It may look as if domestic politics no longer exists in the new America–the one in which there is no money for anything besides guns and prisons but we don’t care because we are all bowling together against the Axis of Evil. But that’s not true. As long as there is a fertilized egg somewhere in this great land of ours, there will be domestic politics. George Bush may not be able to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth for the religious right, who gave him one in four of his votes. He may even realize that a serious victory for religious conservatives–significantly restricting the legality of abortion, say–would hurt the Republican Party, because California has more people than Utah. But he is doing what he can to keep the fundamentalists happy.
It must be frustrating for him–just when we’re all supposed to pretend to love our differently faithed neighbor even if we know he’s bound for hell, Christians keep saying weird things. First there was Jerry Falwell’s remark that God let terrorists blow up the World Trade Center because he was fed up with “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…[and] the ACLU”; Falwell apologized, only to express the same thought a bit more obliquely on November 11 at a Florida church: “If the church had been awake and performing that duty”–proselytizing the ungodly–“I can tell you that we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.” God, says Falwell, “even loves the Taliban”–it’s just liberals he can’t stand.
And then there’s Attorney General John Ashcroft, who burqaed the semi-nude statue of the Spirit of Justice because he felt upstaged by her perky breast at press conferences, and who thinks calico cats are emissaries of the devil, when everyone knows it’s black cats. Ashcroft is in trouble with Arab-Americans for offering this proof of the superiority of Christianity to Islam as quoted by conservative columnist Cal Thomas on his radio show on November 9 (and belatedly denied by a Justice Department spokeswoman): “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” Not to get too wound up in theology here, but if the Christian God sent his own son to die doesn’t that make him, according to Ashcroft’s definition, a Muslim?
Fortunately, the fertilized egg can be rolled onstage to distract us from such knotty questions. In keeping with the strategy of rebranding antichoice as prochild, the Bush Administration plans to use the CHIP program for poor children to provide healthcare to children “from conception to age nineteen,” a neat way of defining zygotes as kids. The women in whom these fine young people are temporarily ensconced will remain uninsured–perhaps they can apply for federal funds by redefining themselves as ambulances or seeing-eye dogs. After all, somebody has to get those fetuses to the doctor’s office. As for the 8 million uninsured postbirth children, not to mention the 27 million uninsured adults, who told them to leave the womb?
But wait, there’s more. In a highly unusual move, the Justice Department has weighed in on the side of Ohio’s “partial-birth abortion” ban, which has been on ice thanks to a federal court ruling that found it did not make enough allowance for a woman’s health, as required by the 2000 Supreme Court decision in Carhart v. Nebraska. The Ohio law would permit the operation only to save her life or avoid “serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Gee, what about considerable risk of moderate and long-term impairment of a bodily function of only middling importance? Should the Ohio state legislature (seventy-five men, twenty-four women) decide how much damage a woman should suffer on behalf of a fetus? Shouldn’t she have something to say about it?
To please fanatical antichoicer Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, Bush is holding back $34 million from UN family planning programs. To return the favor, Congressional Republicans have revived the Child Custody Protection Act, which would bar anyone but a parent from taking a minor across state lines for an abortion. The parental-notification-and-consent laws of a pregnant teen’s home state would follow her wherever she goes, like killer bees, or the Furies–and unlike any other law.
Bush is also stacking with social conservatives commissions that have nothing to do with abortion per se but raise issues of sex, gender and reproduction. The cloning commission, called the Council on Bioethics (fourteen men, four women), is headed by bioethicist Leon Kass, a former opponent of in vitro fertilization who’s associated with the American Enterprise Institute. There’s room around the table for antichoice columnist Charles Krauthammer; antichoice law professor Mary Ann Glendon, the Vatican’s representative at the UN conference on women, in Beijing; and social theorist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that the thirty-years-overdue introduction of the pill in Japan in 1999 spelled the downfall of the Japanese family, because now women will just run wild. But there are only four research scientists, and no advocates for patients with diseases that the cloning of stem cells might someday help cure. Similarly, the newly reconfigured AIDS commission is said to be stacked with religious conservatives and will be headed by former Representative Tom Coburn, whose claim to fame is his rejection of condoms, which sometimes fail, in favor of “monogamy,” which never does.
Finally, there’s the nomination of Charles Pickering for the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Rated unqualified by the Magnolia Bar Association of Mississippi. Pickering, an ardent segregationist when it counted, opposed the ERA, has been a lifelong opponent of legal abortion and won’t discuss his antichoice record in Senate hearings. The Fifth Circuit includes Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, states where the right to abortion is already compromised by conservative legislatures; in l999 Texas tied with Michigan for most new antichoice laws enacted (seven). Traditionally the federal courts offer hope of redress for victims of state laws–in this case, some of the poorest women in the country. What are the chances that Pickering will champion their rights and their health?
My money’s on the fertilized egg.
