Pro-lifers: not as consistent as they’d have you believe

Public + Private

February 6, 2008 4:01:38 PM

The so-called “pro-life” movement must explain its glaring hypocrisy when it defends the “unborn” — with everything from lobbying to extremist elements backing the assassination of abortion providers — while working almost as tirelessly to rob other “innocent” human beings of their “right-to-life.”

Last week, Governor Donald Carcieri and wife Sue — both proud to be demonstrably “pro-life” — made headlines on a related topic.

Governor Carcieri declared, at about the same time as a pro-life protest at the State House, how he wants to balance the state budget, in part, through a $67 million Medicaid cut.

Half that amount will keep elderly and disabled Rhode Islanders from the nursing home care they need: the rest cuts medical benefits for children and for their mothers on welfare. The latter are mostly single moms — the women that Sue Carcieri and her ilk encourage not to have abortions.

Regarding the governor’s disdain for “out of wedlock births” and one-parent families, Linda Katz, policy director of Rhode Island College’s Poverty Institute, told the ProJo that Carcieri has “a very 50’s model of what a family looks like with mom home cooking . . . and dad [going] off to a job. Then you don’t have to pay for childcare.”

Given the numbers of working couples, single parents, and stay-at-home dads in Rhode Island and beyond, Carcieri’s “vision doesn’t meet the economic realities of the state” or the nation, for that matter, Katz said.

The governor and his wife live in the real world of politics, surrounded by staff, advisors, contributors, and intimates who don’t always match the spotless image of two-parent, monogamous, or otherwise exemplary families or individuals. From that circle, Carcieri accepts money and counsel. He then preaches morality to the rest of us.

People who have experienced an unintended pregnancy, and chosen an abortion to deal with it — and those close to such people — step up the grand State House staircase, and into the governor’s office, every day.

In legislative chambers and inside the executive suite, walk people — married and single — who take part in homosexual sex, who openly sport a comatta on the side, or who are a comatta.

The church in which the Carcieris fuel their vision of family life has been exposed for sexually abusing or overlooking the sexual abuse of children. Now, through the governor and his wife, it pretends to define good and evil.

Being “pro-life” is not a part-time job of political convenience. To be credible it must be a commitment to all life: in utero as well as already born.

Those who wish to define morality must either be pure or ready to defend the company, the counsel, and the contributions they keep.

Society is as tired of libertines railing about two-parent families and the “sanctity of marriage” as it is sick of homophobic lawmakers and preachers seeking gay sex in public men’s rooms.

Carcieri’s anti-life Medicaid proposal throws innocent people under the bus to save $67 per Rhode Islander.

Certainly, the governor’s high-rolling friends can cough up a few bucks in tax revenues. Surely, churches can kick in to save mothers and children, the old and the sick, in the spirit of the beatitudes.

Mothers do their best to raise their child(ren.) Other hard-working individuals care for their elders or disabled loved ones. All must be part of the broader “pro-life” agenda, which, right now, seems too obsessed with the surgical suites where women seek private solutions to personal matters under constitutional public law.