The definition of insanity is to keep on doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Albert Einstein
My colleague Sean Dailey published a gutsy post recently in which he addressed the 800 pound gorilla in the pro life room.
That gorilla is none other than the pro life movement’s abject failure to actually achieve anything meaningful in the fight to save babies from abortion. This failure is even more stark when we consider that it is the sad culmination of more than 50 years of marching, praying, voting and hoping on the part of many wonderful and devoted pro life people.
Pro life people have sold their souls in an effort to overturn Roe v Wade. They have become proponents of a nasty partisanship which has brought this great country right down to its knees. They have given over their own security and safety and allowed this country to be raped by right-wing billionaires, all in an effort to save the lives of the babies.
Now, along comes Sean Dailey, and he tells us the truth that we don’t want to hear. He says that we are unlikely to ever overturn Roe v Wade with the tactics we are using. That fact is so obvious that it makes your teeth ache, but nobody has been brave enough to say it out loud.
Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is to keep on doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
If we keep on doing what we’ve kept on doing for the past fifty years, we are pretty much doomed to keep on getting the same result. And that result has nothing to do with saving the lives of babies from abortion.
We talk about saving baby’s lives. But what we’ve actually gotten for our efforts is a string of preposterously bad presidents and even worse United States Senators and Congresspeople.
Bush 2 was supposed to be “pro life,” so we gave him a second term, even after he’d gotten us into an unnecessary war. He led us into the debacles of Katrina and an economic meltdown that nearly took the whole world right down to a depression that would have made what happened in the 1930s look like a walk in the park. What he didn’t do was move us any closer to overturning Roe v Wade.
Now we’re backing an obviously crazy demagogue who is both dangerously incompetent and indifferent to how many people he kills. We appear to be ready to let him do away with the payroll tax, which would defund Social Security and Medicare and put a lot of elderly people out in the street.
At the same time, the religious leadership in this country, at least among the denominations that are most aggressively pro life in their stance, has sunk to the level of abject political whoredom. These religious leaders aren’t preaching Christ. They are preaching the Republican Party.
That is the place where our pro life efforts have brought us.
We are standing at the intersection of a ruined country that cannot function and a totally corrupt and vengeful demagogue who does not value the lives of the American people, but who says he’s “the most pro life president in history.”
That is the fruit that 50 years of pro life organizing and work has birthed. We have put men in power who have used us mercilessly to advance destructive, greedy policies that concentrate power in a few corrupt hands, drain the treasury into a few equally corrupt pockets and disenfranchise We the People.
What pro life people have not managed to do is to overturn Roe v Wade.
We’ve got 5 — count them — FIVE supposedly “pro life” justices on the Supreme Court right now. There are nine Supreme Court justices. We have a majority. We should be able to overturn Roe. It should have already happened.
We swallowed a lot of poison to put these guys on that court. We had to overlook a lot of bad things about them and allow them to hand down decisions that have robbed us and weakened our country in too many ways to count.
We’ve had to become the backers of racists, rapists, liars, thieves and frighteningly crazy men and women in order to put them on this court. We did it for the babies.
But do you know who has not benefitted from all this sacrifice?
The babies.
Just a few weeks ago, this “pro life” Supreme Court that we sold our souls and have destroyed our country to get finally heard a case on abortion. You know what they did? They voted pro choice. They voted for legal abortion.
We got nothing from them.
Nothing
When somebody tells you that you must vote Republican in this upcoming election because of abortion, you will know one of two things. You’ll know that, they are either (1) lying to you, or (2) they don’t know what they’re talking about.
We’ve been trying to overturn Roe v Wade by doing what we’ve been doing for 50 years of failure. And now, we’re being told that we have to double down and do it again, even though the candidate in question is an amoral nut job who will destroy our democracy. The word for that is stupid.
If we want to save the babies lives, we need to do something new.
We can overturn Roe v Wade. But we need to change tactics. To do that, we need to have an open, honest, reality-based discussion about our situation.
We need to take reality on reality’s terms. Compared to the lives at stake, that’s a small price.
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