Dear Bob, you should stand alone

DEAL BOB, YOU SHOULD STAND ALONE

NEW YORK, MARCH 26

POLITICS DEALS in hyperbole, but it is one thing to expect hyperbole, another to become so cynical about its exercise as to decline even to notice it, which brings us to Senator Bob Packwood, Republican from Oregon.

I have here a "Dear Friend" money-raising letter from the senator, the first half of which is devoted to denouncing a kook anti-Semitic outfit called Aryan Nations, which apparently threatened to kill Senator Packwood in retaliation for his support of Israel. If Aryan Nations is going to kill every legislator who supports Israel, we're going to have the greatest massacre in the history of legislatures. And if Aryan Nations goes on to kill every American who supports Israel, why that will reduce the population of the United States about as a first strike by the Soviet Union would reduce it. So Senator Packwood wants to publicize threats against him by mad dogs, okay.

But before you know it, the senator commits a little elision. All of a sudden he is talking about anti-abortion groups, some of who have rated him as a principal target in the forthcoming elections. Here is the connective tissue between the Jewhaters and the anti-abortion folks, as executed by Senator Bob, whose letter goes out under the banner, "Dear Bob, You do Not Stand Alone."

". . . somewhere, some kid who has never known a Jew [where are such kids kept? In the Smithsonian?], and doesn't understand the Holocaust, sits in the dark of the night and listens to this filth. And to that kid, their message may make sense. Kids like that don't get messages just from the Aryan Nations or other radical groups. They also hear from those who use these groups' tactics . . . For example, because I support the right of a woman to make a choice about whether or not she wants to have an abortion, some extreme right-wing groups have labeled me 'Senator Death' and targeted me for political destruction . . . In thei literature they describe me--and all pro-choice people--as having 'the blood of millions of innocent human lives on your hands.' And it troubles me that the same kid who listens to the message of the Aryan Nations will listen to this message as well."

". . . they all show a totaliatrian inability to hear both sides of an issue." They are "intolerant" and "intolerable."

now Senator Packwood is here saying that it is intolerable talk, not to be distinguished from that of genocide-for-Jews talk, to say that abortion results in the death of innocent people.

Talk about moral deafness--which the senator is ostensibly deploring. If one believes that a fetus is entitled to the protection of the law, which position was the near-unanimous position of the state legislatures up until 1973, how else does one reason than that abortion results in the death of innocents? Senator Packwood, like so many others who favor the right to abortion, is himself flagrantly guilty of what he charges the opposition with: failing to understand the other side's arguments. If one holds that an unborn child has rights apart from those of the child's mother, then there is no possible conclusion other than that the abortion of that child is a bloody violation of human rights.

Highly civilized people believe that the mother ought to have that right. But the opposing position has got to adopt the syllogistic imperative: You can't oppose abortion people conclude. Just as you cannot believe in human rights without concluding that anyone who believes in, or counternances, the slaughter of Jews is, to put it gently, an inconsistent believer in human rights. Senator Packwood is engaged in the disreputable exercise of plemical sleight of hand--by suggesting that the kind of people who oppose abortion are the same kind of people who believe in genocide. It would seem to me that whether abortion is right or wrong, those who oppose it on the grounds that a biological entity minus one day old is too nearly like an entity plus one day old, are much more likely to respect the universal right to life of all people than those who believe infanticide is a term only applicable to those who extinguish one-day-old life, before which, anything the mother wishes is A-OK.

The abortion issue to one side, what hurts is the brute mauling of the civility of democratic discourse. Oppose abortion and single out--the democratic way--those who disagree as political enemies. That is okay to do if you disagree with your senator on economic policies, right to work, aid to the Contras, whatever; but if it's abortion, you are the kind of guy who listens curiously, patiently, ardently, to aberrant Jew-killers.

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