The latest and one of the most shameful recent examples of how games of gotcha based on hard-to-walk-back hot takes defile societal discourse is the case of the impregnated Ohio ten-year-old.
First, as the basic story began to consume oxygen, it seemed to be the perfect real-life playing-out of the statistically unlikely situation pro-choice voices employ to make their case. Who among us isn’t going to find such a situation difficult in the extreme? That said, and I hope I can complete my line of thinking in a way that doesn’t make me come across like a heartless bonehead, those who have been fond of putting that scenario front and center in their argument are generally pro-choice under any circumstances, and focus on female bodily autonomy at the expense of acknowledging that another human being is part of the equation.
Before I go any further in laying out the subsequent developments in the story, let me share a tweet from Washington Examiner writer Kimberly Ross. it encapsulates the only morally mature perspective there is to take on the situation:
There’s incomplete discussion surrounding the 10 yo rape victim. One side says, “Ha!! See? She was raped!” and the other says, “Ha!! See? It was an illegal immigrant!” Both in near-celebratory manners. But the ENTIRE situation is heartbreaking. No one wins a partisan point. Stop.
Now, back to our story.
The Federalist, which has turned into every bit as much of a neo-Trumpist sewer as American Greatness or Gateway Pundit, a couple of days ago reported, with great glee, on the exchange Fox News host Jesse Watters had with his guest, Ohio attorney general Dave Yost, in which Yost said
there is “not a whisper” of a police investigation nor any corroborating evidence for the single-source story.
Well, now that it turns out that there is a real ten-year-old girl, and that she was indeed raped and impregnated, Watters is trying to find a basis for self-congratulation in the fact that the rapist was an illegal immigrant. And he brought in Indiana’s attorney general, who did indeed make himself look like a heartless bonehead by engaging in the most vulgar kind of yes-but. Yes, this girl was raped, but the doctor who performed the abortion is an activist, and the Indianapolis Star is a leftist rag:
Fox News host Jesse Watters on Wednesday tried to take credit for putting “pressure” on the investigation into the rape of a 10-year-old Ohio girl who then had to travel out-of-state for an abortion, despite suggesting two days ago that the story was a “hoax” and a piece of “politically timed disinformation.” Earlier on Wednesday, authorities arrested the girl’s alleged rapist.
“Primetime covered this story heavily on Monday, put on the pressure, and now we’re glad that justice is being served,” Watters claimed before showing several clips from that day’s show. The final clip cuts off before the Fox host says that if “the mainstream media and president of the United States [are] seizing on another hoax, then this is absolutely shameful, and fits a pretty dangerous pattern of politically timed disinformation.”
Watters then turned his attention to Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician-gynecologist who performed the abortion, and suggested that she may be subject to a “criminal charge” over how she handled the case.
Watters raised this question with Indiana’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, who proceeded to label Bernard an “abortion activist acting as a doctor” and claimed she has a “history of failing to report” child abuse cases.
“This is a horrible, horrible scene caused by Marxists and socialists and those in the White House who want lawlessness at the border,” Rokita claimed. The suspected rapist, a 27-year-old Guatemalan national named Gerson Fuentes, is in the country illegally, The Daily Beast learned Wednesday. “This girl was politicized—politicized for the gain of killing more babies. That was the goal, and this abortion activist is out there front and center.”
Rokita also attacked “fake news,” which to him includes the Indianapolis Star, which first reported on the rape and subsequent abortion, which occurred after Roe v. Wade was overturned and Ohio’s trigger law went into effect. “They were right there jumping in on all of this, thinking that it was going to be great for their abortionist movement when this girl has been so brutalized.”
Oh, and Jim Jordan, who represents Ohio’s 4th congressional district in the US House, has deleted his tweet from the other day that said, “Another lie. Anyone surprised?” He confidently used Yost’s not-a-whisper remark as the basis for his display of utter foolishness.
But there’s a larger point here than just this Ohio-girl-and-illegal-immigrant story.
Trumpists think it’s possible to stomp every last human being who embraces collectivism, identity politics, climate alarmism or militant secularism to any degree into the dust and be done with them.
That’s not only impossible, it’s an undesirable thing to aim for.
Another tenet at the core of real conservatism is a belief in love that is rooted in a Judeo-Christian understanding of the purpose for which human beings were made.
It comes down to the question of what conservatism is striving for. To couch it in terms of majorities in the legislative and executive branches of government, or eradication of DEI departments in the nation’s universities and corporations is to take a woefully shortsighted view of what it is we’re undertaking.
For one thing, assuming the kind of victory Trumpists envision were possible, what would they do with all the progressives they had stomped into the dust? These are people who have demonstrated fierce determination in pursuit of their vision, and they would not fade away quietly. We already see that with the ferocity with which they’r responding to the Dobbs decision.
One often gets “Quit trying to engage anyone on the Left; they hate our guts” as a supposed final argument against non-Trumpist efforts at good-faith exchange.
It that’s the last word on the subject, there’s no alternative but a red-state/blue-state split, hopefully but not assuredly without civil war. In fact, some who have given up on interaction with anyone outside their ideological bubble have decided that this is the inevitable next step. A particular columnist has even written a series of novels based on this scenario.
Have these people really thought this through? Would a red-state nation-state resulting from such a schism look anything like a Madisonian republic led by people who had thought deeply about preserving that which was worthwhile about an intact United States? Would it reflect the contributions to Western thought from Pericles, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, Oakeshott and Buckley? Based on the preferred methods of those who instigated and carried out the insurrection on the Capitol on January 6 - including the person who was president at the time - and the pass given them by writers and politicians of their general mien - it seems more likely that it would be characterized by a tolerance as tightly circumscribed as what the blue-state nation-state would be setting up. After all, the January 6 mob was ready to hang Mike Pence. It would almost certainly look to particular people and not ideas and principles to shape it. Regard for character, depth and humanity would not be the main driver of finding and elevating such people.
There’s really no substitute, then, for making the case for real conservatism to the American public broadly speaking.
This doesn’t mean watering down or concealing any aspect of the conservative vision, and it certainly doesn’t mean casting any of it overboard to win progressive favor. What it does mean is that the vision must be articulated in such a way that it’s going to have a sufficient degree of appeal to the great American middle - and there is indeed a middle, where one finds leaners to both the left and the right who are nonetheless open to considering fresh perspectives - to move the needle.
The case to be made includes such principles as that that which is truly fair is that which is biased toward freedom, that human nature, human anatomy and the design of life and the universe have not changed over the aeons, and that dignity, nobility, decency and clarity are virtues to be cultivated (and, conversely, that nastiness and situational reaction to what life presents are most certainly not virtues).
Real conservatism’s ultimate selling point is that it’s universally applicable. It can be implemented with success anywhere. A worldview that puts “America First” front and center is by definition not universally applicable.
So how can we muster the requisite patience to embark on the three-phase plan? By extending grace and trust.
It will require peddlers of conspiracy theories (such as that there is something nefarious about Dr. Fauci’s motives) to cease and desist. It will require legislators - particularly those at the federal level, in the matter of aid packages for businesses and individuals - to forego ideologically based add-ons to relief bills. It will require ordinary citizens engaged in the national conversation on social media and opinion sites to go a little easier on each other and not cast aspersions on others’ worth as human beings, even as they acknowledge vehement disagreement.
Trust will be earned as locales put forth honest numbers about the prevalence of the virus. If a given state, county or municipality is quantifiably not ready to graduate from one phase to the next, everyone will need to respect that and not push.
Ultimately, though, the kind of trust that will be required is a kind we’ve sorely needed for a long time anyway: the kind expressed on the coins in our pockets. We’re going to have to give God a much bigger role in this. We’re going to need trust of a degree that surmounts the cynicism born of the age-old question about why God allows misery in his universe. This might be a good time to revisit the book of Job.
Grace and trust are not material commodities. They are not goods shipped from a manufacturer to a user.
We can all start to practice them immediately, if we wish. And if your heart is too full of mistrust and ill will to practice much of it, take baby steps. Approach the task in manageable chunks. It’s like muscles responding to a training regimen.
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see that we have any other choice. The irony is that we’re all after the same goal: a happy, prosperous, noble society. We may define those characteristics differently, but we all agree on the terminology. (Basically. There are a few misanthropes in any crowd.)
In fact, my point is larger than just the fact that this post-2015 bunch that wants to claim the mantle of conservatism takes a give-no-quarter approach to citizenship.
The Left does it, too, as I’ve written about at length. Jane’s Revenge is not a loving bunch. Neither is Black Lives Matter. Neither is Earth First.
We as Americans have lost the art of cutting slack, of letting anyone off the hook.
There’s nothing gentle about us.
And so many, across the spectrum, respond to that assertion with, “Good!”
Ours is a time of purely short-term perspective. Concern with the large questions - about human nature, the lessons of history, the human being’s relationship with the Creator, what a satisfactory organization of human beings into a society might look like - is only discussed at the margins.
A step back from the ongoing fray makes for an interesting observation, though. Hot-take dispensers can come off looking like utter fools. In an age of disregard for having one’s basic facts in order, one is going to do some tweet-deleting, which itself goes on one’s record as a public figure.
In many contemporary situations, if one is interested in encouraging nobility, compassion and truly workable human relations, the best course of action is to zip it as everyone else plays gotcha. What one is after is often best furthered by a powerful silence.
