Author: Lake Jackson Citizen

The Republican Party has marketed a view of a particular medical procedure as the murder of a precious child. The sanctity of life, they say, should be respected in law by making that procedure illegal and, in some places, by making the mother an accomplice in the commission of a crime. And often it is her life that is most at risk and, therefore, two lives.

If you are an American woman, you have watched as your right to have that procedure has become the principal question put to every judicial nominee since 1973. As a result, it has been made difficult, if not impossible, for women in many states to obtain the procedure.

Republicans have mobilized millions of votes through one of the most brutally invasive yet successful political marketing campaigns in history. They have pulled at the heartstrings of voters by romanticizing and dramatizing a beautiful life of the fetus and the the right of that fetus to expect the chance to have a full life with air to breathe, to be cuddled by adoring parents, to become educated and prepare for great achievements and contributions for the betterment of all mankind.

Democrats have responded with the argument that it is about the right of a woman to make decisions about her own health care; that it is about the broader and more generally applicable right to privacy. Democrats have tried to appeal with reasonable arguments.

But is anyone really thinking about those children? When the debate juxtaposes the rights of a cute and cuddly fetus against the rights of a self-interested and probably promiscuous woman, the argument is already lost.

“Sanctity of life” is an interesting catchphrase and marketing ploy. But, it is to mothers that nature has given the responsibility for the delivery, care and nurturing of new life — not Congress and not the Texas Legislature. Those institutions have been corrupted by the Republican Party and have been allowed to become, let’s call them what they are, agents of an evil interference with the God-given right and responsibility of mothers to make decisions about whether her current situation and conditions are right for a child that she may love most fully by not bringing it into a life of almost certain loneliness, poverty and despair. And perhaps most important of all is the right of mothers and the medical profession to privacy.

Your Texas legislature, so assembled, would be a poor choice for a cardiologist. It makes even less sense in the choice of an OB/GYN doctor since, in many cases, there are two lives at stake.

When we look at the lives of the children born into circumstances that any mother can see as wrong for proper nurturing, the Texas Legislature is nowhere to be found. It is a corrupt and shameless institution for which “sanctity of life” often means many thousands of births into lives of violence and despair.

You may thank your gerrymandering Republican political lifers for packing the courts and legislative branch with dull-witted, power-seeking politicians too short-sighted to see the connection between their meddling in medicine and the unhappy lives of youth who become perpetrators and/or victims of violence, sometimes dying by their own hand.

Many of my friends who vote for Republican candidates do so for other reasons and don’t really support these inhumane laws. Some have sound policy reasons for voting the way they do. But I suspect many have just come to accept a view that is popular among their social and economic peers: that Democrats will take their money and give it to the poor. There may be a bit of truth in that view but, really, only if they have more than a fair share of control over God’s gift of a decent livelihood.

Apologies, Republican friends, but now you have introduced a fundamentally Christian notion into the discussion: sharing.

Republicans in the legislature go on celebrating the sanctity of life by pretending that more guns bring more peace to the streets, by underfunding public education, food and nutrition programs, and and by meddling more and more in the practice of medicine. They do all that they can to stay in office for as long as they can by selling the snake oil of a simple-minded gutter morality to a voting population that begs for leadership, not exploitation.

They may become a bit rattled when another teenager acquires an automatic weapon and shoots up a school. Or if he turns the weapon on himself and takes his own life. Then, and only then, they start talking about our dreadfully underfunded community and school mental health services. Or maybe they will call for arming teachers, or adding one more counselor in each of the schools. Yet they never stop to ponder the decision they yanked from a mother’s heart that might have spared these children such tragic lives.

They may do brilliant root cause analyses for problems on the job yet they hardly ever apply that trusted technique in executing their civic responsibilities.