By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The political satirist P.J. O’Rourke can be as funny and insightful as anyone on the scene these days. Not that he is Mark Twain, of course, but no one else is either. (If you want to laugh out loud over and over do a Google search of “Mark Twain quotations.”)
Here are some of my favorite O’Rourke quips: “”You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.” “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” “Gossip is what you say about the object of flattery when they aren’t present.” Good stuff: concise wisecracks that make a serious point.
Making a “serious point” is the key. O’Rourke tries to be funny, but not in the manner of a comedian doing pratfalls in a silly hat. He pokes fun at people he thinks need to be taken down a notch or two. His column on the website The Daily Beast on July 20 is a case in point. In it, he describes his reactions to a libertarian gathering he attended recently in Las Vegas. He talks of “certain difficulties” that arose from being with “people who agree with me.”
He was happy to report there were no “Birthers, no Birchers, no Truthers, no xenophobes, homophobes or white supremacists” in attendance, and that there were plenty of “Blacks, Latinos, Asians” and that “gays were fairly well represented.” But he was not as happy about the presence of people with a libertarian resistance to government social programs: “People love to hear what libertarians have to say until those people go into the voting booth. Then limitations on the size, power, and expense of government start to get personal. According to the Census Bureau, 49 percent of Americans receive some kind of government benefits.” O’Rourke is convinced that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to become linked with too rigid a resistance to these government programs. He asks, “What would be a good yard sign for a libertarian politician? Vote for __________. He Can Give You Less.”
He is also unhappy about the presence of “more socially conservative libertarian-conservatives” at the conference. He believes that seeking to placate those who “worry about family cohesion and erosion of religious belief” and who “aren’t fully reconciled to abortion, gay marriage, and drug legalization” will become a drag on Republican chances at the ballot box in the coming years, as younger Americans move to a more tolerant position on these social issues.
“I’m opposed to abortion,” he writes. “But it is a moral, not a legislative issue. Imagine trying to make the Ten Commandments into laws. There goes Hollywood Buddhism, representative art, golf on Sunday, the language I use during golf on Sunday, most sex, Wall Street, fibbing to escape the Tupperware party next door, and envying your boss’s Porsche. And we’d all be jailed for putting mom in the nursing home.”
I repeat: O’Rourke is usually both funny and insightful. He was neither in the above paragraph. He is trying too hard, revealing how uncomfortable mainstream Republicans are becoming with the presence of social conservatives in the party, now that it looks as if chances are good for significant victories in the Congressional elections this fall. They are afraid we will spoil things for the party.
Basing our laws on the Ten Commandments? We can ignore his references to golf on Sunday, Tupperware parties and envying your boss’s Porsche. O’Rourke is being silly — in a manner he would mock if critiquing someone else’s humor. But on his central point, he is just wrong. Come on: Most of our laws are based on the Ten Commandments: our laws against murder, robbery, perjury, bigamy and libel, for starters.
O’Rourke doesn’t care about Tupperware parties. His problem is abortion. He is one of the Republicans who is convinced that the party has to abandon its pro-life position if it expects to remain viable. He may be right about that. If that is what he believes, O’Rourke should say so up front, and provide us with the polls and projections of what will happen in key elections around the country if Republican candidates take a firm stand against abortion.
If he did that, pro-life Republicans would be put on the defensive; they would have to make the case that it is still possible for pro-life candidates to win state-wide elections — or state publicly that they would prefer for liberal Democrats to prevail in the country for the foreseeable future, rather than give an inch and back pro-choice Republican candidates. That would result in an honest dialogue.
O’Rourke’s position, in contrast, is not honest. He is trying to muddy the waters. When he says he is “opposed to abortion,” but that it is a “moral, not a legislative issue” he is revealing more than he intends. Imagine how he would react if someone said, “I oppose slavery, but it is a moral issue, not a legislative issue.” Or, “I oppose child molestation, but it should not be a legislative issue”; or “I oppose female genital mutilation, but there are Muslims who disagree, so it should not be made a legislative issue.” Why doesn’t O’Rourke simply admit that he is not as convinced as many on his side of the political fence that the fetus is an unborn child?
When people say that they think it is wrong to impose their “moral views” on fellow citizens who disagree with them, they mean that those who disagree with them are likely to be good people with the best of intentions for the commonweal, because there is a moral ambiguity about the behavior in question. That is why no one proposes laws against golf on Sunday, Hollywood Buddhism, and envying your boss’s Porsche. Those who favor laws against killing an unborn child do so because they are unwilling to accept that there is any such ambiguity surrounding abortion.
Americans with pro-life views may find themselves forced to deal with the dilemma of how to respond to an election such as that which is going on in New Hampshire between pro-choice Republican Scott Walker and liberal pro-choice Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. A pro-life Catholic faced with such a choice may feel it necessary to vote for the Republican as the only way to turn the tide against the Obama administration. Theologians loyal to the Magisterium have made the case that such a decision can be defended when there is no realistic chance of electing a candidate who will work to end legalized abortion. But those who make this choice should not fool themselves by hiding behind P.J. O’Rourke’s smokescreen. It is either a product of muddle-headed thinking (unusual for O’Rourke) or a con-job.
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