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Desire To Return To a Mythological Past Fuels The Right’s Battles On Abortion, Marriage

11/16/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
In the 1890′s, the New York Post published an article detailing the arrest for murder of a woman who conducted illegal abortions for patients in New York City. She was not arrested for providing the abortions, though those were illegal. Instead, she was arrested when one of her patients hemorrhaged and died. The police knew about the abortions, but did not want to interfere because they felt that she was providing a useful service to the community. The New York Times did not report the story at all. The motto of the New York Times was “all the news that’s fit to print.” This was not deemed fit to print.

The arguments for and against abortion and marriage rights are often boiled down into a soft, mushy, ambiguous statement which is easily countered and easily held onto. It lacks any real depth, but it is that shallowness that makes it easy to understand and easy to cling to.

Abortion, like most social issues, is not about murder, changing a definition, or any of those surface issues. They are about how the country defines itself, and what reality is. In truth, you have one side of this fight who wish beyond hope that they could shut their eyes and cover their faces and make all the “bad” stuff disappear, and those who know that the “bad” stuff is not going to go away.

You end up on one side of the equation, a group of people who lack empathy and the ability to understand, and on the other, a group of people who think that an emotional argument will break down those barriers. The recent battle over marriage equality in Maine is a prime example. The No on 1 campaign waged a battle showing how non-threatening LGBT families are, and how we are all like them. It was an emotional appeal to let us have equality in order to have normal lives. The Yes on 1 campaign focused on fear of the other, and making darned sure that people feared the idea of even empathizing with LGBT Americans. The hope out of the Yes on 1 campaign is that, by banning same-sex marriage, they can make it go away because it is uncomfortable and scary to them. They hammer away with arguments which are blatant in their fear mongering, and equally blatant in their incoherence, and yet, they get away with it because they have a lot of people who believe that, should marriage be denied to gays and lesbians, they’ll just marry a straight person. Their logic does not include the idea that homosexuality is genetic, and it certainly does not include the idea that marriage equality will actually preserve far more marriages than it will destroy.

The past is something that has been romanticized over and over again with a Victorian patina of respectability. Read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology some time, there will be no single mention of the same-sex love between Athena and Pallas, and the role of Ganymede as Zeus’ lover is certainly not part of that book. Mythology was sanitized for the reading public. It is to that patina, that mythology, of what the past use to be like that these people want to return, and there is little arguing with them. They have created their own little belief system which states that, if abortion is illegal, it will stop, and that, if gays and lesbians are unequal, they will disappear. It has nothing to do with reality since it is, ultimately, divorced from reality.

Theirs is a world view in which crime must be punished and not understood. Theirs is a world which believes that a psychotic should be executed. Theirs is a world view where the reality of the life of ordinary people cannot penetrate. They make arguments rooted in religion, in culture, in the past. They ignore what does not fit within those set beliefs, even within their own religion.

They often know that what they are preparing to do is going to hurt others. They know that what they are doing is, at some level, wrong. They do not care so long as it returns this nation back to the mythological past. They seek to return to a white picket fenced house with a mother, a father, two kids, and not a problem in the world.

Of course, they fail to see the Audrey in the yard (think Little Shop of Horrors).

Theirs is a procrustean bed upon which reality must be put and the bits that do not fit must be chopped off.

I make these assertions with gravity, for they are grave assertions to make. I do not make them without thought and research. I do not make them without grave concerns about what I am saying. Each word is often worked over. This particular article is the work of three days. Its roots are in the wake of the Stupak Amendment and the Maine Vote.

It is often hard to be the person standing in the middle wanting not to abandon reason or to go to extremes. It is often hard to want to understand the motivations and rationales of everyone, and yet to be unable or unwilling to forgive trespasses on either side. There are issues on the Left that drive me as far up the wall as those on the Right. There are Liberals who make me as upset as there are Conservatives. Even Keith Olbermann can anger me as much as Bill O’Reilly, no matter how much I like Mr. Olbermann, and no matter how much what he says matches my own beliefs. Of those times that the Left angers me as much as the Right, I will write about at a future date.