I'm disappointed with kos'
brief and dismissive comment in the open thread about avoiding Louisiana, but I'm even more disappointed with some user comments that followed. Ladies and gentlemen - this is
it. This is the real battle we fight, and it's a bigger and more important one than just getting Democrats elected.
First, some background: while Louisiana's hardline conservativism is neither new nor unique in the country, some of the recent efforts have taken advantage of New Orleans' lame duck status.
Like many larger states with a single dominating urban area, Louisiana has always had a love-hate relationship with New Orleans - the source of its greatest income, the source of its greatest costs, and a major power-player in state politics. But the majority of the state is rural, and much of that (especially the northern half, which is primarily Baptist) has no love for the city whatsoever.
New Orleans has always been the target of controversy (and hatred by the fundies), but not as the result of its laissez-faire attitude alone - it was also the Democratic stronghold in the state.
Back to the abortion issue. The state of Mississippi, another one the DLC could care less about, has only one clinic in the entire state, and that one is constantly under attack. New Orleans, for many, was the only island of sanity in that area - a place where one could find a safe, trustworthy provider without having to worry about the harassment - sometimes physical - that existed elsewhere. Shutting down the clinics in Louisiana, specifically in New Orleans, will de facto shut down services to a large chunk of the gulf coast.
I'd like to quote from a recent editorial in the Times Picayune from a local women's rights activist who's painfully aware of what went into this decision:
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a rag-tag group of women volunteers, including myself, worked tirelessly to defeat bills that, if signed into law, were equally strict in outlawing all abortions and criminalizing the doctors who performed them. A brave Gov. Buddy Roemer stood with us in vetoing these bills -- and hastened the end of his political career in doing so.
I channeled my anger at that time into running pro-choice women for legislative offices, and when those couldn't be found, at least putting a qualified woman in the race. By 2000, women held 23 percent of the seats in the Louisiana Legislature, in line with the national average.
But it became increasingly hard to stem the tide of those intent on banning or criminalizing abortion in Louisiana. Pro-choice legislators were harassed, threatened and in many cases, voted out of office. Some of their children were harassed at home or in church. Pro-choice lobbyists were threatened with their livelihoods and their contracts from state offices, or otherwise isolated professionally.
It became safer and easier to fight anti-abortion efforts in the courts, with the help of New Orleans civil rights attorney William Rittenberg.
As a pro-choice advocate in Louisiana for nearly 20 years, I opted out of this year's legislative battle, knowing we were outnumbered and outmaneuvered. But the result of this legislative session, while not unexpected, makes me sad nonetheless.
Why is an advocate who fought for 20 years "outnumbered and outmaneuvered"? Because the Right has been building up its forces, slowly and surely - and rather than target our resources where we needed them the most (in convincing the voters that the pro-choice movement was an important issue), we made due getting a few "qualified women" elected. In the meantime, the Right entered our communities, they've gone to our churches, they've fed the anti-abortion fires of our religious groups, and they've shamelessly used ignorance as the foundation of their strategies.
Yes, this is about ignorance, more than anything.
Just look at the twisted logic in this LTE:
President Bush says illegal immigrants are taking jobs that U.S. citizens don't take. One reason is that there are not enough young workers to take these jobs. Why not? Could it be that a major reason is that the United States has legally eliminated 45 million people under the age of 40? How? Legalized abortion since Roe v. Wade has prevented 45 million young people from existing and adding to the worker pool in this country.
This is what we're up against.
As Democrats, we often focus our attention too closely on what we believe to be the business at hand: getting elected. But we cannot elect the people we want by ignoring the community of voters. Liberal values don't just descend from the sky - they are the result of education and of information. We've lost the education battle, so we should expect to lose in the state legislatures, in the courts, etc.
Why do you think the Right has so relentlessly targeted our schools? Because they know that an ignorant population is an obedient population. So far, they've been right.
Don't you get it, kos? THIS is the test of the 50-state strategy, right here. It's easy to poke fun at comments that reduce the strategy to "picking their noses" in states like Mississippi and Utah, but when we're faced with a real ideological gap - with states that have no real liberal presence - we have to acknowledge that the road is going to be long and painful. Education doesn't happen overnight. Information doesn't disseminate on its own.
It may be, as rudgrl put it in her recent diary, "A certain, and far too large, percentage of the American population are mouth breathing troglodytes, and always will be." But if that's true, why support the 50 state strategy at all? Why not agree that Mississippi and Utah - and now Louisiana - are troglodyte strongholds?
We don't agree because we acknowledge that strongholds only become strongholds when the other side has allowed its presence to dwindle. That's the essence of Dean's strategy, and the contempt it received from Begala is not entirely different than the contempt some people have shown for the state of Louisiana.
So my question for the community is this: do we take the Dean route, roll up our sleeves, and get to work building grassroots efforts in Louisiana, or do we take the Begala route and avoid Louisiana completely?
Either way, let's give some respect to the liberals who have stayed behind, who are sitting on their porches in New Orleans, angry that the state around them has veered hard Right, frightened that violent crime has taken a sudden upswing, depressed that large chunks of the city are still in shambles, and uncertain as hell about the future. The last thing they need is to be dismissed by the rest of us. They need a bit of our support right now, if you can spare it.