Dear Jim Wallis: Who Is "We"?
by pastordan
Fri Aug 22, 2008 at 06:52:14 AM PST
The man from Sojourners oozes patriarchy in response to his readers' questions about discouraging abortions:
Support for women caught up in difficult situations and tragic choices is a better path than coercion for really reducing the abortion rate. Yes, I agree there is never a "need" for abortion except in the case where the health of the mother is threatened. But until we can reach out to women who "feel" the need for abortion and support them in alternative choices, we will never change the shameful abortion rate that both sides seem content to live with while they just attack each other. It is time to move from symbols to solutions.
So that scared teenager who got pregnant with her sorta-kinda-maybe boyfriend who she doesn't know if she really wants to commit to for the rest of her life? Well, she doesn't really "need" an abortion. What she needs is for someone - perhaps a mid-fifties political player and father figure in Washington D.C. - to tell her how she should "feel."
Ditto the scared teenager who got pregnant because her cousin or her brother or her father has been sexually terrorizing her night after night. She doesn't really "need" an abortion. She just "feels" that she needs one. If only she had someone to steer her straight, maybe she'd make better choices.
Ditto the poor woman who already has mouths she doesn't know how to feed.
Ditto the woman whose husband or boyfriend beats her for any little reason or no reason at all.
Ditto the woman on the Pinewood Reservation who got raped by a stranger from another state just looking for a good time.
They don't really "need" an abortion. And they don't really know what they "feel."
At least, they don't until "we" reach out to them.
And pray tell who, Rev. Wallis, is "we"?
This is everything that's wrong with the argument that Democrats could reach untold numbers of voters if they'd only bend a little on abortion, or "change the conversation" as Wallis and his friends are so fond of saying, distilled down into a single little lump of stupid and arrogance.
It starts with the premise that the issue of abortion is a moral one. But what that means on a practical level is that Jim Wallis wants the political power to enforce his moral vision, whether he understands that or not. "Support them in alternative choices," nothing. Wallis wants to make it safe for Democrats to tell women what they're supposed to do with their bodies, and why.
There is no room here for women to be themselves moral agents, let alone make their own practical decisions. They need to coached to do the right thing according to Jim Wallis and his friends in Washington who will calibrate government policy precisely to "reach out" to their confused selves and bring to them the enlightened truth that they have no need to control their bodies or their destinies short a threat to their lives.
It is painfully obvious that Wallis believes that without a Big Daddy government, women will choose wrongly, and the "shameful abortion rate" will continue. It never seems to occur to him that that rate does not reflect mere convenience or women taking control of their bodies.
This is literally the most patronizing attempt to legislate morality that I have seen in a long long time, outside of the Bush administration. It is smug, elitist and condescending. There is no vision of social benefit, no argument about the values of one policy option over another. When it boils down to it, the purpose of this dubious proposal is to make the Democratic party safe for people like Wallis and other pro-lifers who want to act upon women in the guise of "reaching out to them."
I don't want to hear any more crap about how "we're all on the same team." Until Jim Wallis can start his discussion of abortion with the recognition that women are moral agents in their own right and don't need him to guide their decision-making, we're not on the same team at all.
(Cookies to Thurman.)
- ::
Permalink | 161 comments