With Democrats on the upswing, I figure now is good time to be magnanimous in victory. I’m adding an “opposition” category to my blog roll for those I read on the other side. I may add a few more or switch over a couple writers, as any furtive alliances with libertarians may well breakdown once Bush is out of office. Anyways, if someone is their, take it to mean that I consider them worth reading don’t impute their views to me.
Anyhow, my main disagreement with Douthat is that he’s a social conservative, although to my knowledge he’s never said anything against same-sex marriage. Primarily he focuses on being opposed to abortion rights. He recently had an op-ed where he argued that opposition to abortion wasn’t what sank the GOP ticket in 2008.
The public is amenable to compromise: majorities support keeping abortion legal in some cases, but polling by CBS News and The Times during the presidential campaign showed that more Americans supported new restrictions on abortion than said it should be available on demand. And while some pro-lifers would reject any bargain, many more would be delighted to strike a deal that extends legal protection to more of the unborn, even if it stopped short of achieving the movement’s ultimate goals.
But no such compromise is possible so long as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain on the books…
But so long as the Supreme Court remains closely divided, and a post-Roe world remains in reach, the movement’s basic political task must remain the same. Not because pro-lifers are absolutists who reject compromise, but because any real compromise will always depend on overturning Roe.
Kevin Drum agrees that seeking to ban abortion didn’t sink the ticket, but adds an important caveat.
The truth is more prosaic: pro-life activists have done exactly what you'd expect them to do. They've pushed for the most restrictive possible laws they can get away with, and in many states they've succeeded in making abortion de facto unavailable. If Roe were overturned, compromise would be the last thing on their minds.
That said, while they’ve managed to drive doctors willing to perform abortions out of South Dakota, Denise Ross over at TNR looks into why they keep failing to pass a ban, regardless of whether it would pass constitutional scrutiny.
While it's generally agreed that South Dakotans haven't dramatically changed their view of themselves as "pro-life," Rhoden isn't the only one who thinks the well is poisoned. Blanchard, the political science professor, contends that the rapid-fire repeats of the issue have hurt pro-life efforts in South Dakota. "By making the [2006] bill so extreme, they made the right-to-life movement look like a bunch of nuts," he says. "Coming back two years later without any rest from the issue and producing a more moderate bill--but only a little more moderate--they may have permanently altered people's view of them as just a bunch of busy bodies."
Practically speaking, if at some point Roe vs. Wade proves unsustainable I do think people like Douthat would be willing to make some sort of good faith compromise. That said, I don’t trust many of his compatriots whose eagerness to also take out contraception shows that they’re basically in a zero-sum game with feminists. That said, the abortion rights movement is best off not compromising aside from safe, legal, and rare and trying to push the medical technology as far as possible so that if Roe breaks down it will be as easy as possible to provide services to poor women in restrictive states.
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