“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”
--- Dietrich Bonhoeffer ---
After I asked my congressman to defend, not defund, Planned Parenthood, I got a letter explaining that he couldn’t support Planned Parenthood because he believed in the “sanctity of life.”
I want to tell him that I wish he’d celebrate his reverence for life by supporting an organization that provides cancer screenings and basic health services for the poor of both sexes, even if it provides abortion services, but I already told him that.
The fight over Planned Parenthood pits the health and life expectancy of the poor against the “rights” of embryos. No surprise, Republicans will gladly sacrifice real people for potential ones.
However sincere and thoughtful any individual’s opposition to abortion may be, as a strategy and policy of the Republican Party, the anti-abortion stance is hypocritical, cynical, and sloppy.
But it gets the base riled UP, y’know?
I wonder how anyone can feel comfortable forcing a woman to become a mother whether she will or not. I’m guessing sometimes it’s just ignorance.
Just so, I gave my best parenting advice to long-suffering friends with children before I had any of my own. Now I bless anyone in charge of the crying baby, the hyper toddler running everywhere and touching everything, or the hysterical three-year-old in the checkout line. And I keep my mouth shut. Practical reality so confounds theory.
There’s the Republican Party’s failure of empathy too.
It’s hard walking in another’s shoes, and sometimes truly impossible. Short of being a woman in need of an abortion, I’d suggest every Republican in Congress spend a few days at a daycare – as the only adult for twelve three-year-olds. Then, he should think about doing this 24/7 on too little money. (Conservative political pundits need to spend at least two weeks there.)
And then there’s the Republican denial of reality.
It’s not only voodoo economics. Republicans seem to believe in a romantic adolescent mythology about America and Americans – every man his own Prometheus, and every woman . . . (well, I guess the women will need to be prom queens, something suitably appealing to all those Promethei, and capable of hosting Uber-Babies.)
Every Republican effort seems geared to protect zygotes and blastocysts that might someday be exceptional humans: newborns who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps before they can walk, teeny tots who are only made stronger by the obstacles they’ve overcome – the poverty, hunger, homelessness, the insecurity, the lack of nurturance or health care –as if there were any such babies or any such tots—in this Ayn Randian Republican world where 98% of us apparently are worthless, feckless, shiftless, and no-count -- as if circumstances don’t affect us all, and we weren’t, every one of us, shaped and shaping, interdependent and co-responsible.
So perhaps it’s just that Republicans really don’t like most of us: too old, too needy, too poor, too contrary, too difficult; and it’s only unformed potential life that they can really love.
But then, as soon as potential becomes real, the babies become just more poopy-diapered mewling brats, spotty rebellious adolescents, feminists and Welfare Queens, or other undesirables, and the body politic need not make an effort.
Speaker Boehner cries easily, which seems right for this slushily sentimental defense of the “sanctity of life.” This is cheap grace. Defending anti-abortion policies is free; it costs nothing; it allows Republicans to defund any program associated, however slightly, with choice. Republicans have no skin in the game, just a misty-eyed devotion to rich people, big corporations, and cute, cuddly, future flag-wavers.
This is the claim of sanctity without the dirt work of ethical behavior.
Let’s spend some of our concern on the rest of us here, even the pimply-faced multi-pierced teenager, the opinionated and delusional elderly, the difficult, the disabled, and the despairing.
Let’s bleed off that sanctimonious sentimentality, so that we might have an earnest, good faith discussion about how to feed the million children in America who go to bed hungry, how to house the nearly two million homeless, how to create jobs for fourteen million Americans looking for work.
