Senate Outlaws Violence Against Unborn Children – Kerry Dissents
By 61 to 38 margin, the Senate yesterday approved the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which provides for separate criminal charges when violent acts against a pregnant mother harm or kill the fetus…. John Kerry voted against the final bill.
In my opinion, the efforts by abortion advocates to block the bill made a mockery of their very important agenda. For me, abortion is a women’s rights issue because it is the woman’s choice to have a child that confers the privilege of life. Once a woman has chosen to go through with her pregnancy, her unborn child acquires a moral and legal value both a priori and to the mother who wants to exercise her right to rear a healthy child. Women don’t just have interests as ‘birth controllers.’ ‘They also have vital interests as mothers, and central to these are the right of their unborn fetus to protection from violence by criminals.’ That women might also have pressing reasons to terminate a pregnancy does not nullify the moral and legal necessity of protecting unborn children from potentially life-threatening harm. The health needs of an unborn child cannot be trumped entirely by the rights of the mother, let alone the sick motives of a violent criminal.
Kerry’s vote, fresh after his recent endorsement by firebrand Howard Dean, smacks of pandering, and will bolster claims by conserVatives that he, like other abortion advocates, recklessly devalues the life of unborn children. The women’s rights agenda is of pressing importance, but don’t do it the dumb way. Rather than play politics with unborn life, Kerry should have taken the honest, balanced approach: that a corollary to a woman’s right to choose is her child’s right to grow and develop healthily, free from violence.
The bill was nicknamed “Laci and Conner’s Law” after Laci Peterson, the California woman allegedly murdered by her husband, Scott Peterson, just weeks before she was due to give birth. Were Laci alive today, she would doubtless be heartbroken at the murder of her unborn son. ‘This law is for her as much as it is for Conner. ‘The right to choose has not one, but two faces. One is the choice of an abortion. ‘The other is the choice of life.
—Nate Goralnik March 26
Sistani Fans Israeli Fire into Iraq
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, Iraq’s most visible emerging leader and most powerful shiite cleric is purging Muslims to “unite against Israel and restore what he said belongs to Palestinians” according to CNN.
Does anyone else find this guy latently creepy? He came out of nowhere. The emergence of a leader like him wasn’t unexpected—the Shiites just did get from under the thumb of a Sunni minority. But, did anyone expect a leader to so quickly accumulate power? Did anyone expect a leader to oppose the United States—and win?
Sistani was responsible for delays in the signing of the Iraqi constitution, even though he wasn’t a member of the Governing Council. Many of the Council members consulted him on how to vote that he derailed the process. EvenAhmed Chalabi,once considered a potential leader for the new Iraq, deferred to Sistani’s opinion. Even when Sistani eventually approved the document (meaning that the Governing Council did too) he immediately issued a statementon his on website criticizing the constitution as “placing obstacles to arriving at a permanent constitution for the country.”
Just yesterday, he warned the UN that he would not meet with its delegations if Iraq’s interim constitution was utilized as a foundation for the permanent version. Sistani wants the constitution to be written by a broadly representative interim government.
Sistani is already a thorn in the United States’ side beciluse he jeopardizes its two most important goals:
- To build a Western-style democracy
- To (further) secularize the nation
But now, his comments on Israel threaten to make Sistanian enemy of U.S. policy both within and without Iraq. They also threaten U.S. relations with the Iraqi public, which had been improving lately. This story is sure to grow.
—Phil Wood March 23
The African Elephant No One Wants to Talk About
Athe economy of Zimbabwe continues its decline under Mugabe, apparently many of the white farmers who fueled that economy have moved to Zambia. Zimbabwe’s move to nationalization and party corruption are couched in the rhetoric of anti-colonialism and historical justice, which is why I’m so skeptical of anti-colonialism’s pernicious grip on our historiography and modern political discourse about Third World nations.
The stagnation and decline of Africa that’s existed for the last thirty years despite foreign aid looks like its spreading into the previously healthy southern African economies if party politics continue to spiral out of hand. Mugabe’s shut down the presses, confiscated white farms and given them to his party’s members, and arrested political dissidents. How did this happen? He couched his policies in populism and avenging the injustices of the white colonial past. What have those policies engendered? The collapse of the economy and new levels of poverty while his own party grows rich off the profits.
More worrisome for Africa’s largest economy, South Africa, is its president’s ambiguous relationship with Mugabe. As a woman who had left Zimbabwe last year told me over the summer, “Mugabe’s a nationalist, locking people up who oppose his party, and I think Mbeke [Tabo Mbeke, South Africa's president] is heading the same way.” Infamously, he denied that HIV was responsible for AIDs, but his Mugabeesque tendencies are perhaps more worrisome. He has made many troubling statements and enacted some questionable policies that seem to reinforce this image…
Colonialism was bad for many Africans, but so are dictatorship, corruption, and the lack of political freedoms which all prevent economic growth and perpetuate chronic poverty. Zambia may have learned its lesson, but I hope South Africa and Zimbabwe don’t have to make the same mistakes. Nobody wants to see a new generation of African leaders follow in Mobutu’s footsteps. So the final question remains: Why isn’t the international community (specifically Mbeke, who continues to actively conciliate him)’ condemning Mugabe? Perhaps more puzzling, why isn’t the academia here at Brown? I hear lots of talk about the evils of colonial racism and multinational corporations,but what about Mubutu and Mugabe?
—Nick Morrell March 20
Reforming the Third World Transition Program
The Third World Transition Program ostensibly exists in order to facilitate the transition to Brown for students from minority backgrounds. Fear of being an outsider in the society a person inhabits is a legitimate one. Although those fears may be justified, they do not justify organizations like, the TWTP or other reversed segregational (I say-also thatno one thinks I’m leaping over the true qualitative difference between what I discuss and segregation as we knew it) programs. Partially, this is because those fears are basically irrational. Think about the last time you thought about someone as inferior or stupid based on their race rather than their statements. Not too often, was it? I doubt it was even once. Well, you say, what about the casual way people discuss race? Well, think about the casual way people discuss Republicans or Democrats or people with glasses or hipsters or Gennans or the French. These are differences, differences easily manifested in our society that everyone can see and identify. Does that mean that if I’m the only American in a room full of Frenchmen, I should believe that everyone in that room hates me or will steal from me or harm me? No, because we’ve come to abhor discrimination, we’re intolerant of inequality, and we believe that all men are created equal, even if the Founders didn’t.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t have support groups to help them deal with their issues,even support groups composed of people of mainly one background. A Southern support group sounds like a nice way I could deal with all my fears and concerns about intolerant, Leftist Yankees. Let’s have those groups. However, TWPT is a group that perpetuates those fears and says, “Yes,these are rational fears you should have, feel disempowered, you’re a minority and everyone else is better off.” This is indoctrination, I would feel uncomfortable going to the TWTP not because I’m white but because I disagree with anti-colonial theory and the idea of white privilege, two assumptions obviously behind TWTP just from its name. A group that’s afraid to let white people join for fear of disturbing its ’safe space’ means that group thinks white people are likely to be harmful to them simply because they are white.That’s more patently racist than most things I’ve seen in our modem culture.
I think it would be far more productive if instead of TWTP we had a real orientation forum about race and wealth and privilege and people could share their thoughts, disagree with the premises the TWTP is built upon if they so chose, and for “people who feel stereotyped and discriminated against” to share “their own unique memories.” Maybe if l had attended that, I could have learned that I’m wrong and changed my view,and maybe someone else could have broken free of their preconceived racial notions.
I totally agree with other critics in that I think the most offensive part of the TWTP is its name. I resent the implications it implies about white people and non-minorities, I resent that international participants can take on a martyr’s cross for their minority status when they may not at all be the home their coming from (like are you really going to tell me a wealthy Brazilian scion deserves Third World status simply because their first language is Spanish?).
For those reasons, let’s abandon the TWTP and programs of its ilk. It’s time for a new vision, a post-affirmative action policy that will really finally lift up the poor and beleaguered, and create a more perfect union. Let the next generation of Brown graduates embrace that philosophy.
—Nick Morrell March 19
Judaism and Persecution
Nate Goralnik has brought up the point that Jews have been scared of being killed for being Jewish throughout all time. It’s actually an integral part of the Jewish religion: to a certain extent, Judaism is persecution. Exodus is persecution. Babylonian captivity is persecution. Judaism draws strength from that sense of persecution and supposedly it draws faith from that sense. In a different way, Christianity is persecution, but it turns that persecution into a transcendental strength almost like “making the c-word (crucifixion) our own.” Part of the reason The Passion of Christ has become so contentious is that it is a movie about the meaning of persecution and the meaning of suffering. It examines these things in extreme detail. We may be seeing not only a clash of personalities and style (Mel Gibson and Frank Rich), but also revisiting the interaction between two strangely opposed and intertwined notions of suffering that have plagued Christianity and Judaism for millennia.
Prick us; do we not bleed?
—Barron Youngsmith March 13
Are White Christians Victims?
It recently hit the national headlines that maybe a million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa during the early modern period. According to historian Robert Davis, the “impacton Europe’s white population was significant.” Personally, I find this discovery fascinating, especially for the implications, upon Mediterranean trade during the period and the possible impact on Italy’s economic decline.
However, probably someone will reference Davis’ historical findings as evidence ofhow everybody suffered,even ‘Whitefolks.Beyond the obvious repugnance of those views in a larger racial context, my question is why people feel like they need to be victims? Is this the inevitable result of living in a comfortable modem age combined with Judeo-Christian morality?
Even Mel Gibson tries to avert anti-Semitic accusations by playing the victim. Frank Rich points this out as patently laughable given Gibson’s millions and the success of his movie, but what bothers me isn’t the tactics of Gibson in particular, but that those kinds of tactics work at all.
I think it should be more of virtue to face adversity and overcome it, rather than wallow in whining. Yet, people do what works, and apparently wallowing in misery is somehow more morally upright and endearing than being competent. Watch television or listen to the radio (especially my beloved NPR) or read the newspaper for awhile, you’ll see it. I think we should draw attention to the unfortunate in order to alleviate their problems, but that doesn’t make them saints and martyrs.I think we’d be much better off avoidingthe hagiography and instead focusing on solutions.
—Nick Morrell March 12
