WORDS: ABOUT WAR, GAY RIGHTS, AND ABORTION

WORDS: ABOUT WAR, GAY RIGHTS, AND ABORTION

Americans need to learn that "bi-partisan" isn't necessarily good. Nor is "compromise” --as popularly understood--good, unless by a lucky accident. And "tolerance" isn't good, unless we are talking about tolerating cold weather or a toothache, or (if we are being generous) tolerating fools.

If half of us are racists and half of us aren't, will "bi-partisanship" work as a way of insuring equal rights? Of course not. Likewise, President Obama's inauguration "compromise" on gay rights was absurd. Either gays have equal rights with everybody else, or they are discriminated against and abused as second-class citizens. Having a anti-gay rights bigot and a gay bishop both pray to presumably the same god for him and for us is ludicrously bi-partisan, and demonstrates how idiotic our idea of compromise is.

If partisans on both sides can agree on something, then that something has bi-partisan support. If we reach a compromise on an issue, that means we agree on a course that we think is the right one--which may not be down-the-middle at all! A compromise is an agreement: the word says that those who compromise "promise together"--for the future. (I don't make "promises" about the past; that makes no sense.) We can achieve a compromise on how to end our war in Iraq, by agreeing on how to withdraw U.S. troops; but we can't have a compromise that is half-way between war and no war.

The Clinton "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military was a false compromise. It denied gay rights: it kept gays second class citizens. If the "don't ask, don't tell" policy had applied to all troops, heterosexual as well as homosexual, it would have been a decent if meaningless compromise.

Abortion is currently legal for the most part in the United States. Some people argue that abortion is murder, however. Is Roe v. Wade a compromise solution? No. It rejects the argument that abortion is murder, and accepts the argument for a woman's right to abort a foetus. The question was not decided by putting a woman's right to control of her own body above or ahead of the prohibition against murder; rather, it decided that abortion is not murder.

The U. S. Supreme Court made that decision without establishing precisely what determines whether or not a foetus is a living human child. Under U.S. law, if a court can't determine that a person has committed a crime--murder, for example--the accused must be acquitted: thus, if we don't know that a human child has been murdered we can't judge abortion to be murder. If the foetus is a human child, however, killing it intentionally is murder.

When we acquit the accused murderer because we cannot be certain of his guilt, we make our decision in order to avoid punishing the innocent. "Reasonable doubt" is the cut-off point: proof of guilt must be "beyond reasonable doubt." Can the reverse argument be made in the case of abortion? If the foetus is "beyond reasonable doubt" not a human child, the abortion is legal; but if there is a reasonable possibility that it is a human child, must its right to life be protected?

Our laws have as their first purpose the protection of the innocent, and from this derives the secondary purpose of punishing the guilty. In the case of abortion, however, there are further moral complications. The first is that, prior to Roe v. Wade, it was possible for all Americans except the poor to get safe abortions without fear of prosecution; all they had to do was find a doctor who would perform the operation. The poor could get abortions in back alleys, or abort themselves, but often died as a result. The law against abortion was, on the face of it, discriminatory. The second complication in trying to regulate abortion is that our society doesn't mandate proper care for children: once children are born, they may starve to death or be homeless or grow up uncared for and uneducated for life--and no laws have been broken. If we are to protect the rights of the unborn, shouldn't we also acknowledge that, once born, children have rights too?

We need to stop the partisan shouting of the "pro life" and "pro choice" advocates, and think our way through to an honest compromise: a way forward, to a proper future which will not require some of us to "tolerate" abortion that may be murder, and will not "tolerate" child neglect in any form in our society.