Recognizing Christianity’s Universal Leftism for What it Undisputedly Is

[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism]

Phil Christman, a writer and lecturer at the University of Michigan, is a committed Protestant Christian. He grew up attending a fundamentalist Calvinist church, and sharing in that perspective, but it was one that he struggled with from very early on. His disentangling from that approach to Christianity didn’t lead him to renounce his faith; rather, his faith evolved, and with that spiritual evolution came a political one as well. In the excellent Why Christians Should Be Leftists, he testifies to that evolution, and calls other Christians to join him as well.

The fact that Christman’s argument really isn’t one, but rather is a testimony and an altar call of sorts, must be kept in mind when assessing the book. The way he talks about “leftism”—which he refuses to capitalize, stating in an early footnote that he thinks the term describes an “overall direction” and not a destination “where a person can definitively arrive” (p. 16)—is one that flows organically from his Christian commitments. Rather than starting out by defining terms and unfolding a discourse premised on the materialist language that so much of post-Marxist leftism has been defined by over the past two centuries, his reflections are rooted in a grab-bag of deeply religious, even Biblical, concepts and concern that every believing Christian, in one way or another, confronts. What is fallen in this world? What is the nature of work? Should those who accept Jesus as their savior have a politics? Should they have kings? Should believers love their enemies? And just who, exactly, are their neighbors, and how should they interact with them? In Christman’s view, a serious engagement with all these questions and more must inevitably point believers towards some kind of socialism—but this is a conclusion which he articulates in a manner that, while deeply informed by political argument, actually doesn’t flow from the arguments which have shaped socialism over the years.

This, I think, is why a socialist review of Christman’s book may be valuable. Why Christians Should Be Leftists hasn’t become a bestselling, culture-defining book in the months since its publication (unfortunately), but it has been fairly widely reviewed…overwhelmingly by other thoughtful writers—peers of Christman’s, really—who share his Christian commitments. Kayak Oakes praised it in National Catholic Reporter, as did James K.A. Smith in The Christian Century and Samuel McCann in The Presbyterian Outlook (the more conservative publications First Things, Christianity Today, and Front Porch Republic were, perhaps predictably. less receptive to his book, though all acknowledged the power of his anti-capitalist claims). All of the above comments are worth perusing (as are thoughtful engagements with Christman by such writers as Alan Jacobs), and so are Christman’s own occasional responses to such. But none of any of the above, to my knowledge, have approached the book from the perspective of the Left (using a capital letter this time) as it has emerged over the course of the rise of global capitalism, the impacts of the industrial revolution, and the both important achievements and catastrophic failures attached to the Left throughout Western modernity. I’m hardly an expert on all of the above, but as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as believing Christian (though a Mormon one, which I suspect at least a couple of the above might insist may not really count), let me give it a try.

Christman’s turn towards leftism, and his turn away from the conservative Christianity that defined his early life, defines the whole arc of his book, and is noted by every reviewer of it. As a college student attending a Calvinist university, he recounts being a lonely, confused, frustrated individual—feeling like a profound loser, in his own terms. And then recounts a time when he was reading from the Bible as part of group of similar losers outdoors—at least as compared to the other students playing the guitar, smoking, or flirting in their own groups all around them—and as they worked through Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, he suddenly thought about everyone around him differently:

I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces….[E]ach of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love

From this point on, step by step, the idea that the Christian message of God’s grace, forgiveness, and love entails an absolute, universal equality of persons comes to be unfolded in Christman’s life and thought. “Part of the point of being a Christian,” he writes, “is that you’re supposed to unlearn the human instinct to circle the wagons, identify the outsiders, prioritize the in-group,” and instead develop “the deep conviction that every stranger, every enemy, is a neighbor” (pp. 30-31). Since the structure of capitalism depends upon the private or corporate accumulation of profit and property—and thus functionally meaning the exclusion of others from possession of such of wealth—that means Christians have to move beyond it, even the more liberal and egalitarian versions of it. Similarly, since the structure of national borders depends upon the territorial claims to sovereignty—and thus functionally meaning the exclusion of others from the systems of law and care that sovereign governments establish—that means that Christians have to move beyond the state's imposition of them, even when done so in light of comparatively democratic and humanitarian priorities. The universalizing, the absolute neighboring, of the resources of the world and the people who live within it, is the socialism that Christman believes the plain teachings of Jesus require. (And for those who insist that such "socialism" needs to take the form of personal charity rather than government policy, Christman's succinct reproofs--so why haven't believing Christians ever actually created charitable systems sufficient to meet Jesus's call? and why wouldn't such charity create the same "dependency" which conservatives supposedly fear?--are as solid as any I've ever read.)

Obviously, Karl Marx would have all sorts of problems with this. Not the final result--Marx's vision of post-socialist revolution communism included the "withering away of the state" and, thus, presumably the realization of some kind of universal community of freedom and recognition, after all. Rather, Marx's contempt would have been for Christman's locating of the roots of this ideal in moral conviction, rather than some kind of material logic. His famous description of Christian socialism--“the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat”--makes his perspective fairly clear: if socialism is understood as something that emerges from the guilty feelings or inspired insights of religious believers, rather than something that is built historically, structurally—that is, scientifically—then it'll never truly be a liberating and empowering social form: it'll just be another con that the upper classes impose upon everyone else (and perhaps actually delude themselves into believing). Marx's perspective is certainly at least partly responsible for the hostility to religion widely associated with the Left over the centuries.

But as anyone who spends any time amongst actual Leftists can tell you, this is a perspective that 1) was obviously wrong from the beginning, and has remained so over the years, and 2) has been basically ignored by tens of millions of Leftist religious believers over the same period of time, Christians most certainly included. In regards to point 1), the vital revolutionary force which Marx’s analysis of the history of capitalism provided, whatever its usefulness and insight insofar as understanding the alienation experienced under industrialization is concerned, has been questioned, denounced, re-interpreted, and re-affirmed in alternative ways that have given shape to every socialist argument since the mid-19^th century on. To resolutely demand fidelity to Marx's presumed linkage between the opposition to capitalism and the opposition to religious faith in the face of all this thoughtful debate is to do as much damage to the heritage of that ideal as is done by non-Leftists who insist that “socialism” can only ever mean the tyranny of Stalin or Mao. And in regards to point 2), the fact that Christian socialists—the Methodists who helped form the British Labor Party, the Catholics who organized the Catholic Worker Movement, and hundreds of other example—have, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of genuine intellectual agreement, appropriated and articulated their views in manners borrowed from Marx (talking about “class struggle,” for example), hardly means that their socialism is therefore Marxist, and necessarily carries all of his materialist, historicist, anti-religious baggage. This is especially the case for believers in the words of Jesus as presented in the New Testament, since of course those words were inspiring believers to—as recounted in the Book of Acts, chapter 4—sell their goods, distribute them equally, and have all things in common, right from the beginning. When it comes to socialism, Marx was a late addition to the tradition, and as important (for both good and ill) his contributions were, the Left has no more need to be beholden to him than it does to be beholden to Leo Tolstoy, Eduard Bernstein, Eugene Debs, Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb, Dorothy Day, Simone Weil, or Gustavo Díaz.

Christman, for his part, elides most of this history by providing an assessment of where he sees different leftist intellectual trajectories pointing that is, in his view, “pretty vibes-based,” treating Marx’s thought “as we’d treat a buffet: you pick the stuff you think is helpful and ignore the rest, the same as you would any other economist or political theorist” (pp. 144-145). For people whose approach to these matters is grounded in historical and theoretical arguments over ideology and the writings of particular individuals, this is a pretty frustrating approach. Partly because it gets stuff wrong—as Christman does, such as when, earlier in the book, he goes too far in condemning the liberalism of John Locke as incapable of responding to the threats of capitalism, forgetting that Locke himself wrote that the rights of the property-owner oblige them to make sure that “enough, and as good” will always be available to everyone else—and partly because these are, by necessity, political debates that we are having, and as such being guided by one’s revelatory experience with the Sermon on the Mount leaves much unsaid.

But that doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, that defenses of socialism like Christman’s need to be considered wrong; they aren’t. They just aren’t complete—as I think Christman himself would be quick to acknowledge. Again, his book isn’t really an argument for why Christians should be on the Left; it is a testimony of why, and how, the Christian message made it clear to him how he should think about inequality, about capitalism, about war, about borders, about wealth, and thus found himself moving leftward, hand-in-hand with his faith. He very thoughtfully considers all sorts of Left arrangements which the socialist tradition has inspired reformers and revolutionaries alike to consider over the centuries—worker co-ops, redistribution via taxation, government ownership of industries, wealth funds, and more—and acknowledges that there is plenty of thinking and working yet to be done in pursuing these Christian ends (“I don’t think it pays to get too dug in at this point on any of those systems,” he comments ruefully—p. 121). But that just means that Christman, like any other religious believer whose eyes have been opened to the socialist imperative, is in the same condition as the rest of us: making our way towards more justice, more fairness, more beloved communities in our world, and being attended by God's grace and forgiveness in the midst of our own unavoidable involvement in all that challenges those aspirations along the way.

It should be noted that many of the Christian reviewers of Why Christians Should Be Leftists do, in fact, recognize that any proper understand of Christianity imposes a universalist vision of neighborliness and love upon believers, and they consequently recognize that there is truth to Christian condemnations of how even liberal democratic states (and their richest citizens and corporations) police their borders and protect their wealth, even if they demure from recognizing that such condemnations put them on the Left. But what about personal sin, they ask? What about moral purity? The records we have of Jesus’s words suggest that he didn’t talk about sexual morality nearly as much as he talked about sharing your goods with your neighbor, and didn’t condemn personal lifestyles nearly as much as he condemned exploiting the poor—but to insist that he never talked about the former isn’t correct either. So yes, those who want to find reasons to doubt the sincerity of Christman’s Christian faith solely on the basis of what he thinks about abortion or homosexuality or any other culture war issue can certainly do so. And when I put on my political scientist hat, I can explain at length how predictable it is that Christman, as he moved away from the Calvinist socialization of his youth, likely came to follow well-established patterns of liberal thought which granted enough importance to individualist expressions of moral choice such that he simply couldn’t take the sexual traditionalism of much of American Christianity seriously. But frankly, as something of a left conservative myself, I am happy that Christman felt no need to warp his testimony so as to encompass and defend those elements of his current political beliefs that actually have nothing to do what’s going on at their heart.

Their heart is, simply, a pious conviction that political, much less pragmatic, disputes about what can or should be done when it comes to applying the Sermon on the Mount, to applying a complete abandonment of any kind of distinction between winners and losers, are secondary. Towards the end of the book, Christman writes (in a vein very reminiscent of the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, though he never mentions his name):

The machinery of history is not ours to operate even if we could, which we can’t. But that’s OK, because there isn’t any machinery anyway. There’s the kingdom of God, which God is bringing about and will bring about. We live in a way that anticipates it. We forgive debtors, we hasten to resolve conflicts, we try to love our enemies. We try to build a society where the meek, the peacemaker, the person on the bottom of things is abundantly blessed. Leftism at its best helps us to do that. We are leftists only insofar as it is a name for our doing that (pp. 153-154).

Christman’s final words of testimony are, appropriately, “Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus” (p. 174). Both the unreconstructed Marxist, and the MAGA-influenced Christian conservative who refuses to accept Jesus’s call for those who follow him to have complete solidarity with the poor, with their enemies, and with everyone else, would likely sniff at such a conclusion. But this Christian socialist loved it, and the book itself as well. To Mr. Christman, I can only say, as our mutually acknowledged lord and savior is reported to have said, "Well done, good and faithful servant." (And to everyone else, myself included, I can only also add: “Go and do likewise.”)

Why I have a Pro-Choice Sign in my Front Yard (Even Though I Don't Call Myself That)

[The publication Current asked me to write up my thoughts about abortion; I ended up writing nearly 3000 words. A much, much shortened version of the essay below is available on their website this morning, but if you want to read the full thing, go for it. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

That sign is in our front yard, signalling our support for defeating the "Value Them Both" amendment on the ballot here in Kansas this August. If the amendment referendum succeeds, it would overturn a state supreme court decision which determined that the Kansas state constitution guarantees at least minimal abortion rights to Kansas women, thus allowing Kansans opposed to abortion rights to follow our neighboring states of Oklahoma and Missouri and push for a total abortion ban. The sign thus betokens a "pro-choice" position, even though I've never called myself that and think the language of individual "choice" when it comes to abortion is part of the whole problem. So why am I, some who was raised in a politically conservative (but not, as I later came to see, particularly ideological) Mormon home and thoroughly absorbed the repugnance of abortion which was communicated to me, taking this position all these years later? Well, that's a story, mostly having to do with what my wife and four daughters have taught me along the way.

When I say "repugnance," I really mean it. While my parents were never activists and anti-abortion literature didn't litter our home, the moral and even visual revulsion to the practice of abortion was invoked anytime the topic came up (which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the death-rattle years of the Equal Rights Amendment--my church having played a major role in sealing its fate--was not infrequently). I can still call up in my memory a feverish image that somehow made its way into my brain when I was still a child: that of an abortion doctor plunging a huge butcher knife into a woman’s vagina, murdering the child in her womb. (I should note that the fact that some zealous opponents of abortion rights might point to procedures used in incredibly rare late-term abortions to insist upon the basic accuracy of that nightmarish image from decades ago has no effect on my thinking today; what I find most repugnant in 2022 is very different than it once was.)

Was it all just moral revulsion and distaste? No, there was some actual doctrine taught as well (emphasis on "some"). Mormon leaders over the decades have made multiple, if not numerous, statements regarding abortion, with some stipulating that “life begins when two germ cells unite to become one cell, bringing together twenty-three chromosomes from both the father and from the mother”--which would seem to suggest that Mormon doctrine teaches that life begins at the creation of human zygote--and others stipulating that a woman’s “right to choose what will or will not happen to her body” is fundamentally limited if “she behaves in such a way that a human fetus is conceived”--which would seem to suggest, in light of the previous declaration, that any sexual activity which results in the creation of a cell-multiplying zygote entails a mother’s complete responsibility to preserve that cell-multiplying life. In practice, however, none of these teachings were ever politically deployed throughout Mormonism in a theologically rigorous or ecclesiastically consistent way (which is not to say there haven’t been attempts to do so). In general though, the unarticulated presumption seems to have been (and still seems to be) that stating officially that “elective abortion for personal or social convenience is contrary to the will and the commandments of God” is sufficient, with no further elaboration or explanation regarding public matters being necessary. Repugnance at the idea of extinguishing “a cherished newborn baby,” complete with “beautiful eyes” and “little fingers” was perhaps assumed to do the rest.

It certainly did for me, for many years. The change in my opinions didn’t come at once, my movement away from being “pro-life” (a phrase I don’t remember particularly liking even in my most ardent phases) was a long process. Well into my 30s and 40s, articulating a set of reasons that could make sense of my youthful revulsion--even as I grew into a fuller understanding of the deep complexities of human sexuality, science, and sociality—remained hugely important to me, thus leading me blog about abortion and related topics repeatedly, in perhaps some increasingly strained ways.

During these years, for reasons that are probably similar to those of nearly every person who comes to think differently about the faith of their youth as they grow older, I became more and more doubtful that the statements of Mormon leaders, when not explicitly grounded in the scriptural canon, were necessarily the word of God and thus normative. For related reasons over the same time span, I came to recognize the scriptures as exceptionally complicated and thus not well-served by the proof-texts, just-so-stories, and tidy logical conclusions so unfortunately common in Mormondom (and pretty much every other Christian domination as well, to be fair), especially in regards to complicated claims regarding the pre-natal beginnings of meaningful life. And finally, officially non-Mormon (though unofficially, many conservative Mormon leaders and thinkers had been borrowing them for years) anti-abortion arguments, such as those dependent upon a religious invocation of natural law, became increasingly implausible to me; for example, I found the teleological demand to view a human zygote which may or may not implant itself in a woman’s uterine wall as equal in every way to a newborn baby simply unpersuasive, philosophically speaking. So what coherent articulation of anti-abortion belief did that leave me with, if I wasn’t to simply dismiss my original revulsions and intuitions as bankrupt, but neither found them well served by the simplistic affirmations of my leaders or many other anti-abortion thinkers? Well, one grounded in my long-standing contempt for philosophical individualism and capitalist commodification. Abortion, I came to believe, was a moral evil not primarily because of its harm to human lives (since 99% of abortions in the United States take place months before the life of the fetus in question stops being a matter of mere scientific principle and instead becomes an actionable reality), but rather because it was rooted in a socially harmful, choice-centric sense of disposability: a disconnect from both the anthropological fact and the civic ideal that our social relationships form a connection (as Edmund Burke said) between the living and the dead and the not yet born. Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion, Theologically Understood,” though I do not agree with all of it, made this point better than I ever could:

If you want to know who is destroying the babies of this country through abortion, look at privatization, which is learned in the economic arena. Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies. The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ. So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake.

I look today at the 15-year-old essay where I quoted Hauerwas, and I think the perspective it articulated (a perspective I tend to call “left conservative”) remains mostly sound. And yet I want to take much of it back nonetheless, because the animating force behind it—the admittedly simplistic yet still meaningful repugnance I felt when I first learned what abortion meant—has become deeply entwined other, more complicated and, I think, more mature intuitions. I’m particularly bothered by the way, in 2007, when our oldest daughter wasn’t yet 10 years old, I could write that those who defend abortion rights as necessary to the sexual freedom essential to individual personhood, who think it a matter of right to “enjoy sex without their futures or thoughts or relationships being messed up by any communitarian crap in any way, clearly have only ever had sex on the starship Enterprise's Holodeck.” I see the point I was trying to make in those passages, but still, that’s a sentence that could have only been written by a man woefully uninformed about the complications of sexual identity and expression, especially as experienced by women, one of whom he was married to and four of whom he was raising to adulthood. I hope I’ve repented of that presumption.

To be very plain: I now realize that to accept, even just implicitly, the notion that insofar as abortion is concerned there are only two types of pregnancies--those which result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be guaranteed to the violated woman, and those which didn’t result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be treated a perilous choice that needs to be weighed against principles of social responsibility and connection and regulated by the state accordingly--is really stupid, even if a coherent point can be found within it. Why is it really stupid? Because it’s a binary, and binaries practically always fail. Maybe that 16-year-old teen-ager’s, or that divorced woman’s, or that 42-year-old mother’s, sexual decisions were made entirely without violence. But were they made entirely without social pressure? Without religious expectations? Without bad information? Without forced compromises? Without conflicting socio-economic and cultural demands? As I’ve grown older, and watched my daughters grow and move into adulthood, and watched as my wife and I have moved into middle-age, the pressing and often painful complexities of marriage, sex, love, risk, desire, and children, the confusions and justifications and fears which attend all of them (as well as, of course, the many joys and surprises they bring), have simply become enormous to me. Add to that concerns about money, concerns about extended family, concerns about health (both mental and physical), and maybe most importantly, concerns about all the innumerable little assumptions and (mis)understandings amidst the ones we love which we navigate day after day after day. The result of all this is a heaviness—the same sort of heaviness I can remember feeling when I held our firstborn daughter, and felt the enormity which my wife and I had taken responsibility for.

Does that responsibility carry any kind of moral obligation to it? Of course it does! But that obligation cannot be extricated from all the other obligations that come with the complex existences we are all heirs to. Eventually, there came a point when I realized that the repugnance I feel at abortion is more than matched by my repugnance at the prospect that someone with the power of the state (and here I remember Elizabeth Bruenig’s sharp observation from several years ago: “penalty seems to be the only way those operating under the ‘pro-life’ banner feel comfortable expressing their commitment to life”) could approach any woman who has come to a moment of heavy decision-making regarding abortion in the midst of all of the above, looked her in the eye, and say: sorry, but we’ve decided that this choice should not be available to you.

So my intuitive sense of the wrongness of abortion hasn’t changed; that repugnance is still there, and it still guides my thinking. But it is no longer a solitary or supreme guide; there are too many other potential harms, manifest in too many other ways, for me to accept any longer that a pregnancy, insofar as the responsibility to the potential life which it may result in is concerned, is always of only two possible sorts. Between violent rape at one end, and mere (though is it ever actually “mere”?) convenience at the other, there is an immense amount of very murky road. Do my critical views about that individualistic, privatized, choice-centric mentality which treat all the connections in our lives as disposable still matter? Absolutely they do. But mostly today, they lead to me focus ever more on the response that millions of women have screamed, and continue to scream, at anti-abortion politicians who insist upon inserting their concerns into an enormously difficult and private decision, but whose concerns lead them to do exactly nothing in terms of compassionately responding to the enormous weight that women as human beings who can become pregnant and give birth experience every single day of their lives. What about supporting those connections? What about health care? What about maternal leave? What about reproductive assistance generally? What about educational and social and care-giving support? (Carolyn Homer’s list of what the “pro-life” label ought to include is an excellent rundown.) Again, while I do not agree with every implication of her language, the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant’s comments in The New York Times last week speak truthfully, I think:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg….made the case that abortion is really the price of admission to society we demand of women. And I think she's factually right. That's what we ask of women. We don't support women when they're pregnant, even with wanted pregnancies. We don't support parents nationwide. We place heavy burdens on parents who are most vulnerable. TANF, which is support for needy families, has been hollowed out. The child allowance didn't make it to parents who were the poorest. So it's true, you can look around and say, our culture has no room for the vulnerable. It doesn't have room for babies who are vulnerable, and it doesn't have room for women who are vulnerable. So abortion is a crutch that lets us navigate that hatred of dependence that's pervasive in our culture.

And now, millions of people who have worked very hard for decades on behalf of a simplistic defense of the unborn have kicked away that crutch. Bad decision, I say; very bad, all the way down.

Which is why, here at the end (for now, anyway) of this ongoing argument I've been with myself (and others) for years, we have the aforementioned sign in our front yard. The argument over abortion in the U.S., thanks to Roe v. Wade, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and other Supreme Court cases, has for a half-century been utterly entwined with—and often served as a proxy for—debates over judicial power and the meaning of democracy. I have strong opinions about both of those debates, both nationally and in the context of our state constitution, and given that I have a profound distaste for undemocratically allowing unelected judges to make policy for the people, one might wonder why, all arguments over abortion aside, I don’t see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health as a good decision, or Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt (which articulated a very broad—much too broad, I think, especially given how many Republican politicians hypocritically misused it to justify opposition to vaccination policies during the pandemic—right to “bodily integrity” and thus abortion here in Kansas) as a bad one. The answer, of course, in line with everything I’ve written thus far, is that nothing happens without a surrounding context which weighs upon one’s choices.

I’ll freely admit that if Dobbs really does turn out, in the years to come, to have been just the first step in the expression of the Supreme Court’s determination to no longer involve itself in not just abortion legislation, but voter rights legislation, gerrymandering legislation, health care legislation, gun control legislation, etc., the time may come when I'll eat crow and call this a good decision, at least constitutionally speaking, because the ending of undemocratic judicial rule over the people's elected representatives will turn out to have been a very, very good thing. However, given that the Supreme Court involved itself in New York's century-old and widely supported gun laws literally just the day before Dobbs was handed down, I see no reason to believe the Court is suddenly turning away from screwing with democratically determined legislation. Rather, I conclude—as I think any remotely well-informed observer also must—that the Republican majority on the Court has, with Dobbs, achieved a long-standing and carefully developed (and financially well-supported) political aim, nothing more. That is an aim that will hurt women whose lives I want to make easier; preserving Hodes here in Kansas is, I think, not nearly as much a perhaps unavoidable concession to the individualistic, choice-centric assumptions of our current social order as it is an embrace of showing mutualist support to women who, in the absence of a radical change in the direction of solidarity and equality our economy and culture, are now facing potentially grave harms in their navigation of the heavy choices of family and health and life. (Also, please note that, despite claims to the contrary, Hodes has not “radically changed and expanded the landscape of abortion in Kansas,” unless you think that “landscape” is defined entirely by the ability to the state to be able to ban one particular rare second-trimester abortion procedure or impose prohibitively burdensome abortion clinic requirements; moreover, keep in mind that does the “Value Them Both” amendment really doesn’t appear to do anything of specific value for women’s choices at all anyway). Thus I say, to any Kansan who reads this: vote on no on August 2, please!

Abortion is, I believe, often (if not always and in every way) an evil. I also believe there are lots of evils in this world, some actual and some potential. Telling a pregnant person who might have to tragically confront--in all their diverse physical and economic and familial and occupational and religious and mental situations--a hideously difficult route through all these diverse evils (both real and potential) that they no longer have, and never should have had, a political or legal promise that one particular route will be available to them, no matter what their circumstances or what the science of what’s going on (or not yet going on, or no longer going on) inside their bodies at any point along their pregnancy, is simply repugnant to me. So yes, I changed my mind since I was a boy. If I was able to do so regarding same-sex marriage, I can do it regarding the necessity of abortion rights too.