June 2022 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Criminalizing abortion is spiritual narcissism

Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.

People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.

I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.

So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.

In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.

As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.

Criminalizing abortion means women die. Women with ectopic pregnancies, for instance.

And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.

I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.

All media (including “mainstream/lamestream”) support the NRA

Once again, a mass shooting, and, once again, a committed unwillingness or inability to deliberate sensibly about our policy options regarding gun violence. The most common narrative–and most damaging–is that we are at impasse because the issue is a zero-sum battle between two essentially hostile groups (“pro- v. anti-gun” or “pro- v. anti-gun control). The NRA, for instance, says that this (actually complicated) issue is a binary of people who are pro- or anti-gun. They claim that “pro-gun” is the same group as “gun owners.” They tell their base that gun owners are facing a binary: either support the NRA, or Obama personally kicks down your doors and takes all your guns.

All major media endorses that false binary and the resulting false narrative.

To the extent that media frame issues about gun ownership as pro- or anti-gun (or gun control), they endorse the NRA narrative.

This binary is false, and doesn’t describe our situation at all. The more we think our world is made up of two groups–people who want all the guns in all the hands and all the places, and a group that wants no guns of any kind for anyone or anywhere–the more we are going to stay caught in a trap we’ve set for ourselves. And that benefits the NRA, and guarantees lots more mass shooters.

In fact, the NRA does not represent gun owners–it has much more extreme stances on all sorts of policy questions about access to guns than most gun owners–but gun owners do tend to believe NRA demagoguery about the opposition wanting to take all their guns. Thus, to the extent that media describe our policy discourse about gun ownership as pro- or anti– (and especially pro- or anti-“guns”), it helps the NRA in its demagoguery.

There is a tendency to assume that, when it comes to gun violence, we have a polarized public. One side is reasonable, principled, and caring, and the other is irrational, intransigent, and extremist. Oddly enough, everyone agrees that’s the situation (it isn’t), but, if we agree that’s the situation then we just fight about who is sensible.

In pro-NRA rhetoric, gun owners are reasonable, and anyone who wants any kind of restrictions on gun ownership is in the group of irrational and fearful extremist. NRA rhetoric characterizes “gun control advocates” as “anti-gun,” who want to criminalize all gun ownership and repeal the Second Amendment. Any change in gun policies other than more guns is a step on a slippery slope to the world of Obama kicking in your door to take your guns. Many critics of the NRA accept the false premise of two groups, and simply flip the characterizations. They paint gun owners as irrational extremists who need guns because they are fearful and fragile, whereas gun control advocates are rational and realistic. As long as we begin with the false assumption that “the” gun debate is a battle between two groups, we’ll waste all our time arguing which one is the irrational one instead of reducing gun violence.

That media, all media, frame our complicated disagreements about policies as a binary of identities means that they are endorsing the NRA argument that this is an existential battle between people who own guns and people who want them banned.

If we focus on policies instead of thinking about this issue about identity, then two things immediately become clear. First, in terms of policy affiliation, there is not a zero-sum war between a group that wants no restrictions on gun ownership and another that wants no gun ownership at all. In fact, the majority of gun owners are advocates of gun control.

As numerous polls show, gun owners overwhelming support some restrictions on gun ownership. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center (“Views on gun policy”) shows that approximately 80% of the gun owners polled support background checks, preventing the mentally ill, people on watch lists, and people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Only 33% of gun owners endorsed permit-less concealed carry. Michael Siegel and Claire Boine’s The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the US (2020) shows similar levels of support for restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill, as well as for people at risk for suicide, or with certain kinds of criminal records; A majority support “red flag” laws, and background checks. As Boines and Siegel say, “The majority of gun owners supported every policy for which they primary aim was to keep firearms out of the hands of people at high risk for violence.”

In other words, most “gun owners” are “gun control advocates.” It isn’t a binary.

The second point follows from the first. The NRA’s policy agenda of responding to gun violence by getting more people to buy more guns does not represent the views of gun owners. Gun owners and the NRA are not a homogeneous group, despite what it (and too many of its critics) say. The binary of irrational gun owners who want all the guns for all the people in all the places versus sensible people who want some restrictions is also a false binary.

If most gun owners are gun control advocates, why don’t we have the policies about which there is so much disagreement? And the answer is demagoguery.
While the majority of gun owners reject the NRA’s policy agenda, they believe its representation of the Other.

According to Boines and Siegel, “the majority of gun owners have accepted the NRA’s rhetoric that the ultimate aim of firearm violence prevention advocates is to take away their guns and eliminate the Second Amendment.” If gun owners believe that there are only “two sides” on “the” issue of gun violence, then they are unlikely to advocate the policies they actually want, since those policies would seem to be letting anti-gun extremists win a skirmish. And, to the extent that advocates of restrictions on gun ownership accept the false binary of identity, the fears of gun owners are confirmed.

We don’t step out of this trap by trying to understand the Other side better, or attributing better motives to Them, or any other approach that assumes the problem is hostility and misunderstanding between two groups of people. We stay out of the trap by understanding that reducing gun violence means enacting policies and funding programs about which we can agree.

[There’s a longer, and more sourced, version of this argument in Rhetoric and Guns.]

Gun deaths and deliberative cowardice

Imagine that, despite your spouse’s resistance, you took a big risk, and moved cross-country to take a relatively specialized job with a high salary, pressuring your spouse to give up a good job they can’t get back. You spent everything on buying a house at a price you later realized was inflated, and then you discover it’s a toxic af workplace, and staying there will probably kill you.

You might try to talk to someone at work, but in a toxic workplace, that might cost you your job. It’s the kind of place that fires people who are looking for other jobs, so if you look for another job you might get fired. If you quit or get fired you might be able to find another job, but definitely not one that pays as much, so you’ll have to sell the house. You can, at best, sell the house for what you paid, so it will cost you money to sell the house, money you don’t have.

You can keep adding details–my point is simply to imagine (or remember) being in a bad situation that has a lot of possible solutions, and all of the possible solutions have high costs. What we tend to do in that situation is: nothing.

If we’re facing a problem, and we don’t like any of our available options for solving it, then we find ways to deflect thinking about it pragmatically. We don’t want to think about it at all. It’s as though we’re swatting away even considering that it’s a big problem about which we have to make some uncomfortable decisions. And that’s our situation with gun violence.

We know how mass murders happen. Troubled men (not necessarily ones who were bullied, by the way) get access to fast-firing and powerful weapons, and get access to a community that valorizes mass murderers. They believe that engaging in mass murder will gain them fame and admiration. Sometimes a person with violent tendencies is threatened with losing everything and decides to harm the people or person whom they irrationally blame (the situation in many workplace or domestic violence shootings). Sometimes the guns are illegally obtained or modified, but not always. Sometimes they’re weapons that used to be illegal (e.g., assault weapons), but not always.

Given that the situations are very different, there is no one solution that will solve all of them. Deliberative cowards say, “Welp, nothing we can do then.” But they don’t say that about other social problems, and that’s how all political problems work—there are always multiple contributing factors. Fatal car accidents have a lot of causes, and we haven’t chosen, as a culture, to say, “Welp, nothing we can do then”.

We identify the various causes (unsafe drivers, roads, and cars), and pass laws that regulate the drivers, roads, and cars. And we provide the resources necessary to enforce those regulations. There are still fatal car accidents, but far fewer than if we didn’t try to do anything.

Similarly, sometimes people say that the real issue is that the murderers are mentally ill, or that they were bullied. Were the people saying this genuinely concerned about mass murders, then they’d promptly advocate significant changes to our mental health policies, or how we handle bullying in schools. But they don’t. They don’t because both of those options would cost a considerable amount of money. Advocating the necessary expenditure would alienate the “starve the government” bloc of the GOP, as well as the people opposed to delinking health care from having a job (since people who are seriously mentally ill tend not to be able to keep a job). It would mean advocating a massive social safety net, which is about as popular with GOP voters as an abortionplex.

Sometimes people say that we have mass murders because our culture has turned from God, and they cite something they don’t like (tolerance of homosexuality, respecting the First Amendment) as an example of our cultural sinfulness. So, they wash their hands of the deaths of children when it comes to shooting. But they don’t say, “Oh, welp, abortion is just a consequence of our declining morals.” They haven’t spent the last fifty years just sending thoughts and prayers about abortion. They passed laws, violated democratic norms to get a favorable SCOTUS, and voted. They acted strategically to get abortion criminalized. If they really cared about mass murders they could act strategically to end them.

There are some fairly straightforward policies that we could deliberate. We could discuss spending the money necessary to enforce existing laws, restricting access to or banning weapons that are useful for mass murders, criminalizing the irresponsible storage of weapons, reducing bullying, requiring background checks, spending the money that would ensure people with serious mental health issues can get help. Any GOP politician who even talked about considering any of those policies would be making a career-ending move.

GOP politicians aren’t willing to be rational or principled when it comes to gun violence because they don’t really care enough about mass murders of children to take the electoral and media hit that would be the consequence of their being principled.

They’re more afraid of deliberation than they are of children being shot.