Blinders full of women
November 17, 2012 § 22 Comments
One of the peculiar features of modern society is the extent to which manifestly obvious facts hide in plain sight. Something can be so obviously true that it hits us over the head relentlessly, day in and day out, year in and year out; and yet when we state it out loud we get some combination of outrage and impossible-to-satisfy demands for “proof”. This isn’t a totally new phenomenon, of course: The Emperor’s New Clothes was written in 1837. But political correctness is pervasive in modern society, to the extent that even most pretenses to political incorrectness are just political correctness repackaged.
So it is with the connection between female suffrage and abortion law.
There are really just three basic questions here:
- Does women’s suffrage in itself – that is, the actual voting patterns of women – affect abortion law?
- Does the pervasive view that female suffrage is a matter of basic justice, as opposed to a prudential choice about governance over which reasonable people may disagree, affect abortion law (through everyone’s voting patterns, through judicial and regulatory decisions, and through literally millions of other everyday actions and considerations)?
- If these things do affect abortion law, in what direction do they affect it?
The answers to these questions are obvious; and yet every fibre of the modern being resists acknowledging them. (That in itself, ironically, provides additional evidence of the effects that attitudes about womens’ suffrage are having on our culture and our polity).
The first question, even though it is ultimately the least relevant of the three, is the easiest one to answer in the affirmative: yes, the actual voting patterns of women most certainly have an impact on abortion law. I’ve already made the point that it is women’s actual voting patterns specifically which make it nearly impossible for a pro-life politician to be elected without embracing exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.
I would submit that the answers to all three questions are blindingly obvious.
Zippy Catholic 
[…] are similar casualties around us, right now. Because of the peculiarities of the modern condition they hide in plain sight. But as I’ve observed before, the Nazis have nothing on us, […]
women’s actual voting patterns specifically which make it nearly impossible for a pro-life politician
Good.
Zippy, after 5 weeks, yours is now my favorite blog. First time commenting.
There’s a deeper, more fundamental point I’m waiting for you to make. Actually, I know you’ve made it before, so I suppose I’m just waiting for you to remind everyone.
All those who register a fever are all operating under a dual-assumption: that suffrage per se is both an objective good and a “right”. The former is highly debatable, the latter, outright fiction.
That women’s voting patterns effect abortion laws is just one – and probably the most important – example of demographic groups negatively influencing society by voting according to perceived self-interests. In other words, we – by which I mean you – can probably come up with a list of societal ills brought about by white male suffrage, black suffrage, Jewish suffrage, 18-35 age group suffrage, land owner suffrage, ad infinitum.
When “rights” are equated with the common good, a fever is the least worrisome of our symptoms.
Welcome to the blog, Padron.
Getting a handle on our current situation is difficult. Even getting acknowledgement of the gravity of our current situation is difficult: if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard the sentiment that sure things are bad but they’ve been bad other times too, so why gripe about today when yesterday or tomorrow could be worse, I’d have an awful lot of nickels.
And I’m talking about getting that acknowledgement from reasonable people of good will, not the narcissists and revolutionary freaks that constitute what is today considered respectable mainstream society.
Part of the paradox is the conservative disposition inherent to anyone who might be capable of resisting the endless liberal revolution. We just want to get along in life without screwing things up, and every time a revolution comes along there always seems to be gulags and guillotines and such. Even in the case of America, arguably the most conservative of the liberal revolutions, the first wave of massive bloodshed was just delayed until the 1860’s. So we conservatives are naturally resistant to radical sentiments and tend to downplay the situation when things get to the level of unspeakable atrocity, which is where we are now.
The problem is that our tradition for the last couple of centuries has become a tradition of revolution. That is the perfect way to neuter resistance to ongoing atrocities and the endless stream of new ones.
Eight to nine figures of infanticide is a hard number to come to grips with. Three or four thousand a day (just in the US), a couple every single minute of every single day, ongoing for decades and with no end in sight, are the kinds of numbers that would mobilize armies if we hadn’t found a way to keep the whole thing sublimated so we can stay fat, dumb, and happy. We’ve perfected the art of refusing to think too much about things; and for a long time that might have even worked.
All I can really do is try to help someone here and someone there break a little free from the intellectual bondage that liberalism uses to neutralize our capacity to resist evil. If there is any benefit to it beyond just being self-indulgent naval gazing on my part, that benefit will be to a few individuals here and there who slip the surly bonds and discover that all this compromise with evil isn’t getting them anything: it is just an impediment on the path to sainthood, which is the path we all ought to be on.
So in the end, all of my attempts at truth-telling from various perspectives aren’t aimed at moving levers on big political machines. I am under no illusion that I have any influence over such things.
When “rights” are equated with the common good, a fever is the least worrisome of our symptoms.
Yep.
“Even in the case of America, arguably the most conservative of the liberal revolutions, the first wave of massive bloodshed was just delayed until the 1860′s.”
Not that being loyal in 1776 was any picnic. See Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War
Keep talking, Zippy. Troglodytes like you just keep cranking out more progressives.
kimmargosein:
Troglodytes like you just keep cranking out more progressives.
I personally am completely negligible, in the grand scheme of things. Progressives don’t have to worry about having me as an enemy. They have to worry about having nature and nature’s God as an enemy.
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Reading this article at Crisis today brought to mind this memorably-titled post. It seems the author (Kevin Clark) is tangled up in the revolutionary concept of the Woman Question (a.k.a., What About the Women?!?!). Once you’ve conceded in your mind that this Woman Question is something that ought to be asked, it appears you’ve already agreed, at best, to play the right side of the liberal spectrum (a.k.a., Gilligan).
There are worse things that come from this I’m sure, but the most distasteful that I can identify is dishonest sentimentalism about the sexes. Distilled down to its saccharine base, the essential thing to know about the sexes is, regarding Women: they are good; regarding Men: they do bad things.
Zippy was right about Ireland, though.