The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Here’s an excerpt of Steve Waldman’s blog post:

…consider this statistical couplet. According to a 2007 survey commissioned by a progressive think tank called Third Way, 69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the “taking of a human life,” but 72 percent believe it should be legal.

Let that soak in. Most people think abortion is taking a human life and yet favor the procedure being legal. How grotesque! Are we Americans utterly immoral?

Actually, what the data proclaim is something that politicians and activists can’t: Most Americans believe there are gradations of life. Some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. But in reality they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more “killable” than a nine-month-old fetus. For them, determining whether “life” begins at conception really doesn’t determine anything.

Right. I said something similar back in January:

Disclaimer: I’m choosing the words “anti-abortion” as opposed to the false dichotomy of pro-life and pro-choice. Who isn’t pro-life? Who is pro-abortion? And – is it a honest-to-God fact that every instance of abortion is really a choice? I think reasonable minds can come to a different place on this issue – especially if we stop talking about it in ways that define us as against each other. Most of us don’t think animals have the same rights as humans – but we also agree that we don’t have a right to be cruel to animals. that’s not a choice we get to exercise. There’s a reasonable place where we all can meet – I’d like to see us get there.

Given that Roe v Wade already makes the trimester distinction, it seems reasonable that that’s a line we can pursue, safely, without jeopardizing the sanctity of established law.

QT

I received this in my inbox today as part of a subscription to daily snippets from the Baha’i Writings. I found this particularly thought provoking and hopeful:

Together with the crumbling of barriers separating peoples, our age is witnessing the dissolution of the once insuperable wall that the past assumed would forever separate the life of Heaven from the life of Earth. The scriptures of all religions have always taught the believer to see in service to others not only a moral duty, but an avenue for the soul’s own approach to God. Today, the progressive restructuring of society gives this familiar teaching new dimensions of meaning. As the age-old promise of a world animated by principles of justice slowly takes on the character of a realistic goal, meeting the needs of the soul and those of society will increasingly be seen as reciprocal aspects of a mature spiritual life.

The Universal House of Justice, Message To the World’s Religious Leaders (Haifa: Baha’i World Centre, 2002) p. 5 Para 21. E-text from Ocean Library, http//:www.bahai-education.org

Moor

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it’s a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do?

Like Andrew, I’ve been in a shifting place within my own spirit for years. My earliest such shift came when I was 19 years old, and realized that neither all the churching in the world, nor all the political consciousness in the world prevented my parents from becoming drug addicts. Again, years later, and after converting, perhaps with aggressive defiance, to Islam, I found my world shook up when two African Nationalists I’d known and loved as family while in college divorced. People can talk about how divorce is something kids adapt to, and in some respects this must be true – my parents divorced when I was young and while it was a painful time for me – by the time I was a teenager, I was accustomed to my parents divorced status, and very good friends with my stepmother. And yet, when these two people – not family, just friends, divorced, my confidence in the ability of marriage to survive at all was shook in a way that has had lasting repercussions.

And of course, 9/11, and the realization that even in the most enlightened practice of Islam, my rights as a woman were highly suspect, shook me at core on the subject of Islam. I limped along with the faith, arguing vigorously that the perversions of Islam as witnessed in so many news articles were not the true face of Islam. I believe that till today. But my hold on Islam became more tenuous than I ever realized, until I discovered the Baha’i Faith.

Unlike perhaps anyone that I know, I find myself willing to journey. Joseph Campbell talks about the Hero’s journey – there is always some calamitous affair that sets the hero on his or her journey. The boat capsizes. The tornado uproots the house. Etc. And the hero, thus unsettled, sets out. There is always a homecoming – but first, the journey.

If it be of any comfort to Andrew – I think blogging is like a journey. May we all journey successfully, and arrive home again, safely.

QT