You Know Better Than Me?
Don’t Tread On Me
California International Marathon is 16 weeks away.
I am nowhere near ready. Not even approaching ready. If ready was Planet Earth, I’m in Alpha Centauri. Or even farther away.
But I guess that’s what the next 16 weeks are for.
As usual, my runs this week (so far) have been a mixed bag:
Sunday, I struggled to complete 8 miles; I stopped and walked home after 7 and change, deciding to add the missing mile to my Monday run. Which I did, and in a complete reversal I felt very comfortable on that 5-nee-4-miler.
Wednesday, my men Roger and Tom coaxed me into a trail run first thing, despite the long and fat rattlesnake Roger saw on his run the day before, and, while it might have been the company, I felt pretty good on that run too. (Well, except for the mounting evidence that my aerobic capacity has dwindled to near-zero.)
I planned on an interval session on Thursday, but several miles of walking following my trail run the day before sapped my legs, so I settled for my normal bike commute to the library.
Friday, I’m flying to North Carolina to see the daughter of one of my best friends marry her beau over the weekend, so I hope to squeeze in that interval session at some point during the trip. (Apparently hope really does spring eternal for the aging endurance athlete.)
So my training is meandering along, though without the speedwork I desperately need. But my mind excuses the lack by saying I have plenty of time to catch up. Delusions, delusions. . . .
In the meantime, without anyone to keep me otherwise occupied during my early-week runs, my attention wandered to politics and other fruitless endeavors.
This week I’ve been wondering about Montana’s citizen’s initiative to put a woman’s right to abortion on the ballot. I understand that abortion is an emotionally-charged issue, and that I’m not going to break any new ground here. But it’s on my mind, so I’m going to recount my thoughts.
Lucky you.
Putting abortion aside for the moment, the actions of the anti-abortion zealots who inhabit the state offices of Attorney General and Secretary of State are mocking their duties with the pretzel-making contortions by which they are trying to deny the citizens of Montana their rights to self-governance. The Montana Supreme Court has slapped down both Knudsen and Jacobsen several times, because their personal opinions are disfiguring their offices and undermining their credibility as public servants. They are behaving like autocrats, allowing their personal beliefs to subvert the democratic processes set up in the state’s constitution. You may not agree with your fellow citizens, but we vote to resolve policy differences. Your job as a public servant is to make sure those votes are fair. And that’s it. The content shouldn’t matter to your office — put the issue int front of the people and let us decide. You get to express your opinion with your vote, not by distorting the duties of your elected office. You are obligated to represent all the people in the state, including those who hold different opinions than your own.
Now back to abortion. My position is pretty straightforward.
I believe in maximum agency.
We enact laws when we have a consensus about what is right for our community, and that’s the way we collectively govern ourselves. I’m cool with those restrictions on personal liberties. In the absence of consensus we must allow individuals to decide their own paths.
And we don’t have consensus to outlaw abortions. (In fact, we actually have a pretty broad consensus to allow abortions with a few restrictions.)
To drive consensus on any issue, including abortion, we need robust public discussion that uses data and expert opinions to inform that discussion. Individual beliefs don’t belong, because without data, without more-or-less objective facts (I say “more-or-less” because we can nit-pick just about anything to create doubt to help our own positions), then we’re just expressing our individual beliefs. And if I’m not comfortable using my own beliefs as policy when others have just as much right to their opinions that conflict with mine — and I’m not — then I’m definitely not comfortable having you tell me what I can and cannot do because you think it’s “right.”
Wars have been fought over taking away people’s personal agency, and you can bet that I will go to the streets to keep mine. And yours for that matter.
Feel free to believe that a fetus is a child, but there are no compelling (more-or-less) objective facts that support that position. I will never force you to have an abortion. But I cannot let you keep someone who doesn’t believe as you do from exercising their own agency in concert with their beliefs. Your beliefs make you right for you, but they don’t make you right for me.
Now I could tell you that I wouldn’t want a fetus aborted. I have children, and I would choose to have them born one-hundred times out of one-hundred. But that doesn’t matter for policy. Policy has to accommodate all of us, no matter what our beliefs, and we all have to be able to live with it.
So convince me if you can. But if you try to force me, don’t be surprised if I push back.
