Thread by @stevenpmillies

1/ Some things have been on my mind that maybe we need to try to remember and think about at this fulcrum moment in the #abortion debate.

Since I wrote my book several years ago & re-read #Roe for the 1st time in years, I've been wondering abt something.

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2/ #Roe, let's remember, divided pregnancy into trimesters. #Abortion was more or less unrestricted in the 1st 12wks, practically prohibited in the last 12wks. Interests of mother & child were balanced this way.

This amts to a legal recognition of personhood.

3/ The only sensible reading of the #Roe scheme is as a balancing of the interests of 2 persons that are in conflict.

This is a glass-half-full reading. But the casual way we talk abt Roe as a total loss is not constitutionally realistic or accurate.

4/ Let's recall. The Constitution is for all the people of the U.S. That includes Western Christians who believe life begins at conception. It includes other Christians and other believers who do not believe life begins at conception. It includes others too.

5/ The glass-half-full reading invites us to notice the full half w/o necessarily overlooking the empty half. This is what constitutional solutions look like when rights conflict and there is no wide agreement abt what is at stake.

#Roe wasn't the last word. It was a good start.

6/ We also know #Casey provided a basis to expand protections for the unborn as tech advances made that feasible. Again, good judging and on balance a good situation if you are #prolife.

Well that ship is sailing. But now is a good chance to ask why we never saw it that way.

7/ When I say "we" I am particularly thinking abt #Catholics & #abortion. Why were we not able to see that full half & build a #prolife movement devoted to building offramps from abortion, encouraging women to take them?

Why did the prolife movement take the shape it took?

8/ That's a complex historical question. We certainly can say that the shape of the #prolife movement as we know it did not emerge immediately.

8 days after #Roe #abortion didn't come up at a presidential press conference, nor either a day later at the Natl Prayer Breakfast.

9/ Liberal Democrats like Ted Kennedy initially were against #Roe. This all is well known.

Somewhat less well known is the role the 1976 election played in mapping #abortion on to party identification. The GOP saw a chance to win #Catholic voters. They went for it, it worked.

10/ But why did it work?

This is a subtler question, and here I am just speculating. But I think it worked because of the characteristics of the social and cultural moment.

#Abortion became a lens through which rage was focused. Not exclusively the rage of #Catholics.

11/ But the social rage of #Catholics was particularly important at that time, & would be so in succeeding decades.

Let me divert a little bit abt why I say rage.

I'm trying to zero-in on what animates the most devoted activists & protesters to do socially transgressive things.

12/ What really enlivens the #prolife movement?

In technical terms, I think it's a sort of parousiastic gnosticism that seeks to overturn a condition that seems defective and unjust.

More plainly? The "defense of unborn life" is such a noble goal that it can justify anything.

13/ That's why just war defenses have been claimed for killing abortion providers and it's how everything from humiliating women entering clinics to Frank Pavones's sacrilege have been justified. The parousiastic goal is worth it. We are "defending unborn life."

14/ Who is called to the vanguard of such movements?

The disaffected and displaced, the ones who feel that the world does not reach their high ideal.

Only in a world that conforms to the moral law could some #Catholics find an adequate field of action.

15/ "The gravest insult to human personality is the denial of opportunity to let qualities of high value become an active force in society. When a society has reached the stage of corruption where its most valuable members are simply shoved aside the consequence will be,...

16/ "...according to their personality types, the withdrawal into contemplation or the active resistance to the point of revolutionary destruction and criminality."

Such, I think, is how many #Catholics in the US saw things in years after #Roe.

17/ #Catholics had reached the US cultural mainstream at the moment when sexual revolution, nascent secularization, and civil rights had changed the US cultural landscape. Catholics had come a long way to find their reward was to be "shoved aside."

A brief Catholic moment ended.

18/ Rage was a response, according to personality types. That rage shaped the evolution of the GOP from 1976 to today, and it brought us here.

I think also this gives a rather clear explanation for why the #prolife movement was a jet fuel of rage for #MAGA #nationalism.

19/ What else can explain how such overtly religious people embraced such an overtly irreligious man as their avatar? It wasn't purely transactional, it couldn't have been. There was real feeling in #Catholics who supported #Trump.

It just had little to do with Christian love.

20/ The revolutionary rage to Make America Great Again captures everything that middle class white Catholics felt had slipped from their hands in the late 60s and 70s.

And the tragedy is that it kept #Catholics from doing something both more effectively #prolife & more American.

21/ +Bernardin attempted to show the way. He was rejected. Every effort to engage #abortion through dialogue, discourse, debate was discredited.

Dialogue, discourse, and debate are not effective channels for something so primal as rage.

22/ Fifty years of rage brought us here. There were better ways. We did not have to see #Roe like this.

We did.

The question now is what else 50 years of rage will beget once the revolutionary thirst to overturn #Roe is sated.

There's no reason to think it will be good. /END/