Now that the dust seems to be settling, what can we step back and learn?
Two things hit me: First, having gotten elbow-deep into how Komen works, it's now obvious to me why charity can never replace government.
Second, we need to go on offense, not just with plans and programs, but by attacking the philosophical, religious, and moral sacred cows of the religious right. We've got to stop granting the assumption that anti-abortion folks are talking a principled moral stand.
[This is excerpted from the much longer "Five Take-Aways from the Komen Fiasco" on today's Weekly Sift, which also includes background that I figure the Kos community already knows.]
1. Charity can't replace government. A common conservative/libertarian fantasy is that private charity can replace the functions of government. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all that good-deed-doing stuff could happen through voluntary generosity, with no taxes or audits or anything?
When you look at the big McCharities like United Way and a handful of others -- a stratosphere Komen has recently entered -- you see what's wrong with that idea. All of them end up doing an enormous amount of marketing, image-building, and other rah-rah stuff to keep both themselves and their issues from slipping people's minds. (My wife, a 15-year breast cancer survivor, hit her limit when football teams started wearing pink accessories that clash with their uniforms.)
The amount that shows up as overhead on a McCharity's annual report is just a fraction of the true overhead. How much time and effort do participating corporations put into their United Way drives? How much money do individuals waste buying merchandise they don't need and wouldn't have bought without the charity tie-in? If you total up not just what a McCharity takes in, but what the donors and volunteers actually put out, you see that the true overhead is astronomical.
Mass-market private charity is a really, really inefficient way to do just about anything.
Like cure breast cancer. Almost every woman is at risk to some degree. Almost every man has a mother, wife, sister, daughter, or friend at risk. So curing breast cancer is in the general interest.
And breast cancer is not going away this year or next, and maybe not for a long time. So we may be facing decades of wide receivers wearing pink gloves just to keep our interest and awareness sufficiently high.
Imagine: Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to decide once and for all that we as a people want to beat breast cancer? We wouldn't have to stay perpetually amped-up about it, we could just commit to finding a cure and get on with our lives.
Amazingly, there is a way! We could elect representatives who could all meet somewhere and decide what each person's fair share is. Then we could have that amount deducted from our paychecks automatically, without all the hoopla and overhead and waste.
Government -- that's what it's called. Whenever we want to do something in the general interest and to keep doing it year after year, the right tool for the job is government.
2. Supporters of abortion rights need to take the initiative. All we accomplished with Komen this week was to preserve the status quo. The other side continues to pick the battlefields and hammer away. Sometimes we stop them and sometimes we don't. That's not recipe for victory.
Meteor Blades says "So, clearly, self-defense is crucial. But we need offense as well." He then outlines steps to advance the family-planning* cause, including the repeal of TRAP laws, opening new women's-health clinics, and ending government funding of abstinence-only sex education "which amounts, in many cases, to no education at all."
MB doesn't go far enough. We also need to take the intellectual, moral, and religious initiative.
Here's a place to start: The anti-abortion movement's most extreme positions (opposition to embryonic stem cell research and to post-conception forms of birth control like IUDs and the morning-after pill) follow from the belief that a one-celled organism, the newly fertilized ovum, has the full moral value of an infant.
Anti-abortion advocates usually get away with presenting this as a principled religious conviction, part of that old-time religion.
We need to point out loudly and often that in fact this is a nutty idea that has no historical, traditional, or scriptural basis. People don't oppose abortion because they believe on religious principle that a zygote has the moral value of a child. Quite the opposite: This an ad hoc belief invented for the purpose of opposing abortion, and the faithful simply ignore many of its inconvenient consequences.
The Wikipedia article on ensoulment is worth reading in this regard. Aristotle, the Talmud, and all early Christian sources agreed that the soul entered the body well after conception -- 40 days at the earliest. Nobody dreamed up ensoulment-at-conception until the Middle Ages, and even then the infallible popes went back and forth about it for centuries.
The very idea of a "moment" of ensoulment is one of those theological contrivances rejected by every folk culture that has ever existed, including ours. Intuitively, we all understand that the moral value of the fetus (like everything else about it) develops gradually, beginning somewhere around zero at conception and becoming immeasurable by the time of birth. In actual practice everyone -- even a conservative Christian who "believes" in ensoulment-at-conception -- understands that late miscarriages are more tragic than early miscarriages, and that the death of an infant is more tragic yet.
Consider, for example, that the majority of fertilized ova fail to implant in the uterus and abort spontaneously without the woman even being aware of her pregnancy. Anyone who honestly believed these were full-fledged human souls would regard failure-to-implant as the greatest health problem and greatest human tragedy of all time. But where is the religious monument to these billions of souls? Where is the big research program to do something about this holocaust?
Nowhere, because deep down no one really believes that a fertilized ovum has the moral value of a baby. The whole idea has been trumped up to justify opposition to abortion. It does not deserve the respect it is typically granted.