An elite meltdown
Ok so I am reading Sullivan’s revolting piece, because I’m masochistic that way. 14 words in I’m already pissed off.
To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement.
“Elite.” What an asshole. Does he think non-elite women want to be forced to bear children they don’t want? You can’t even phrase it so that it makes sense – women who don’t want a pregnancy don’t want the pregnancy, so of course no women want to be forced to do what they don’t want to do. It’s a contradiction in terms. But here’s smug Sullivan calling us “elite” for saying so. Easy for him.
The seriously stupid bit, as we already know, is where he pretends to think Kamala Harris meant all women vote yes on abortion rights.
Kamala Harris also found her voice:
Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, ‘How dare they?’ How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?
The premise here is that all women support abortion rights.
The hell it is. She doesn’t say, or imply, “all women support abortion rights.” She says how dare they [the theocrats] tell women what we can do with our bodies? That doesn’t imply anything about the views or loyalties of the women in question. It’s a statement about rights, not a statement about opinions or votes. There is no premise about how women vote.
What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it.
Democratic process? What democratic process? The Supreme Court isn’t a democratic process. The appointment of justices isn’t a democratic process, although it is in theory the outcome of one…but of course we know it isn’t, strictly speaking, since Clinton got more votes than Trump. It’s a gerrymandered process that relies on a grotesquely undemocratic Senate and Electoral College, so Sullivan should start complaining about that before he complains about angry feminists dissing Our Demokrasee.
I’ll leave it there. He scrapes my nerves.
The democratic process he’s referring to is State’s legislation.
And now I’m regretting posting my own response, which I did before reading this (I think I started it before you posted this.)
The “elite” thing bugged me too, and I grok the rage. But my overall take on Sullivan’s argument was more positive.
I held my metaphorical nose and read the whole thing earlier. The chap’s either a moron, or doing a damn good impression of one. So what if even a majority of women would vote against abortion being a private medical matter? It’s not up to them to dictate what other women do! And that was Harris’s point, not that she didn’t believe that some women hate abortion.
Ugh.
Anyway, this twit seems to think that the polarisation of US politics began when a court decided that women were as entitled to privacy and bodily autonomy as men. If he is correct, then it wasn’t that decision that was at fault, but the over-the-top reaction by the conservative Christian lobby. Does he think that the riots which happened after schools were desegregated were caused by the desegregation? Because I think they were caused by the people who unfairly reacted badly to other people getting the rights they already had.
Sullivan’s an appeaser. He probably thinks the war in Ukraine is the fault of Ukraine, for not letting the Russians just walk in and take over.
I’m being unclear again.
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that even if every single woman in America bar one thought that abortion is murder, and that one woman was pregnant and didn’t want to be, then that one woman should be allowed to have whatever medical and/or surgical help she needs to end her pregnancy.
Because some things shouldn’t be decided democratically, and whether or not the female half of humanity is allowed to have bodily autonomy is not something which should be up for a vote.
The most divisive period in US history, surely, was the civil war. Does Sullivan really believe that it was the fault of the government wanting to end slavery of Black people? Because that’s the logic he’s applying when he claims that Roe divided the country. So what if some people think that abortion is murder, and are willing to hate the rest of the country for saying it isn’t? That’s not the fault of the rest of the country! Nobody is obliged to humour the extremists in order to reduce disunity, especially if to do so entails throwing away the human rights of half the population.
And I say this as someone who really believed that abortion is murder, until I learned all the facts about pregnancy, especially what happens to women and girls and their pregnancies and babies when forced to give birth by a male supremacist cult which seems to believe that the only life which is sacred is that which exists precariously before birth.