First: On Love Trumping Politics
Before I respond to your (many) emails, I have a story to tell you.
In the fall of 2020, I realized with dawning horror that I really was going to have to vote for Trump. I didn’t want to for the obvious reasons—his odious personality, his manifest personality disorder, his immaturity. I hated him so much that when I used the word “orange” on my iPhone, the predictive text function immediately suggested “shitgibbon,” simply because I had called him “the orange shitgibbon” in texts and messaging app messages to friends so many times.
What forced me to make this choice? Two factors.
The first was that the area in which I live is cobalt blue. All the downtown area had been made lawless all summer, with roving bands of teens and 20-somethings committing crimes in the name of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. After a scary close call, I stopped using public transportation, since the bus station is right in the middle of the area that they had “claimed.” I had friends leave to go live with grandparents in other places because they were unable to live normally and leaving their downtown area homes was unsafe—American war zones.
My choice, therefore, was between the guy who wanted to call up the National Guard, if necessary, to restore order; and the guy whose VP was raising money to get the perpetrators out of jail.
The second was that Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was clear to me. I lost all of my grandparents by the time I was 18 years old. Three of the four had cognitive decline at the end of their lives, and I saw it. I helped care for one of them. That meant I was primarily voting for whether Trump or Kamala Harris would be acting as POTUS. I didn’t know much about Harris, but I knew that she couldn’t even win a primary in the state where she had served as Senator for years. I knew that she was annoying and, it seemed to me, nakedly thirsty for power. Going from selling shirts based on the moment she accused Biden of being a segregation-loving racist to happily serving as his VP struck me as proof of profound dishonesty.
My choice there was between the profoundly dishonest devil I knew, hated, and disagreed with, but who had a track record from which I could draw conclusions, and a profoundly dishonest devil about which I knew little but had good reason to think was sympathetic to CRT and other philosophies I deeply oppose.
There are very few people in my life who deeply matter to me. This isn’t because I am cold or uncaring. It’s the reverse; a self-protective mechanism to keep me from caring too much and setting myself up to be crushed. Two of these people, I felt that it would be a lie of omission if I didn’t discuss my decision with them. (The reasons for that feeling are complicated and irrelevant to the point I’m making.) I love them both very much, but we have very different types of friendships. One I have regular conversations with and thus the easy rapport that comes of many hours of talking, back-and-forthing, sparring, laughing. The other I rarely speak to, mostly trading emails and long texts, and I’ve been nervous out of my mind on each of our (exceedingly rare) conversations.
So I sat down and wrote an email to one, and scheduled a phone call with the other. In telling them that I was going to vote for Satan, directly in conflict with their political values, I expected the worst. It never occurred to me that anyone could care about me enough to tolerate a major disagreement, especially about deeply held values and beliefs. This fear nearly kept me from sharing my decision, but lying to people I love is intolerable. It would come out eventually.
The reply email from the writing friend expressed understanding and love for me a person. The conversation went better than I would've dared imagine, with my friend expressing that we all have to be kind, including to ourselves, in situations with no good choices. He likened it to a field medic in combat, who sometimes has to make choices that would get him condemned and his license stripped in peacetime. Emergencies are different. We all do the best we can in an emergency; normal standards do not and cannot apply.
The full story of how surprised I was--that anyone could love me more than they hated Trump, that anyone could still want to be my friend even if I made a choice that disappointed them--would be its own essay.
Suffice it to say, it changed me on a deep level, a type of change that was as much re-writing code as it was healing an old wound (though it was that as well).
Reading my email responses to my recent essay on the coming reversal of Roe vs Wade, I read story after story of friendships and even family relationships that were threatened or ended over this event. It hasn't been long enough to be sure, but I suspect a friendship I deeply valued is over.
Not everyone is as astonishingly fortunate as I am, as my email revealed. Many of you have lost friendships and even family over politics. More on that momentarily.
The Political Fallout
I am not a prophet and I own no crystal balls. Yet it’s only been a few days, and some of what I predicted is already occurring. This is because what I predicted was as plainly and obviously predictable as the sunrise.
The blue states are going bluer, codifying the right to abortion at any time through birth, which is horrifying.
The red states are going full Christianity-into-law. Oklahoma, the first, passed a law that doesn’t even pretend not to have religious motivations, a 6-week ban that explicitly contains no rape exceptions. When asked why not, the governor cited the rapist’s sin as not belonging to the child. (For clarity, he meant the pregnancy, not any child a rapist may have impregnated.) This means that the next time a raped-by-her-father fifth or sixth grader is put into foster care, she will by law be required to give birth to her half-sibling. Likewise any child who is in foster care already when she is raped, by a foster father, foster brother, other foster child, or stranger. And any woman who is raped has a couple of weeks (pregnancy is calculated from the date of the last menstrual period, not the date sexual activity occurred) to get over any injuries and trauma sufficiently to be able to handle the intimate procedure of an abortion, or else face a complex legal process of placing the baby for adoption (which the rapist is legally entitled to fight her on in many states) or share custody with the rapist (allowed in many states). Four weeks after the rape, her fate is sealed.
Louisiana is the second, but there will be others. The state is proposing a bill that defines personhood as beginning at fertilization. This would make the morning-after pill, IUDs, and some types of birth control pills both illegal and subject to homicide charges (at least some of the time, these work by not permitting a fertilized egg to implant). I know some are claiming, especially on Twitter, that this is not a fair interpretation. To be sure, I asked an attorney, who is also a lay minister I used to work for in Alabama, to review the language of the Louisiana law. He was delighted by the language of the bill and assured me, with great joy, that it would in fact make Plan B and IUDs illegal. He knows we disagree on this issue and advised me, as an attorney, not to mail Plan B to any friends in Louisiana once this law is in effect, lest I put myself at risk of a homicide charge.
Some of the states that have trigger laws in place likewise define personhood as beginning at fertilization. If you live in one of those states, the time to stock up on Plan B is now.
Based on what I’ve learned from talking to friends—including two friends I had been steadily working on for over a year, making real progress, and who were ready to vote Republican for the first time in their lives in November—this is going to hurt the Republicans. A few people who, quite correctly, trusted exactly zero things that CNN has reported for years suddenly find CNN valuable when they reported that Republican support went up after the announcement. Even if they did use a statistically sound method to do a poll and even if CNN (!!!) reported the numbers honestly (yeah, right) it’s too soon. The news of how the extremists on the right are reacting to this hasn’t even covered everyone on Twitter, much less the normies. Give it two months. Let the actual ruling come out and the red state trigger laws go into effect. Let the first news stories about raped sixth graders being forced to give birth to their half-siblings come out. Then do a poll and talk to me.
Where I am personally also reflects this. I will not vote for the Democrats. But I’m not going to vote for the Republicans, either, unless some of their national voices step up and start condemning the extremism. (Narrator: they did not step up and start condemning the extremism.)
The Left and the Bat
The most common type of response I got could be summarized like this:
You know what? You’re right. This is going to hurt a lot of people—women, and especially little girls, who’ve been raped; couples facing miscarriages; children who will be born into poverty and abuse; communities that can barely handle the level of social services the poor children in their schools need now and are in no way prepared for that population to increase. But I just can’t bring myself to care. I want the left to lose so badly. I drink their tears and I hope every single one of them walks around in terror of having to drink pennyroyal tea or crowdfund a trip to another country. I am so furious at what these monsters have tried to do that at this point I’d cheer Lucifer himself if it meant handing these bastards a loss.
It is understandable that people are so furiously angry at the left. I get it. I am, too. This is an explanation that must not become an excuse.
The left overreacted to discrimination against trans people by adopting gender ideology as a religion and beginning to transition children.
If the right overreacts to leftist excess by punishing victims of rape, even children who are victims of rape, we lose the moral high ground. Worse, we lose it out of vengeance instead of misguided zeal. We become worse than what we have mocked, and we deserve the backlash we will get.
My friend James Lindsay and I had a private conversation wherein I expressed my frustration with the right-wing overreach on this issue. He told me about the hundreds of emails he’s getting from people who were ready to ally with the right, right up until they started reading right-wing Twitter voices celebrating the Louisiana law and affirming that yes, women should be charged with murder for hire if they’ve had abortions. He gave me a very helpful metaphor: abortion as a bat. You give a child a bat. They use it to hit Grandma (in this case, “shout your abortion” and legalization through 9 months and other horrifying excesses). You take the bat away. What you do not do is start beating the hell out of an innocent person (in this case, rape victims) to teach your child that beating the hell out of people with bats is wrong.
One thing I have found extremely clarifying and helpful is this: looking at myself in the mirror and saying the truth out loud.
If you have seen yourself in this section—if you are uncomfortable with what Oklahoma, Louisiana, and other states are doing, but you’re so happy to see the left freaking out that you can’t bring yourself to care that much—then I encourage you to go look in the mirror and say, out loud:
I hate the left more than I love my friends.
I am ok with raped sixth graders being forced to birth their half-siblings if it makes the left upset.
Leftist tears are so delicious that I really don’t care who has to be devastated for me to taste them.
You can then decide, after admitting the truth to yourself, if this is who you want to be.
Rape Is Only X%
The second most common type of response pointed out that rape is only (insert a statistic) percent! Some cited a screenshot that’s going around Twitter (no links to the source data that I could find) with a minuscule number. Others cited the (reliable and robust, to the best of my judgment as a statistician) statistic of 1-4%. A few admitted that women impregnated by rapist men they don’t want to report for whatever reason (provider-husbands, fathers, bosses) or who were raped in situations in which they were partially at fault (passed out drunk, etc) may not want to admit they were raped, so it could be larger. Others may simply prefer to keep that information private.
I do not care if it’s only one woman or little girl forced to give birth to her rapist’s offspring, just as I don’t care if the left only sterilizes one child in a transition process. Both are travesties.
But regardless, using the 1% number, let’s talk about that.
Here are some other things that are at 1% or less:
—the number of children on puberty blockers, given double mastectomies, having their testicles removed, or otherwise being medically transitioned
—the number of adult detransitioners speaking up and demanding changes to the medical gatekeeping of the transition industry
—the percentage of teachers recording themselves boasting about how they’re grooming kids into Queer Theory and putting them on TikTok
—the number of voting precincts with serious and credible accusations of election integrity issues
I could go on and on, but my point is: we on the center, right, and center-right are quite pleased to pay a great deal of attention to things that rarely occur, because they matter.
How many raped sixth graders being required, by law, to give birth to their half-siblings is ok with you?
Loss of Family and Friends
The third most common type of email I got related stories of family relationships and friendships that have been lost over this issue. I wish I knew what to say. I want to say that I understand the pain, but I probably don’t. My perspective is quite skewed by my unusual experiences. That’s partly why I related the story at the beginning—it was so surprising, and so wonderful, the one time I experienced having people love me more than they hated the political enemy.
All I can say is that I’m sorry. It really sucks.
Should I Be Here?
The fourth most common type of email I got related to my statement that I shouldn’t be here. I appreciate the well-meaning behind your messages, including those of you who told me stories of how I’ve inspired you. I know your hearts are in the right place and I appreciate the kindness that made you express it.
Can you understand that I’d rather not be inspiration porn for strangers on twitter? I’d rather just be normal, not saddled with what my childhood saddled me with?
As to the abortion decision, let me put it another way.
Suppose a 19 year old girl came to you and said:
I probably have both narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders. My boyfriend for sure has antisocial personality disorder. He is also an alcoholic and drug addict. The bedroom where we have sex has multiple holes that he’s punched in the wall. We just found I’m pregnant. Neither of us want this kid. He’s going to have to move out of his mother’s house, where she cooks him three meals a day and he can spend his whole paycheck on drugs. I’m going to have to stop partying and get a job. My father’s high profile job means that adoption isn’t an option. Once people see that I’m pregnant, there will be no choice. I’m four weeks pregnant, so the pregnancy has only developed to the size of a poppy seed. There is no brain, heart, or capability of suffering if I terminate. Can you give me a ride to the clinic?
I’m not sure I can express just how little you’d have to care about children in order to say anything other than “can we leave right now?”
This doesn’t make me suicidal or imply that I hate myself. It makes me realistic, and honest.
Worthless Baby-Killing Slut
Lastly, I got two emails that referred to me as a baby killer. One, a worthless baby-killing slut who had probably had ten abortions I was lying about and really needed a man to knock me up and keep me in the kitchen, where I belong, so I could stop imagining anyone cared about my worthless opinions. The other offered to help me do an immediate abortion on myself, if I had the nerve.
I have no comment on these. Just sharing the contents in the interest of balance for those who imagine that the anti-abortion/pro-life side are universally motivated by love and have no real desire to control women.
What Do I Think Would Be Good Abortion Policy?
Many of you asked for my personal view. I think this makes sense: a nationwide limit of either 12 or 15 weeks for any reason, with exceptions after that for medical catastrophes or rape victims in two categories: minors, and those whose rapes inflicted serious physical injuries such that they needed medical attention and ten weeks (remember, pregnancies are calculated by last menstrual period, so the moment sperm meets egg you’re two weeks pregnant) is not a realistic time frame to be ready for outpatient surgery.
How Did the Subscriptions Go?
I’ll end with the promised report on paid subscriptions—I was pleasantly surprised. Four cancellations, all from the right. That’s not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Y’all are more tolerant than I expected, which is quite a feat in hyper-tribalized 2022.