Sep 8, 2021
Abortion in Texas and the Great American Divorce
You want further evidence the United States is breaking up come hell or high water? Look at what Texas is doing on abortion.
Look, my personal views on abortion won’t make anyone happy. I hold that all these things are simultaneously true:
- Every abortion is a tragedy
- Abortion decisions are between a woman and her doctor
- Options other than abortion should be promoted and supported
- Men should have a say in what happens to a fetus they helped make
- No one should be prevented from getting an abortion who needs one
- Whether someone gets an abortion isn’t your damned business
[NOTE: My use of gendered terms — man/woman — is here tied only to whether or not the person in question has a uterus. I recognize that transgender folks face extreme troubles getting proper care because of bigotry around their gender identity and agree this is wrong.
For the purposes of talking about abortion, though, there are biological realities that run deeper than gender identity for the purposes of discussion alone simply because physically carrying a child requires specialized equipment not everyone possesses, giving rise to a useful (but not intrinsic) split between man/woman in this situation.]
I don’t see how a complicated emotional, medical, and ethical question like this can be anything but difficult and painful for all involved. That’s life sometimes — there aren’t easy answers and not all futures are possible.
Every life lost no matter the cause is an incalculable amount of potential good in the world that is forever lost. But lots of potential lives are lost — pregnancy has never been a 100% guaranteed thing where all goes well and a healthy baby is the result.
Medicine is hard. That’s why decisions must only involve the people directly impacted — namely the person carrying the fetus to term, whose body could be harmed by it.
So I don’t see any role whatsoever for government to be involved in abortion issues one way or another. Medical professionals decide standards of care based on the best scientific knowledge. Patients are told the risks of procedures and allowed to make their own choice.
Banning a medical procedure — banning anything really — accomplishes nothing but giving the government the right and responsibility to prosecute someone for violating the ban. People who want abortions will find a way to get one — it’s their health on the line. Criminalizing healthcare on any level is, frankly, idiotic.
So on purely democratic grounds I definitively reject Texas’ misogynistic attempts to control people’s autonomy — because let’s get real here, that’s what these abortion restrictions are really all about.
Evangelical Christian conservatives have always worked to control everyone’s lives. That is what their faith is ultimately about — rejecting any other way of being, any other vision of morality.
They hate freedom of any kind. All are to be slaves to God, and they won’t stop attacking the rest of us until we’re all holding hands in a giant prayer circle begging God to bring fire and death upon the wicked.
I’d say it’s a fair bet that the majority of people living in cities like Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio vehemently disagree with Texas’ new abortion restrictions. Women there are only being subjected to them because other parts of Texas have decided to restrict the rights of all Texas residents.
The same pattern holds across most of the Red States, especially in the Southeast, Plains, and Ohio River regions.
The stark urban-rural divide is an undeniable symptom that the American democratic system is utterly broken. Texas Republicans from the rurals and suburbs are — both in this and the mad crusade against mask and vaccine mandates — deliberately inflicting harm on urban populations to score political points — and secure donations from Evangelical Christians in Blue states where their nonsense has no chance of taking over.
Most people angry at what’s happening want the federal government to get involved, to push back against Texas’ shredding of Constitutional rights. Biden is naturally promising to raise hell, without much ability to back his words up given his collapsing poll numbers.
Trouble is, it’s the federal government’s total stagnation and steady collapse that is causing most of this insanity in the first place.
Deep down, the entire conservative movement dominated by a rage that has been building for thirty years, fueled by Fox News and partisan talk radio and now social media. They have chosen to embrace a perilous dual narrative of white victimhood and the impending (overdue) Apocalypse of so-called Western Civilization.
Coupled to America’s outdated political architecture, the rise of this New Confederacy is simply devastating — America is already in a Second Civil War no less deadly than the first, the only question is how soon it ends and how many people die.
Normal legislative channels are being swamped by a kind of virulent partisanship animated by the pressing financial need to generate violent anger. This true for the Left, Right, and Center of American political life these days, but Evangelical Christians are now in the driver’s seat on the hard right and many of their leaders have been dreaming of this moment for years.
They secretly hate the Constitution and desperately strive to colonize it, turn the bones of American democracy into a new chapter of the Bible interpreted by charismatic preachers. They are determined to enslave the rest of us to their dead faith at any cost — just like the wealthy neoliberals among the centrists, even if the form of their faith is quite different.
In the past, no Republican state would be pressing the abortion issue this hard, in this mad way, covered by the maneuverings of brazenly partisan justices. Frankly you almost have to admire their bloody-mindedness to some degree — would that the so-called champions of American democracy and equal rights begin to fight with the same commitment and vigor!
Of course, now, even that would probably just accelerate what is already happening. The Great American Divorce is proceeding whether the rest of us like it or not.
The hard right won’t stop until they have total power. They are America’s Taliban, and they want to win.
Americans simply do not exist in the same moral universe. The hard-right is no longer conservative at all, but a revolutionary movement determined to capture the federal government and remake it in their image.
That old American debate has risen again, a dread zombie that just won’t die: the eternal American war over state’s rights. Evangelical Christians want powerful Christian-dominated state governments protected by a compliant federal regime, just like the old Confederacy’s leaders wanted a federally protected slaver paradise.
The fight isn’t really about state’s rights, of course — that’s just the rhetorical position the Christian fascists always take to try and justify their revolutionary aspirations. It’s all Constitutional, they insist — while actively working to take control of what the Constitution means.
Power is what is at stake here—that’s the fuel of all politics, deep down. Only when there is some basic agreement on reality that satisfies the vast majority of people can you have anything approaching a united nation or society.
Once a society splits into two moral and philosophical universes, endless escalating struggle is all you can expect. One side’s win represents a bitter loss for the other, so each escalates until there’s nothing left but the endless war.
America is disintegrating, bit by bit, with one side accelerating the process at every turn while the other screams real loud but doesn’t take steps sufficient to get ahead of the compounding problems the country faces. America’s last sane leaders — geriatrics mostly in a dark echo of the dying Soviet Union — are determined to pretend massive federal spending programs can fix the rot when voting rights are under attack at the state level and the majority of the opposition literally rejects the democratic legitimacy of the current federal government.
The Democrats and allied media, sadly, are only going to point fingers and solicit donations right up until the point the New Confederacy seizes the Capitol and White House while claiming — with the Supreme Court’s approval — that they’re acting in a totally Constitutional manner by restricting voting rights and giving state legislatures the ability to overturn elections based on mere allegations of fraud.
Those few sane Republicans left, like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, appear determined to try and salvage their party from the inside — an effort doomed to fail, as too many of their voters are now Independents who don’t vote in primaries or want to be associated with either party.
The proverbial Dutch boy is jamming his fingers in the breached dike, but the tide is rushing in. The Afghanistan debacle is a key symptom, the unrelenting, unopposed Delta variant surge another, and the constant degradation of social norms and endless politicking just adds more froth to the wicked brew.
A hard truth that Americans who want to oppose this barbarity must come to accept is that the federal government and the Democrats aren’t coming to save anyone.
They are utterly bound to the two-party doom loop, unable to break out of their own patterns and rise to the occasion the present situation demands.
If Americans want to fight back against creeping fascism, they — likely with the help of allies abroad — ultimately have to take away the single common denominator powering this Neo-conservative nightmare: the federal government itself.
Too much power has been centralized in Washington D.C. over the past 80 years. This has allowed wealthy and influential interests to totally capture the political system, gutting American democracy.
On the country’s current trajectory, a severe legitimacy crisis is bound to erupt after the 2024 Presidential election. A split of the states into Red and Blue alliances each backing a different President with the Supreme Court’s rulings ignored because of its obvious partisan lean.
But as I’ve written before — these two entities would hardly be able to work for long. They would either go to war to try and establish total control over the nation or, more likely, swiftly disintegrate into regional groupings thanks to the simple fact that once the federal government in D.C. is defunct, the two-party system is dead too.
Basically, once extremists in Texas and the other Red States don’t have Liberals from California and New York to own anymore, no way to convince their voters that their lifestyles are under attack, a political realignment will come in 2–4 years, leaving them isolated and swiftly powerless.
In less than a decade they would be scattered and all but forgotten, because the Christian fascists who dominate the Republican Party now would be unable to govern in the modern world.
I say we should give them what they want.
Let all Regions of America have Constitutional Autonomy — suddenly, those Americans and allies abroad will have many more tools at their disposal to help modify the behavior of Red state governments.
Truth be told, the federal government of the United States is all that shields Red America from the extreme international hate that would be unleashed upon it by nearly every other country if given the chance.
Russia and Brazil might like Red America’s Christian Fascism, because Putin and Bolsonaro advocate basically the same thing, but do you think the European Union really wants to do business with Texas?
Hardly.
Right now, Europeans angry at what is happening in the US have no leverage. They can perhaps try to ban travel to certain states within the US, but this would create a diplomatic incident. It is difficult to restrict where their businesses can establish operations because of the united federal government so international sanctions are impossible to target.
But let a bunch of states like Texas have regional autonomy and their leaders will get a swift and harsh introduction to the reality of highly mobile international capital. Investors don’t like uncertainty, and the threat of sanctions looming over Texas would have an immediate impact on every company there.
What this means is that social issues that Texas Republicans get away with nationalizing because their enemies live in New York City and San Francisco would suddenly become globalized, which is their absolute worst nightmare.
If the European Union can boycott, divest, and sanction parts of the United States while retaining their ability to invest in others more in line with European views on human rights, then these would-be Christian fascists will suddenly find themselves with a national economy in free-fall.
Look, if you are determined to get rid of abortion, you are free to push to have your own community ban healthcare facilities that offer the procedure.
But in the places where people reject your crude lust for power over people’s bodies?
You can step right off. You have no right under democracy or the Constitution to dictate the moral choices of people who don’t live near you unless they’re somehow directly putting your life in danger — like by refusing masks or vaccines.
No abortion has ever threatened the life of a third party. Given that the anti-abortion people also tend to be anti-mask and anti-vaccine, the entire movement is part of the same cruel authoritarian package that seeks to elevate the rights of the wealthy few over the rest.
Unfortunately, contrary to what our civics classes taught us, the United States of America was founded on the basic principle that the right people should be allowed to rule the rest. Only landed white men originally were considered citizens for this reason — it took a 200 struggle just to make them agree to allow everyone to vote and that’s still under threat.
America is not a democracy and never has been. This is by design. The country we were raised to believe in isn’t real — the term American means absolutely nothing but violent dispossession.
And I say this as a veteran from a family of veterans. The Constitution has been stolen from us by the wealthy and well-connected. Their inevitable schism is taking us all into a pointless war over Truth, an experience European Christians have had again and again over the past thousand years.
The biggest lie in this country right now is the fantasy that either party can save it.
No one is putting the thing back together — and they shouldn’t.
America has killed millions of people at home and abroad. Osama Bin Laden was able to provoke its idiot leaders into a 20-year Forever War that America lost badly and in the process proved to the world it was no different than any other world power of history.
In short, it destroyed the very foundation of United States national security since 1945.
America never was what our teachers and professors taught us to believe— it is not democracy by and for the people, but a ruthless empire, a merciless monster that drains our lifeblood and taxes our labor in order to sustain a self-destructive system, a violent grand casino where the House always wins and victims of Covid and mass shootings and lead pipes and the Taliban are left to die.
A House dominated by a wealthy, influential few who are so alienated from the rest of the world they can’t possibly understand how badly they are screwing it up. America’s leaders are literally murdering the planet, and making us all complicit in the killing.
The America we knew is dead, and nobody should mourn the thing.
Let the Great American Divorce proceed — let America tear itself apart!
Once Pacific, Atlantic, Southwest, and Great Lakes Regions have autonomy and a chance to rebuild our alliances with the democratic nations of the world, we can start to roll back this wicked tide of hate the old fashioned way — the only way it has ever been broken in the past:
By cutting off the intolerant and hateful from the world, supporting all local democratic resistance to their rule until it crumbles from the inside.
Only then can a America be reborn better, a Fifth America we might even be proud of.
