There's a Right and a Left Way to Connect the Dots

Obviously I couldn't stick with the blog-a-thon posting for 16 days in a row. I tried... but for the first time in my life, it seemed that I didn't have enough to say. Who would have thought?

During my "free" time lately, I've been reading up on the reactions to Mary Cheney's pregnancy. If ever we needed proof that the personal is political, we have found it here. The radical right's response thus far seems to be mostly in cyberspace and ranges from ridiculous to depressing. And, in my never entirely humble opinion, wrong.

One of the most outrageous responses I've read in the last few days was posted on townhall.com from Janice Crouse (apparently of the gloriously conservative Concerned Women for America). I love how she gets to create her own system of "logic" and draws confusingly tangential conclusions. None of it is surprising, but here are some of the more infuriating portions.

Throughout the article, she compares Mary Cheney's pregnancy to women having children out-of-wedlock and raising them as single parents, all the time completely ignoring the fact that Mary has been with her partner, Heather, for 15 years and that they intend to raise this family together. She includes a quote from a Georgia High School principal about youth not having role models at home because their mothers are working 60 hours a week and hardly ever home... I'm sorry, did I miss how this has anything to do with the situation at hand? I don't know it for a fact, but something tells me that Mary and her partner are pretty well off and won't both be spending all of their time away from their children. In fact, they'll probably have more time to spend with their child than most parents.

Along the lines of Crouse's repudiation of mothers who have the audacity to raise their children "fatherless", she writes, "These older women are pushing out-of-wedlock birth statistics higher and higher." Umm, okay. And? So, these arbitrary statistics are inching higher and higher? How do those numbers hurt us? And if she's really so worried about that particular statistic, perhaps that's a good argument for allowing same-sex marriage. Then, all of the queer, bisexual and lesbian women in relationships with other women can get married before having children. That will keep the numbers lower. And it's interesting that she doesn't even consider the idea that some of the other women who have children out-of-wedlock might not have realized at the outset that they'd have to raise the child alone. It's not that unusual for a man to leave, but she certainly couldn't acknowledge that. And since she's so anti-abortion, shouldn't she be grateful that these women at least aren't terminating their pregnancies? The conundrums are mind-numbing.

Later, Crouse writes, "Mary Cheney’s action sets an example that is detrimental for mothers with less financial resources who will start down an irrevocable path into poverty that tends to be generational –– children in households without a father tend to themselves have unwed births later in life."
While I wouldn't argue with the fact that there are some generational impacts of poverty, this is largely based on the way our political and economic systems operate and less on personal characteristics. We don't have a system in place to support single mothers, regardless of how they became single mothers. Again, she tries to build an argument without logic. How does this set an example for mothers without financial resources? Mary Cheney is financially stable and also in a stable relationship.

I always come to the same place at the end of the argument about children always needing a mother and a father (a married mother and father according to Crouse) - are all heterosexual marriages created equally? Having been in the domestic violence and sexual assault field, I would argue that they aren't. There are plenty of children who are growing up in terror. (The true terrorism that threatens us all is in our own country and often our own homes.) There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of children who grow up being abused themselves or watching their fathers abuse their mothers. The right wing and their pro-marriage policies never address this, and it always seems to me that they're more concerned with outward appearances than with the actual quality of the family's relationships. The best answer for a single mother, they seem to argue, is to find a man. Brutal or otherwise, this is the best thing for a child. Granted, there are plenty of healthy families with mothers and fathers, but not all families that consist of a mother, father, and x number of children are healthy. And that is not the only healthy family make-up.

I do agree with her that, at this point, Mary Cheney's pregnancy affects us all, but it obviously affects us all very differently. As a straight, conservative, religious woman, this is an affront to Crouse. As for me, the fallout from this causes my breath to catch in my chest. It never gets easier to watch the country debate about whether or not being gay, lesbian, or bisexual allows you to be a full human being. It never gets easier to watch the country demonize a group of people for sport and in the name of "values".

Mary Cheney, I applaud you.