Agenda Elaborated.3
#4 Abortion and its Fellow Travelers
My Mom hated this sign. It’s along a stretch of US 150 a couple of miles south of Alpha, IL just across the road from an abandoned coal mine. One day as we drove past the sign, Mom surprised me with one of those non-verbal expressions of disgust that I had come to know mostly in the context of my own misbehaviors.
I pressed her for an explanation: was it something about my driving?
No, it was the sign. She hated the sign, she said, because of what it was really about, not because of what it said. What it was really about was having the government take away the right to abortion.
Mom was never outspoken about political issues. Most of my lifetime I could never have said for whom she voted or how she felt about, say, Vietnam or income taxes. She seemed generally unimpressed by partisan expressions from others.
She was a religious woman, although never particularly outspoken about that either. I know she was disappointed in my religious lapses, especially as they extended to never baptizing her grandchildren, and that my brother’s rejection of the family Methodism in favor of his wife’s Catholicism pained her. She never bugged either of us about these matters, but we knew how she felt and knew also that she wouldn’t love us less because of them.
So, I was surprised at her reaction to the sign — it suggested a complexity in her thinking that I seldom saw. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. There were plenty of signals, if I’d paid more attention. For example, she had dumped a college man in the early 1940s to marry my much older father, a divorcee with an 8th grade education, a disability and no particular prospects. That choice worked out very well for my three siblings and me but was so much a taken-for-granted part of our lives that we never thought much about it.
After the disability ended Dad’s career and forced Mom to go back to work with her youngest child not even old enough for grade school, she progressed to become the operations officer of a small bank where she and her female coworkers propped up much less capable males who had weightier titles, bigger offices and richer salaries. She was quiet about it, never what we would think of as a feminist activist.
Yet her reaction to the sign was visceral, something that came from deep inside her, and approached the activist mindset. That’s the way it is with many of us and the so-called social issues that I point to in Agenda Item #4:
“Abortion is none of the government’s business. Nor is anyone’s relationship or lack thereof with his or her God.”
Abortion is just a symbol, a sign as it were, of issues about which many of us have visceral reactions. I invite the rest of you to talk about others. It’s difficult to argue with someone else’s gut, which is a good reason to step aside and say the government should stay out of such issues. Our right to believe what we want, even crazy stuff, is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The right to believe, however, doesn’t extend to telling others what to believe or insisting that the government do it for you, except (uh, oh, it’s getting complicated), oh, say, taking away assault rifles.
