I read a couple of medical articles this afternoon that got me to thinking about absolutism. I don’t mean the absolutism of monarchs, dictators or tyrants. I’m referring absolutist political and philosophical positions. From my perspective, absolutist positions are intellectually and often morally deficient if not entirely bankrupt.
Absolutist positions are intellectually lazy because the holder of the position does not actually acknowledge let alone think through the implications, complexity and nuance is the position. “All abortion should be banned,” is absolutist. There is no room for the discussion of rape, incest, fetal malformations incompatible with life, intra-uterine fetal demise, ectopic pregnancy, illness likely to lead to the death of the pregnant person with or without fetal death. Instead, ideology prevails; the potential life of the fetus is sacred and fuck everything and everyone else.
The same is true of the Second Amendment right to possess firearms when it is absolutist. The same intellectually laziness that lets some individuals to declare that all abortions should be banned, now says that any citizen should have the right to bear arms – of virtually any type, anywhere, and anytime. The intellectually lazy do not have to address the behaviors of the individual carrying a gun until he fires it causing injury and/or death.
There is moral laziness too. The morally lazy absolutist considers an ideological position on the basis of the rights of an individual endowed with a right without addressing the rights of others. A person unfit, either by temperament, prior behaviors, or lack of training, to carry a weapon, has the right to carry it, but those who might be injured or killed because of that temperament, violent behaviors or lack of training, have no right to be safe in public. The right of the society for safety and peace is not considered in the absolutist’s interpretation of gun rights. A fetus’ presumed right to reach life independent of the womb, in the mind of the absolutist, trumps the right of a sentient pregnant person to life and the right of the family to exercise control over the number of children it has to rear.
The medical articles that I read today did not address the rights of fetuses or of gun owners. One of them addressed the rights of health care personnel to refuse to participate in medical procedures when they have firmly held religious beliefs regarding doing so. We’ve heard it all before. I can refuse to bake your wedding cake if you are gay, and my religious belief is that being gay is wrong and marrying gay people is also wrong. This particular article addressed a recent South Carolina law that allows health care practitioners to refuse to be any part of providing care in such situations. It seems intended to focus on the care that gay people need and request. An example was fertility treatments for same-sex couples. Another was gender-affirming care for transexuals.
If your religion believes that same sex marriage is an abomination, you can decline to provide fertility treatment to same sex couples. Pretty neat, no? To my mind, it’s a form of state-sanctioned discrimination. No? I would like to see whether any health care provider might refuse to provide such services to a mixed-race couple simply because their religious belief is that the races (a social rather than biological construct) must be maintained separate and pure. And would that apply just to unions between “Anglos” and “Blacks” or also to unions involving individuals of different ethnicities- Latino and Anglo, South Asian and Anglo, etc.
The second article was about a new Male Contraceptive pill – a combination of androgenic pro-drugs that can be taken once daily. The pill is just in Phase I trials (to establish safety), but perhaps in ten years or less, it will be ready for prime time. Will the absolutists on the SCOTUS turn the legality and availability of this form of contraception to the states? Will men be allowed autonomy over their own reproductive capacity? We shall see.
I hope to live long enough to see all the religious and political absolutists, the American Taliban as I have called them on other occasions, kicked to the curb along with their intellectually and morally barren arguments, but I fear that I will die in our unfolding American dystopia, and not survive to see America come to her senses let alone the promised land (an idea rather than a place).