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Kissing Up to Kate William Murchison The challenges of a presidential election year—this one, for instance—are many and varied, such as the likelihood of being prodded by that pesky old conscience to tune in a televised presidential debate. Maybe good old morbid curiosity does the job. Either way, stoic patience is the watchword, not just for the candidates who exhibit their stuff but also for the voters they seek to overhaul, wheedle, and persuade. And by the way, would the late Marcus Aurelius himself be up to one of these quadrennial exercises? He was an emperor, after all, with small disposition probably to suffer fools longer than it took the Praetorian Guard to hustle them away. In a presidential year, there is much the voters must bear with, nor am I talking about advertisements alone. I am talking about junk and nonsense and equivocations repeated over and over again for maximum effect. Pitching your message at nearly 300 million not-exactly-like-minded citizens means, among other things, shunning the complex, hunting for the hot button, declining to see both sides of a question (unless, to be sure, you miraculously discover three or four sides, each worth discussing to three or four distinct audiences). Great grave questions reduce to sound bites and happy talk. You wouldn’t like to imagine, probably, how the likes of Madison must be taking it in, their wool-stockinged legs crossed in some celestial retiring room for founding fathers. Again, in 2004, presidential politics is reducing the human life question—the terrible, terrifying question, the question of all questions in some sense, to bumper sticker material. There will be no careful, reasoned debates this presidential season, over the imputed rights and the imputed wrongs. There will be as usual shrieks, most of which will proceed from the liberal and Democratic side of the political spectrum. Kate Michelman of NARAL Pro-Choice America emitted one notable shriek on Jan. 22, 2004, the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade. She was in a mood for fund-raising and brow-beating. “[W]e are truly at a moment,” said our Kate, “in which American women could again be stripped of their rights and forced into deadly back alleys.” Really? Well, really, according to a pro-choice leader who wants to make sure her pro-choice political Indians stay close to the reservation. As of course they will, if they know what’s good for them. Political discourse on abortion is generally worse than unenlightening. It is off-putting and useless, save in terms of rousing the troops. It must be acknowledged that the pro-life side of the equation doesn’t necessarily, by virtue of alignment with the moral tradition of Christian civilization, produce the most delicate rhetoric. Nonetheless, the most stubborn talk, the most adamant, tends to come from national Democrats, a not-quite wholly-owned subsidiary of the pro-choice movement. (Union chieftains and minority “spokesmen” like Al Sharpton enjoy co-ownership rights.) Democratic presidential candidates can’t blow their noses without making the noise sound like a honk of approval for the proposition that a woman has the right to “choose.” News of this nature is not news to readers of the Human Life Review, or to most other sentient voters. Why bring it up again? Does bringing it up equate to mere dead horse beating? Actually, I think not. There is some use and merit in, from time to time, traversing familiar terrain for the sake of remembering how the land lies—irrespective of the way it ought to lie. The Democratic party, and of course those leading Democraters who would like to be president, are in bondage to the pro-choice movement. What the movement says, goes. What the movement says is, roughly speaking, a woman’s body is her own; so keep hands off if you’re a lawmaker or judge. The Democratic candidates comply. They know, or sense, the cost of defying the likes of Kate Michelman, abortion absolutist, whose look can kill, politically speaking, from 3,000 miles distant. You clearly don’t want one of Kate’s looks. You want her vote. So you fall over yourself trying to please—assuming you really, truly, want to be president of the United States. You give no quarter to doubts. You click your heels smartly. If you see the point of pro-life protestations and execute some nods in that general direction, your nose starts to pick up the odor of cooked goose, coming from the Michelman kitchen. Richard Gephardt had that experience. In the ’80s, Gephardt, then a mere Missouri congressman, was generally pro-life. He wanted to be president. For that to happen, certain philosophical adjustments were indicated. They took place. Richard Gephardt became pro-choice. Would he have become pro-choice in any case? Sincere conversions do occur, as St. Paul and St. Augustine would testify were they available. This conversion, nonetheless, had the look and smell of raw opportunism. Gephardt, in 2004, fell early from the running. His conversion had cleared no certain place for him at the Democratic table. Plenty of other pro-choice Democrats had pulled their chairs up, jostling Gephardt for the seat nearest Kate Michelman. No Democratic presidential candidate held back, not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, whom you might not unreasonably have expected to cut a little more slack for biblical authority and Christian tradition than more secular types like . . . well, like Howard Dean would have. Dean, the Episcopalian who became Unitarian due to a dispute with his church over an aborted bicycle path, does find the principle of abortion to his liking. While governor of Vermont, he proposed, as part of a healthcare reform, that the state offer $5 abortions to poor women. There seems in retrospect a whiff of eugenics to the Dean proposal: more abortions for the poor, fewer poor kids born into the world to consume government services and pollute the gene pool. Maybe that is leaning too hard on Dr. Dean, but then his sympathies for babies partly extracted from the womb, then drained of their brains, are not conspicuous. The good doctor, back when he was a hot presidential property, affirmed a mother’s right to decide for herself about abortion, in consultation, if she liked, with parents and doctors. “[M]aking personal medical decisions for Americans,” he brusquely declared, is “none of the government’s business.” Oh? And why is that? Is some explanation owed? Evidently not. The decisive question, as Dean professed to see it, is “deeply personal.” That would seem true, and also worthy of examination in policy terms provided some “personal” standing were conceded to unborn babies: some expectation of a right, on their own side, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Pell grants. How can you not have such a debate in an election for the most powerful secular office on earth? You could, technically, of course, but not without riling up the pro-choice side. Gen. Wesley Clark, during his candidatorial heyday, showed himself hep to the challenges at hand. Clark told the editorial staff of the Manchester, N.H., Union-Leader, that he wasn’t “going to get into a discussion of when life begins.” From the standpoint of his audience outside the office of the conservative Union-Leader, this was entirely prudent. Discussions relating to the start of life lead inevitably to the question: What obligations upon individuals and society does the start of life entail? Isn’t life traditionally entitled to protection? That wasn’t the discussion in which Clark wanted to engage. What he wanted was to declare solidarity with Kate Michelman. He succeeded. “I’m in favor of choice, period, pure and simple,” the general snapped back. “You don’t put the law in there.” No law? No law at all? The Union-Leader staff afforded the general opportunities to retreat from that exposed position before logic overran his flank. He stood fast. J’y suis, et j’y reste the French marshal said. Here I am, and here I stay. You get medals that way sometimes. Not this time. Word got around that Gen. Wesley Clark, by the logic of his own reply to a question, seemed to favor abortion in every case the woman wanted it. This was, ahem, sticking out the old neck pretty far. (ABC pollster Gary Langer notes that whereas most Americans think abortion “should be generally available . . . most do think it’s generally objectionable and as such shouldn’t be done casually or as a mere convenience.”) Bugler, sound retreat! Cogitation led to clarification. The general supports Roe v. Wade “as modified by Casey,” the Supreme Court decision that created some hard-to-define rights when it came to protecting unborn life. NARAL Pro-Choice America understood. NARAL Pro-Choice America’s writ (and of course that of non-affiliated abortion supporters) runs right up to the door of the church. Neither scripture nor the authority of the church has Kate Michelman’s clout with the Democratic presidential stable. Wesley Clark turns out to be a Roman Catholic. As everyone knows, Roman Catholicism and its pope strenuously, uncompromisingly, oppose abortion. That would seem to argue, would it not, Gen. Clark—an interviewer put it to him in these terms—for a different stance on abortion than one of total, or near-total, approval. Well, you see, the general replied, “I understand what the Catholic doctrine is. But I have freedom of conscience . . . [A]s much as I respect the opinion of the Catholic Church, in this case I don’t support it.” It is not the kind of observation one passes over with gingerly tread. The doctrine of the church, in Wesley Clark’s telling, has become the “opinion” of the church—suddenly a very mortal thing, a human thing. Opinions are variable. We all have them. That’s not to say we should enforce them. To attempt such a thing, don’t you see, would be brutal, undemocratic, a violation of the sacred right to privacy. We are all so very private around here, it seems, that no one has the right (no political right, that is) to elevate one private judgment above another. Of course Clark didn’t put it that way. Why should he have? He merely wanted to extricate himself from a theological discussion—the kind of discussion few generals, certainly few Democratic generals hopeful of becoming president, go in for these days. I tease out the implications of Clark’s weasel-out to highlight the kind of dishonesty the abortion lobby is enforcing on the leadership of one of our two major political parties. The abortion lobby won’t tolerate a dissenting opinion. You wonder where the leaders learned this approach. In a Saudi madrassa? Well, anyway there it is. If you want the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, get used to how things are. You certainly get the impression that theology doesn’t rate highly with leading Democrats and pro-choicers. This comes of seeing theological teaching quickly reduced to mere opinion, such as any pimply devotee of Britney Spears might venture. You’d have no idea the teaching about respect for unborn life rests on anything other than medieval misogynism or some such. Opinion. Ah, yes. But occasionally, from a candidate, comes a hint of larger understanding. Such a hint can tantalize, as in the case of John Kerry, ahead of whom at last lies an unobstructed trail to Election Day (though not necessarily beyond). Kerry is an ex-altar boy who once contemplated the Roman Catholic priesthood. “Whatever my personal beliefs,” he told a South Carolina audience after the New Hampshire primary, “they have no place here.” See—the barest suggestion, hardly breathed, that, possibly, conceivably, Kerry the Catholic boy all grown up, could see some merit in the church’s established position on unborn life. That’s as far as heresy goes in the Reformed Church of Choice: a wink; make sure that’s all. Since Roe v. Wade, one discovers, a colossal switcheroo has taken place. The role of guardian of truth has devolved upon NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has its own college of cardinals, not to mention female pope, the latter of course being Kate Michelman. No belief, no conviction, unless vetted and approved by the sacred consistory of NARAL may be heard in the land without shame. As for the shameful—those pro-life Galileos rash enough to challenge the cardinals: Toll the bell! Close the book! Quench the candle! Let them be anathema! Anyway if they have any notion of uniting Democrats behind their presidential candidacies. Pro-choice leaders’ obsession with presidential politics, and the Democratic presidential candidates’ forelock-tugging in the presence of these leaders, seems to have at least two sources. One is unease as to the reliability of the Democratic troops on Capitol Hill—their capacity for slacking or even mutiny. When the rank and file can’t necessarily be counted on to march on command, and without muttering, the question of who gives the orders takes on some urgency. Last year’s congressional battle over partial-birth abortion—which issued in passage of the first federal bill ever to criminalize an abortion technique—crystalized the challenge facing pro-choice leaders such as Michelman. Seventeen Democratic senators voted for the bill, as did two-score House Democrats, including five from Al Gore’s Tennessee. Even Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle voted yes, avowing that “[W]e’ve got to address this issue and let the courts decide . . .” Well, uh-huh; still, a yes vote is a yes vote. Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, describing herself as “about 99 percent pro-choice,” likewise voted yes, attributing her decision to the popular will back home, in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. The final Senate vote was 64-36; in the House it was 282-139. Naturally disloyal doubts about partial birth abortion didn’t afflict John Kerry, who objected—for public consumption at least—to the lack of an exception in the bill for protection of the mother’s health (the same grounds cited by President Clinton when he twice vetoed bans). Kerry has since referred to the ban as “a dangerous effort to undermine a woman’s right to choose.” For the same ostensible reason Sen. and sometime presidential candidate Joe Lieberman likewise voted no. In time past Lieberman, the most faith-oriented of the Democratic presidential candidates, has branded partial-birth abortion “horrific”—while perpetually voting not to ban the horror. John Edwards’ was one of two Senate votes not cast on this occasion. Despite such evidences of loyalty to the cause, Kate Michelman gazed out bleakly upon the chaos of the battlefield. “Politicians,” she reported, “got nervous.” No doubt. Pro-lifers had turned the pro-choice flank through relentless presentation of the realities involved in the medical “procedure” known as intact dilation and extraction, i.e., the suctioning out of fetal brains to facilitate abortion. If Congress today can assert itself with such unusual effect, what might it do tomorrow? Michelman voiced suspicions regarding a plot “to take away entirely the right to personal privacy and a woman’s right to choose.” That brings up prospects, such as they are, for replacement of the next U.S. Supreme Court retiree (Sandra Day O’Connor? John Paul Stevens? Chief Justice Rehnquist himself?) with a jurist friendly to maintenance of the Roe v. Wade regime. As Michelman warned on the most recent anniversary of Roe, “Anti-choice momentum is growing . . . The extreme conservative leadership that controls both houses of Congress is committed to taking women’s rights away. The Supreme Court may be no more than one vote away from hollowing out Roe or two from overturning it completely.” The last thing Kate Michelman probably could be called is complacent. Efforts to calumniate, then eliminate, Republican nominees to the federal bench have received the pro-Roe faction’s complete and earnest attention for months now. The idea, evidently, in smearing able appointees to the lower courts (e.g., Miguel Estrada) is to show what lies in store for any candidate whom President Bush, if re-elected, might name to the court without advance approval from NARAL Pro-Choice America. Watch out! is the watchword. You think Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork had it rough! Wait and see what happens to any high-court nominee viewed as dwelling to the right of David Souter. How much easier, all the same, to be rid entirely of Bush, who gratefully signed the partial-birth ban, and whom Maria Gallagher, of LifeNews.com, calls possibly “the most pro-life president of the post-Roe era.” The horror, the horror! Better to oust such a guy than exhaust yourself, and your cash reserves, working everlastingly to control him. All the more to the point this seems, given the exponential growth (as of this writing, in March) of Bush-Hating as a popular pastime and a possibly decisive factor in the presidential election. A pro-choice Democrat in the Oval Office—he could be pro-French and pro-tax hike, as well, without impairing Kate Michelman’s aims—would presumably always do “the right thing”; nor would one have to threaten him, or wait expectantly while he recalled the side on which his bread was buttered. He would know in his heart what his friends expected of him. It is easy enough to imagine a President Kerry vetting judicial nominees with NARAL Pro-Choice America in the interest of—you know—fairness and the defense of constitutionally embedded rights. Another Bill Clinton would do just fine. For all the former president’s “safe, legal, and rare” talk, the need to make abortion truly rare seemed the last consideration on his mind. He did just fine from the pro-choice viewpoint: a friend to those who needed one. On marches Clinton’s party, arm in arm with the likes of Kate Michelman. No rupture seems likely in the mutual dependence society the two have formed, a dependence far stronger than that which is said to link Republicans and the “religious right.” Without firm, monolithic Democratic support, the absurdities of the Roe v. Wade regime are likely, in some measure, to meet with political and judicial rebuke. Without the support of the abortion lobby, no Democrat seems able to procure the presidential nomination, or anything else at the national level. Retiring Georgia Sen. Zell Miller appears the exception that proves the rule. We know how the dependency culture is viewed in therapeutic circles. The partners need each other, can’t live without each other, encourage each other in ways destructive as well as constructive. The partial birth debate suggests at least one means of breaking (at least occasionally) the iron circle: namely, exhibit the horror and don’t ever stop, no matter what. Because . . . because, indeed, of many things: the sacred character of human life; the aggressive character of the abortion regime; and, yes, the arduousness of the journey to this political halting place, where the suctioning of baby brains has been put outside the law. For now. Published by:
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