Political Ethics: Why Lie About 'Life at Conception'?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Tiassa, Sep 22, 2014.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    Unreconciled Questions Leave No Quarter Save Lying
    Rep. Cory Gardner's struggle to cope with simple facts is instructive


    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    The mere politics of Colorado's Fourth Congressional District are strange enough.

    The background: In 2010, Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck won the Republican nomination to challenge the appointed incumbent, Sen. Michael Bennet (D), who succeeded former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. In a year that saw the Republican Party enjoy great success, even winning control of the House, Buck lost by a 1.7% margin, an outcome overwhelmingly attributed to perceived antagonism of women—in 2010 he explained to voters that he was a better candidate for office than fellow Republican Jane Norton, formerly Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, because he didn't wear high heels, and then the ugly story emerged that he used his office as Weld County District Attorney to aid and abet a confessed rape. This year, Buck declared his intent to run for Senate again, this time against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall. Someone, somewhere figured out this wasn't a good idea; Rep. Cory Gardner of the Fourth CD would step up to run for Senate; Mr. Buck dropped his candidacy for Senate and filed to run for Gardner's seat in the House.

    Politically, the otherwise popular Gardner shares one particular point of overlap with Buck's despised misogyny: Both men support personhood legislation.

    And while the national Republican leadership might think it's all a matter of packaging, Gardner has struggled badly at every turn when addressing personhood in utero. After all, he put his name on a bill intended to create exactly that outcome. And while the question has pressed at least since March, it has been a morbidly curious comedy of errors. Most recently, Brandon Rittiman of KUSA 9 News caught up with each of the candidates, and Gardner attempted a rather astounding tack:

    Rittiman was also lucky enough to sit down with Republican Cory Gardner. The people not voting for him accuse Gardner of trying to gloss over his conservative record representing rural eastern Colorado in the House.

    Rittiman: What do you say to that line of attack? Are you not trying to become a little more moderate as you run statewide?

    Gardner: Look, I think if you're Senator Udall and you voted 99 percent of the time with Barack Obama, you can't run on the economy because his economic policies have failed.​

    Rittiman: How do you square your recent change on personhood at the state level with the bill that you still are on in Congress. The life begins at conception act?

    Gardner: Well, there is no federal personhood bill. They're two different pieces of legislation, two different things.​

    His fellow co-sponsors disagree with Gardner, saying the bill is personhood. It would "implement equal protection under the 14th Amendment for the right to life of each born and preborn human person." Gardner says it isn't a focus of his campaign.

    Rittiman: I get what you're saying, it's not the top of your pile. But it's still a piece of legislation that says abortion ought to be illegal, no?

    Gardner: No. It says life begins at conception. Look, Sen. Mark Udall is trying to say that it's something that it's not.​

    At the very least, the bill is meant to set up a legal challenge to a woman's right to choose. 9NEWS asked a few times for Gardner to share the details of his canceled healthcare plan, which he has used as an issue in the campaign.

    Rittiman: You don't want to discuss the details of your old plan?

    Gardner: Well, look. This is about a promise that Mark Udall made. About being able to choose the health insurance that they liked for their family. Mark Udall didn't tell people that if you had this policy or that policy you might be able to keep this but not that. Mark Udall promised if you like your plan you could keep your plan. He broke that promise.​

    Most recent polls have Udall and Gardner in a statistical tie.

    And the politics of personhood are once again brought into sharp focus; Rep. Gardner has chosen to leave his name on the bill:

    The House of Representatives adjourned at noon today, meaning Colorado senatorial candidate Cory Gardner has officially missed his chance to withdraw his name from the Life at Conception Act, a federal personhood bill, prior to the Nov. election.

    To uncosponsor the bill, Gardner would have had to make a statement from the House floor, and now the House is out of session until Nov. 12.

    In March, Gardner reversed his longstanding support of state personhood amendments.

    But in an endlessly puzzling move, the congressman did not also remove his name from the federal personhood bill ....


    (Salzman)

    H.R. 1091 (Life at Conception Act) uses Fourteenth Amendment equal protection to functionally outlaw all abortion and also any birth control that disrupts implantation of a fertilized zygote; this is a personhood bill, regardless of what the Congressman wants to call it.

    But that is the political consideration; what drives it is a functional issue, one that confounds advocates of Fertilization-Assigned Personhood. Very simply, these laws create by decree a period in which two people assert equally protected rights in direct spatial and temporal conflict. The functional answer from the FAP outlook is clear; the problem is that there really is no good packaging for the argument that women have lesser equal protection than anyone else.

    And herein arises a basic ethical question: If you're afraid to admit it, should you really be supporting it?

    Or, perhaps more bluntly: If you feel the need to lie about your support, why are you giving that support in the first place?

    Or is it okay to lie, since it's one o'them "women's issues"?

    How does this work, ethically? The constitutional principles in play have enormous significance. What exactly happens in this conflict of equally protected rights if government elevates a new class of person for the purposes of equal protection?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Rittiman, Brandon. "Chasing answers on the senate campaign trail". 9News. September 6, 2014. 9News.com. September 22, 2014. http://www.9news.com/story/news/pol...nswers-on-the-senate-campaign-trail/15157141/

    Salzman, Jason. "Gardner all in on federal personhood bill". Colorado Pols. September 19, 2014. ColoradoPols.com. September 22, 2014. http://coloradopols.com/diary/62985/gardner-all-in-on-federal-personhood-bill

    113th Congress. H.R. 1091: 'Life at Conception Act'. March 12, 2013. Beta.Congress.gov. September 22, 2014. https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1091/text
     
    Last edited: Sep 24, 2014
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    I imagine they feel they answer to a 'higher ethic'; perhaps one imparted by some kind of sky-being.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    The Great Gump in the Sky

    Indeed. But that's just the thing. Is the sky-being a moron?

    To wit, these are the United States, and while some go back and forth about the idea of ours being a "Christian nation", we can certainly acknowledge without controversy the proposition that Judeo-Christian psychomorality is among the leading influences shaping our society.

    And this influence is important because there are a number of ideas many of faith are happy to blithely recite to their friends, children, or evangelical targets; for example, I simply cannot be the only person raised in proximity to Christianity who knows the phrase, "God knows what is in a man's heart".

    Nor am I the only one who recalls that, "God works in mysterious ways".

    And I damn well know that Jesus specifically instructed to not demonstrate one's piety for the sake of others.

    The FAP approach, for decades, has been justified by Christian theology; Jeremiah 1.5 is from the Bible, not the Qur'an. Revelation 13.8 is from the Bible, not the Holy Menu of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

    Rep. Gardner? In the first place, market dynamics suggest his rhetoric about religious values pitches first and foremost to Christians; indeed, in 2010, Gardner "scored perfect responses" on candidate survey by Christian Family Alliance of Colorado.

    And this is where it comes back to lying.

    To the one, Gardner wants to pitch to Colorado Christians, and yes, that is a seemingly smart move from a marketshare perspective. To the other, there is also a corruption of faith taking place.

    In the first place, a bill invoking the Equal Protection Clause for fertilized ova is a personhood bill; this is an observable result of the way Amendment XIV is written. Did the congressman attempt to lie, or did he simply demonstrate his ignorance of the issue?

    We need only look to Christian arguments in the Gay Fray in order to see an example of what such corruption of faith do to a person. It might seem enough to point out the obvious paradox of demanding supremacy as a condition of equality, but more direct is the fact that while the right-wing advocates tried all sorts of Christian appeals like, "lifestyle sin" and "adultery", many Christian churches were endorsing heterosexual "lifestyle sins" and adultery by blessing unions including a divorcée.

    As a side note, there is always the shiny, happy salvation of John 3.16, but this relies for its market appeal in large part on a distortion of the meaning. Just as Prosperity Gospel ignores that a rich man will have a hard time entering Heaven, the sola fide of the late twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, seems to separate acts as independent of faith. Maybe we can blame the Red Scares, since American Christians turned their backs on the Apostles in that one.

    What I'm after in general, though, is that even if we set aside the broader question of the legitimacy of a goal or prize attained through illegitimate means, there remains a specific question resulting from the shape and workings of a specific policy according to specific justifications.

    You know that stereotype about how feminists wanted more than any person was entitled to? The advanced degree, the six-figure salary, the three kids, the vacation house, and all that? Well, what about what "Christians" want, as such?

    Supremacy as equality? Lying to advance the cause? The way the anti-abortion movement treats women in general? None of this impresses God; or if I'm wrong certainly the religious folk can show that, and in that case, well, fine, at least they'll be declaring that God likes dishonest, supremacist hatred.

    There is certainly some ephemeral psychomoral satisfaction in the proposition that these people actually believe they will answer God at some point; it would be interesting to witness those discussions.

    But in more practical terms, this simply isn't a healthy situation for society. Gardner's pitch would have Colorado voters in general, and Colorado Christian voters in particular, endorse calculated dishonesty in hopes of maybe someday getting something they want in return—something they pretty much can't have.

    To what degree Gardner is religious seems a question mark. Though he has omitted those answers on some candidate surveys, and observing that he "scored perfect responses" only four years ago, it seems a calculated presentation either way. Several months ago, Gardner tried to roll his stance on personhood, calling his support of the LACA "a bad idea driven by good intentions", admitting that he "was not right", and explaining, "I can't support personhood now; I can't support personhood going forward. To do it again would be a mistake."

    But he never took his name off the bill. And now he tries to justify what he called a bad idea by saying it really isn't a personhood bill.

    The GOP really does seem to think this is all about packaging, or as one Democratic strategist up it, "They seem to understand the problem, at least on a national level. But they seem to think this problem is simply one of tone and messaging."

    Thus we saw Gardner raise his stake in pitching to female voters, leading a GOP attempt to outflank Democrats from the left:

    It appears that Rep. Cory Gardner (R), running for the U.S. Senate in Colorado, was the first to roll out the over-the-counter solution, at least this year, hoping to push back against criticisms of his record as a far-right culture warrior, including repeated endorsements of anti-contraception "personhood" measures.

    In the three months since his announcement, Gardner has apparently blazed a trail for his far-right brethren. Republican Thom Tillis, the U.S. Senate candidate in North Carolina, embraced the exact same idea. So did Rob Maness, a conservative U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana. Before long, Virginia's Ed Gillespie and Minnesota's Mike McFadden, both Republican U.S. Senate candidates challenging Democratic incumbents, said they've embraced the policy, too.

    At first blush, the idea might seem like a reasonable way out of a religio-political mess. If anti-contraception employers don't want to cover birth control as part of employees' health plan, and religiously affiliated employers have moral objections to insurers' paperwork, this OTC approach makes the purchases more direct: if the FDA approves contraceptive medications for over-the-counter sales, it wouldn't matter what employers, insurers, or even physicians like or dislike.

    But in practice, there are real problems. For example, the whole point of the Obama administration's policy is to make contraception accessible and affordable: if birth control is available without a co-pay through Americans' health care plan, consumers don't have to worry about cost. And since pills can cost several hundred dollars a year, simply adopting an OTC model would leave millions of low-income Americans behind.

    In other words, the solution Republicans came up with – the way out of their contraception dilemma – is to tell poor women, "Good luck; you're on your own."

    For that matter, just as a matter of basic human biology, an IUD can't just be sold over the counter at a local drug store.


    (Benen)

    I would say it's more a matter of physiology, then again, I've never tried to set an IUD in my own body, though that is for obvious reasons; maybe it's something all women should know how to do, and reality represents a failure of the godless public schools.

    Maybe in the Jesuit schools ... er ... ah ... oh.

    Right.

    Baptist?

    I don't know, I guess the question there is the wisdom of self-applied intra-uterine devices.

    See, Gardner can fulfill both pitches if personhood legislation passes; with no hormonal or intra-uterine birth control, birth control pretty much can be entirely OTC. Well, until tubal ligation becomes popular. Welcome to the Walmart Snip 'n' Clip? At least women won't be buying the home kits at Hobby Lobby.

    I won't even get into the question of which oral contraception is the right one for any given woman. The potential problems are enormous; unless the point was to further degrade access to women's contraception by making it entirely out-of-pocket, they haven't really thought this through. Furthermore, even if that is the point, they still appear to have skipped the actual planning and leapt from brainstorm to implementation.

    Kind of like Gardner's graceless personhood maneuver; we might propose that he didn't think that one through because, six months later, his name is still on the damn bill and he can't come up with anything more than ad lib to explain his position.

    Deception in politics is one thing. But look at what that creates in the pious voters: Shall we support a Devil in order to please God?

    Psychologically, at least, this is unhealthy. And in that context, issues of traditional masculine, heterosexual supremacism have shown us many, many results. The cognitive dissonance is unavoidable, resulting in neurotic conflicts, and suddenly we have homophobes snorting meth out of hookers' asses, hiring rentboys to lift their luggage, taking wide stances in airport bathrooms, and prostituting themselves in parks because they're afraid of black people.

    And, yes, that last one really did happen, no matter how bizarre it might sound.

    Or there's the impeaching family values man from South Carolina who left his wife to hike the Appalachian trail in Argentina, or the one from Georgia who's on his third wife. These behaviors, represented in a vacuum, are whatever we might think of them. But considered in a more functional, realistic context they represent ruptures of conscience driven by the neurotic tension between the truth experienced and the lie told.

    Not all falls from grace are fair game; not all are by similar neuroses. Was Jim Bakker's adultrous transgression a result of neurotic pressure derived from pious sexual obsession or culture of privilege?

    Then again, do I care that Newt Gingrich is a serial adulterer? Well, frankly, it wouldn't matter except he makes such a holy racket about family values; it's the disruption of the social discourse that matters in that question. Like with Eliot Spitzer, I could not care less who's zoomin' who, except for the fact of these people profiting by their prudery. John Edwards? Well, that seems to be a different neurotic complex. It's all adultery; but why does it matter?

    What we get from appeals like Gardner's is a slowburning corruption of conscience, a matter of psychological conditioning. Those who remember the late eighties through the nineties and into the new millennium might also recall a dizzying inflation of the sums at stake. Where we used to fight about a handful of millions of dollars, the high-profile arguments are about billions to trillions of dollars. Entertainment, sports, and executive profits have skyrocketed. In the 1980s, a contract issue regarding Seahawks quarterback Jim Zorn saw him paid an extra dollar in order to fulfill the highest-paid clause; Brian Bosworth had been signed for five hundred thousand. Aaron Rodgers renewed his contract with the Packers this year, five by a hundred ten. Twenty-two million dollars a year.

    We have largely become accustomed to these numbers, have we not? That is, while there is certainly still outrage over budgets and expenses, if our outrage scaled from our sensibilities three decades past, well ... er ... ah ... right.

    But what happens when we become accustomed to neurotic spasms as influential in the public discourse? The number of 2012 candidates not simply crossing the line, but also pretending it never existed, loomed large in the election.

    Gardner's personhood rhetoric obviously does not rise to the rape talk of Akin, Murdock, and others, though it's worth noting that he did vote for the 2011 HR 3, which would have redefined rape to exclude statutory rape. But scaling back down to what his personhood rhetoric actually is, how can we suggest this sort of dishonesty is healthy, for Gardner, voters, or society in general?

    If we keep passing over the lies, they gain influence. And this time it's a pretty cynical lie. Not a personhood bill? Is the congressman just not paying attention?

    Playing for that evangelical crowd is difficult, and can be dangerous politically. But when that requires the kindling and stoking of dishonesty in the public discourse, no good can come of it.

    Which brings us back to the sky monster. If they believe, then why would they risk this course? It's a pretty straightforward variation on Pascal's Wager.

    And if they don't actually, genuinely believe? Then why the hell do we have to put up with this in the first place?

    Political ethics are often a tricky matter; while we measure success in electoral outcomes, we also tend to ignore the off-ledger costs.

    It is one thing if neurosis drives an advocate to flee discussions of policy effects; it is another if those conflicts compel an advocate to simply lie about what he is saying.

    It's a personhood bill. Why lie? And what was all that stuff in March, then?

    What is going on in Rep. Gardner's head? And what's up with the intended market sector insofar as one might expect voters to take the bait?

    Which brings us back to the question: How does this work ethically?

    Is the skymonster proud of craven dishonesty? I mean, sure, the whole higher ethic thing. But sometimes that higher ethic seems entirely arbitrary. Well, okay, behaviorally arbitrary. Which, in turn, isn't really arbitrary but, rather, symptomatic.

    How does one answer God with pride for having done harm?

    And just how ethical is it for Gardner to ask so many Christians to line up behind desperate, thoughtless lies?
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Jorgensen, Leslie. "Gardner wins Republican CD 4 nomination". The Colorado Statesman. May 28, 2010. ColoradoStatesman.com. September 24, 2014. http://www.coloradostatesman.com/content/991868-gardner-wins-republican-cd-4-nomination

    Weigle, Luther, et al. The Bible: Revised Standard Version. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1971. University of Michigan. September 24, 2014. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/

    Margolin, Emma. "Poll finds Republicans still struggling with women voters". msnbc. August 28, 2014. msnbc.com. September 24, 2014. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/republicans-still-struggling-women-voters-poll

    Benen, Steve. "The GOP's contraception solution is no silver bullet". msnbc. September 8, 2014. msnbc.com. September 24, 2014. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-gops-contraception-solution-no-silver-bullet
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.

Share This Page