I'm going to do something that I am usually hesitant to do, which is interject my own extended opinion into a very, very volatile topic -- but to be honest, the opportunity is ripe, I think the example I have chosen is an instructive one, and I haven't been pulling my weight around here in the controversy department.
Let me snip a sentence out of a currently recommended essay about the NARAL flap, and use it in a totally inappropriate way.
Particularly offensive are the gay men who show up to tell us that abortion is "icky." We don't concern ourselves with what you do with your bodies - only your right to fair and equal treatment under the law and personal privacy - so leave our bodies alone.
The enemy of women's rights is... gay rights? No, that's obviously not what the author meant by that seemingly out-of-place little slap. But if the owner of this site wrote such an insensitive, perhaps misworded, easily manipulated attack on one particular group, we wouldn't hear the end of it for the next three months. On the contrary, he'd be blasted on a variety of websites, and never trusted by that group to give objective news or analysis of gay rights issues again.
But pointing out the moral hazards of the "gotcha" game of maximum possible offendedness isn't my central point here. In reality, this leads me (circuitously) to my main question in all these "single-issue advocacy" fights. To my own, now that the opportunity presents itself, personal example.
Let's suppose I have three candidates to choose from:
- One has a solid pro-choice record, but is dismissive of gay rights.
- One is solid on gay rights, but unnervingly middling on pro-choice statements.
- One is solidly anti-war, and powerfully effective at it. But an unknown, when it comes to privacy and rights issues.
Pick which one I should support. Now.
And God help both you and me if I choose wrong, because I've just fucked a hell of a lot of my fellow citizens, much less world travelers. Big time.
Or should I stay home and not vote at all, because no one candidate meets ALL the very specific tests I have?
Or should I make the best judgment I can based on the best possible common good, and fight like hell for the rest of it once I have someone in office that at least shares the best possible common ground for those debates?
That's all this single-issue, not-single-issue argument is about. That choice, right there, and how to make it. It's not about "disrespecting" people, or "abandoning" people, or "not understanding the severity" of the issue. It's about the fundamental problem with representative democracy: if you're not your own representative, you're by definition going to have to figure out who should be. And it's a brutally imperfect process.
These purity debates are all fine from an intellectual level, but when it comes to real-world situations I am, at some point during every single election, going to have to sit myself down on my own decidedly imperfect ass and decide on ACTUAL human candidates who will never -- and I mean, absolutely never -- match up with my own personal fifty-point litmus test of Deadly Critical Issues That I Cannot Compromise On. This isn't a damn political fantasy football game. Do we honestly think that these miraculous candidates are actually out there, that agree with you, me, him, her, grandma, grandpa, and the dog all at the same time? On economic issues? Gun control? Gay rights? Affirmative action? Women's rights? Religious freedoms and separations? Educational opportunities for my children?
Critical public health issues?
War?
This is the problem with single-issue groups. Bless them, they need to do what they are doing, but there are plenty of circumstances in which the stance taken by one single-issue group is dismissive or downright destructive to the issues of other fellow citizens. Not intentionally, or cruelly, but accidentally, and by the very nature of single-issue advocacy. Does that mean they're wrong? Of course not.
But to reduce all possible campaigns, strategies, candidates, and elections to subserviency to the particular internal strategies of one particular team of advocates is to doom the entire progressive movement to division into one Party per possible stance per possible issue. It's the advocacy groups' task to advocate. It's then up to the rest of us -- you and me -- to weigh them all together and come up with some possible amalgamation that, if possible, screws noone overtly, and leaves noone behind.
Single-issue groups don't have to worry about that last part.
Now, I know for a nigh-on-fact that a great many people on this blog and elsewhere would sell out gay Americans in a heartbeat if it meant Roe v. Wade was momentarily strengthened, and vice versa. And immigrants? Affirmative action? Please -- don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining. Don't get all high-and-mighty with me about how you are for broad coalitions, as long as everyone agrees that you get to call the strategy shots and the rest of your party doesn't.
It is possible to support women's rights, and still disagree with occasional narrow strategy options that a particular organization like NARAL chooses to pursue. (I have to say, while I think this is a good debate to have, I find it absolutely ridiculous to conflate "criticizes NARAL" with "abandoning women's issues".) It is even -- shockingly enough -- possible to support single issue causes and still recognize the damage it can cause when a particular group of advocates screws up. And it is indeed possible to have a debate over critically important issue-based strategies without being "naive" or "a sellout".
So if you want to criticize my approach to the issues, or Kos' approach, or Dean's approach, or Kerry's approach, or NARAL's approach, or GLAAD's approach, or the DLC's approach, or whoever -- knock yourself out. Have a ball. That's the whole point -- having those debates is the only way we're going to get anything approaching a workable long-term Democratic infrastructure.
But don't presume that anyone who has a different strategy than you isn't "serious" enough, or "liberal" enough, or whatever-the-hell-else suddenly rises in your throat because a certain partisan dared throw a critical paragraph or two towards your life-defining issue, as opposed to all the other life-defining issues and strategies that you were just fine in criticizing every other day of the week. A meaningful debate can't work that way.
There are large parts of the Democratic infrastructure that are a mess, and there are significant forces that have great personal advantage in keeping it that way. This is going to get messier before it gets better. We can fight as we must, in this interim period, but at the end of the day it's time to get off the damn horse, and help pull the wagon. You, me, Kos -- all of us. You pull my issue, and I'll pull yours. That's the only way out of this godforsaken place.