The following was presented as part of "A Call to Action," a salon series of short political pieces from The Skeleton Rep. It was directed by Ria DiLullo and written and performed by me. Because I occasionally do perform things.
I want to make one thing clear: I would have gone to
D.C. I would have stood up against the
casual acceptance of sexual violence, the condescension, the inferiority woman
are facing in the near future. But when
the leaders of the Woman’s March said pro-life woman need not apply, I stopped
myself, and I did a double-take. They
didn’t say, come, but know we will have pro-choice speakers. They didn’t say come, but please be
respectful of the general view. They
said don’t come. Now, the name of this
march was not March for Choice. It was
the Women’s March. For women. I
basically had my vagina card rejected by the organizers of this protest.
I am a pro-life moderate.
I oppose overturning Roe v. Wade and defunding Planned Parenthood as
tactics. I oppose most legal measures to
stop abortion because they are ineffective to the larger goal of ending abortion. I am a Catholic, but my objections are not
religious. They are based on principles
of human rights and social justice. Moderates
like me have no voice on either side of this increasingly dogmatic debate.
And I think that’s bullshit.
Do you believe there weren’t disagreements within the suffrage
movement? Those bitches fought each
other like crazy. Alice Paul and Carrie
Chappman Catt hated each other. And
let’s not forget other movements. Malcom X and Martin Luther King- diametric opposition
of tactics. Think how shitty a musical Hamilton would be if the founding
fathers agreed about everything. By
laying out a specific doctrine and declaring it the official stance of “women,”
you are limiting yourself and robbing yourself of allies. I know some kick-ass
pro-life women, way more radical than me, who would be invaluable assets to
what you are doing. But you don’t know
them. Because you told them not to show
up.
Yesterday, a friend posted an article about how progressives
should no longer use the term “pro-life,” because pro-life people don’t really
care about life. My friend pledges to only call people like me anti-choice from
now on. This is not discourse. This is re-framing an argument so you are
guaranteed to win.
Let me break down something
for any of you who think this is a good idea.
I have a degree in philosophy, with a focus on the Jewish Enlightenment
thinker Baruch Spinoza. He wrote about
democracy before John Locke. From his
example, I’ve extracted two basic rules for effective discourse. First, always
assume your opponents value what they say they value. In other words, don’t
assume your opponent is lying or trying to trick you. Second, you must choose
the strongest and most convincing of your opponent’s arguments and engage
directly with that argument.
When you reframe the prolife- prochoice debate into a
pro-choice-anti-choice debate, you are committing two philosophical
fallacies. You are assuming your
opponent is lying about her values, and you are insisting that her weakest
argument is her only true argument. You require less of your intellectual power
to beat a less powerful premise, bringing the entire conversation down. You weaken the level of discourse and that’s
bad for me and it’s bad for you.
Listen, clearly I’m not stupid. I know you have reasons to believe that
pro-life people are contributing to more abortions. I’m aware of those arguments and I have
counter-arguments. Give other people the
benefit of the doubt. Why do you assume
people are dumb? Or is it just because
you know the real discussion, the hard discussion that we might have will be
painful for you? I’m in pain too. It’s
okay, we can get through that together. And with that pain, we can find common
ground. We can ask- where and how can we
work together?
By excluding me from the Woman’s March you have also
excluded my ideas, my values, and my dreams.
You’ve devalued me as a woman.
If, on the other hand, you’re open to pro-life women in general being
part of the conversation, then pro-life moderates will most likely side with
you in elections and in policy. We will join
you in the fight for equality in the workplace, for an end to sexual violence,
for more support for single mothers and increased resources for children in
foster-care and for families. We’ll ally
with you in the fight for diversity and inclusiveness and a strong thriving democracy. I’ll ally with you on so many things. And
I’ll fight with you about the other thing. I think that’s okay. But it’s up to progressives to decide whether
one more person marching makes a difference. If not, I’ll sit the next one out
too.
