Atrios, Amy Sullivan, and Abortion

Responding to Amy Sullivan's recent post on Political Animal, he asksWhat do pro-life Democrats want?.

Do they want to outlaw abortion? If so, I'm not going to tell them that view is okay.

Do they want to add additional legal restrictions to abortion in response to the latest Republican icky-abortion-scare? If so, I'm not going to tell them that view is okay.

Sullivan insists that neither she nor Sarah Blustain, whose Prospect article I discussed in a previous post, are trying to take away anyone's rights or suggest a change in the party platform, just that they want to change the "perception" that Democrats are pro-abortion. Sullivan traces this perception to a vocal, powerful, minority of embarassingly strident people who refuse to believe abortions are a mortal sin, and thus bring all of us pro-choice dems down with them.

So she speaks approvingly of a recent report in Newsweek about John Kerry:

When John Kerry stopped by a meeting of the liberal 527 America Votes two weeks ago, EMILY's List president Ellen Malcolm asked him about the future of the Democratic Party. Kerry "told the group they needed new ways to make people understand they didn't like abortion. Democrats also needed to welcome more pro-life candidates into the party, he said."

Sullivan goes on to write, "If Democrats can change the perception that they are pro-abortion, they will finally be free to go on the offensive."

Unfortunately, the perception that Dems are pro-abortion is not the result of the behavior of any particular faction of college chicks attending pro-choice rallies, taking their shirts off, and inking "keep your laws off my body" on their breasts.

No one can accuse John Kerry himself of having EVER been rah-rah about abortion. When asked about it in the debates this year, John Kerry did not say "I love em. I think getting an abortion is great way to use up spare sick days." No, he sounded like what he was, a man who felt pretty sick about abortions but believed he couldn't legislate it.

This is not new for him. The Washington Post reported, in an article about Kerry's stance on abortion, that

Kerry has professed his personal opposition to abortion since his unsuccessful 1972 campaign for Congress. "On abortion, I myself, by belief and upbringing, am opposed to abortion but as a legislator, as one who is called on to pass a law, I would find it very difficult to legislate on something God himself has not seen fit to make clear to all the people on this earth. . . . And I think, therefore, with a sense of justice in mind that one has to leave the question of abortion between a woman and her conscience and her doctor," he told the Sun, a Lowell, Mass., newspaper, in 1972.

My point is that Democrats are not responsible for the perception that they are 'pro-abortion'. Our 2004 presidential candidate was about as squeamish as you can get about abortion while still supporting the party platform. And what did he get for it? A bunch of Catholic bishops calling him "pro-abortion" and refusing to serve Communion to him; President Bush saying "Well, it‘s pretty simple when they say:  Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion?  Yes or no? And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no.  And that‘s just the way it is.  That‘s a vote.  It came right up.  It‘s clear for everybody to see.  And as I said:  You can run but you can‘t hide the reality." That John Kerry would have voted for a ban on late-term abortions if it included an exception for the health of the mother made no difference. He was still tarred as "pro-abortion" and not supporting the "culture of life".

So the reality is, people, that the only way Dems are going to change the perception that they are "pro-abortion" is by becoming anti-abortion, not just by modulating our rhetoric, which, from most of the people in actual power, is already modulated. After we've succesfully changed our image by agreeing to make abortions really hard to get, what exactly will we be free to go on the offensive about?

Anyway, abortion is a red herring, like so much we are arguing about these days. I'll tell you what we should go on the offensive about, and we can do it now, without first retreating, either in rhetoric or in fact: torture.

How about giant billboards, with the famous Abu Ghraib prisoner on box with hood and electrodes, and the words "MR. PRESIDENT, IS THIS WHAT A 'CULTURE OF LIFE' LOOKS LIKE?"