The people of the US support keeping abortion as a legal option, 58 to 35%.
The people of the US support policy changes to take action in response to the climate crises, some 60-80+%, depending on the policy in question.
Of course, on matters of liberty for our LGBTQ+ neighbors/friends/family, support for legal rights have grown to a significant majority with 70% supporting legal marriage rights (because, why wouldn't we? - and who are those 30%?... I know, we know).
And with 55% favoring decriminalizing drugs and ~70% supporting legalizing marijuana, the progressive position has popular support.
Importantly, support for the progressive position is more solid with younger adults and voters which means support for the more conservative policies are literally dying off.
We have the support of solid majorities on most/all big issues. Change will have to come as long as we vote in ways that reflect the will of the majority. Which, sadly, is part of the problem, isn't it?
None of this is a comfort for women, LGBTQ folk, black people and others who feel their rights are under threat and attack and I'm so sorry. I will stand by you and follow your lead.
10 comments:
"The GOP’s capacity to wield power in excess of its popular support has had profound implications for American political life.
Were the U.S. president elected by popular vote, and
Congress governed by proportional representation,
the GOP would never have held unified federal power this century, and a liberal majority would reign over the Supreme Court.
Put differently: Under a more democratic system of representation —
in which every American’s partisan preference counted equally,
irrespective of where he or she lived —
the GOP would have either been locked out of power for the past three decades,
or else forced to moderate its agenda, as governing in defiance of the popular will wouldn’t have been an option."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/hr1-voting-rights-conservatives-states-rights-gop-voter-supression-gerrymandering.html
Marshal made an unsupported claim - that his position/the conservative position is smaller than progressive positions because more people are "stupid."
Says the man who believes Trump when Trump says the election was stolen and probably gave money to the non-existent "election defense fund" and was thus ripped off by a stupid man pulling a stupid con on stupid people.
White people are willing to torture Others for our beliefs. It’s Constitutional by and from it’s *conception.
Unlike you, Marshal, I don't ban people from commenting on my blog. But stupidly false and unsupported claims will be deleted. Also, stay on topic.
“you’ve banned me at that moment”😂😂😂
He makes up his whole world.
Marshal said, in a now deleted comment due to false, unsupported claims...
"you've banned me at that moment..."
Here's part of the crises of reason in the conservative white men world: People are increasingly saying, "You can't attack people here..." or "you can't make those false and/or unsupported claims here..." and they're so used to getting their way that they are personally offended, thinking their words are supreme and not to be questioned. They think other people having rights is roughly equivalent of having "their" country taken from them and to them being "replaced..."
You have no guaranteed right to say whatever you want wherever you want with no consequences. You have no right to forever ruling over any nation. That's just reality. Get used to it.
Marshal again posted claims with no support and then used the sort of vulgar, oppressive/abusive to women sort of language that conservative men and rapists and misogynists have always used and that won't stand here.
The 9/11 terrorists were willing to commit brutal violence on others for the sake of a reward outside of history and time. For that they zealously absented themselves from any earthly pleasures of family, community, social relationships, social good, social progress, and worldly connection. From rage they were driven to exchange their place and engagement in the world for no place. Nihilism. They were willing to enter into brutal violence entirely: to do it to themselves, too.
Who does that sound like?
Well, first, it sounds exactly like On Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford. The pilgrim Puritans stepped foot on North America by exiling themselves and entering into desperation. They quickly learned to divide the native populations around them by taking sides in violent action, and within their own generation, ostracized other pilgrim groups setting up masochistic villages nearby. The pilgrim Puritans were religious extremists with strategic terrorism of others at the ready in order to safeguard their identity as the future blessed in heaven.
It also sounds like American protestant Christianity as a whole: urging the faithful to serve the economy (and not first or enduringly themselves) by dispossessing natives and enslaved Africans of land, labor, limb, and life.
And, of course, it sounds like 60+ million Americans today who identify as white and will not direct their moral agency or political will to their own benefit but instead thrill to enact brutalizing control over others.
Do they even conceive of a reward?
I believe they do.
1. Consciously they believe that business driven, government absent communities will thrive. That's an irrational myth. They cannot look at themselves and see how their consumption behavior kills everyone and everything: kidneys to kangaroos; liver to Live Oaks; opioids to meth to Oregon and Montana; children and Chillicothe; black and brown, Biloxi and Box Springs; guacamole and Wichita; etc.
2. Subconsciously they believe in a diffuse god who rules. Though warped far from the Christian gospels or the Hebrew prophets, this god is angry and demanding, not for love or justice, but for behavior that conforms to a norm. The norm as established for 500 years: straight, white, male.
3. Unconsciously they believe in whiteness and they inchoately fear, are in terror, of being emptied - or rather of it revealed that whiteness to which we cling *so *hard, is actually emptiness: an abstraction of power ideology only, only possible, to make it incarnate in Other people's flesh. The terror they feel they project onto the objects of their world, the field of all things within the horizon of their perceived world.
They believe all these things throughout their psychic make up. They believe just like they were taught.
Religious extremist terrorists are willing to commit brutal violence on others for the sake of a reward outside of history and time. They are willing to enter into brutal violence entirely: to do it to themselves, too.
From rage they are driven to exchange their place and engagement in the world for no place. White Nihilism.
I'm curious as to what people see that is reasonable from the so-called pro life movement that could possibly participate in a synthesis of argument from “both sides.”
All I can see is bad faith lies and twisted motivations on the their part - begun, as we know, by Paul Weyrich as he looked and looked for a way to gin up white cultural anger more acceptable to society than warring against integrated schools.
All I can see is intentionally corrupted reason and a history of choking out all synthetic solutions to abortion: namely, the only thing that statistically reduces abortion is full sex education, full healthcare advice and options, and full access to contraception. Works in Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and here, where it is provided. But this full panel of education and care has been denied our full nation from… well, forever. The GOP has exerted all its efforts to make sure of that. What is also proved is that banning abortion does not reduce it and some studies show an increase.
So, bad faith actors give us corrupt reasoning and we cannot fall for it.
What's more, banning just makes it more dangerous. 1 in 10 abortions are complicated in jurisdictions where abortion is legal. 1 in 4 where it is banned. So, harm is caused by banning, not reduced. Banning abortions also increases rates of poverty for women and for their children.
So, bad faith actors give us give us corrupt reasoning and we cannot lend them fake credibility in the discussion as if they have come with reason.
And lastly, people of faith are divided about abortion. Radical evangelical protestantism isn't the only faith. Many observant Jews are opposing the Supreme Court decision: they believe the fetus is part of the mother's body and only a distinct person when the first breath is taken (which agrees with Torah: Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus specifically).
Regarding synthesis, the Hegelian dialectic does not assume that any and every opinion is reasonable. In fact, Hegelian dialectic does not involve "two sides" at all. There is the effort at crafting a reasonable platform, which in practice will have a percentage of failure, breakdown, ignorance. Such negative data is then used to correct the lacunae now revealed in the previous rationale to critique and improve the whole reasoning project, resulting in… a new synthesis. Not two sides and most definitely not legitimating a side that has zero respectable rationale. A case in point, Judge Gorsuch wrote the decision in the school prayer at the 50-yard line. He dismissed the dissents' argument that "'history and tradition'… will not afford 'school administrators sufficient guidance.'" He responds, "but that’s concern supplies no excuse to to adorn the Constitution with rules not supported by its terms and the traditions undergirding them." Justice Gorsuch writes as if the US had public schooling a hundred years earlier than we did and as if we are still 95% protestant as in 1789.
So, I can only conclude that if one really cares for the fetus one cannot argue that banning is best. If one does not actively care for the born child - indeed, enforces all kinds of barriers to the success and wellbeing of a born child - then one does not care at all for the fetus no matter how many times they yell it in the name of god. They make no case. They have zero reasoning. All they have is manipulative cultural zeal for power over others.
That cannot be synthesized. In fact, it is already cancerous and killing many thousands.
[An aside of critical reasoning: as always when I'm engaged as a white man discussing the "managing" of the rights of Others, I keep in mind Dr King. In a Letter From a Birmingham Jail, responding to the white clergy of the area arguing for "slowing down: you're going too fast for Birmingham, Dr King" he wrote, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation."
And then two years before this letter he gave a speech at Lincoln University dealing with myths: "And if the American dream is to be a reality, we must continue to engage in creative protests in order to break down those barriers which make it impossible for us to realize the American dream. Now we must get rid of two false ideas in order to continue to engage in creative protests. One idea is the myth of time. There are those people who argue that time alone will solve this problem. And so they say, you must not push things. You must be patient. You must sit down and wait. And sometimes they’ve decorate it in even larger terms, they say cool off for a while and slow up for a while. Time is the only thing that can solve this problem. What we must come to see is that evolution is true in the biological realm. And so Darwin is right at that point, but when a Herbert Spencer seeks to apply to the whole of society, that is little evidence for it. Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. And without this hard work, time itself becomes the ally insurgent and primitive forces of rational, emotionalism and social stagnation so that we must somehow get rid of this idea that time alone will solve the problem. We must use time. Another idea is idea the myth of what I call educational determinism. It is idea that only education will solve this problem. I’m sure you’ve heard this, that you’ve got to change the hearts of people and people must be educated to the point that they will change their attitudes, now there’s some truth in this. But to say, this is the only thing is where we developed the myth. It is not either education or legislation. It is both education and legislation. Now it may be true that you cannot legislate morality. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also. This is what we seek to do through the law, to control the external effects of bad internal feelings. Religion and education would have to change the attitudes but legislation, executive orders, judicial decrees will have to control the external effects of bad internal attitudes. Therefore, if we are to realize the American dream, we must continue to work through legislation."]
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