Fighting Words

what do free speech, gun control and abortion have in common? they are the new chorus in our theater of confusion

I Am A Member of both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association.

Privileged to sit in these two mutually abhorrent camps, I have been struck by the similarity of their fundamentalist stance on two disparate issues: the First (A.C.L.U.) and Second (N.R.A.) amendments to the Constitution.

The First Amendment states that there shall be no law limiting freedom of speech (the only exception being the advocacy of violent overthrow of the Government).

The A.C.L.U. and enlightened liberal thought have long held that the First Amendment could not be plainer and is open to no interpretation; that interpretation or amendation in the least degree must inevitably bring about destruction of the amendment's protective meaning.

The members of the A.C.L.U. do not, in the main, I am sure, derive pleasure from lurid pornography, but they are sufficiently concerned about the tenuousness of freedom of speech that they are prepared to submit to the dissemination of pornography rather than open the First Amendment to that interpretation they feel must lead to its emasculation.

The leadership of the A.C.L.U. is sufficiently devoted to the purity of the notion of freedom of speech that it came to the defense of American Nazis, a group whose very existence they must have found loathsome, when the Nazis were debarred from marching in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish community and home to many survivors of the Nazi death camps. Many viewers on the right (as well as some on the left) must have looked on in wonder at this, arguably, Pyrrhic display. As must viewers of the left look on when the N.R.A. opposes limitation of firearms whose only possible employment is in mayhem.

Well, the left says, yes, keep your guns for home defense and for sporting purposes, but why must you have your semi-automatic assault rifles? What possible purpose can they serve? To which an enlightened member of the N.R.A. might answer in a twofold way: (1) A semi-automatic assault rifle is, the inflammatory modifiers removed, simply a rifle. The semi-automatic of the name refers to the action used to make the piece ready to fire again, semi-automatic being one of many possible actions, among them pump, lever and bolt. The "assault" of the name means that the rifle is made to resemble, and may even be made by the manufacturers of assault rifles, which are the modern evolution of the machine gun and are fully automatic; i.e., they fire more than one round with each pull of the trigger. The members of the N.R.A. might be asked why they would think it necessary either to possess or to espouse the possession of such articles designed to resemble weapons of war, to which the response might be (and this is the second portion of the answer): (2) "None of your business--the Second Amendment to the Constitution states that the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. This statement is not open to interpretation."

"Yes, but," the interlocutor might state, "don't you see that your mindless pursuit of this idea leads to murder?"

To which the response might be, "No, I do not see that, any more than you see that pornography leads to rape; but I do see that any attempt to interpret the Second Amendment must inevitably lead to destruction of this freedom to bear arms, and I feel that this freedom is sufficiently important that I am willing to tolerate abuses in the (continued on page 229)Fighting Words(continued from page 118) name of its preservation."

Well, then. We are not too far removed from the viciousness that follows curtailing freedom of the press; e.g., the Red scare of the Fifties and its attempts at rebirth. Neither are we too far removed from the terror that can visit itself on a disarmed populace: the Czechs of Prague Spring, the Jews of Europe under the Third Reich.

Is this, then, a possible point of similarity between these organizations: the dedication to a nonreducible, noninterpretative reading of an aspect of American law?

Yes. And, further, both defend their particular amendment and hold to it as the epitome of the definition of a free individual. (1) A free individual is one possessed of the unalterable right to assert or protect his or her individuality (which is to say, his or her integrity) by means of free speech. (2) A free individual is one who is possessed of the unassailable right to protect and support his or her individuality (integrity) by force of arms.

A good case could be made (historically) for either or both of these assertions, and, in fact, in a more reflective, less troubled time, we might simply refer to the Constitution's first two amendments and say: Yes, what a good idea.

And we would see that unbridled freedom of expression is, in fact, a good idea when your authors are barred, when the writers expressing your views are imprisoned; and that the right to keep and bear arms is a rather good idea when the police/army is imprisoning/torturing/persecuting your people, that it can and does happen here (whatever "it" is, and wherever "here" is). It can and does and will most probably happen here, and that is what the A.C.L.U. and the N.R.A. are concerned about. And they are sufficiently concerned that they are ready to abide abuses and censure and, indeed, the ridicule of their opponents.

The debate itself is good, and the purpose of law is to allow people of differing and heated feelings to settle their disputes fairly and amicably--if not always without compromise.

The retreat to fundamentalist positions is, of course, natural in times of great social upheaval and uncertainty--unsure of our future, of our place, of the integrity of the institutions we have created to protect us, we retrench behind that which we feel to be the most powerful and protective of our prerogatives: We lighten our pack down to that which we cannot do without--free speech/the right to keep and bear arms.

Now, what about abortion?

Like most fundamentalist arguments, it is symbolic. (This is, perhaps, the nature of most arguments of any persuasion: As in the more formal legal proceeding, each side elects what it feels is a representative issue or assertion, feeling, "If I can sustain this [finally arbitrary] position, I will be content that I have vanquished my opponent and am entitled to the prize.")

Can one say that abortion, the most heated of debates, is, in fact, an arbitrary and jurisprudential fiction, a mutually chosen battleground for the trial by ordeal of two opposing cultures?

The right says that life begins with fertilization, and it fights under the banner of Right-to-Life. Is this a banner of convenience? I would ask this question: Is the leadership of the Right-to-Life movement speaking for itself and on behalf of its constituents, embracing, in effect, the Eastern doctrine of ahimsa; i.e., absolute nonviolence toward all living things? Is this movement equally prepared to oppose capital punishment absolutely as vehemently as it opposes abortion on demand? Is it equally prepared to espouse complete submissive pacifism and unilateral disarmament? If not, then the argument of the sanctity of life's beginning at the moment of conception falters, and the movement limits its protection to "that life which we, the movement, choose to specify."

The Right-to-Life movement, so-called, in the manner of the Catholic Church of the Inquisition, relaxes its protection of the sacred individual at birth; and, arguably, the movement masses not behind the right of the embryo to be born but behind the right of the movement to compel an unwilling pregnant mother to have a baby. And Right-to-Life is a flag of convenience.

What of the other side? Well, I find myself with the other side on this issue. I have been a young man myself, and have been with young women, and I am the father of two daughters, and political leanings to me are not the point. In this issue, the point, to me, is intellectual honesty, and, in my soul, I cannot say that I can support the notion that my daughters should be compelled by law to give birth to unwanted children. I have seen that abortion can be, in many ways and in many degrees, traumatic, and as to whether or not it is finally "wrong," it depends on the standards that you apply and the faith that you have; but, if it were my daughters, I would and will support their decision not to bear unwanted children, and I would not suffer them to be treated like outlaws for so deciding, and I would not vole to force them to flee the state or the country for adequate medical care should they so decide.

That is what I find in my heart, and that is how I have to vote, and it's no more complex than that.

Are there people who feel differently? Yes. Am I appalled by the violence of some of those in the opposition to this view? Yes. I am. The bombing of abortion clinics, in my view, is despicable in the extreme: It is, I feel, shameful behavior to prosecute a dispute through violence, and it is behavior that is particularly reprehensible in a group that calls itself Right-to-Life. It is also behavior that I endorsed when, in the Sixties, it was practiced by and for the supposed furtherance of the views of the antiwar movement--itself fighting, one might say, under the banner of Right-to-Life.

And so what is the issue that moves one to traduce the very tenets one is supposedly trying to defend? What is the issue behind the vehemence of abortion debates?

The issue of this small war for which Choice and Life are the names of the flags is this: We are the good people. There are only so many good people in the world, and they are found on our side. Lacking the convenience of racial or geographic distinctions to separate the good from the bad people, we will employ the irrefutable litmus test of an issue: "How do you stand on abortion?"

(Now, do I feel that the above is, in this instance, truer of the right than of the left? Yes, I do; I'm sorry, but I do, as, being human, I do tend to ascribe just a tad more humanity to the people with whom I agree. [See above.] I also think that in the Sixties, the above was truer of the left.)

Why can there be only a limited number of good people?

Because we are frightened. Abortion on demand and criminalization of abortion, N.R.A. and A.C.L.U. see real visions of social anarchy, and that is why they each hold to their weapons. The right and the left see anarchy around the corner, too; and the decision of the Supreme Court is both craven and effective: By weakening but not destroying the freedoms of Roe vs. Wade, it effectively recognizes that prerogative, but not abortion, is the issue, and says to both sides: You fight it out; you people on the left know that the rich and the mobile and the aware will always be able to have abortions, and that with the ever-growing feminist consciousness in this country (think back to 1973), fewer and fewer women will feel constrained to abide by local laws that they feel intolerable and which they can evade through travel; you people on the right know that human nature is not going to change, that people will fornicate and that women will have unwanted pregnancies and that they will terminate them as they see fit (as they always have) but that, at least, Government endorsement of practices you find morally abhorrent has been somewhat curtailed. The Court, in effect, ruled: "Take your fight out into the alley."

The end of all the show will be decided by time. The liberal Presidents got to pack the Court with Justices who would unalterably ruin the fabric of American life for quite a number of years; we are now in the era of the prerogative of the conservative Presidents to pack the Court with Justices who will unalterably ruin the fabric of American life.

Am I being too evenhanded? Possibly. Yes, it is not my ox being gored at this precise moment. And no one has yet tried to throw me in jail for the things I have written, or tried to kill me because of my race--though instances of each are happening to others every day, and have happened to others of my profession and race within my lifetime.

How will the abortion debate be settled? It will not be settled. It will pass. It is the Dreyfus affair of this century: a theater of the confusion of the times.

"We lighten our pack down to that which we cannot do without--free speech/the right to keep and bear arms."