The Wages of Compromise: Defeat

If the White House and Senate Democrats still think, despite all evidence to the contrary, that compromising with the anti-healthcare forces is going to lead to a better reform bill - or any bill at all - they would do well to study the fresh, still warm and bloody lesson of the Stupak Amendment.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains:

Conceding That Abortion Is Icky -- Not An Effective Strategy

Lizardbreath is 100% right about this:

I can't help thinking of the Stupak amendment, prohibiting abortion coverage in any health insurance plan that's paid for in part by federal subsidies under the House health reform bill, as the payoff from all that talk about how pro-choice voters should be more respectful of pro-lifers' beliefs. If we just acknowledged that abortion was always tragic, and always kind of wrong somehow, and that prolifers' total opposition to anyone being able to get an abortion ever was a deeply held moral belief that pro-choice voters shouldn't hold against them, then they'd respect us more in return and abortion would stop being such a hotly contested political issue.

Turns out, no. What happens when you treat pro-life views with solicitous respect and make sure pro-life politicians feel completely welcomed in your big tent party is that sixty-four House Democrats vote for poor women to be unable to get abortions or, most likely, to in at least some cases get late-term rather than early abortions because they can't get the money together in time. Solicitious respect isn't just interpersonal decency that will make political conflict over abortion less intense, it's unilateral political disarmament, and it has real policy consequences.

The logic that by which "emphasizing that abortion is gross and women who get abortions are immoral" actually benefits the pro-choice position has never made any sense, and surely the Stupak amendment settles the question. The idea that anti-choicers don't actually want to legally restrict abortion for poor people but just want Democratic politicians to give them a pat on the head makes no sense in theory and is pretty clearly wrong in practice.

Katha Pollitt at The Nation makes a passionate case for those of us who support full human rights for women to stop surrendering for the sake of a future victory that never arrives.

You know what I don't want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it's the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. "If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon "cultural" issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice "progressive" Christians, men: why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

For example, budget hawks in Congress say they'll vote against the bill because it's too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won't wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.

President Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination's tax exemption. The Catholic Church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn't even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don't want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women's abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don't want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.

SNIP

The big prochoice and feminist organizations are up in arms--NOW and Planned Parenthood want to see healthcare reform voted down if Stupak is retained--but writing in the Daily Beast, Dana Goldstein nicely captures the bewilderment of leaders caught by surprise. "It's the feeling that you've been rolled," said Eleanor Smeal, of Feminist Majority. Or haven't been paying attention. Smeal was onto something, though, when she told Goldstein, "Here we are playing nice guy again, we didn't want to make a fuss." Consciously or unconsciously, by not organizing in advance to insist on coverage of abortion, prochoicers set themselves up to be out-maneuvered. In fact, as Sharon Lerner reported on TheNation.com, Democrats stood by while antichoicers kept contraception out of the reform bill's list of basic benefits all insurers must cover. So much for the "common ground" approach where we all agree that birth control is the way to lower the abortion rate.

Enough already. Prochoicers have been taking one for the team since 1976, when Congress passed the Hyde amendment, which Jimmy Carter would later defend with the immortal comment, "There are many things in life that are not fair." Time for the theocrats and male chauvinists to give something up for the greater good--to say nothing of the twenty prochoicers, all men, who supported Stupak out of sheer careerism. After all, if it weren't for prochoicers, there wouldn't be much of a team for them to play on.

Read the whole thing.

Fuck it. From now on - for abortion, for universal health care, for stopping climate change, for a real jobs program, for gay rights, for bulldozing Wall Street, for the whole liberal wish list:

No Retreat. No Surrender. No Quarter.