I have various friends that I’m likely to chat with on the phone at least once a week (I love girl talk). I recently realized that fully 50% (if not more) of them are not in agreement with me on the political issues of the day.
This has been distressing. I have a hard time agreeing to disagree. Perhaps I dwell on these differences more than I ought. But I spend many hours a week volunteering for Obama (calling undecided voters or signing volunteers up in swing states) and that makes it difficult to let the topic stray from my thoughts very long. Plus my upcoming immigration to Sweden, which also weighs heavily on my mind, would be a lot more comfortable for me if the people there regarded Americans and their leaders with respect and admiration, which I don’t believe will be the case with a McCain-Palin administration, making me feel (pretty irrationally–but it is feelings I’m talking about) that by not voting for Obama, my friends are kinda voting against me. And Obama’s values and ideas are pretty well in line with mine, meaning an attack on Obama is also an attack on me. The political is personal.
It’s obviously possible for personalities, children’s ages (I think all my friends are mommies these days), schedules, and geography all to mesh and result in easy friendships. What surprises me, though, is that political, moral, or religious points of view can just as easily be completely out of sync. I guess I always assumed that people I like, who like me, are like me. But friends are not duplicates of ourselves, even if we have some things in common.
The problem coming up with my buddies these days is probably rooted in my seeing social conservativeness (where we tend to differ most) as being essentially illogical and selfish. I don’t value these two attributes in friends, so their juxtaposition confuses me. As a liberal, for example, I believe in extending everyone the right to marry whomever of whichever sex; I don’t care either way. But conservatives want to deny others the right to a differing opinion. Totally unfair.
I approach abortion rights in a similarly pragmatic manner. I can’t see this any other way: abortion is the deliberate ending of life. The word “murder” applies. I wish it never occurred. I also wish there were no unhappily discovered unintended pregnancies. I wish there were no children conceived with severe health problems. I wish women never became ill in pregnancy. But these things happen.
For women who want abortion for social reasons (though every pregnancy is a health event), where there’s a will there’s a way. The abortion rates in countries with or without legal abortion are very similar, so I’d prefer abortions at least be safe. I’ve never been faced with an unwanted pregnancy (my problems have always been in the other direction), but as distasteful as elective abortion is to me, I understand that for many, a life unborn is mostly unknown, making its death less a disappearance than a failure to launch. I can understand choosing to stifle a largely theoretical life to save or preserve one already active on the world’s stage. This is the kind of issue I want to see reduced–even eliminated–by proper sexual health and pregnancy prevention education and by better access to contraception (something I’ve struggled with myself, with all my own resources and education) and emergency contraception (which is not abortion to me).
For women whose abortions come about for health reasons, either hers or the child’s, I believe no law can or should try to set a line of risk that a woman or child must have to meet in order to qualify for a life-preserving (or quality-of-life preserving) medical procedure. These questions are no one’s business but the families and doctors involved. These are tragedies all around. McCain can pretend women like to fake illness so they can cavalierly murder their infants but that is absolutely not the case. These abortions are not really choices. And people like to forget that if the mother dies, the baby dies also, so in such cases, abortion is a life-saving event.
So you see what I mean about preferencing pragmatism. At any rate, I, like everyone, always think my opinion is the right one. Since I value reason, I like to think of my point of view as eminently sensible, as arriving crystalline from some fount of Duh. That other people might come to different conclusions might be due to their putting value in something else first (like religious tenets), or deviations in our respective lines of reasoning, or some basic element of our world views instilled in us from childhood, or some unshared life experience, or even in some genetic quirk of thinking. Who can say? It’s simply hard for me to believe that smart, reasonable, informed, and thoughtful people could see the world so differently. But since I simultaneously cannot believe my friends are total idiots and selfish jerks, having known them, I guess that must be true. Huh.
