The Grand Illusion
What aspect of both abortion and immigration does the Republican far right fail to see or understand?
That aspect is fairly simple. You can’t totally stop either. You can’t even significantly restrict either without massive loss of civil rights and without significant adverse health effects and social disruption, particularly on women and families who are living from paycheck to paycheck.
Already, some of the various state restrictions on abortion are having major impacts on women’s health. Family planning clinics are closing;.hospitals are closing maternity wards; some doctors are reluctant or refusing to treat patients with spontaneous miscarriages because they fear lawsuits. Certain drugs that can be used to induce miscarriages are effectively being prohibited for sale, even to patients who need them to survive other medical conditions, partly because pharmacies fear lawsuits and even conviction on felony counts.
Some women, largely affluent or with connections, will still find ways to obtain abortions. But millions of women won’t have that choice. Millions of others will find their health and health care compromised.
As I noted more than a few times before, you also can’t stop all unwanted immigration, not without becoming an authoritarian police state with walls like the former East Germany, willing to shoot anyone who crosses the border.
Yet the Republican Party trumpets freedom – except what they’re effectively trumpeting, as demonstrated in Tennessee last week, is more a form of white male supremacy, rationalized by evangelical white Christianity, in a country where less than fifteen percent of the population adheres to the stringent beliefs of Christian nationalists (essentially the largely white evangelical Trump base).
Moreover, a Pew study released last week showed that two-thirds of Americans believe that religion should stay out of politics.
Yet Republicans continue to use gerrymandering and judicial selection as a way to impose stringent religious-based beliefs into law, beliefs contrary to those held by the majority of Americans, and for that matter, contrary to the U.S. Constitution itself.
Those laws will fail to stop abortion or immigration, but they will adversely impact the health and welfare of all Americans, as well as increasingly limit personal freedoms in almost every area, except of course, the right to bear arms – and to carry and use weapons of war.
so should 5-10 million mostly unskilled persons will improve wage growth, will lessen global warming as we run out of fuel, we don’t pretend that electric will support the grid do we,
we can go to the social wars of 1st century war, to see how such masses could lead to the fall of the republic,
I genuinely wonder sometimes if it’s the idea that if they stop women having abortions, then more white people will be born and they’ll reverse slowly becoming a minority.
Which still doesn’t make sense, because you’d think they’d want to make birth control widely available or even enforced to prevent the immigrants coming in and outbreeding them.
I mean it’s such a weird thing to prevent – what’s so special about a fetus when effectively once it’s born the State has little to no interest in it – there are no loud demands for state run orphanages, or subsidised childcare support or any other form of dealing with unwanted children.
It’s simply the mother’s fault for having a child when she isn’t capable of looking after it, and it’s entirely her fault for having sex in the first place.
As for immigration – in many countries illegal migrants are used as effectively indentured labour to keep wages down, when you can’t do that through overpopulation and underprovision. The US especially relies heavily on illegal migrants in all the southern states to do agricultural and physical labour jobs, especially in places where the convict based slave labour industry is frowned upon.
Taking that away would likely crash the economies of several states.
As someone says, “It is all about the Benjamins.” A guest worker program would solve much of the immigration problem if the people using illegal immigrants weren’t opposed. If the owners of the businesses where illegal immigrants work were arrested for tax evasion at the same time this would change drastically.
The abortion position is simply about pandering to the religious right. The pandering has gone on so long some of them have forgotten that they were pandering.
The leadership of the Republican party only cares about being reelected. They do whatever it takes which is do what gets them the most donations to their campaign funds and then what lets them cash in along the way. Many of the Democrats aren’t a lot better. Too many of them get wealthy while making less than $200k a year.
I agree 100%.
The Republicans aren’t fear-mongering about abortion and immigration because of a policy goal. Their goal is simply to bring out the reliably scared Republican voters.
At least right now it’s looking like a rough time for republican politicians. Banning abortion is the car the dog was never supposed to catch.
Independent voters who were fine with Republicans when it was just a scam to get the base out to vote have been turning away from them from coast to coast, in places that count. Kansas. Wisconsin.
Best of luck getting through a Republican primary with a moderate message with the base energized over abortion or MAGA hysteria.
So the solution is caving in and allowing the genocide of babies and replacing that loss of population with an influx of illegals? That’s NOT a solution, that’s a formula for becoming third world, which is NOT a compliment.
Either propose a real solution or accept that some loss of freedom either now or later, esp. for the poor and the illegals, will be necessary to keep us all from becoming poor illegals.
Execute convicted rapists, garnish the wages of those failing to pay child support (and compensation for lost wages, etc); sterilize males that have babies by numerous women none of which they married. Publish their names, warn against them. Hold males to a high standard using as much force as it takes, and put the fear of death into them for being anything less than responsible. But none of that should be cause to let women get abortions (taking a life, even if it’s just a blob that will eventually become a specific human if not murdered) except to save their lives. Sex is NOT cheap entertainment, it’s probably the most expensive entertainment one could pick.
Yes, men don’t have wombs. So hold them to higher account, but don’t try to equalize nature by letting women take zero responsibility.
Heck, doesn’t all that mandatory evil socialist health insurance cover birth control? Wouldn’t that be way better than covering elective abortion?
R. Hamilton, I thought you were the one who wanted minimalist intervention from the state. Now you’re proposing that the state expend countless resources to police irresponsible fathers. None of what you propose is workable; the state doesn’t have those resources so don’t spend them on curtailing individual freedoms. Let individual adults determine what type of entertainment they can afford or wish to engage in. Birth control isn’t 100% effective and some fetuses have defects that make abortion a kindness.
Abortion isn’t genocide on babies and most Americans support abortion only to a certain point anyway.
Illegal immigration would decrease if a viable immigration framework were in place. Only business owners profiting from cheap illegal labor would argue in favor of increasing illegal immigration. Many of us want a humane, functional immigration system.
Republicans tout freedom, but they mostly seem intent on restricting the freedoms of the majority.
Shannon, that is very well said.
I doubt that it will make a dent in Mr. Hamilton’s perfect fantasy world, though.
Agreed. “Republicans tout freedom, but they mostly seem intent on restricting the freedoms of the majority.” That pretty well sums up that party right now.
Shannon, I have read a number of RH’s disquisitions and my overall takeaway is that they tend to a very binary view of life. The universe is not like this – most of the things we must make decisions about exist on a continuum and there is no one point where it is reasonable to make a “this/not-this” ruling. In these situations, the best approach is to leave it to the person(s) involved and to provide support as needed. The single clear statement that we can make is that, when fact-based sex education is taught and reliable contraception is readily available without moral judgement, there are vastly fewer of these situations that seem to exercise the ostensibly-religious
“Heck, doesn’t all that mandatory evil socialist health insurance cover birth control? Wouldn’t that be way better than covering elective abortion?”
Not when Republicans are banning or trying to ban a significant proportion of non-abortive birth control methods, which also goes against your “minimalist state” views. Face it. Republicans only want a minimalist state when it suits their interests.
I can’t help but feel like what the Republican platform really is, is a desire to return to some imaginary time in the past (perhaps the 1950’s) when white men could be “comfortable”: where a relatively uneducated man could still get a job that would support a family, most women were doing nothing but housework and child rearing, dark-skinned people “knew their place”, and gay or transgender folks stayed firmly locked away in the closet so they wouldn’t disturb the delicate sensibilities of ‘normal’ people. And of course safe abortions were something that only wealthy women could get.
Some quotes which might/should be applied to “ABORTION, IMMIGRATION, AND THE FAR RIGHT” but also to all of us.
“equals do not have authority over one another” – “the entire system of state sovereignty is subject to the duty to respect human rights” – “a duty to see that one benefits and the other sustains no loss”
The “Right” or “Republican” is said to be “Conservative”. If ‘conservative’ implies “traditional” then perhaps the desire is to return to a utopia of us all being “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”. I have yet to meet or read about any human who is/was a Lady or Gentleman 100% of their lives; although I have been fortunate enough to come close to two or four such “almost” individuals and several hundred (I am old enough) who consistently attempted the impossible.
Most of us try behavior implied by the above quotations but we are all “sovereign individuals” and the “diversity” the far left desires has to be balanced with the “traditionalism” implied by the far right (no matter how desirable the utopian goal). If we do not succeed then there is no diverse innovation nor traditional quality. But then the universe is familiar with chaos; perhaps not tolerant of it?
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