From November 8, 2012, \u201cA very slightly less \u2018fake\u2019 argument from Mark Galli in Christianity Today<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Ten years ago, then-editor of Christianity Today<\/em> Mark Galli had to publish a correction following an editorial in which he accused Jonathan Dudley of \u201cfake news\u201d for writing about how white evangelical abortion-is-murderism was younger than the Happy Meal<\/a>. Dudley forced Galli\u2019s retreat because he had the receipts \u2014 many of them from the archives of, yes, Christianity Today<\/em>. And he also had the receipts to show that Galli\u2019s straw-man version of what pro-choice people actually say and do and believe was mendacious, malicious, willful bullshit.<\/p>\n Galli\u2019s half-baked correction was one long \u201cAh, well, nevertheless.\u201d<\/p>\n That makes this 10-year-old post relevant for today, the first national post-Dobbs<\/em> election. No one knows for sure how abortion politics will play out in the brave new world of post-Roe<\/em>, post-legal-argument Supreme Court Galli-ism.<\/p>\n My guess is that it will eventually have an enormous, tectonic impact. But not yet. Because I think Mark Galli isn\u2019t the only one still clinging to his reassuring slander. I think a lot of voters, just like Galli, think of \u201cbanning abortion\u201d as mostly something it mostly isn\u2019t. They think it has to do with registering their opposition to cavalier sluts making decisions for the worst imaginable reasons. So they\u2019re still thinking that this is all that happened with Dobbs \u2014 that cavalier sluts were legally prohibited from making decisions for the worst possible reasons.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think enough time has passed yet for it to have sunk in with many voters that this isn\u2019t what it means at all. They don\u2019t yet understand the full cruel horror of it.<\/p>\n So, for now, they\u2019ll do what Galli did in the 2012 editorial discussed below. They\u2019ll cling to the false witness they\u2019ve borne against their neighbors, desperately telling themselves and each other that this is all about those imaginary sluts in their heads and nothing more.<\/p>\n Savita Halappanavar died in Galway hospital in 2012. Ireland legalized abortion in 2018. I suspect something like that time frame may be how the full rejection of Dobbs unfolds here in America. I hope I\u2019m wrong and that it happens much more quickly, but I fear the next six years or so will get worse before it gets better.<\/p>\n At\u00a0Christianity Today,<\/em>\u00a0Mark Galli\u2019s voice isn\u2019t always this high-pitched<\/a>. That\u2019s just the Doppler effect on account of his back-tracking so fast from his\u00a0earlier post attacking Jonathan Dudley for supposedly \u201cfake history<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s only a half-baked correction, but at least Galli acknowledges that his earlier post was misleading twaddle.<\/p>\n Galli\u2019s latest is also misleading. He qualifies the sweeping nonsense and historical errors of his earlier post, but still clings to it with weasel-words like \u201csome\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t necessarily.\u201d Yet these grudging qualifiers can\u2019t be reconciled with the logic of his position or the coherence \u2014 such as it is \u2014 of his argument. Galli writes:<\/p>\n Dudley is correct is suggesting that some pro-choice advocates do indeed believe that the fetus has moral value, and that they don\u2019t necessarily think abortion is the principal answer to the control of human reproduction. \u2026 The problem is that a large part of the pro-choice community \u2014 which includes millions beyond the U.S. \u2014 do indeed fail to see that the fetus has moral value, and do indeed champion abortion as just another method of birth control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A qualification and concession, then a false bit of maliciously dickish hogwash \u2014 \u201cjust another method of birth control\u201d \u2014 and then Galli is off to the races, dismissing those few \u201csome\u201d who \u201cdon\u2019t necessarily\u201d fit his bogus caricature of the international sisterhood of the pro-choice conspiracy and returning to the same false binary choice of his previous post.<\/p>\n Galli\u2019s official, tribally sanctioned \u201cstance\u201d on abortion requires him to dismiss any consideration of pro-choice views that \u201cdo indeed believe that the fetus has moral value.\u201d In doing so, as Galli reluctantly concedes Dudley is correct to say, he must therefore dismiss the view that the majority of evangelicals held just 40 years ago \u2014 and the view that more than a third of us hold\u00a0today<\/em>.<\/p>\n Everything Galli argues after dispensing with the \u201csome \u2026 do indeed\u201d qualifier above is based on this binary view that every zygote is either: A) morally indistinguishable from a human adult, and therefore legally more<\/em> significant than the women who carries it; or else B) of zero value and zero moral significance. Allowing for those two \u2014 and\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0those two \u2014 options, Galli concludes that \u201cA\u201d is the only acceptable position for real, true Christians.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a coherent argument, but it\u2019s a smart one for Galli. If he wants to keep his job at\u00a0Christianity Today,<\/em>\u00a0then \u201cA\u201d\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0the only acceptable position.<\/p>\n The problem with constructing the question in this binary way, however, is that it prevents Galli from hearing, understanding or even\u00a0imagining<\/em>\u00a0the actual view of the actual people who disagree with him. And thus it also prevents Galli from understanding or even imagining the actual view of\u00a0American law.<\/em>\u00a0That law is based on the idea excluded by Galli\u2019s binary framework \u2014 the idea that a zygote or fetus has great value and moral significance, but that it\u2019s value is less than that of the adult person who carries it. Her rights therefore carry greater weight than its rights \u2014 her humanity counts for more, legally and morally, than its potential humanity.<\/p>\n This is not an obscure idea \u2014 it\u2019s embodied by and embedded in all of our cultural traditions and rituals, including our\u00a0religious<\/em>\u00a0rituals, from birthdays to baptisms. This is why we mourn for a lost pregnancy, but not in the same way that we mourn for the death of a child. This is why when the tragedy of a miscarriage occurs, we wonder, \u201cHow far along?\u201d \u2014 gauging our response by the answer, the further along, the deeper the tragedy.<\/p>\n We know this. All of us, including people like Mark Galli, know this.<\/p>\n So why exclude this possibility? Why pretend our only choices are the binary options of zero value or greater-than-a-woman value?<\/p>\n One reason to pretend such a thing might be hinted at by Galli\u2019s insistence that legal abortion is the province mainly of cavalier sluts for whom it is \u201cjust another form of birth control.\u201d No, he didn\u2019t explicitly say \u201ccavalier sluts.\u201d He didn\u2019t\u00a0need<\/em>\u00a0to say it explicitly. One can\u2019t wind up where he winds up \u2014 with this glib, nasty garbage about \u201cjust another form of birth control\u201d \u2014 without starting from the presumption that women are cavalier sluts who cannot be trusted with the fetuses in their own bodies.<\/p>\n I\u2019d urge Galli to read a recent post at\u00a0the dead authors club<\/a>\u00a0(via<\/em>\u00a0Abi at\u00a0Making Light<\/a>) in which Chris discusses \u201cFetal personhood and criminalizing abortion: a prosecutor\u2019s perspective.\u201d Chris writes [original link is defunct, post can be read on this Tumblr<\/a>]:<\/p>\n
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