Spong Q&A on The Right to Live and Die and a Short Tutorial on Recent American Politics

Carol from Florida writes:

"Several years ago, I was interviewed at a pro-choice event for Republicans. Being well past any likelihood of pregnancy, I linked my concern about my right to die with my right to decide about my fertility. Both ends of life are clearly the prime battlegrounds of the "Right to Life" groups, yet they assert that an embryo or a fetus and a person who cannot survive without heroic, indefinite intervention are fully alive and must be saved. I said then that I was as appalled at the notion that the government might decide if I should live or die, just as they might decide if my daughters could have an abortion within the reasonable parameters set by Roe v. Wade. People at that event thought I was "stretching it."

"Since then I have been proven tragically correct. Attorney General John Ashcroft has challenged Oregon on its right to death with dignity law. Abortion conditions continue to be eroded by the radical conservatives who seem to know better than the family in question what is best. People in nursing homes often have to be resuscitated at hospitals because, even with written directives otherwise, the nursing home is required to send the patient to the hospital to be "saved." Can you explain how it is that the Republican Party that has historically stood for limited government is now inserting itself into the most personal of issues?"

Dear Carol,

Politics is always more about power than principle. You should not expect consistency from either party. If you go back into the 30s, the Democrats were in power and met the Depression with massive spending programs and rising deficits. Today the Republicans are in power and the Democrats are complaining about bigger and bigger government and massive deficits. In the days of Abraham Lincoln, the Republicans were the party of civil rights and justice for black Americans. Today, black Americans tend to vote about 90% Democratic. In the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans were the environmental champions. Today most environmental groups endorse Democratic candidates. These things may be ideological for some but I am convinced that they result more from the desire to ride issues into political power more than anything else. That is not cynical so much as it is realistic. Power is the name of the primary goal of politics.

When I lived in Virginia in the fifties and sixties, the Democrats tended to be "States Rights, Anti-integration, Anti-Union, Conservatives." During that time, the best governor of that state was, in my opinion, A. Linwood Holton, a Republican. As a citizen now of New Jersey, I still regard Republican Thomas H. Kean as the most effective governor in the past thirty years.

What is now going on in American politics is, I believe, a reaction to the fast pace of change that always creates uncertainty and fear. It has been building since shortly after World War II. It began with the post World War II massive migration of black Americans out of the south into urban America. Next came the morally correct, but culturally destabilizing ruling of the Supreme Court against segregation in 1954. This was followed by urban unrest and riots in the sixties, created in part by the pressure on social systems in northern cities with the arrival of black migrants who, as products of a cruel and dehumanizing segregation, were generally poorly trained and poorly educated. Next came the disillusioning war in Vietnam that we could not win, we could not lose and from which we did not seem to know how to extricate ourselves. This was followed by the Watergate scandal in which, for the first time in American history, a sitting president was expelled from office. These forces came together to create great insecurity, great anxiety and great fear. It also caused our nation as a whole to search for leaders who reflected the values of our past that, by comparison, looked calm and peaceful where values were not in doubt. Since it is far more difficult to articulate new values than to retreat into the past, this nation turned first to 'born again' Jimmy Carter and later Ronald Reagan, whose movie career projected him as the candidate of law and order, American patriotism and traditional values. Gradually security was restored and in 1992 America turned its presidency over to one who reflected the Vietnam resistance. It was time to move on. President Bill Clinton's misuse of the Oval Office for sexual escapades, however, plus the constant and I think excessive investigation of him by a politically motivated Republican Congress reignited the fear that values were once again under assault, resulting in the narrow victory in 2000 by another voice of the past, George W. Bush, the son of Reagan's vice president and successor, George W. H. Bush. The Bush II presidency was then defined by the 9/11 attacks that once again cast the people of this nation into a mode of fear. Fear always drives people to seek the security of yesterday, a security they feel that they have lost. The appeal of the present Bush administration is first to family values, which is code language for anti-abortion measures and government control of sexual activity. The corollary to this is the drive to protect the "sanctity of marriage," which is the code language for anti-homosexual measures. So life issues and sexual repression issues dominate their social agenda. They seem not to realize that this flies in the face of their conservative promise to "limit government" or to "get the government off the back of the people." The politics of fear is quite frequently the ticket to power. The rise of a controlling religious mentality that seeks to force everyone by law to abide by the prevailing traditional norms of behavior is a part of that.

What usually happens when religion becomes politically powerful and seeks to impose its values on the whole body politic is that, drunk with a new sense of importance, it ultimately overreaches its mandate and people begin to feel threatened by the imposition of a narrowly defined religious power. The passion that surrounded the Terri Schiavo case, the president's dramatic flight to Washington to sign the emergency measure rushed through Congress at midnight to "save this woman's life," Republican Majority leader Tom Delay's subsequent attack on the Judiciary, the whole drama being orchestrated from Florida by Governor Jeb Bush, and Republican Senate Leader Bill Frist's suggestion that by not passing every judge nominated by the President, the political opposition party was attacking religion, even hinting that Democratic opposition to these potential judges was based on the fact that the nominees were "Evangelical Christians," has all the marks of a major over-stepping of the boundaries of religious power. People respond quite negatively to any attempt to coerce conformity. A Democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the height of his post depression popularity, tried to pack the Supreme Court and was rebuffed by an aroused public. That is clearly happening once again today even though the political shoe is on the other foot. The practice of politics is always about power more than principle and this nation is strong enough and wise enough never to let any group or any person get too much power. So, relax and let history play itself out. It will.