We Have To Be Fearless And Relentless

I've written a lot about Democrats and progressives fighting back at the polls.  And nothing I'm about to say here should in any way detract from anything I've written.

But it's not enough.

Thinking inside the ballot box is not enough, essential as it is, when the other side is working as hard as possible to shred the box.  To make the act of voting functionally meaningless, because they are working to fight elections "rigged" by changing demographics, and actually rig them legally so that it becomes impossible to lose them.

It has already started.  The effort to fight it at the national level, for the moment, has failed.  It may be impossible to out-organize this effort for this year's midterms, though we must make every effort to do that.  In a worst-case scenario, we may be descending into an age of political darkness, where all elections are rigged and peaceful means to oppose the rising tide of authoritarianism are no longer available.

But, BH, we're not quite there yet.  And I pray that we never get there.  But we're going to have to do more than vote.  We have to learn or re-learn to flex our activist muscles in other ways.

Take, for example, the spate of anti-women laws passed in right-wing states that are designed to force pregnant women to carry their children to term.  Regardless of how the child was fathered.  Regardless of the impact of a given pregnancy on the health of the woman carrying it.  Regardless of the viability of the pregnancy, before or after birth.  And regardless of the circumstances into which the birth will, and does, occur, which may doom the child into a life that leads to an early death.

The effect of these laws, and a looming Supreme Court decision on one of them, will be to effectively confer legal status on the unborn, perhaps as early as fertilization.  Perhaps even worse, given that the laws in question vary in the point at which a fetus obtains personhood, we will end up with a hodgepodge of cases and controversies leaving open the question of when a human is a human.  With all of the rights of one.

Well, if the opposition leaves you a loophole, why not exploit it, as this opinion piece in the Washington Post suggests?  Here is a ready-made opportunity to take the efforts of the right in punishing women, and weaponize it against them.  Imagine an effort to take some of the ideas in the Post piece, and enact them as statutes in all of the anti-abortion states.

Imagine, for example, proposing that child-support laws be reformed so that the woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy receives compensation for her health and other related expenses.

Imagine leveraging the success of such an effort into a push to change immigration law to protect both a fetus conceived in this country and the mother carrying the fetus from deporation, on the grounds that a majority of states have declared the fetus to be a person from conception, and is therefore a citizen from conception.

Imagine extending the concept of due process inadvertently proposed by abortion opponents to all fetuses of women detained for law-enforcement purposes.  They are, by definition, innocent of any crime, and therefore cannot be detained.  Neither can the women who host them.  Pregnancy, wanted or not, can become a get-out-of-jail card for any mother, whether innocent or not.

Imagine, for that matter, requiring that each fetus be counted for Census purposes, on the grounds that, born or not, they are effectively citizens of the United States that need to be enumerated.  The potential impact of that on decennial redistricting, and the consequential effects of that on the partisan distribution of power, speaks for itself.

All of this has, as the author of the Post piece points out at the end, the potential to turn our Constitution into a knot no one can untangle.  But I'm inclined to think that the threat of that happening is kind of the point.

To quote myself, Democrats and progressives have a tendency to treat politics as a debating society, in which ideas triumph on their merits and mutual personal respect is the order of the day.  That's how democracy is supposed to work, so there's nothing inherently wrong with that.  Except when the meetings of a society's members are disrupted by people with no goals except power and no respect for anyone but themselves.  That's where we are, whether anyone likes it or not.  Not just on January 6 of last year, but every day for the foreseeable future.

If we can't debate, we have to fight.  But we don't, at least at this point, need any weapons but our ideas, and the willingness to act on them.  Fighting for legislation like the examples I've proposed above are one way to do that.  Along with having votes every legislative day on bills that advance our goals, regardless of their prospects for victory.  And along with taking back the streets from the bullies, so that they never get a chance to storm the government again.

We don't yet need to respond to the violence of our opponents with violence of our own.  But we need to be fearless and relentless, regardless of our prospects for immediate success.  We need to show every day that intimidation is a strategy that has no victors.  We need to remind them of the fact that millions have died, so that we can live together in peace and prosperity.  If we can rise to the challenge, we can surmount it.  We have in fact, no choice.  It's the only way to get past it.