SocraticGadfly: I'm putting a kibosh on the self-hating woman voter meme

October 03, 2014

I'm putting a kibosh on the self-hating woman voter meme

This, in that exact phrase of “self-hating woman,” or similar, has become an ever-growing meme this year among liberal-minded women and men on the issue of reproductive choice.

And, if ever there were a poster child for the old cliché of trying to catch flies with vinegar rather than honey  (or bullshit), this would be it.

To me, even though I’m not female, it still comes off as offense. Let’s first put this in male terms. If Fundamentalist LDS leader Warren Jeffs said that every anti-polygamy man in America is a self-hating male, how would you react? Well, some horndog males, ignoring that he’s talking about multiple simultaneous marriages, and not multiple simultaneous hookups, might say “cool,” but the rest of us? We’d be upset at the least.

Or, let’s say AARP said you’re a “self-hating senior” if you don’t join AARP, to name another voting “interest group.”

I do know that, were I a woman who’s pro-life, even if not the farthest edges of the pro-life movement, I’d be insulted. If I were a woman who accepts some pro-choice arguments, even, but is still “personally pro-life,” I’d be insulted, too. I might be even more insulted, I think, than a woman who has a dug-in position on the far right edge of the pro-life movement.

People who read me regularly know how I feel about the abortion issue. I’m a centrist who doesn’t try to camouflage some of the tougher ethical issues.

I'm somewhat, if not exactly, with Ted Rall on this, and have been ever since I read his take, which is in this blog post about the "Gordian knot" of the issue:
Abortion is murder. In my view women have — and ought to continue to have — the right to murder their unborn babies. Each abortion is a tragedy, some necessary and others not, and all of them are murder.
If you let me caveat Rall to add “Post-viability” before each occurrence of the word “abortion,” I’d be totally with him.

Pre-viability? The issue is even murkier yet.

And, that’s the point.

It’s also why, although I know Planned Parenthood does other things, they’re one liberal organization I’ve never given money to.

(Now, is it possible that the likes of Greg Abbott want to take us back to pre-Roe days, per Perry? Yes, it is. Although none of them want to take the logical next step, per conservative Grade-A asshat Kevin Williamson, and arrest either women or doctors as murderers, let alone give them the death penalty.

As Perry notes, Williamson has made a career out of dickery that's just slightly less offensive than that of racialist Steve Sailer.)

Besides, whether on this issue or others, you can’t, won’t and don’t convert wingnuts by acting like them.

That doesn’t mean that liberals, per public radio, should act like Nice Polite Republicans. It means, on some issues, you still keep the mailed fist inside a velvet glove and on others, you never put it inside armor in the first place.

But, some women want even that — criminal convictions, at least for abortion providers, but not with death sentences — that doesn't mean they're self-hating.


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