Austin at Large: Look What We Made Them Do

Protesters at the state Capitol on Tuesday, May 3 (Photo by Jana Birchum)

My first political memories, as a child, are of Vietnam and Watergate; for my son's generation, it was Bush v. Gore, 9/11, and Iraq. We're quite aware that our nation and its leaders can do bad and wrong things and should not be trusted to learn from their mistakes. But neither I nor anyone younger than me genuinely remembers what life was like before Roe v. Wade, when every month in every town one might learn of someone who, unsustainably pregnant, tried to self-induce an abortion, and died.

What I do remember is that grownups, including myself eventually, were prone to arguing over whether abortions should be harder to get than they were, and whether Roe went "too far," and whether the subsequent Casey decision modifying Roe made it better or worse. It was an issue that animated people, including relatives of mine, who otherwise didn't really participate in or claim to understand politics. In my 1970s childhood in Reagan Country, abortion was not yet as Jesus-y an issue as it would become, but just part of a larger narrative of the nation's changing morality, like smoking dope or not being straight all the time. Inevitably, there'd be a very special episode of a Norman Lear sitcom that we'd find cringey and uncool by the time we were teens. (Maude Findlay, played by Bea Arthur, had her TV abortion way back in November 1972.)

Today, those other harbingers of Our Declining Values would barely get Fox News Nation out of bed, but abortion has become an incredibly powerful fetish among a quite limited, and increasingly undeniably creepy, group of Americans. Over the three days, as I write this, since Blake Lively's Met Gala cosplay as Lady Liberty was interrupted by the screams of naked Lady Justice, I've seen a lot of people on the socials and in my inbox misunderstand and mis-prognosticate on this point. Yes, there are definitely some people who'd like to keep the ball rolling and overturn a bunch of liberalizing Supreme Court precedents all the way back to Brown v. Board, just as there are some people who think Donald John Apesh*t Trump is still the American president. Doesn't mean they can, just that they want to.

Dumb Games, Stupid Prizes

The leaked draft opinion by Justice Sam Alito, and the clearly coordinated GOP spin around that leak, provides some early talking points to this effect about rights that aren't enumerated, words that aren't in the Constitution, all that nonsense. But perhaps the most stupid and wicked sentence in the draft opinion – which I think Alito probably leaked himself – is: "Far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division." All by themselves, they did that! People would have all agreed with how Americans self-regulated and self-allocated their sexual agency if it wasn't for that meddling Supreme Court!

The events of this week are not just the culmination and intersection of opposing forces of nature, buoying us up above the great Circle of Life; they are the climax of what is basically a scripted reality show that has been running for 50 years. The American political right has become completely beholden to the votes and the money of people who, for reasons that we can safely assume are spurious if not downright disturbing, care about this issue, this saga, this storyline, this great adventure more than any other. They were willing to overlook Apesh*t's wealthy white libertinage and clear patterns of deviance because they knew he'd appoint judges who would overturn Roe. Mitch McConnell, who doesn't care the slightest bit about the innocent pre-born and doesn't even try to fake it, managed the process of getting those judges appointed, by any means necessary and without any shame, because he knew it was the most important part of his job description, bar none.

What we'll know before too long is whether "ending abortion" is sufficient to appease these creeps or if they'll want more, and if the latter, do they have the energy and range to be successful. I do not pretend to know what happens next, but I do think we need to be clear about what just happened: After decades of effort focused exclusively on "enflaming" this issue (I mean, seriously, Sam, fuck off), being willing to let other ones slide, and waiting for their opposition to tire out and lose focus (which, of course, we did), the anti-choice cult achieved its long-cherished goals that almost all Americans find objectionable, about a decade after it already wielded its maximum power to kick abortion patients and providers out of the red states. Would you really want to be in their position?