A Sign of hopelessness

Speaker’s departure a stunning move

The most powerful Republican elected official in the country plans to resign.

Speaker John Boehner announced Friday morning he’s leaving Congress. This is one of the most stunning, entirely self-inflicted defeats of a major political party I’ve ever heard.

Boehner couldn’t get a consensus among his party members. That’s a great failing as a leader, but now I seriously wonder if anyone can succeed. If the task is so hopeless that a speaker has to resign just to avoid another government shutdown, things are very bad indeed.

Not just any speaker, either. For years, Boehner did anything to hang on. Now even he thinks it’s not worth the trouble.

The federal fiscal year ends Wednesday. Hardliners in Congress want another showdown over Planned Parenthood. Stripping funding from Planned Parenthood won’t happen. Republicans would have just taken a beating in the polls, then caved. Now Boehner is free to make a deal with Democrats and leave.

Let me point out something to those cheering at Boehner’s exit. Videos of Planned Parenthood execs being callous stoked a fair amount of outrage. Those videos could have had some result. They have — worsening the split in what should be the majority party.

The hardliners don’t have enough votes to rule. Let’s take abortion, the cause du jour, as a starting point.

It’s cold but clear in hindsight that the videos weren’t that powerful. They’re grisly, but not game-changing. That’s because they didn’t tell us anything we couldn’t have figured out by being honest with ourselves.

We know Planned Parenthood performs abortions, among other things. We know it supplies tissue from those unborn to medical researchers. We know the procedures for extracting tissue from humans can’t be anything but grisly. We know that Planned Parenthood probably errs on the side of not taking a loss when charging to cover their costs for that tissue. That’s what the videos showed. Now tell us something we didn’t know or couldn’t have figured out more than 20 years ago.

Let me make a comparison. I have no qualms against capital punishment. I’m past the big moral hurdle on that. I’m OK with taking a life in execution. You’re probably not going to change my mind by beating me over the head with gruesome details of how an execution goes. I already know that killing somebody is a grisly matter. You might convince me we ought to change our method of execution, but you aren’t going to alter my core belief. If you nag me and shut the government down because I’m not outraged enough at gory details, I’m only going to get annoyed.

Abortion should be curtailed, perhaps even eliminated — by prevention. Abortion may be the ultimate example of an ounce of prevention beating a pound of cure. I’ve said for years that convincing the average middle-aged man a vasectomy won’t kill him would be the greatest single anti-abortion step ever taken. I’m not sure it’s possible, knowing many middle-aged men, but I’d like to know.

Sixty percent of the people in this country are OK with gay marriage. What does that have to do with abortion? Well, it’s safe to say there’s no rising tide of conservative Christian morals flooding this country. The large majority of folks really don’t care what consenting adults do with each other. Therefore, we may assume that the root cause of abortion — unwanted pregnancy, which springs from a mainstream form of adult contact — won’t solve itself.

Therefore, it’s fair game to point something out. The people who want to defund Planned Parenthood are, by and large, the same ones who cheered the Hobby Lobby ruling. That’s the one that declared personal religious beliefs to be applicable to a businesses those believers own. In that case, the owners of a craft store chain got themselves exempted from having to provide health insurance that pays for birth control.

Do you oppose abortion? Do you want to be effective in reducing it? Then you might have some tough choices ahead of you. You might have to support planned parenthood — not the organization, but the concept.

No, I’m not saying anyone has to give up his principles. I admire people who stand up for their principles, even when I disagree with them. I just think they should do so effectively and try to do their own side more good than harm. May the best principles win.

How to stand for your principles effectively in any given environment’s your problem to solve.

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