Poisoned Politics

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Roe's Birth, and Death: "Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.
When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate."

This is an angle we don't often see in this debate and an excellent read for all. Of course, it's coming from the ever masterful David Brooks, author of the excellent and On Paradise Drive, both available from Amazon but I'm too lazy to find the links.

Brooks spends his column espousing the need for the middle ground that most of us desire--certain circumstances in these debates are excruciatingly difficult to determine the true moral/correct choice, and a black and white analysis on the issue simply won't work. I won't get in to specifics here--but I strongly support Brooks' argument. The question remains whether an overturn of R v W would actually result in his hopes or would just cause incredible disarray. It is an issue that never should have entered the courts, and it clearly has polarized and poisoned the American political scene. I would like to see additional details on what he describes when he says there is no comparison with other (presumably mostly European) nations and how they apparently have *stricter* policies.

Today's political environment is defined by the polarization of parties on a number of "moral" issues and there is no movement towards consensus and solution. Instead of finding a proper middle ground or backing off, people simply shout at each other and the the system perpetuates itself. Meanwhile, the politics of other equally pressing issues that are less headline grabbing and less "good v evil" styled debates are forgotten and politicians simply spout off different versions of the same points. Everyone wants to improve healthcare, education, and social security--who actually does anything about it. Meanwhile issues like the environment end up artificially linked with the left and free trade linked with the right, largely arbitrarily. The result is a system that greatly displeases those of us that try to define the reality of an issue by investigating both camps and defining our own realities rather than the propaganda of politicians and talking heads. It is a sad and pathetic state in which we find ourselves, and something must be done to break us from this rut.