Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Michaels chapter on religion is, I think, a skeleton key to what he’s about. He seems to have taken to heart whatever he learned in rhetoric classes and spent a career elevating all the reasons why you shouldn’t use ad hominem into a theory that has all the analytical subtlety of the cudgel you find in the hands of the superbad guy at the end of a game of Donkey Kong.

In the chapter, he writes the following, arguing that religion has been pushed to the fore of our political life primarily because identity issues have displaced the more legitimate engagement in ideological issues. I actually agree with that. I spent a lot of time arguing against the way sex positive feminists attacked radical feminists because they treated the debate as one that was about identity and not one that was a debate about opposing ideological frameworks. I repeatedly pointed out, much to belledame’s and others’ irritation, that what radical feminists were about was a particular set of theoretical assumptions about women’s oppression. as such, the debate should proceed on the basis of those disagreements and not on the basis of moral outrage.

This is not to say that I think that there’s no connection between identity and the theories you end up embracing. It is rather, that the arguments proceeded on the basis of moralizing about whether this or that person was a good or bad person, (the famous debate over twisty and the degree to which she was basically a horrible person out to manipulate,use,and abuse others. A meeeeenie, in other words.) But what was the point? Instead of saying “look, Twisty’s beliefs are wrong and here’s why” the debate was “Twisty’s a bad person, here’s why.”

round and round and round it all went. It isn’t productive. I have a whole argument for why that approach was wrong. several actually. when I resuscitate the old blog’s database someday, maybe i’ll point at those arguments.

Michaels, of course, takes it to a controversial end when he argues that religion is about belief. Hence, we must argue with one another about religious claims regarding homosexuality. It’s not that people who think that gay sex is wrong are bad, bigoted people. Rather, it’s that their explanations for their belief — reference to textual evidence in the Bible for example — can be shown to be wrong. They have a very weak argument to support their beliefs that homosexuality is wrong. Thus, he writes:

If, however, you think that homosexuality is wrong, it’s hard to see how you can be accused of prejudice against gays, just as it’s hard to see how people who think that fundamentalists are wrong can be accused of being prejudiced against them. Disapproval of what people do doesn’t count as prejudice any more than disagreement with what people believe. So the good news for homophobes is that they’re not bigots; they believe that homosexuality is wrong, and they have their reasons. But the bad news is that their reasons are so weak. Because while it’s easy to see that homosexuality is bad if it goes against the laws of God, it’s really hard to see much wrong with it if it doesn’t go against the laws of God or if we don’t believe there are any such things as the laws of God. So while the arguments against abortion don’t rely on religions belief, the arguments against gay marriage seem to rely on almost nothing but religious belief.
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The trouble with diversity, from this perspective, is that it tries to imagine a world in which no one is a believer, as if even our belief in God (or our belief that there is no God) were just another aspect of our identity. But belief is at the heart of both our religion and politics, and insofar as the displacement of ideology by identity has helped bring religious beliefs to the fore, it cannot possibly make sense to keep pretending that the best way to deal with them is by asserting that religion has no place in politics. It has a lot more place in politics than race and culture do.

To put the argument about abortion in context, he writes:

“The argument against abortion is that it is muder, and you don’t need to be a Christian or, for that matter, to have any religious convictions at all to think that murder is wrong. Indeed, almost all the people who support abortion, including atheists, oppose murder but deny that abortion is murder, insisting that the fetus does not yet count as a person (and thus cannot be murdered) or that the pregnant woman’s refusal to accept the unchosen obligation to bear the child does not meet the legal definition of murder. So that what the opponents of abortion need to do is show these people that they are mistaken, that the fetus does count as a person. How does religion help? Why, should the fact that most Protestant evangelical churches and the Catholic Church oppose abortion count as a reason for people who don’t oppose abortion to change their minds? How does telling people that God doesn’t want them to doit make a difference if the people you’re telling don’t belief in God?

The problem he is that the specifically religion part of the argument is entirely (to use Neuhaus’s terms) “private and arbitrary,” dependent on “revelation” in a way that the conviction that we can’t draw a sharp line between the fetus and a person is not. If I am trying to convince you that the fetus is a person, I can — to take a standard argument — point out that if you don’t regard the fetus as a person, you won’t be able to regard people in comas as persons either, since they are similarly unconscious, dependent on others, et cetera. And you may be led to reflect that the considerations that cause you to think it’s wrong to pull the plug on people in comas (they may recover consciousness; they may once again come to function as persons) are applicable to the unborn child as well: if nurtured, it too will come to be a person. So you may decide that you were mistaken in distinguishing so sharply between the fetus and a person, and you may come to believe that abortion is wrong. Or you may not. For our purpose here, it doesn’t matter how we come out on the abortion debate; what matters is just that we recognize how limited is the role that religious conviction plays in that debate.

For consider the alternative, the idea that in convincing you that abortion is wrong, I’m convincing you not simpoy to alter your values but somehow to take into account the importance of their being religiously based. What this means is that not only do I have to convince you; I have to convert you. I have to get you to believe not only that abortion is wrong but that it’s wrong because God forbids it. Which is to say, I have to get your to believe in God. And here it’s notoriously the case that arguments of the sort that might conceivably prevail in the pulic square will be of very little use. How many people get argued into a belief in God? And why should people who don’t believe in God, or don’t believe in your God, be the slightest bit impressed by your insistence that (your) God forbids abortion.”

As you can clearly see, belief that abortion is wrong has nothing to do with religion. right? Riiiiiiiiiiight.

But I do think this is quite wrong. Plenty of people think that murder is wrong. They may even think that the fetus is a child and that they’re killing it when they have an abortion. They just don’t think that killing a fetus is the kind of killing that society should be concerned about ant, thus, punish it by law.

I have often said, “abortion is killing. So what?” In other words, our society ranks different kinds of killing: first degree murder, negligent homicide, and so forth. So, already, we’re willing to rank the severity of different kinds of killing. Some killing is murder, some is homocide, and so forth. We dole out different levels of punishment depeding on how bad we think it is. The badness of the killing depends on the state of mind of the person doing the killing — on their motives. killing for money? really really really a bad. killing because you were negligent and did something that meant someone else accidentally died. a crime of passion? premeditated?

So, we’re already willing to say some killing is less bad than other kinds. There’s no reason not to take that further and say that, while we might think that killing is bad, the motives and intentions of the person who has killed aren’t the kind of motives and intentions we want to punish by law. So we don’t.

All we’re doing with abortion is saying, “abortion is killing. so? we don’t think it’s something that’s punishable by law.”

If you happen to think it’s punishable by the law your god put forth, then don’t have an abortion!

Michaels doesn’t take on that argument. *sigh* I suppose he’s never heard it.

At any rate, I found the whole section quite odd. In my estimation, the people who usually get bent out of shape about abortion, people on the left? they are almost always operating under the influence of the ghost of undead religious belief. They are usually spiritual in some way or believe that there is some kind of spiritual force out there. As such, they tend to believe that there is something out there that is going to punish them — and others — if they have an abortion. As leftists, they grudgingly support abortion rights, but in the end, it really is about their undead religious convictions haunting them.

Alas, gotta run!