One of the easiest things to do in this life is to be an anti-feminist blowhard. It’s easy because you don’t have to know anything at all to do it: when it comes time for some dude to spout off about Women’s Lib, he can count on being taken seriously without having spent 5 minutes on even a casual attempt to find out what his target’s views actually are, whether he has represented them rightly or wrongly, whether he is saying something true or false, or whether he is musing about something that has already been mooted and already answered definitively many, many times before. You don’t have to know anything about the history or theory of the feminist movement (a lot of which is, mind you, less than 40 years old and widely in print); you don’t need to know anything about what particular feminists did or didn’t say; you don’t even have to know anything in particular about current affairs. As long as you are spouting off about feminism or some particular feminist, no-one in the mainstream media or culture is likely to bother checking up on a damn thing you say.

Given the complete lack of any kind of intellectual accountability, or felt need to stop for a moment and read up on what you’re talking about, that big-mouthed men have enjoyed when it comes to feminism, it shouldn’t be surprising that a broad spectrum of ill-informed lectures, factless tirades, half-truths, distortions, and outright lies spring up and spread from year to year. At the furthest, most degenerate end of the spectrum, you can find a particularly loathsome specimen: the anti-feminist horror file quote list that are circulated among Fathers’ Rights bully-boys and anti-abortion websites. As a case in point, I offer Fathers for Life’s compilation of quotes, apparently collected by Bill Wood (with interspersed commentary by an unnamed author) claiming to show that feminism has roots in communism.

Now, as far as the conclusion goes, it seems to me that this is a bit like marshalling all your forces–complete with cavalry, banners, and a booming great military band–into a massive charge to take a cowpatch that was never contested. Anyone who has spent five minutes reading a survey history of second-wave feminism–like Feminist Revolution or In Our Time–or some of the actual works, such as The Dialectic of Sex or Toward a Feminist Theory of the State—already knows that many of the pioneering second-wave feminists came out of the radical wing of the New Left, and many of them were socialists, Marxists, or anarchists of various stripes. They are not particularly coy about the fact, and so what, anyway? Anyone who has taken the time to look up these basic facts before spouting off also knows that a lot of the New Left responded with hostility and contempt towards the emerging Women’s Liberation movement; they know that it eventually led to an acrimonious split and the abandonment or qualification of many classical Marxist doctrines as women came to shape an analysis grounded in their own experience of oppression and liberation. If you think that this is going to come as some kind of shock to people, then you are presuming a great deal of willing ignorance on the part of your audience about feminism. Depending on the audience, that may be a pretty safe assumption, but where it is, it’s pretty clear that the fault lies with the audience, not with the feminists.

No, the issue here is not that the conclusion of the horror file compilation is false (it may be false, if they mean to portray feminists as classical Marxists; it is true if they only make the more limited claim that feminist theory is deeply influenced by Marxism). It’s that the reasons given for this conclusion are deceptive. Nestled in between lengthy quotations from several anti-feminist polemics (among others, Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Professing Feminism), there are citations from a number of feminist authors and activists purporting to demonstrate connections between Marxism and feminism. The problem is that, even though the conclusion is true, the quotations used to bolster it are being used deceptively. They do not mean what Fathers for Life claims they mean. In some cases, they express a view that is the opposite of the one the author holds. In fact, it includes a quote which may be completely fabricated for all I can tell–more on that below. And these aren’t innocent mistakes, either. Fathers for Life has made it clear that they do not care whether the evidence they’re using to bolster their case is accurate or completely spurious. I know because I wrote them about it:

To: FathersForLife.org website contact form
From: Charles Johnson feedback@radgeek.com
Date: 25 February 2005

I was a bit puzzled to see some of the following quotes at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies, apparently intended to demonstrate that feminism is derived from Marxism:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism…

— Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1989, First Harvard University Press. Page 3.

I wonder whether anyone involved with this page has actually read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, or The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. In fact, one wonders if you have even read the title of The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, since that puts it in a nutshell before you have even made it to the essay. I ask these things because the two pieces are extended discussions of the problems inherent in trying to combine feminist and Marxist politics. The first 1/3 of MacKinnon’s book is devoted to a lengthy feminist critique of Marxism and of attempted Marxist-feminist syntheses.

There are plenty of places to find Marxist influences on feminism, or attempts to combine Marxist and feminist politics. But MacKinnon and Hartmann’s essays are not among them. Frankly it’s hard to regard the selective use of these quotations as anything other than (i) incredibly sloppy, or (ii) dishonest.

Here’s the reply that I got:

Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 21:26:13 -0700 From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org Subject: Re: Data posted to form 1 of http://fathersforlife.org/contact.htm
To: feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Thanks for writing.

If you read all of the document, you must have read also who produced it and noticed that it contains many, many more quotes than just the couple that you found to be objectionable.

Your complaint is noted, but two objectionable quotes about the strong ties between communism and radical feminism isn’t all there is at Fathers for Life. I suggest that you make a search for “feminism communism” at fathersforlife.org.

Amongst the more than a hundred pages containing information that relates to the connection between radical feminism and communism, there must surely be a few more that will irk you. I suggest that you narrow your search down by adding the following search term to the string:

Pizzey OR Hubbard

Enjoy,

Walter

Of course, this was not a response to the point and I was not (and am not) particularly interested in changing subjects to a general debate on the validity or invalidity of feminism with someone who can’t even be bothered to care whether or not the claims presented on his advocacy website are true or false. So:

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:42:22 -0500
To: “Walter Schneider” misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Data posted to form 1 of http://fathersforlife.org/contact.htm
From: “Rad Geek” feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Rad Geek People’s Daily

. . .

Mr. Schneider,

I’m not sure that you quite understood my purpose in writing. I don’t dispute that there are real historical and intellectual connections between radical feminism and Marxism. Anyone who has read the history of the feminist movement knows this; radical feminists make no secret of the fact that substantial parts of their thought come from contemporary Marxist movements and that they themselves were often involved in revolutionary socialist movements (they went on to angrily break with most of these movements, but rarely gave up those movements’ fundamental goals–see for example Robin Morgan’s Goodbye to All That).

What I am concerned with is the fact that you cite the following three quotes, among others, as evidence for this fact:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism –Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (qtd. in MacKinnon 1989)

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism… –MacKinnon (1989) p. 3

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. –MacKinnon (1989) p. 10

Hartmann’s and Bridge’s essay is a criticism of Marxism; the quote is a parody of Blackstone’s famous nutshell summary of the legal status of husband and wife in a marriage. Her argument is that, heretofore, Marxists have claimed to support feminist goals while actually ignoring them or distorting them in order to make them subordinate to the theoretical concerns and personal interests of Marxist men. This is obvious if you’ve read the essay; it should be clear that that’s where it’s going if you’ve so much as read and understood the title.

The use of the quotes from MacKinnon is even worse. Both quotes come from the first several pages of an extended critique of Marxism. The opening statement that sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism is used to set up a series of questions as to whether or not Marxism and feminism are, at the end of the day, compatible. (MacKinnon goes on to argue that they are not, and that feminist method must be, in some important sense, “post-Marxist”.) The second quote is not a statement of MacKinnon’s beliefs at all; it is a statement of a view with which she sharply disagrees; she thinks that the view is part of the anti-feminist strategy that some Marxists have tried to adopt in addressing feminist concerns. Again, these points are quite clear from a single reading of the opening chapter of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

Are there historical connections between feminism and Marxism? Of course there are. But the quotes that you intend to introduce as evidence for that conclusion aren’t evidence for it, and they clearly do not mean what you seem to be indicating that they mean by grabbing them out of their context and arranging them as you have. The problem is that the use of all these quotes is selective, and in being selective it is deceptive. I do not know whether the deception is by intent or by ignorance; in either case it is clearly the result of sloppy or nonexistant reading of the text.

Will these quotes be removed from your discussion of Communism and feminism?

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

Here’s the reply:

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 19:03:58 -0700
From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee
To: Rad Geek feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Dear Mr. Johnson,

No, not at all, I have a fairly good appreciation of what you are getting at, but let me be more direct about your misperceptions, as there are more than just one.

You picked on three examples of quotes that don’t quite meet your exacting standards, and you picked on the wrong fellow to direct your complaint to.

Obviously, those three examples are only a small fraction of all of the quotes used by Bill Wood, the author of that article containing the evidence he presented to the Ways and Means Committee. Surely you understand that I can’t willy-nilly edit the things that other people stated, just to suit your preferences.

However, just because those three quotes don’t meet your standards, does that prove the basic premise wrong? Of course it doesn’t.
So, what exactly is your beef?

If it is nothing more than a complaint about the academic quality of the article with respect to the standards used for the documenting of sources, then you should address your concerns to Bill Wood.

If you are not happy with the manner in which Bill Wood formated his quotes, so as to make it clear as to who said what and that it would be unmistakable that some of the quoted phrases do not present the opinions of the authors that quoted them, write to Bill Wood.

If you think that I have editorial responsibilities that I did not exercize with due diligence, consider that I merely quoted another source that is clearly identified in the version of the document that concerns you. In that case you should write to the people in charge of that source.

• From Marxism to Feminism: The planned destruction of the American family http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=view&id=954
• Statement of Bill Wood
  FC-8 Hearing on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse July 17, 2003
  TESTIMONY FOR THE [US] WAYS AND MEANS COMMITTEE

The sole reason why I posted Bill Wood’s testimony is that I installed a hyper-text-linked index to the various entries, so as to make it easier to find them in the rather lengthy document. If it would not have been for that, I would have pointed people directly to the original source at which the testimony had been delivered and published. A link is so much less troublesome than to quote and format a whole large article, right?

This whole debate has taken far more of our time than it deserves. I don’t know whether you can afford to spend that much time on relatively inconsequential and misdirected criticism, but I do know that I can’t.

Sincerely,
Walter Schneider

PS. Did you have a chance to look for the items I pointed you to? –WHS

Incidentally, the link he provides is not the source of the collection of quotes as it is presented on FathersForLife.org. It contains a few of the same deceptively out-of-context quotes that are repeated in the quotes page at FathersForLife.org, but wherever the latter came from, it was not from a copy of an address already given.

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:55:42 -0500
To: “Walter Schneider” misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee From: “Rad Geek” feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Rad Geek People’s Daily

Mr. Schneider,

In your reply from several days ago, you seemed to be laboring under a couple of misunderstandings.

First, this is not a matter of “exacting standards”, “suiting my preferences”, or “academic quality”. And it’s certainly not an issue of “formatting”. This is a matter of factual accuracy.

The compilation of quotes and commentary on your site at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies lists three quotes, taken selectively from Catharine MacKinnon’s work, and insinuates that they represent her views (or the views of radical feminists broadly) on Marxism, when in fact they are (1) part of an argument that feminism and Marxism are in fact incompatible or (2) expositions of views that MacKinnon explicitly condemns. By stripping the quotes of their context, it attributes a view to MacKinnon that is the opposite of the one that she holds; that is to say, it presents demonstrable deceptions as fact.

I sent an e-mail through the fathersforlife.org contact page to whoever was responsible for the content on the website; since it was you who received that e-mail, and since you ask the following:

If you think that I have editorial responsibilities that I did not exercize with due diligence,

I gather that you are the person, or at least a person, responsible for deciding what content goes on your site. As such, you have a responsibility not to purvey false information to readers on the Internet in the name of your cause. You’re quite right that Bill Wood is identified as the compiler of the quotes in the article (although I might add it’s not at all clear from either the article or your remarks whether you have drawn these quotes from sources presented by Bill Wood, or whether he himself assembled the page as it currently appears on your site; nor is it clear whose commentary is represented by unquoted remarks such as Catherine A. MacKinnon is a University of Michigan FEMINIST LAW PROFESSOR!! Do you think her lawyers are learning Republican government OR are they learning Communism?)

You wonder why I did not contact Bill Wood about this. Well, I’d be glad to contact him in order to inform him of his (frankly either sloppy or dishonest) mistakes in describing MacKinnon’s views, but (1) I don’t have his contact information, and (2) you have responsibilities as an editor in this matter whatever Bill Wood has or hasn’t done. Given that whether or not the conclusion that this compilation puts forward is true, the grounds given for it are demonstrably false (by a simple reading of the plain text), your responsibility, as an editor, is to do one of the following, depending on the nature of the piece and the author’s wishes:

1. Remove the offending quotes (with an editor’s note or ellipsis if necessary)
2. Issue a correction
3. Remove the piece from your site.

All three of these things are things that responsible editors sometimes do when authors make mistakes of fact. Simply leaving a piece with known factual errors online, as-is, for public consumption, while making no attempt whatsoever to avoid deceiving your readers, is not.

Second, this is not a “debate”. There is nothing to argue about. Your page, as it currently stands, is deceptive. That may be the result of negligence–in which case it is a sloppy error–or it may be the result of intent–in which case it is spreading lies. Which conclusion an observer should draw depends, in part, on how you deal with the matter now that it has been brought to your attention.

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

And here’s Walter Schneider’s final word on the matter, for the time being:

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 05:35:55 -0700
From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee
To: Rad Geek feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Mr. Johnson,

Rad Geek wrote:

….You wonder why I did not contact Bill Wood about this.

I didn’t at all wonder, I suggested that you do.

Well, I’d be glad to contact him in order to inform him of his (frankly either sloppy or dishonest) mistakes in describing MacKinnon’s views, but (1) I don’t have his contact information, and

I can help you out with that. Try http://waysandmeans.house.gov/contact.asp, the first organization that published the quotes that you perceive to be misleading. They may be able to provide you with contact details for Bill Wood, which shouldn’t be that hard for them. Unfortunately, on account of two recent PC crashes I no longer have Bill Wood’s e-mail address. This clue may help you in contacting him: Representative Bill Wood, Charlotte, North Carolina.

(2) you have responsibilities as an editor in this matter whatever Bill Wood has or hasn’t done. Given that whether or not the conclusion that this compilation puts forward is true, the
grounds given for it are demonstrably false (by a simple reading of the plain text), your responsibility, as an editor, is to do one of the following, depending on the nature of the piece and the author’s wishes:

My responsibility as an editor is not to alter text taken from a document authored and published by other people. If you misconstrue such quotes and become offended on account of your misperception, that is your problem, not mine.

The best of luck,

Walter Schneider

Of course, Schneider does not anywhere make clear where the document in its current form was published or why he, as an editor, cannot indicate through the use of elipsis or editor’s notes that parts of the text are incorrect. Responsible editors of advocacy sites either remove pages that contain false information, or issue corrections on false information where people reading the misleading page can see them. Schneider, for his part, seems uninterested in any of this; at least, as of press time, FathersForLife.org continues to print the same quotes from MacKinnon without redaction, correction, or apology.

For myself, I do have a bit of a correction to make: since I wrote the first couple notes while on vacation, and didn’t have my copy of Toward A Feminist Theory of the State with me, I assumed that this quote, attributed to page 10 of MacKinnon’s book, was an explanation of one of the anti-feminist Marxist approaches to the woman question that she was criticizing:

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. –MacKinnon (1989) p. 10

I was wrong about that. The sentences I was remembering were similar sentences from Chapters I, II, and IV of the book in which she does set out and then demolish views that come out roughly to that (e.g.: the view that women’s subordination to men, when acknowledged, is seen as caused by class dominance, its cure as the overthrow of class relations [p. 62]). If MacKinnon did say what she is quoted as saying, then it was surely in the context of elaborating an opposing view in order to criticize it, and the quote is deceptively taken out of its context and passed off as a statement of belief in propia voce. But after going through the opening chapters of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State several times, I cannot for the life of me find where she did say Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism in the first place. It is not on page 10 of Toward A Feminist Theory of the State. Nor is it on page 9 or 11. Nor is it anywhere to be found anywhere in Chapters I or II. Nor is it on page x in the Introduction, nor on likely candidates for a typographical error–you won’t find it on page 19, or on page 20, or anywhere in pages 100-110. A Google search returns only anti-feminist websites with the same quote and the same claim that it appears on page 10. All three quotes are gravely misunderstood if they are accurate quotations, but this one may very well be a complete fabrication. (If you have a bibliographic reference to where the quote actually occurs, drop me a line–I’d appreciate being able to print the quote in its actual context!)

Fathers for Life is spreading deceptive information on their website in an attempt to further their cause. This may have originally been the result of carelessness and sloppiness. That’s bad enough in itself–there is far too much misleading through carelessness or sloppiness in public debates today. But whatever the original cause, they continue to spread deceptions knowingly, without correction.

That’s lying.

It’s been a good two weeks since I meant to put up a post on some great labor news–the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ have won the Taco Bell boycott after four years of ground-breaking organizing and agitating for and by the migrant farmworkers of southern Florida in the Taco Bell Boycott and Boot the Bell! campaigns. You can read more about it from the CIW themselves.

March 8, 2005 (IMMOKALEE/LOUISVILLE) – In a precedent-setting move, fast-food industry leader Taco Bell Corp., a division of Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM), has agreed to work with the Florida-based farm worker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), to address the wages and working conditions of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.

Taco Bell announced today that it will fund a penny per pound pass-through with its suppliers of Florida tomatoes, and will undertake joint efforts with the CIW on several fronts to improve working conditions in Florida’s tomato fields. For its part, the CIW has agreed to end its three-year boycott of Taco Bell, saying that the agreement sets a new standard of social responsibility for the fast-food industry.

…

Taco Bell has recently secured an agreement with several of its tomato-grower suppliers, who employ the farmworkers, to pass-through the company-funded equivalent of one-cent per pound directly to the workers.

With this agreement, we will be the first in our industry to directly help improve farmworkers’ wages, added Brolick, And we pledge to make this commitment real by buying only from Florida growers who pass this penny per pound payment entirely on to the farmworkers, and by working jointly with the CIW and our suppliers to monitor the pass-through for compliance. We hope others in the restaurant industry and supermarket retail trade will follow our leadership. Yum! Brands and Taco Bell will also work with the CIW to help ensure that Florida tomato pickers enjoy working terms and conditions similar to those that workers in other industries enjoy.

…

The Company indicated that it believes other restaurant chains and supermarkets, along with the Florida Tomato Committee, should join in seeking legislative reform, because human rights are universal and we hope others will follow our company’s lead.

— CIW / Taco Bell Press Release 2005-03-08: Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Taco Bell reach groundbreaking agreement

The penny-per-pound increase means a cost increase of only $100,000 / year for Taco Bell. Here’s what it means for migrant farmworkers:

As part of the agreement announced Tuesday, Taco Bell will pay an extra penny paid per pound — about $100,000 annually — that will be funneled to about 1,000 farm workers through a small group of suppliers, Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said. Taco Bell buys about 10 million pounds of Florida tomatoes a year, Blum said.

Lucas [Benitez], co-director of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said farm workers earn about $7,500 a year, without health insurance or paid vacations. The extra penny added per pound picked will almost double the yearly salaries of the roughly 1,000 farm workers employed by Taco Bell suppliers, [Benitez] said.

— Miami Herald 2005-03-09: Taco Bell agrees to pay extra pennies for tomatoes

So, feel free to eat at Taco Bell again. In fact, I’ll be going out for dinner at Taco Bell tonight to thank them now that they have given in to farm workers’ demands, and I’ll be contacting them to be sure that they know why I’m buying food from them again.

This is a major victory for the CIW and for farmworkers as a whole. There’s a lot that organized labor can learn from it: how CIW won while overcoming barriers of language and nationality, assembling a remarkable coalition in solidarity (from students to fellow farmworkers to religious organizations and onward), drawing on the dispersed talents of agitators and activists in communities all across the country, and making some brilliant hard-nosed strategic decisions (e.g., the decision a couple of years ago to begin the Boot the Bell campaign–which hit Taco Bell where it hurts by denying it extremely lucrative contracts with college and University food services). I only know a bit of the story from following the boycott, and I already know that it’s a pretty remarkable story to tell. I look forward to hearing more.

It’s also — although you won’t hear this as much — a major victory for government-free, syndicalist labor organizing. The CIW is not a bureaucratic government-recognized union; as a form of organizing it’s far closer to an autonomous workers’ syndicate or a local soviet (in the old sense of a democratic, community-based workers’ council, not in the sense of the hollow state apparatus that the Bolsheviks left after the party committees seized power at bayonet-point). Of course, not having the smothering comfort of the US labor bureaucracy to prop them up has often made things harder on the CIW; but it’s also made them freer, and left them free of the restraints on serious and innovative labor activism that have held the government-authorized union movement back for the past 60 years. (Example: the strategic decision to target Taco Bell in the first place–that is, the whole damned campaign that allowed the Immokalee workers to win such a huge improvement in their standard of living–was a secondary boycott, and so would have been illegal under the terms of the Taft-Hartley Act and the Landrum-Griffin Act. But since the CIW doesn’t need a permission slip from the NLRB to engage in direct action, they won the day–not in spite of, but because of their freedom from government restraints on labor organizing.

Unfortunately, some of my libertarian comrades haven’t been quite so willing to celebrate. In fact, I first heard about the victory from Daniel D’Amico’s post lamenting the development. D’Amico wrote a misguided attack on the campaign before and so did Art Carden. The problem is that the arguments given in these articles seem to proceed from a double confusion: first, a confusion about the nature of CIW; and second, a confusion about economics and the nature of market processes.

Both Carden and D’Amico seem to make the initial mistake of thinking about the CIW campaign entirely by analogy to either (a) the student anti-sweatshop movement or (b) government-authorized trade unionism, and so feel free to lift boilerplate from the standard arguments against those (e.g.: that it is the misguided effort of patronizing college students who ought to pay more attention to the real interests of those they claim to act on behalf of; that it courts the coercive power of the State in order to achieve its goals) when it is in fact completely alien to how CIW actually works. They’ve never requested government assistance against Taco Bell, and they couldn’t legally get it if they asked. And whether the standard accusations against student-driven anti-sweatshop organizing are apt or inapt (I think they are apt in some aspects and unfair in others), they don’t apply to CIW. It’s certainly true that they’ve been more than willing to draw support from anti-sweatshop organizations and to draw comparisons between their struggle and the anti-sweatshop movement in order to curry support on college campuses (and did so very intelligently); but this isn’t the anti-sweatshop movement. It’s not directed from college campuses; the shots are called by a community organization of immigrant farmworkers in Southern Florida. You might try to argue that they’re acting foolishly against their own interests, or avariciously at the expense of other people’s legitimate interests, but to simply try to lift the standard Where are all the third world workers in the anti-sweatshop movement? objections won’t hold water for anyone who has actually met (as I have) CIW organizers.

Carden and D’Amico’s articles are both mostly about their economic complaints against the CIW strategy; they may think that they can simply dismiss any mistakes about how CIW organizes as marginal to the main point. That’s fine, but the economic complaints are also unfounded. D’Amico, for example, complains that CIW is interfering with the market processes that set wages for labor:

CIW expects the boycott to put pressure on Taco Bell to pay more for its tomatoes and thus more for migrant laborers. But this would not be a sustainable market scenario. Prices are not set by arbitrary moral standards, but rather by available levels of supply and demand in the market.

…

Stopping the market transactions of mutually benefiting exchange in the name of moral obligations does not produce anything of lasting value to assist in capital accumulation or increasing standards of living.

But the entire complaint presupposes two things which are in fact false: first, that the moral demands on Taco Bell to improve its contracting for tomato-picking so that farmworkers are paid a better wage are arbitrary; second, that moral obligations are not part of what people take into account when they determine which transactions count as mutually beneficial in the first place. Let’s bracket the first presupposition for a moment in order to clear away the second: prices and markets are not mechanistic systems; they are the results (both intended and unintended) of people’s choices. Notice how little attention this point gets when D’Amico offers the following weirdly primitive picture of how someone decides whether or not to buy a taco:

The value of a chalupa is not imputed through the sweat equity of the Immokalee migrant workers. When the typical college kid is watching his favorite episode of The Simpson’s and a Taco Bell commercial comes on, he does not pause and reflect on the condition of the plighted migrant laborer; rather he sees a funny Chihuahua that speaks Spanish, standing next to a greasy bundle of cheesy goodness, and his stomach growls accordingly.

Of course, I’m sure that some people do think like this about their meals, but there is no reason that they have to. When you are trying to figure out how people will make the choices they make, you always need to refer to a notion of benefit. But the judgments of benefit that people make don’t just issue from some hydraulic system of inborn drives and aversions; they are the result of deliberation, and involve answers to a lot of questions about not only hunger, thirst, low-grade humor, etc., but also decisions about what kinds of pleasures are worth the cost, what sort of life you want to live, what sort of society you want to live in, and so on. Sure, not everyone thinks about those things when they deliberate over whether to go to Taco Bell or not; and the fact that they don’t ponder them had heretofore meant that wages would be as low as they were. But what the hell were CIW doing if not trying to educate people about the conditions that people picking the tomatoes they eat face, and so encouraging them to think about whether a marginal decrease of less than a penny per chalupa is really worth it to them? That’s as much a part of the free market as deliberations which issue in decisions to seek the lowest price at any cost are.

What about the first issue? Is it right to think that workers deserve more than they get paid, or is it foolish? D’Amico might try to push his point here by arguing: sure, given that you can convince people of those values, that’s as much a part of market processes as anything. But it shouldn’t be a part of people’s values; it’s foolish and economically destructive to act on the preference that people deserve extra money just for being hard workers that you feel sorry for, and not for any marginal increase in the valuable material output that they produce. So the campaign has gotten people to agree to giving the farm workers more than they should get if our aim is greater economic prosperity and higher standards of living. Which it should be.

But again, this seems to presuppose a weirdly mechanistic picture of the economic concepts involved. Prosperity and higher standard of living are irreducibly evaluative terms no less than mutually beneficial; and you have to ask whether it’s possible to exclude basic considerations of fairness and solidarity with our fellow workers from a reasonable conception of what counts as a prosperous commonwealth and what doesn’t. Furthermore, even if you grant D’Amico his principle, it’s unclear why he’s as certain as he is that it applies here. He points to the backward imputation of value and seems to be taking for granted the standard economic argument that at equilibrium, wages are set by the worker’s marginal productivity. Since workers were making sub-poverty wages from the tomatoes for tacos before sentimental comparisons of their yearly income to the average came into play, it must be that those sub-poverty wages reflect their marginal productivity to the consumers of tacos when consumers of tacos are thinking only about the factors that D’Amico thinks they ought to think about.

But that conclusion rests on at least two unargued premises: (1) that farmworkers’ wages are set in a free market for labor, and (2) that farmworkers’ wages are at the equilibrium point. But why should we believe either of these? As CIW itself has repeatedly demonstrated, farmers and caudillos in Southern Florida have repeatedly been willing to use violence, coercion, and fraud against their laborers, up to and including outright slavery; and since many of the workers in Immokalee and elsewhere are undocumented, they also have to face the constant threat of violence from La Migra. All of these factors use coercion to undermine farm workers’ wages and bargaining positions. Further, even if the market were completely free, that wouldn’t be any guarantee at all that it would be no guarantee that wages would be set at marginal productivity given how consumers evaluate the taco; that argument depends on the kind of neo-classical anti-economic argument that I think Roderick Long rightly criticized as the doctrine of Platonic Productivity.

All of this is too damn bad. Not just because it makes for mistaken conclusions, but also because the willingness to make those mistakes tends to paint 21st century libertarians as court intellectuals for the bosses of the world, and it puts them directly at odds with their 19th century forebearers. Radical individualists like Benjamin Tucker, for example, defined their position as both the most consistent form of free market economics, and the most consistent form of the labor movement. Sure, part of that position was based on economic and philosophical error–e.g., commitment to the Smithian labor theory of value–but part of what I hope to show in all this is that corrections to their economic premises don’t require abandonment of their economic conclusions. In fact, if you want to learn something about how people can get together and make their lives both freer and happier in the course of just a few years, without the false help and bureaucratic meddling of the State, you’d do well to look at what the CIW has accomplished over the past several years.

So here’s to libertarian labor organizing and state-free struggle. ¡Si se puede!

Further reading

• GT 2001/08/30: Si se puede!
• GT 2004/05/01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

Jus ad bello

Like Judas of old,
you lie and deceive
A world war can be won
you want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

Senator Bob Smith (R-NH), Republican Party fund-raiser, 12 April 2002:

Why don’t we just take his oil? Smith bellowed to the crowd during a fiery 13-minute speech, referring to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Why buy it? Take it!

President George W. Bush, speech before the United Nations General Assembly, 12 September 2002:

He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge — by his deceptions, and by his cruelties — Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.

…

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

United Nations’ inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.

…

We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence.

Perry G. Smith, guest column for the Opelika-Auburn News, 27 February 2003:

The editorial board asked these questions:

1. How can we start a war with Iraq while waging a war against terrorists all over the place?

2. Would the battlefront be too much to manage?

3. Might al-Qaida appreciate us going into Iraq?

4. If we attack Iraq, will we be more vulnerable to terrorists?

It’s too bad those people whom we elected to make decisions about those questions for us (President Bush, Vice President Chaney [sic] and our Republican-controlled Congress) and our nation’s National Security advisers and military leaders don’t include the [Opelika-Auburn News] on every little aspect of their planning. Our smart leaders use intelligence that is gathered by very sophisticated sources in their decision-making process. Disclosure of our secret intelligence and plans (necessarily the answers to your questions) to the liberally biased news media usually gets the people who gave the information on which we based our decisions killed or stops any further disclosure of information to our sources. I believe that our leaders have made a full assessment of those and other questions and the best courses of action have been decided upon for the best interest of our nation. All of us should fall in behind our president and whole-heartedly support him and our committed military personnel now.

…

Saddam needs to disarm now. If he does not, this superpower intends to make him. I personally believe that this conflict will be over more quickly than Desert Storm and with even fewer U.S. casualties.

Jus in bello

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

George W. Bush, 20 January 2002:

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, … do hereby proclaim Sunday, January 20, 2002, as National Sanctity of Human Life Day. I call upon all Americans to reflect upon the sanctity of human life. Let us recognize the day with appropriate ceremonies in our homes and places of worship, rededicate ourselves to compassionate service on behalf of the weak and defenseless, and reaffirm our commitment to respect the life and dignity of every human being.

Alberto Gonzales, memo to George W. Bush, 23 January 2002:

Positives

The consequences of a decision to adhere to what I understood to be your earlier determination that the GPW does not apply to the Taliban include the following:

…

• Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441). ** That statute, enacted in 1996 prohibits the commission of a war crime by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. War crime for these purposes is defined to include any grave breach of GPW or any violation of common Article 3 thereof (such as outrages against personal dignity). Some of these provisions apply (if the GPW applies) regardless of whether the individual being detained qualifies as a POW. Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty. A determination that the GPW is not applicable to the Taliban would mean that Section 2441 would not apply to actions taken with respect to the Taliban.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meeting with troops in Qatar, 28 April 2003:

And there have not been large numbers of civilian casualties because the coalition took such great care to protect the lives of innocent civilians as well as holy sites. … When the dust is settled in Iraq, military historians will study this war. They’ll examine the unprecedented combination of power, precision, speed, flexibility and, I would add also, compassion that was employed.

General Tommy Franks, Bagram Air Force Base, 19 March 2002:

I don’t believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered. You know we don’t do body counts.

Donald Rumsfeld, interview on FOX News Sunday, 9 November 2003:

Well, we don’t do body counts …

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, interview with BBC Today, 18 May 2004:

Q: How many people, Iraqi people, have been killed during the occupation? Do you have a figure or don’t you?

A: … And I gave answers to a Parliamentary Question on this. I went into it in a great deal of detail. We’ve made use of NGO estimates, and others, but the last estimate which I gave in answer to a Parliamentary Question, and I speak from recollection but I’m happy to have this checked, was about ten thousand.

Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, 7 September 2004:

A spike in fighting with Sunni and Shiite insurgents killed eight Americans in the Baghdad area on Tuesday and Wednesday, pushing the count to 1,003. That number includes 1,000 U.S. troops and three civilians, two working for the U.S. Army and one for the Air Force. The tally was compiled by The Associated Press based on Pentagon records and AP reporting from Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited progress on multiple fronts in the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism and said U.S. enemies should not underestimate the willingness of the American people and its coalition allies to suffer casualties in Iraq and elsewhere.

Dr. Les Roberts, 29 October 2004:

Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths.

James Massey, interview on Democracy Now!, 24 May 2004:

Iraq violated every rule of engagement that I have ever been taught – violated every rule of the Geneva Convention that I have been taught.

Adam Gorlick, Associated Press, 16 October 2004:

Depression set in, and Jeff dealt with it by going on heavy drinking binges. On Christmas Eve, he sat down with Debbie and gave his first account of being told to shoot two unarmed Iraqi soldiers.

The way he told the story, Jeff was about five feet away from two Iraqis — each about his own age — when he was ordered to shoot them. He said he looked them in their eyes before closing his own, then pulled the trigger.

He took off two dog tags around his neck, threw them at me and said, Don’t you understand? Your brother is a murderer, Debbie said.

Doug Struck, Washington Post, 7 December 2004:

A former U.S. Marine staff sergeant testified at a hearing Tuesday that his unit killed at least 30 unarmed civilians in Iraq during the war in 2003 and that Marines routinely shot and killed wounded Iraqis.

Jimmy J. Massey, a 12-year veteran, said he left Iraq in May 2003 after a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress. He said he and his men shot and killed four Iraqis staging a demonstration and a man with his hands up trying to surrender, as well as women and children at roadblocks. Massey said he had complained to his superiors about the killing of innocent civilians, but that nothing was done.

U.S.-appointed Iraqi Defence Minister Sheikh Hazem Shalaam, 9 November 2004:

We’ve called it Operation Dawn. God willing, it’s going to be a new, happy dawn for the people of Falluja.

U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, 9 November 2004:

There is no confusion, if you’re on the street, you’re a bad guy. Ninety per cent of the civilian population has left

Rory McCarthy and Peter Beaumont, The Guardian:

The moves came amid renewed warnings from aid groups that Iraq’s civilian population was facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Although many of Falluja’s 200,000 to 300,000 residents fled the city before the assault, between 30,000 and 50,000 are believed to have remained during the fighting.

The horrific conditions for those who remained in the city have begun to emerge in the last 24 hours as it became clear that US military claims of precision targeting of insurgent positions were false.

According to one Iraqi journalist who left Falluja on Friday, some of the civilian injuries were caused by the massive firepower directed on to city neighbourhoods during the battle.

If the fighters fire a mortar, US forces respond with huge force, said the journalist, who asked not to be named.

The city had been without power or water for days. Frozen food had spoiled and people could not charge their cellphones. Some people hadn’t prepared well. They didn’t stock up on tinned food. They didn’t think it would be this bad, he said.

At the main hospital, cut off from the rest of the city, doctors have reportedly been treating the injured with nothing but bandages, while the Red Crescent says people have been bleeding to death for lack of medical attention.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meeting with troops in Qatar, 28 April 2003:

Q: Hi, Mr. Secretary. I’m Sergeant Cramer (ph) from the 502nd (Transit ?), and I was just curious to know whether or not you’ve been bombarded with apologetic phonecalls from your critics who had perceived a doom and gloom scenario.

(Applause; cheers.)

Rumsfeld: My answer’s off the record. (Laughter.) There were a lot of hand-wringers around, weren’t there? (Laughter; applause.) You know, during World War II, I think Winston Churchill was talking about the Battle of Britain, and he said, Never have so many owed so much to so few. A humorist in Washington the other day sent me a note paraphrasing that, and he said, Never have so many been so wrong about so much. (Laughter; applause.)

Jus post bellum

How much do I know
to talk out of turn?
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Thought I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never forgive what you do

George W. Bush, remarks to reporters, 3 May 2003:

We’ll find them [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. It’ll be a matter of time to do so

George W. Bush, interview with TVP Poland, 30 May 2003:

But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 10 February 2004

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s pre-war claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be deployed in 45 minutes.

I don’t remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest, Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he didn’t remember the statement either.

The claim made headlines around the world after Blair leveled it in a 55-page white paper presented to the House of Commons in September 2002.

Paul Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority, 2 September 2003:

The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don’t have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over.

George W. Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, 12 January 2004:

One thing is for certain: There won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, report to Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, 11 March 2004:

On 19 January 2004, Lieutenant General (LTG) Ricardo S. Sanchez, Commander, Combined Joint Task Force Seven (CJTF-7) requested that the Commander, US Central Command, appoint an Investigating Officer (IO) in the grade of Major General (MG) or above to investigate the conduct of operations within the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade. LTG Sanchez requested an investigation of detention and internment operations by the Brigade from 1 November 2003 to present. LTG Sanchez cited recent reports of detainee abuse.

…

I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts: (a) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; (b) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; (c) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; (d) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; (e) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; (f) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; (g) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; (h) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; (i) Writing I am a Rapest (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; (j) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; (k) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; (l) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; (m) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. … These findings are amply supported by written confessions provided by several of the suspects, written statements provided by detainees, and witness statements.

…

Several US Army Soldiers have committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law at Abu Ghraib/BCCF and Camp Bucca, Iraq. Furthermore, key senior leaders in both the 800th MP Brigade and the 205th MI Brigade failed to comply with established regulations, policies, and command directives in preventing detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib (BCCF) and at Camp Bucca during the period August 2003 to February 2004.

Then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, CBS Early Show, 19 March 2004:

There are no more rape rooms and torture chambers in Iraq.

George W. Bush, remarks on the first anniversary of the Iraq War, 19 March 2004:

All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression and instability in the Middle East. … Who would prefer that Saddam’s torture chambers still be open? Who would wish that more mass graves were still being filled? Who would begrudge the Iraqi people their long-awaited liberation?

George W. Bush, interview with Al-Arabiya Television, 5 May 2004:

It’s very important for people, your listeners, to understand in our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act–and we act in a way where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. … Iraq was a unique situation because Saddam Hussein had constantly defied the world and had threatened his neighbors, had used weapons of mass destruction, had terrorist ties, had torture chambers …

George W. Bush, Presidential radio address on the second anniversary of the Iraq War, 19 March 2005:

Good morning. On this day two years ago, we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to disarm a brutal regime, free its people, and defend the world from a grave danger.

Et cognoscetis veritatem

Let me ask you one question.
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
when your death takes its toll
all the money you made
will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I’ll follow your casket
in the pale afternoon
I’ll watch while you’re lowered
down to your death-bed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead

IN MEMORIAM.

Just a reminder: today is Tyrannicide Day, the commemorations of the nearby assassinations of Czar Alexander II on March 13th, 1881 (124 years ago Sunday, give or take the relevant calendar adjustments), and Gaius Julius Caesar on March 15th, 44 CE (2,048 years ago today, give or take the relevant calendar adjustments).

It’s worth remembering in these days that the State has always tried to pass off attacks against its own commanding and military forces (Czars, Kings, soldiers in the field, etc.) as being of a piece with terrorism against civilians. This is, in fact, what virtually the entire record of so-called terrorism attributed to 19th century anarchists was: direct attacks on the commanders of the State’s repressive forces. But that just ain’t terrorism. I think there are plenty of reasons–strategic reasons, not moral reasons–to criticize the strategy that lay behind the assassinations of Czars and Princes in the late 19th century, or for that matter the assassination of Julius Caesar, but the fact that the brutal absolute monarch of a monster State lay dead at the end of it is not among them.

The fact that someone puts a crown on his head and wraps himself in the bloody robes of the State does not make him anything more than a person just like you or me, and the same principles of just self-defense apply when it comes to the crowned heads of Europe as apply to some freelance thug on the street. The right to challenge the princes and potentates of the world as fellow human beings, subject to exactly the same moral principles as you and I and anyone else, has been at the core of every movement for human liberation in history. And thank God for it. That’s something worth commemorating a lot more than, say, the births of a couple of jerks who got themselves selected as President.

Beware the State! Celebrate the Ides of March!

Here’s a typical, arbitrarily-selected example of the standard rhetoric from anti-choicers who just happened to be the leading supporters of so-called fetal homicide bills at the state and federal level:

I don’t buy the theory that any fetal homicide laws in existence, nor the one recently vetoed by Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, would have the effect of criminalizing abortion. Abortion rights are as safe in California as they are just about anywhere else, and have always been so, but Scott Peterson is still considered a double-murderer. Good.

— Xrlq (2004-12-10), comment on SayUncle 2004-12-09: Healing the divide

You heard this from nearly every conservative legislator and Concerned Woman for America over and over again as these bills moved through the legislature. Problem is that that was all a goddamned lie. All that sentimental law-making was not about protecting pregnant women from domestic violence; it wasn’t about punishing men who attack women and it wasn’t even about protecting fetuses from assaults on their mothers.

It’s about abortion. Specifically, it’s about creating the legal groundwork for enforcing murder statutes against anyone who helps young women obtain an abortion unauthorized by the government. (The second part of the one-two punch, of course, is that anti-choicers are working hard every day to ensure that as many kinds of abortion as possible are unauthorized by the government.)

Pro-choice groups said this over and over again when the debate over manipulative bills like Laci and Connor’s Law came up. For it, they were denounced as paranoiacs and bitter partisans. But guess what? They were right.

A few months ago I mentioned test case #1, in which a Macomb County prosecutor decided to indict a 16 year old boy for manslaughter after he helped his girlfriend in a desparate, home-made abortion by hitting her (with her consent) with a baseball bat until she miscarried (she was about four months pregnant at the time).

Think that was just some rogue prosecutor with an axe to grind? Well, oops–they did it again. In test case #2, a Lufkin, Texas prosecutor has decided to raise the stakes by charging an 18 year old boy with capital murder for helping his 16 year old girlfriend with a desparate, home-made abortion by stepping on her stomach.

They didn’t go through the extensive bureaucratic paperwork, privacy-invading parental notification measures, artificially inflated expense, traumatic harassment by screeching fundamentalists, or invasive surgery that the states of Michigan and Texas impose on young women seeking an abortion. And for that, the prosecutors are going after them with a charge of murder.

Of course, since the authors and supporters of the bill clearly weren’t trying to do anything like this when they passed it, obviously they are raising howls of protest.

Right?

A co-author of the state law said it was intended to protect women and unborn babies from domestic violence, drunken drivers and other assaults.

We didn’t consider a case as ridiculous as this, said Rep. Ray Allen, a Republican. I feel sad for these immature, stupid people. But the law is what the law is.

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2005-03-04

Of course they didn’t mean for any of this to happen; but hey, it’s not like legislators can change the law or anything, right?

Meanwhile, the prosecutors in both Macomb County and Lufkin mainly seem to regret that they can’t haul the poor girl before the magistrate and have her sent to a pro-life prison or perhaps a pro-life lethal injection. They regret that their hands are tied by the laws’ explicit exemption of the mother from legal liability.

Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith said his hands were tied when it came time to decide whom to charge in the baseball bat beating death of a fetus being carried by a teenage girl.

He decided Tuesday to do the only thing one state statute allowed: charge the boyfriend who wielded the bat, hitting his girlfriend in the stomach repeatedly over a two-week period, but let the girl off the hook, uncharged.

…

Although Smith called the case shocking and reprehensible, he added, we are bound by the law. We don’t have the option of charging (the girl).

—Detroit News 2005-01-05

Prosecutor Clyde Herrington said it was startling that they completely leave the female out of the criminal penalty.

It doesn’t seem entirely fair, Herrington said.

— Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2005-03-04

(You might think that the explicit exemption for punishing the mother is evidence that the laws weren’t intended to be applied in cases of unpermitted abortion. Horsefeathers. Even most strident anti-abortionists mainly favor bans that would punish abortion providers but not the woman who has an abortion; and the fact that they would think it’s necessary to exempt the mother from liability shows, if anything, a specific intent to apply it broadly to cases in which the mother consents to inducing the miscarriage. Otherwise there’d be no need for the exemption.)

What were those stupid, immature, shocking, reprehensible kids thinking, anyway? Don’t they know abortion is illegal in this country?

This is no accident. They are coming for the young and desparate first; they are the easiest to go after. They have already created a byzantine system of explicit restrictions and burdensome regulations to create a limited class of authorized abortion providers and make the conditions of obtaining an authorized abortion from them as harrowing as possible. Now they are moving to back up those restrictions with a charge of murder for any provider who steps outside of the ever-narrowing magic circle of what the courts will uphold from Roe. The purpose is to make the equation of abortion with murder a standard and accepted part of legal practice, and to bring closer the day in which there are no protections left at all (because, after all, they would be unfair). Lucinda Cisler warned us that this was a trap back in 1969, just four years before Roe: giving the State the power to limit who is authorized to provide an abortion and under what conditions (whether or not the woman consents to those conditions) is furnishing the ground from which to launch the counterattack against abortion-law repeal, and it means that the most desperate women will be targeted first.

Welcome to 2005. Here we are building a culture of life, one hangman at a time.