Republicans aren’t so much postponing their “serving a cause greater than self-interest” convention in Minnesota as they are recasting the nightmarish affair as a charity drive, laying on (unearned) guilt trip after guilt trip about a category 1 hurricane hundreds of miles away that has nothing to do with nominating a presidential ticket. They are blatantly grandstanding, using the Republican-controlled government, i.e., federal and state officials, to promote a political agenda and proving they are the more consistent party of altruism, in case expansion of Medicare, aid to Africa and Christian missions of sacrifice in Iraq and elsewhere left any doubt. What a farce.
Hardly noticed this week was the news (reported on cable news networks) that the apparently missing Orlando, Florida, toddler named Caylee, whose mother refuses to cooperate with police, was an unwanted pregnancy. The mother—who appears to have murdered her child—wanted to put the child up for adoption; the maternal grandmother reportedly intervened, insisting that the mother birth and raise Caylee.
To me, this is another result of the anti-abortion philosophy being insidiously but widely accepted by the American people. Abortions are barely taught in medical school and fewer doctors perform the procedure than ever—try finding a clinic where abortions are performed—and the act has been thoroughly stigmatized by the religionists, who have all but eradicated any trace of acceptable abortion in the United States. What seems to have happened to Caylee is what happens when people accept the anti-abortion creed that a woman is a birthing vessel, not a being of volitional consciousness, on earth to procreate. If she’s guilty, she should be severely punished, but the mother clearly should never have been encouraged, let alone pressured, to bear and raise children; she should have been counseled to choose—including abortion—what to do with the unwanted pregnancy for herself. I suspect the maternal grandmother knows—and is responsible for—much more than is presently known, and I wonder if Caylee’s mother knew first hand what it means to be unwanted.
