Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn’t so!
According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda.
What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call.
The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really—it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one’s own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one’s life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools—provided by the free market, to boot—to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger.
What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism.
Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol’ fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children.
How did this happen?
Well, it has occurred to me that one of the singularly binding features of human political reality is the in-built hypocrisy of claiming that you (whoever you are and under whatever system you live) wish to be free. When you look at that claim—and Americans are by no means exempt—what it means in practice is the freedom to be autocratic in your own way. Even back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan you heard members of the Mujahadeen claiming thay they were fighting to be free. But free to do what? And for whom? Certainly they didn’t mean freedom for their womenfolk. No, they meant freedom to be oppressive in their own unique way, and apparently it’s not much different here.
Freedom is a slippery term. Anyone with half a brain realizes that absolute freedom is not viable. Freedom must be tempered by responsibility. The edges of what constitutes responsible use of form is fuzzy, of course, and so we have laws to constrain those whose situations or philosophies run counter to the common good. The irony of the pioneer image, the Mountain Man who went west to escape the constraints of civilization is that they never did and for the most part really didn’t want to. The first thing settlers wanted once they had established themselves was law and order. The mountain men were by and large entrepreneurs who depended on the civilization they supposedly disdained in order to make a living. And they had to perforce accept the local laws of the native populations with whom they trafficked. Freedom does not mean lawless.
What it means is living within a framework according to your own desires. You accept the framework while making your own place within it through your own choices and actions. How well this works out depends on many things.
When conservatives claim to represent American values for freedom, the image they seem to have in mind is one locked in the amber of time that discludes equality for women. It is freedom for men. Not that they do anything and whatever they might wish to do. No, it is that men determine the framework and then work according to their will to build something within it. But the image tends to ignore the framework, seeming to take it as given that it exists as something out of nature, god-given, pre-extant. It is an old, hoary, knotty kind of image that harkens back to notions of the frontier and the need for growing populations and the presumed biblical virtues that allowed us to dominate this continent (displacing, killing, and otherwise bilking the natives out of the land along the way). What it did not include was the image of women running businesses, holding political office, and certainly not bedding down with anyone they liked any time they liked just to have fun.
Basically, though, women as equals alters the framework, and everyone has to shuffle to find a new way to live within it.
So much for the vaunted champions of American individualism. But still, it is a profound irony that the rhetoric—so powerful, so eloquent, so persuasive—should represent the polar opposite of what it is intended to.
But some of them, apparently, seem to get it. Good for you, Judge Korman.
