Conservatives have been attempting to find ways to influence the national conversation, about abortion among other things. You segue into military service; I have five sons and two of them are in the military and will make careers of national service while one is now a veteran. We no longer have a draft and I think we should appreciate the liberty of voluntary military service. If we had a draft and those men you castigate for not having sons in the military had kept them from it, I would sympathize with you. Politicians who support the military get my support, depending. Ted Kennedy supported military spending because a good portion of that money was spent in Massachusetts.

Head Start — the head start is gone by sixth grade, apparently and kids who started in Head Start are as likely to be high school dropouts as those who were not. I’m not impressed by the program, which is not excellent if it’s results evaporate so quickly. If it worked as touted, I’d be delighted. It doesn’t.

Sex ed. in schools does not seem to be working to prevent teen pregnancy and abortion. Complain about abstinence programs all you like, the other programs are doing no better a job.

The more I respond to you, Dan, the more depressed I become. But conservatives talking into the wind of current social conditions are probably wasting their breath. And yet, if there is no push back, if we say nothing, then where does society go? We persuade who we persuade and I was a radical leftist who was persuaded to go in a different direction. So I believe it happens and that people are persuaded. I don’t know what to do about everyone else.

Rosemary Nossiff. 2001. “Abortion Policy Before Roe: Grassroots and Interest-Group Mobilization.” The Journal of Policy History 13: 463-478.

Take your fingers out of your ears.

Your theory stinks. Edward Kennedy was not the leader of the Democratic Party, formally or informally, and as late as 1976 he was unwilling to put his imprimatur on legal abortion. George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were good family men, and Carter was unwilling to endorse legal abortion without qualification. There was a shift in elite culture most foul, typified by Harry Blackmun and five or six others.

In so doing the opinion took liberties with science as though the questions surrounding the inception of life itself had been in someway solved by a mere group of nine men, to the detriment of the life of the fetus. Perhaps that was felt necessary to resolve the matter at the time. Perhaps the timing of the case, by the complainants, was such that developments in science were feared.

There seems a gap to me. Christians had resolved the issues of abortion and contraception early in the infancy of the faith. The conclusions, however, involved much more than notions of sanctity of life and at what point a life begins. Their considerations involved why and whether procreation was good and not evil. (Some heretical sects did believe it evil. No wonder those sects are no longer around.) Was it a means of immortality, a way to carry on the Faith, the only valid reason for sex, or just a fact of nature?

The practices of both abortion and contraception were seen by Christians as sinful, mostly because of the notion that both were acts against nature. The gap seems to have come along in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th. Some of those issues continued to exist, but others were now as relevant. We’ve increasingly moved away from agrarian societies dependent upon large families. Advances in medicines have greatly decreased infant mortality. The world’s population seems too large to adequately feed all of us. And people live longer.

I believe those issues naturally became relevant before science got around to better determining the likely beginning of life, and before drugs were found to actually prevent conception rather than stop conception. The church, to a great degree, had long ago included both abortion and contraception as one issue, as there was no plausible way of distinguishing whether drugs were abortive or contraceptive in use.

The gap has now closed. We know what drugs prevent conception. We know that the fetus feels pain, so as to clarify that there is some cognitive form of life in every viable fetus. Now we can clearly say that feticide is the killing of life. You are correct. I too call it murder. (I use the word “viable” because doctors, in their infinite wisdom and lack of sensitivity, consider even the “evacuation” of naturally deceased fetuses from the womb to be abortions. Man, did my wife and I have an issue with that when told of her second miscarriage. The loss of life was heart-breaking. The label of abortion made it even worse. That should be changed.)

Mine may be a different view on whether these cases challenge the foundation of the Constitution. Like the many varying progressions made in the sciences, especially with regard to technology, the Constitution is holding up pretty darn well. I believe, like the Roe case illustrates, our legal code rarely can foresee necessary protections. So society usually addresses issues only in reaction.The Constitution allows for it. It also allows for correction.

My argument with regard to winning the debate involves not only the harshness of many conservatives, but the lack of any “plan” put forward by conservatives toward bettering the lives of those in trouble. The hashness is all over the radio dial. A certain TV network on the one hand critiques the mores of the world, and on the other panders to the vices of a decadent society. It’s confusing to me; it must be to our young and impressionable as well.

The harsness isn’t one-sided. Many liberals have adopted the notion that a person can somehow escape conscience when only wished, as though sins don’t weigh on the soul. Many liberals like me, however, have not adopted such a notion. Did my party leave me behind? No. Is there room for me to express my opinions without giving up my value to others in the party? Yes. They’ll just have to learn to be as open-minded as they pretend to be. And I assure all that I express my opinions to liberals. I even express my opinions to my church, the PCUSA.

Kate is wrong, I think. Conservatives do talk about it. They talk about how with just two more justices the Court will finally be able to do something about Roe; how we simply must elect “our guy” in order to bring this nation back to God, as though conservatives have figured Him out.

This democrat most assuredly doesn’t want conservatives to stop talking about abortion; talk while you work, for once. Talk up the value of all life, even the livelihood of the woman who feels desperate enough to consider an abortion. Talk up the value of the lives of the young and poor, who make up the majority of un-wed parents and the majority of would-have-been parents, except for an abortion. Talk up excellent programs like Head Start, which realizes $9 for $1 allocated it, which brings impressionable and vulnerable children into safety from surroundings that surely limit their lives and their abilities to be productive members of a better society, rather than “takers” or criminals in a rogue society. Talk about the child after he’s been born as though his life still matters. Talk about how to make his born life better, rather than talking about taking away his educational funding, his medical coverage, his subsidized lunch. And for Heaven’s sake, stop talking so much about sending him to fight a war for your freedom when that’s an obvious lie! Want another war? Send first the five sons of the SOB who advocates the next war. Stop sending mine instead of his or your’s!

Conservatives certainly do and should talk. They just don’t realize how void their talk is of building a morally upright society. Al Franken, who I realize you all must hate, devouted a chapter in a book toward abstinence, a favorite issue of the far-right. His chapter exposed quite well that the talk didn’t in any way match the walk. He merely asked several prevalent conservatives to share their “abstinence stories”. The point is that if conservatives want society to move toward better mores, then the argument has to be practical and proven attainable. How ’bout any of you? Anyone care to share their abstinence stories?

What I see in many of the more widely recognized conservatives are men who carouse as much as any other (think Dubya, Limbaugh and the Newt); Sunshine Patriots who ducked military service long ago, only to advocate service in war by others (think Dubya, Cheney, Chambliss, Wolfowitz, Frist, Hastert, Rove, Ashcroft, Lott….Romney); men who pacify middle-class mobs by proposing to cut-off those of even less fortune, even children.

I stand by my argument that conservatives are too harsh in their rhetoric toward the very people they claim to want to save from sin. Carl, you recently posed a question about how anyone could profess to be a Democrat and a Christian. You may not see it that way, but I believe I just answered (in part).

And Carl, I thank you for your tolerance and most of all for your willingness to make a very substantive argument. It was not lost on me. I apologize for getting a little worked up (my ears are actually hot), but I do hope that all understand that my passion is for the issues, and not toward disrespect of people who differ with me.

I’ve never heard the talk about stop over these past 40 years, but I would hardly call the talk persuasive. Unless it becomes persuasive, we will still be divided on the issue until hell freezes over.

I was putting books (you guys remember them?) away in boxes and came across my copy of “John” by Niall Williams, a profound work. I save it.