MICHAEL DAVIS WORLD

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Baby, It’s You, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

August 27, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 2 Comments

In this election year, when we find ourselves ever more polarized, I’ve been trying extra hard to listen to other points of view.  It’s not always easy, because I work at home, so I don’t necessarily run into people at random.  I have to go out of my way to find different opinions.

For better or worse, I find I have more than a few Libertarian friends.  Maybe I always have, and it’s only recently they feel comfortable enough to come out about their political beliefs.  Personally, I find Libertarians a lot like socialists — idealistic, but not realistic, at least not right now.  And when I ask them how they plan tomato the changes to achieve their ideals, they tend not to have answers that satisfy me.

(Note:  They are not obligated to give answers that persuade me.  It’s more than a little bit possible that I lack the imagination to see their points.)

I’ve also been occasionally binge-watching Blue Bloods, a television drama in which the police are always right, their critics are always wrong, and the few bad cops who might exist are scorned and condemned by their peers.  Sometimes the writers lay it on a little thick — for example, an attorney for a Black Lives Matter-type group sexually harassed women in his office and in his movement — but I like the relationships among the family members in the title.  They give me a chance to see how their lives and values work for them.

Also, it’s fiction.  Fiction is supposed to have a point of view.  It doesn’t have to be political (although it can be), but fiction should never be Fair and Balanced.

Facts, however, are not a matter of opinion.  By definition, facts are something that are true.  We might interpret the consequences of facts differently, but interpretations of facts are not, of themselves, facts.

So, here are some facts:  the maternal mortality rate in Texas has doubled in the last two years.  This coincides with a spate of closings of women’s health centers, including those of Planned Parenthood.

Coincidence is not causality, and I cannot state as a fact that the lack of convenient local care caused so many pregnant women to die.

But it sure looks a lot like cause and effect.  And I’m not the only one to make such an inference.  That’s because it is a fact that women’s reproductive decisions are a major element in women’s health, and if the state begins to interfere with those decisions (as they do in Texas), women die.

And the die in large numbers.  They die even when they want to be pregnant and have their babies.  The doctors who provide abortions are the same people who provide care to women who want to be pregnant.

It’s not enough that states like Texas are trying to use the law to shut down women’s health clinics.  There is also a terrorist network dedicated to the same mission.  They have been far more successful in committing terrorist acts in this country than any radical Islamist organization, but they share a fundamentalist view of women and women’s body parts with their Muslim counterparts.

Terrorism works because its victims are, well, terrified.  In the case of anti-choice terrorists (no rational person would call people who shoot doctors or bomb clinics “pro-life”), they succeed not only when they kill their targets, but when they force legal businesses (i.e. health care clinics) to spend wild sums of money on security and insurance.  That’s what’s happening in Wisconsin, for example, and it’s likely to be happening near you as well.

It’s more than a little bit possible that the Regan family, the characters on Blue Bloods, are opposed to legal abortion.  They have been portrayed as good Catholics, so this is not a huge leap.  It’s also more than a little possible that they would protect women going to clinics to get abortions, because they work in law enforcement, and protecting people from terrorists is a part of their jobs in which they take pride.

It doesn’t matter what they would do because Blue Bloods isn’t real.  Domestic terrorism is real, however, and whatever one’s opinions, we should denounce it and demand that its perpetrators be punished.  Especially when they are religious nutballs.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, has been having trouble with her AppleTV, which is why she isn’t caught up on Netflix yet.

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Comments

  1. Ed Sedarbaum
    August 28, 2016 - 7:55 am

    Hey, it’s August. Tomatoes are in season in the Northeast.

  2. Ed Sedarbaum
    August 28, 2016 - 7:55 am

    Hey, it’s August. Tomatoes are in season in the Northeast.

  3. tom brucker
    August 28, 2016 - 7:38 pm

    Facebook memes aren’t points of view? Thank you for raising this example of domestic terrorism. The “second amendment crowd” has a long and unfortunate history.

  4. tom brucker
    August 28, 2016 - 7:38 pm

    Facebook memes aren’t points of view? Thank you for raising this example of domestic terrorism. The “second amendment crowd” has a long and unfortunate history.

  5. Rene
    August 30, 2016 - 6:22 am

    I have the same opinion about Libertarians. They do remind me of hardcore socialists. They’re both products of the Cold War period, by the way. My own view of what makes good policy is something in between the two extremes of socialism and libertarianism. We need individualism and entrepreuners. We also need government oversight and centralized planning.

    I am also the rare liberal that is more pro-life than pro-choice. But this data from Texas does not surprise me either. The pro-life folks, by and large, have made a solid moral choice, but they don’t have good answers for the practical aspects of the issue, I have to be honest. In this, they’re like Libertarians. They close their eyes and stick their finger in their ears, and sing “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

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