The Epic Smackdown: Will It Stick?

For the pro-choice community, Tuesday's election was an epic smackdown of the religious right. So how do we keep them from bouncing back?

Tuesday’s election meant many things to many people, but for the pro-choice community, it was
an epic smackdown of the religious right that wants to
control how you have sex, who you have sex with, how many children you
have, and even how you die — a religious right so stuck on its own sense
of self-importance that they actively fight against science, in no small
part because the roads of reason don’t uphold their mystical worldview
and need to be shut down.  Ballot initiatives on abortion, stem
cell research, and the right to die with dignity (and outside the
reach of right wingers who need to mind their own business) all broke
for the pro-choice side, with the one exception of Proposition 8 in California. 
The punishing hand of the right reached far enough to hurt gays and
lesbians.  But otherwise, the losses should be humbling to the
religious right.   

Seriously, normal people would
crumple in defeat after the death blows the hard right has received
over the years.  Certainly, feminists have given up after lesser
defeats (The ERA, for instance).  And this was an ass-whupping.  For the
third time, parental notification has been defeated
in California.
 
The personhood amendment in Colorado was
beaten 3 to 1.
 
In South Dakota, the
abortion ban went to the polls in a dead heat,

but was demolished at the ballot box with a 55-45 vote.  

This was a direct repeat of
what happened in South Dakota in 2006, when the ban looked alive going into the polls
and was sucking dirt before it was over.  But it also gives us
a clue as to why the anti-choice religious right will not give up, even
in the face of humiliating defeats (and it’s not just because
they have no shame). 
That so many South Dakotans tell pollsters they’re undecided on the
ban and then turn pro-choice in the privacy of the
ballot box tells us a lot about how the religious right creates the
illusion
of consensus in certain parts of the country through loud
mouth guilt trips.  My pet theory about undecided voters is that
they’re mostly conflict-averse people who fear registering an opinion
because they know it will offend others.  Which is fine, of course,
but in communities where the religious right has a big megaphone, the
people who refuse to resist them create the illusion of agreement,
which allows the right to perpetuate the myth that they’re a silent
majority.    

The other thing that keeps the religious right going is that they cherish the battle
over the victory. It gives them community and gives their lives
meaning.  In his book American
Fascists,
Chris
Hedges describes the way that the religious right preys on people who
are confused, unhappy, or in crisis and offers them a simple solution:
blame all your problems on liberalism, especially abortion.

The stories many in this movement
tell are stories of failure–personal, communal, and sometimes economic.  They are stories of public and private
institutions that are increasingly distant and irrelevant, stories of
loneliness and abuse.  Isolation, the
plague of the modern industrial society, has torn apart networks of extended
families and communities.  It has
empowered this new movement of dreamers, who bombard the airwaves with an
idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through apocalyptic purification,
to eradicate the old, sinful world and fill the resulting emptiness with a new
world where time stops and all problems are solved.

As Hedges notes, abortion in
particular is blamed for all problems.  Women who come to the religious
right with lifetimes of sorrow and abuse are told that any abortions
they may have had are the source of all their problems.  From that
perspective, it would almost be a bad thing for abortion to be banned,
and for the soldiers of the right to realize that it didn’t immediately
usher utopia in.  

But more importantly, the belief
that God is coming down to wipe out all the sinners and purify the world
means that winning or losing is less important than fighting.  When victory is certain in your eyes,
then the fight is ultimately about the fight, and all it gets you — a
community, a sense of moral superiority, a scapegoat on which to blame all your
problems.  They won’t quit fighting because every time they
get to gloat about how morally superior they are to the fornicators,
they win. 

In fact, Bob Enyart of Colorado
Right to Life admitted as much, when
he was quoted saying,

"Part of our goal was to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it’s not reasonable
to expect an institution to correct its own error. Our goal is to increase
the social tension over abortion.
"  He was trying to explain
why they backed a ballot initiative they knew would lose.  

We on the left have our own versions of this.  I’ve tangled with militant vegans,
utopian leftists, and people who still think Ralph Nader is awesome. 
Often, you get the strong impression that they oppose positive developments
that fall short of their definition of perfection, saying that there’s
a danger in dramatically improving people’s lives because they become
"complacent," and feeling calm and putting down weapons is considered
a worse problem than grinding misery that can be alleviated.  But
the volatile weapon of religion makes the moral superiority trip even
worse, because it’s assumed that an objective third party is watching,
and therefore the only way to lose is to quit fighting.   

So they will keep fighting,
because as long as they’re fighting, they’re winning.  It’s
up to us to figure out how to keep resisting without becoming demoralized.