashedly announce "I had an abortion" to friends and strangers alike, out loud and on T-shirts and bumper stickers, but an abortion party is an entirely new concept to me."

In a followup comment, Mary Elizabeth Williams astutely writes that "the story reads like it was calculated to provoke the most apoplectic reactions of the right. The wimmins are celebrating baby killing, and men aren't welcome!" It's that last bit about men not being welcome that I'd like to focus on. The piece's numerous flaws notwithstanding, it affords an opportunity to discuss an issue that all the critical responses I've seen have mostly ignored.

Here is the relevant passage:

Maggie, too, looked less than excited. A few days beforehand, one of her friends had asked her to have the abortion in Ohio. When Maggie insisted on bringing her boyfriend along, the friend told her not to bother coming. Maggie was being shown a great deal of respect, certainly. But she told me she couldn’t help but feel as though her pregnancy had been "hijacked" by women who felt like her inclusion of a man in the decision was weak or wrong. This was a surprise to me, but I didn’t exactly know how to weigh in.

Abortion is, after all, a very tricky topic — a minefield of opinions where the slightest misstep can elicit unexpected reactions from friends, family, co-workers and strangers. Though I would classify myself an ardent pro-choicer, I also recognize that I am a man, and therefore somewhat of a problematic player in the debate. It’s never been made clear to me what sort of involvement I’m entitled to on the issue, and I don’t feel particularly confident making judgment calls about women — whatever their political leanings.

Let's call this the Tupac Shakur approach to the abortion question:

I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don't we'll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies
And since a man can't make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one
So will the real men get up
I know you're fed up ladies, but keep your head up

Without taking any position on abortion itself, I want to interrogate the appropriate role of males, and suggest that progressives especially face some thorny questions. As I understand it, the most common position on the left is that how a woman deals with an unwanted pregnancy is a choice to be made by her alone. At the same time, the progressives I know subscribe to a partnership ideal in relationships, wherein major life decisions between couples are made via a process of mutually supportive dialogue, stripped of archaic gender norms whenever possible. It is easy enough to imagine how this plays out in a film that reflects the cultural sensibilities of secular liberals. The woman gets pregnant: "I'm late," she tells her boyfriend. The man, if he wants to keep the sympathy of the audience, says, "What are we going to do?" The "we" signals his mutual responsibility for the circumstance and investment in the process — and the question mark signifies that he'll pretty much support whatever she decides.

And perhaps that is how things ought to go! But holding it up as an ideal in a flawed world has complicated consequences. A culture that tells men they shouldn't have any part in decisions about abortion, as portrayed at the "abortion party," inevitably discourages them from responding to a pregnant girlfriend by asking, "What should we do?" And the notion that at most men should signal mutual investment in the process, and graciously support whatever the woman decides, may sound wonderful to a lot of people, but is it really realistic? A societal norm that elevates the woman's choice above all else can certainly safeguard widespread access to abortions. But I suspect that the same norm inevitably leads some men to ask — wrongly in my view, but understandably — if you think that abortion is ethically unproblematic, and whether to have one or not is your choice, why should I have to pay child support for 18 years if you decide against having one?"

I've neither revealed my own views on abortion here, nor made an overall judgment about the social norms we ought to be inculcating. The narrow assertion I want to make is that the social norms we are inculcating are working to safeguard reproductive choices for women, and to undermine men's investment in pregnancies and child-rearing. Given that progressives and feminists are especially invested in pushing back against the notion and reality that rearing children is the province of women, I'd be curious to hear whether they agree with my diagnosis, and how they think these questions ought to be navigated. Is there an inherent tension between the social norms that advance your agenda on reproductive rights, and the ones that better bring about the world you'd like to see more generally?

By Conor Clarke

Ann Althouse responds to my original post about the value of diversity on the Supreme Court:

I dunno. Two points. First, it seems to me that neither religion nor race necessarily has an impact on one's thinking. Either one can have a big impact, and either one can have no impact at all. Furthermore, describing religious identification as a choice also seems like a bit of a stretch. I went to Catholic high school and would put that on a survey form, but I didn't choose that religious identification in the same way I chose to eat a burrito for lunch.

Second, I'm open to the possibility that diversity can have effects beyond the individual justice's thinking. I'd like to think, for example, that an openly gay justice would have an impact on both public opinion and the other justices on the bench. 

by Patrick Appel

Gay Talese would never make it as a blogger. It takes him all morning to write a page. From an interview with the Paris Review:

by Chris Bodenner

HuffPo's Shirin Sadeghi compiles several horrific accounts. Potkin Azarmehr, a British-Iranian blogger, points out:

By killing protesters, the government makes martyrs of them, but by raping them and allowing them to live, it makes them shunned in society.

by Patrick Appel

"Like Oliver North, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, [Palin] is known not for her ideas but as a martyr, a symbol of the culture-war crimes of the left. To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman's voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger's sneer, every celebrity's slight, every crazy Internet rumor," – Thomas Frank, WSJ.

by Chris Bodenner

This triptastic video for DJ Tiga's "Shoes" sounds like it was inspired by the YouTube hit of the same name:

Tiga "Shoes" from AlexandLiane on Vimeo.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Writing in Salon, Michael Lind argues "against comprehensive reform — on any issue." It's music to my ears. In cautioning against "giant, complicated, omnibus pieces of legislation that are supposed to solve multiple problems at the same time and for a long time to come," he draws on history. The Missouri Compromise was voted down when Henry Clay tried to pass it as an omnibus bill, he recalls. Only Stephen Douglas' insight that it could be broken up into 5 separate pieces of legislation, passed by distinct Congressional majorities, saved the effort.

There are no doubt modern cases where a piecemeal strategy is the best strategic route for passing a package of reforms. Health care? Immigration? Social Security? But I am more persuaded by other arguments against "comprehensive" solutions. As Mr. Lind notes, these bills "try to address too many problems at the same time," and the ones that fail kill the legislative appetite for any subsequent reform efforts on the same issue.

I'd add a couple critiques of my own.

The worst thing about "comprehensive reform" efforts are that they shut the average citizen out of the legislative process by making bills so complicated that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to properly evaluate whether on balance it is a wise or unwise measure. Who can predict all the effects of a 3,000 page bill spanning all manner of issues? Often times not even the legislature itself. Certainly not the press, which often focuses on bits of the legislation that won't actually have the most impact, sometimes because legislators themselves are deliberately obscuring what's actually at stake.

Comprehensive reform also seems more prone to capture by narrow lobbying interests who take advantage of its complexity to insert provisions they'd be hard pressed to get away with were more discrete questions being addressed.

In a prior post, I called for a Congress that reads all the bills it passes. Together with an effort to make small, piecemeal improvements to public policy, rather than the kind of sweeping efforts that flatter vanities but fail citizens, two simple reforms would go a long way toward improving legislative outcomes.

By Conor Clarke

I think Matt Yglesias makes the important points about this race-obsessed column from Pat Buchanan. (Buchanan's admirably-frank-but-morally-repugnant argument is that Republicans should ignore the supposed demographic torpedoes and win elections by catering to the racial concerns of white people.) But I do want to touch on one claim from Buchanan:

I've written all this before, but let me make what I think is a fairly obvious point: There's absolutely nothing wrong, much less "arch," about criticizing Sarah Palin for being an anti-intellectual demagogue while simultaneously demanding respect for Sonia Sotomayor. Palin's whole shtick is that she's an ordinary American with ordinary American concerns. Which is completely fine. But I'm of the mind that our leaders should be exceptional people — hard-working Type-A meritocrats with actual expertise — and I think Sotomayor is one of those people. (Palin, not so much.) That's my preference, of course, and not necessarily the country's. But I like to think it's a perfectly legitimate distinction, not a "hate crime."

by Chris Bodenner

Buzzfeed has 30 more. This one of Britney Spears is simply unrecognizable:

by Patrick Appel

Free Exchange reacts to a surtax on the rich being proposed to fund health care:

For me, the biggest concern is that Congress seems to have followed the path of least resistence here and it may do so again in the future. Recall that America has a fairly significant structural deficit, which will only grow as the population ages. American also has fairly significant need for large-scale investment in things like infrastructure and education. Revenues are going to have to rise to avoid a budget crisis somewhere down the road. And that means that taxes will have to rise.

It would be extremely unwise to try and stick all of the additional tax burden on the rich.

Unnecessary, too—there are many opportunities out there to tax negative externalities, and the use of a broadly shared tax burden to fund fairly progressive social safety nets in Europe seems to work well. It's a lot easier to raise taxes on 1.2% of the population than on the majority, but that's a game which begins to have diminishing returns very quickly. There are ways to raise revenues without placing a very large drag on economic activity, and Congress needs to figure out how to find the political mojo to make it happen.