"The one-day-old child is protected with the full force of the law. The proposition that he is without rights when he is minus one day old is nothing more than a social convention." -- Wm F. Buckley
I met Emily Mills a week ago at an Isthmus soiree. I can report she is a delightful young lady (who still labors under delusions as to my role in her life).
My take is that her ultra-liberalism is a psychological rebellion born of this misapprehension. Perhaps if she had grown up at Stately Blaska Manor she would today be a proud member of Americans for Prosperity, own an autographed copy of "Going Rogue," and gone into investment fund management just to tweak Barack Obama.
As it is, she turned out o.k. Just liberal.
As you know, the mission of the Blaska Policy Research Center and Experimental Work Farm is to plumb the depths of the liberal mind in all its exotic wonders and publish the findings for a grateful nation. Compassion compels me to help the less fortunate. We can cure liberalism if only we commit the resources! (If a man can land on the moon ...) A grant application is pending before the National Institutes of Health. And the Bradley Foundation.
My operating thesis is that liberals were born without a corpus collossum -- that flap of tissue connecting the two lobes of the brain. That was the malady that afflicted the late Kim Peek, the real-life inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man. Kim Peek could memorize telephone books worth of facts; he just couldn't reason. Or tie his shoes.
Isthmus has tabbed Emily as the latest challenger to the sweet reasonableness emanating from Stately Blaska Manor. The young artist also maintains another blog, the Lost Albatross. Emily posts this picture at that other website, and poses, 37 years after Roe v. Wade, this thought exercise:
(The pro-abortion group) NARAL is simply asking you and me to answer one question: What does "Trust Women" mean to you? And this is my answer: To trust women means to leave up to them all decisions pertaining to their own bodies and minds. Whether that decision is to terminate a pregnancy or to see it through, we as a society must trust each other to do what is right for ourselves.
I'm willing to trust women with all decisions pertaining to their own bodies and minds but ask them to pause, however briefly, to consider the life of that other body within them. It is in this spirit that I address the very pregnant lady in the photograph: Sweetpea, why don't we wait a dozen years or so and let the child speak for herself if she is pro-choice? If you are willing to wait to allow it to be a child, that is.
It's not always about us, Emily.
Sing along with Blaska's Blog and the great Leslie Gore: It's my baby and it'll die if I want to, die if I want to ...
