This entry was posted on 8/17/2008 5:10 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
When my son was getting shot at, and his Marine buddies getting blown up pretty much every day in Iraq in 2004-5 and again in 2006, and every day Marines and soldiers were dying and getting maimed in a war that was based on, and continually perpetrated by, a LIE, I had to rely on a number of coping strategies that might seem grim or even unhinged to anyone who has never endured such daily agony for months on end (and repeated, the next year)--dark fantasies on what I would do "if anything happened" to my beloved boy.
One fantasy was what I would do if, after his grisly death, I were approached by a network morning news program and asked to talk about my son for the cameras.
When Dustin was home for his first post-deployment leave, I told him, "I'd say, 'You can take your patriotic graphics and your sentimental music and your tear-jerker story for the folks to weep over their morning cereal before racing out the door to the mall, and you can shove it up your ass.'"
My son nodded in grim approval. He understood what I meant.
Although I completely empathized with the desire of grief-stricken families to honor their child's memory, to make his or her death more than a cold statistic, I believed that they were being manipulated by a cynical media who knew full well that less than one-half of one-percent of their viewers would ever have to undergo the anguish of sending a child off to war--repeatedly--to risk his or her life. It was a vicarious way for their viewers to put a mental check-mark next to the "support the troops" box of their lives before going about the business of utterly and completely ignoring that same war and those same exhausted troops and their stressed-out families.
Another dark fantasy of mine during those days, was what I would do should I be herded in with other bereaved family members for a private audience with my dead son's commander-in-chief.
What I would do, I decided, was refuse to shake his hand, then stare at him dry-eyed and say, "You murdered my son."
This was not just idle fantasy, designed to help me cope with the cascade of daily fear and worry that flooded my system for months on end--it was truly the way I believed. And every time I saw Bush make one of his pompous hypocritical speeches about the "sanctity of human life," I wanted to throw up.
The pro-life movement, I suspected, was highly selective about just WHOSE life it was pro.
Which is why, when I read Frank Schaeffer's incendiary powerhouse blogpost, "Frank! As a Pro-Life Leader How Dare You Support Pro-Choice Obama?" at HuffingtonPost.com, I literally leapt to my feet in instant recognition of a symbiotic soul--even though, technically, we disagree on abortion rights issues. It was as if this Marine dad, a powerful leader of the evangelical Christian right throughout the 70's and 80's and strong John McCain supporter in 2000 who now supports Obama, had read my thoughts and put them into even better words than I could have. And I don't mean just on abortion, I mean on EVERYTHING.
You can read his outstanding post here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/frank-as-a-former-pro-lif_b_119435.html
Because, you see, it takes far more courage for him to express these thoughts than for me, simply because he was a Christian right leader for so long, and now, they consider him some sort of traitor.
So, this is what I read that first brought me to my feet:
"I say this as the proud father of United States Marine. I say this as someone who believes that we should be in Afghanistan where my son served, fought and risked his life for us all. I also say this as someone who believes that when it comes to pro-life issues in the most comprehensive sense, that President Bush, Dick Cheney and the neoconservative/Republican establishment have needlessly killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and over 4000 American servicemen and women.
"I use the words "needlessly killed" advisedly. When you send men and women into an unnecessary and unprovoked war-of-choice for spurious reasons that then turn into outright lies, you've murdered them. And George W. Bush has sanctioned torture, contravened the Geneva conventions, and has lied to the American people about all of it."
What Schaeffer--who makes clear that he is still solidly pro-life--is doing is putting into CONTEXT what it actually MEANS to be "pro-life."
You can't drone on and on about "killing innocent babies" whenever desperate women choose to terminate a pregnancy, and then turn around and ignore thousands of babies who have been killed as a direct result of the evangelical darling Bush's warmongering--not to mention more than 4,000 of American mother's children who died as a direct result of his and his administration's policies.
Schaeffer takes what is normally considered to be a single issue, and broadens it to encompass this entire election:
"There's no point arguing about abortion, capital punishment, women's rights, gender equality or any other issue -- no matter how important -- while the ship of state is being torpedoed by the Commander-in-Chief. We can't afford more of this. Our honorable military can't endure more of this. Our economy can't endure more of this. Our Earth will not survive more of this. Bush and his look alike shill McCain have to go."
In that sense, he is referring to the life or death of our entire planet, which has been slowly burning up while Bush has fiddled away at least a thousand days of his presidency at his Crawford "ranch" and at Camp David. (Not only has he enjoyed more days of vacation than any previous president, but he has also attended more sporting events than any other occupant of the White House.)
Of equal importance to our particular country, is the abuse of the United States military at the hands of an administration who claims to love them--an abuse that has damn near broken it. The army can't meet their recruitment goals, their junior officer corps is abandoning them at record numbers rather than staying to make a career, (as one army major said, "All I have to look forward to is more deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan"), and those returning from multiple combat deployments are cracking up in frightening numbers.
Aren't we pro THEIR lives?
As far as "pro-life" policies, Schaeffer cuts right to the marrow:
"What kind of care do we provide to mothers and children? What is our educational system like? Is healthcare available to all? Do our preschool programs and everything from paternal and maternal leave to the economic well-being of our country come first? Or do we argue about abortion rights while we live lives of such supreme selfish decadence that the nature of our country means that no matter what we do with the laws about abortion life will not be valued?
"The Republican leadership is not pro-life. They are simply against abortion for reasons of political expediency. They are also for torture and military aggression. And they chose a literal executioner for president; a former governor who has more blood on his hands than any other modern American governor; Mr. Texas-sized, Capital Punishment-with-no-mercy-no-pardons hang em' high himself."
This last remark was a shot through the heart for me, as a Texan, because I can still remember, vividly, our esteemed Governor Bush's reaction when Death-Row inmate Carla Fay Tucker appealed for her life on the grounds that she had become a born-again Christian since her incarceration, had married a minister, and had dedicated her life for the previous decade to ministering to other prisoners. She'd been a model prisoner and had accomplished a great deal of good in those years.
With a sneer, on-camera, he affected a high-pitched, whimpering female voice and simpered, "Please, please don't kill me!" and then giggled.
A few weeks later, he denied a stay of execution and she was put to death. It was a horrifying display for any fellow human being to make, but for it to have been our head of state was inexcusable and, to fellow Texans, humiliating.
Schaeffer moves on, to address the aspect of pro-life policies to climate change in this way:
"The Republicans have contributed to climate change by coddling oil companies and car companies and ducking the hard environmental and energy policy questions for thirty years. They have literally sold our country to the highest polluting bidders from the Saudis to the Chinese. Therefore the Republicans have literally risked the ability of our planet to sustain all human life born and unborn. So much for human life values.
"Who will help us to become a nation that values life -- abortion rhetoric aside? Obama."
Then, to my delight, he compares and contrasts Obama's and McCain's appearances before the prosperous evangelical mega-church, Saddleback, and its wealthy bestselling author-preacher, Rick Warren. He points out, one-two-three, how easy it has been for the Republican leadership to manipulate the party faithful:
"The contrast could not have been more clear than on August 16 in the interview between pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church and Obama and McCain. Obama gave real and thoughtful answers, often trying to explore a moral question deeply. McCain offered nothing more than canned applause lines and anecdotes from his tired simplistic stump speech.
"McCain fed pre-programed red meat to the Evangelical faithful who were packing the auditorium, but not much more. He parroted all the 'right' lines about abortion, the same empty phrases Bush, parrots, Bush's father parroted and Reagan and Ford parroted.
"'When does life begin?' asked Warren. 'At conception!' shot back McCain.
"The Evangelical crowd goes wild! See?! That's our guy!
"And where do the tired canned pro-life "correct answers" get us? Nowhere.
"I will be voting for the presidential candidate who seems most authentically exercised about our devastating problems and who is ready to not only address them but to provide the inspiring leadership that will move my fellow citizens and I to do something about our terminal situation. I'll be voting for the man that has also inspired the world more than any national leader in my lifetime."
Then, he makes a smooth segue into the whole national security argument that is supposed to favor McCain:
"There are worse things than America being liked and therefore safer. Would you rather have non-Americans waving our flag or burning it?"
He even sends a flaming arrow through the old patriotism-meme:
"The question is: Who can best help us to the realization of the real American Dream?
"The Republicans only offer consumerism as a debased sort of 'freedom.' This is the freedom of 'me' and 'I.' This is the freedom of pigs rooting at a trough.
"As a born-again Christ-centered believer Obama offers a spiritual vision of life founded on the Sermon On the Mount. It is the freedom of 'we.' It is the same view of freedom that my Marine son learned in boot camp: that the person standing next to you is more important than you are. That concept of freedom is more in keeping with valuing all human life. It will create a climate more friendly to mothers and children."
And finally, Schaeffer brings the argument full-circle: he defines what it REALLY means to be "pro-life."
One of my basic complaints about the whole "pro-life" argument is that it seemed to me that its proponents were mostly pro the lives of blond-haired, blue-eyed babes who could be brought up in proper white Christian homes. A crass sort of blindness was applied to the stark reality: that most abortions took place among the most desperate among us--women of poverty and similar grim struggles who simply had no other choice, and young women ignorant of basic pregnancy prevention methods.
A cold-hearted Republican attitude toward government-as-enemy had shut down any chance those women had for:
1) meaningful, thorough sex education available to those most vulnerable--teens
2) readily-available contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place
3) insurance coverage for contraception to go along with its full coverage of Viagra
4) pre-natal health care for all
5) childbirth and post-natal health care for all
6) paid leave-time from work to care for a newborn
7) affordable childcare upon returning to work
8) universal health insurance for those children as they grow up
And so on. It just seemed to me that the entire movement had a sort of bland denial to the impact their policies would have on the real lives of real women. What Schaeffer does is put Obama's pro-choice policies in the full context of compassion for ALL, and of policies that respect ALL human life:
"As I listen to Senator Obama speak, as I see the selfless altruistic energy he has generated in a whole new generation of young people, as I think about the ethical, caring culture he would like to foster with healthcare for all, a revamped and reenergized educational system that includes the arts, history, poetry and all those things that make life worthwhile, as I think about the wars my son's brothers-in-arms are still mired and dying in because of the hubris of the Republicans, as I think about the crying need to restore our standing in the world, as I think about the scandalous way in which the Republicans have manipulated people, including the most sincere Evangelicals, Orthodox and Roman Catholics, to get their votes, while not actually doing anything about the issues they care most about, yes, I am ready to for a change.
"In Obama's America arguments for compassion for the unborn and all the other 'least of these' will resonate regardless of Obama's stance on the legality of abortion. Roe is not the point. Our hearts are the point. The unborn like everyone else will do better in a country that puts people, the earth, and our future ahead of greed, oil company profits and jingoistic rule by fear.
"I will be voting for Senator Obama and am fighting for his election because I am pro-life. "
I could not have said it better myself, Mr. Schaeffer. Thank you for your courage.
