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Saturday, March 11, 2006

If you voted for Nader in 2000, you voted for the South Dakota abortion ban
Posted by Jill | 8:38 AM

Yes, that's an oversimplification, but as Michael Bérubé points out, that's in essence what happened:

When I think about South Dakota, I think about all kinds of things. Like this little item from way back when:

Nader Sees a Bright Side to a Bush Victory
by Melinda Henneberger

Dearborn, MI, November 1, 2000 –

Mr. Nader said he did not think there would be much difference between the justices Mr. Gore would choose and those Mr. Bush would appoint. After all, Democrats had helped confirm Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hadn’t they? Besides, “You can’t really predict how Supreme Court justices will behave.”

And he called the possibility that a court packed with Republican appointees could overturn Roe v. Wade a “scare tactic.” On Sunday, Mr. Nader said in a television interview that even if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the issue “would just revert to the states.” Just?

“Here’s what happened on that,” he said wearily. “The scare tactic is that would end choice in America, and I just said that’s not true, but I should have been astute enough not to mention that.”

He said he did not in any case believe for a moment that Mr. Bush would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble and they know it,” he said. He described the party’s opposition to abortion as just for show, “just for Pat Robertson."



My point is not that Ralph Nader was secretly pro-coathanger. My point is that Nader, like all too many men on the left, doesn’t believe that the right-wing culture warriors really mean it. They think it’s all shadow-boxing, a distraction, a sop thrown to the radical fringe.

[snip]

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, “the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” and you’d be, ah, wrong, you know. Besides, there’s a nasty time lag between that first back-alley death and the repeal (if any) of a state’s draconian abortion law, and in that time-lag, that state’s Republican Party might or might not be in deep trouble. It’s hard to unseat incumbents in this jerry-built and gerrymandered system, after all. So there’s no guarantee that popular outrage against back-alley deaths would jeopardize a state’s elected GOP officials en masse. But we can be pretty sure that women with unwanted pregnancies would be . . . how shall we say? in deep trouble.


And so they are -- in South Dakota and at least six other states. And just to cover all the bases, the guys, now faced with having to pay child support for all these unwanted pregnancies once the women into which they spewed are no longer able to abort, are already working to get out of it.

Because after all, women who have sex are sluts who deserve to be punished. Isn't that the real subtext beneath all of this? Why else would the self-determination of 51% of the population be so blithely jettisoned by the party which professes to represent them?

And this is what's so damned perplexing right now. I have no doubt that Al Gore and even John Kerry would have nominated very different Supreme Court Justices than George W. Bush has -- and yet, when I see the current crop of Democratic DLC hacks whose names are being bandied about for 2008, names like Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner, the so-called "centrists" (which actually means "bend over so Bill Frist can spank you"), I just despair as to what I'm going to do.

On the one hand, it's already too late to save the right to determine your own reproductive destiny. Roberts and Alito are just salivating to get their hands on Griswold v. Connecticut after they succeed in making Roe meaningless. And it's tempting to believe that it can't get a whole lot worse. Except that it can. But at the same time, I simply refuse to vote for yet another Democrat who's going to sell us down the river.

Except for the wingnut trolls, who need not weigh in here, where do some of YOU stand on this?
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