logic | dearth (Part the First)
Distraction: Click for bran'new love.
So anyone willing to try to make sense of this, understand his argument, because I give up.
Part of what is happening here is the sloth that comes with comfort. Rep. Humphrey is not so old; his political conscience formed during a period when certain cultural priorities held sway; what seems inherent to him is changing, and he really doesn't have any idea what he's doing.
Not quite an analogy: Young voters don't like contexts of blame and culpability any more than anyone else, but consider young voters: This was the last of the Roemer-year kids coming of age, and these are significant because they have lived in a particular time; if one was born in '96, this was your first presidential year, while those born in '93 came of age in '12. Their slightly older siblings hit the voting market in '10.
These are conservative consciences that have grown up entirely in an age in which Justice itself has been abused in a bizarre, codependent relationship; everybody wants Justice, but conservatives just lose their own plot when Justice doesn't follow their path.
The reaction to losing Amendment 2 has been a simmering grudge against the judiciary. 1993 was the first injunction; 1996 was the U.S. Supreme Court settling the issue. They won at the ballot box, how dare the court take it away.
A contrast point: There was a decision a couple years ago when the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck an anti-abortion ballot measure before the election; they did it through gritted teeth, in a brief opinion that left a whole lot unsaid. And they were
furious. They could personally loathe abortion as much as possible, but you put this before a judge who does his job and he will do his job and how dare you put this shit before the court. So their decision was brief and pained, noting that there was no way the law to be established by the initiative would pass constitutional muster.
Far and away, judges generally do their damn jobs. It is indeed why Republicans get so frustrated with the judiciary, and the object of both sides' hopes about Justice Gorsuch. Justice Souter was always something of a disappointment for conservatives; Chief Justice Roberts may be pretentious and egocentric, but he's not a whole-ticket ringer so they're pissed off about that, too. And this is how it has gone for a while, now—long enough to raise a generation of voters taught from the cradle that courts are enemies of democracy. There is a reason the conservative culture warriors feel left behind: Supremacism is supposed to be over in these United States of America. They lost on the human rights of homosexuals; they will lose on the human rights of transgender; there is a reason they intend to take it out on women—they think they can.
At its heart, though, is a logical conundrum they just cannot resolve: They feel their constitutional rights are abridged by the absence of extraconstitutional authority.
Not that we actually need to blame young voters on this count; it's just that nobody likes being singled out, but it's also true that
history offered several striking generational questions this time around. Nor can we blame young Sanders voters for apparently not caring about history; a similar righteous rejection showed in a lot of older Sanders supporters, too. But on the right, these younger were a generation of voters raised in an abusive, codependent relationship with the idea of Justice.
And this is what isn't quite an analogy; perhaps it is more like a vague framework, a shape constructed of patterns.
It's kind of amazing; I really can't find Rep. Humphrey's age, but we can tack it from mid-forties to early fifties; he has university degrees, spent two decades working in Corrections, and settled up afterward as a minister-consultant to courts and working as a high-ranking union official before finally running for office last year.
And that means that most or all of his political conscience is built post-
Roe.
Over the course of forty-three years, anti-abortion activists have pretty much limited their creativity to focusing their attention on pretending to ignore the Supreme Court. Follow the trend on "life at conception", and these days called "personhood", and the whole thing is an effort to turn law, justice, and juristics on their heads. When the Supreme Court made a certain point about the ontology of recognizing human life—a question ne'er settled in any prevailing manner—the anti-abortion response has been to simply presume the question settled and argue from there.
Furthermore, American traditionalism rooted in supremacist Christianity has been losing ground at least since the nineties, and it really might have been the Gay Fray that did it. Animosity toward the courts was such that by 2005, at the latest, in
Roper v. Simmons, the pattern was so indoctrinated that the U.S. Supreme Court could uphold a state supreme court decision by one of the most conservative state supreme courts in the country and conservatives would seethe about liberal judicial activism killing states' rights. And, you know, the really weird part was this would be taken seriously. These days people have a lot to say about equivocation in the press, and we ought not overlook such questions.
For the longest time, certain shapes of ideas simply found greater inherent sympathy than others. When people appeal to common sense, this is what they think they are relying on. Consider: For all we hear about Christians and their rights, gay marriage should have been settled, in gays' favor, on First Amendment grounds including both free expression generally and freedom of or from religion alike in particular. But it wasn't sufficient because the baseline presumption included inherent supremacy under law for Christianity. An ironic example would be
Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 Supreme Court decision repealing P.T. Barnum's law against discussion and use of contraception. The precedent establishing marital privacy plays a pivotal role in many of these culture-war issues, and proved vital to gay marriage. Still, at no time during the law's eighty-six years was anybody granted the manner of conscientious exemption we hear Christians demanding in the twenty-first century.
And this is important; as long as things went this way, these ideological blocs were just fine with what they considered rule of law.
Once that changed, though, they were clearly disenchanted.
But much like the young voter might be steeped in rhetoric seemingly foreign to some older consciences—
i.e., illegitimacy of the judiciary—so are many Christianist voters of late Boomer and early X age appalled by their declining political influence. There is a reason why we're back to arguing about contraception. Facing the prospect of
mere equality, Christianists want an escape hatch; if they cannot be superior, they need an exemption from the rules. That is pretty much the game.
One of the first rules to go was the part about making sense. In
Roe↱, the Supreme Court decided, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." The anti-abortion movement response has been to simply insist, to such a degree that bills keep popping up, here and there, intending to
legislate ontology in order to derive legislation therefrom.
There is a reason why these "personhood" bills prove problematic to their sponsors. No one has yet fashioned a personhood bill that makes
functional sense. That is to say, it might sound great to one or another conscience, but that does not mean the law will work. And as we go along, the culture-war bills get even stranger, like the one in Texas that would empower state agents to invoke conscience in order to deny medical care to a sexually abused minor. Yes,
really↱.
And over and over again, they keep losing. It is a cycle of self-imposed negative reinforcement:
Pass a stupid law, lose in the courts. It has reached the point that their initiatives find regular rejection at the ballot box. As their political power dwindles, they reorganize, refocus, reassert.
Meanwhile, the hardest aspect to explain has been the abandonment of nicety. It's like the rape rhetoric in 2012; while the Willke Lie persisted, and occasionally bubbled up into the discourse, over a period of decades, it really wasn't supposed to be stated so forthrightly in public. At one point, a Republican compared unwed pregnancy to a disease; that is to say, the prospect of his daughter being pregnant while not married was akin to
him personally suffering cancer.
And, you know, at that point we're through a particular looking glass.
The question of the parasite is an undignified argument, an implication of disease, and something anti-abortion really ought to leave alone. It's the sort of thing conservatives like to hold up as an example of
what's wrong with feminism. In other words, JJ Humphrey is an idiot.
Basically, the freshman legislator just said something a family values, culture warrior, or other such conservative social-issue disposition simply shouldn't say.
―End Part I―