Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights
With the cocksure demeanor of a fifth-grade bully, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.; pictured left) appeared on Fox News on Monday night to defend his controversial comparison of fetuses and black people.
Joining civil rights leader Al Sharpton on the network's 'Sean Hannity Show,' he attempted to clarify his stance by doing the old Republican shuffle:
Evade. Attack. Retreat.
With an unusually passive Sean Hannity moderating the debate, Santorum contended that finding it "remarkable" that President Obama is pro-choice has nothing to do with his race (despite saying just that with all the self-righteous indignation he could muster), but everything to do with Obama's legal background.
"My comment was that [Obama] should be sensitive, more so than probably most people, as a civil rights and constitutional lawyer... to how we define people in the constitution," Santorum backpedaled.
He must have forgotten who he was debating.
"You did not say that President Obama as a constitutional lawyer or a civil rights lawyer should be sensitive. You said as a black, which brought race in," Sharpton sharply corrected.
Hannity used Santorum's uncomfortable silence to throw him a lifeline by rattling off the disturbing percentage of African American women having abortions versus white and Hispanic women, hopefully rendering race a relevant component in the debate.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, black women terminate their pregnancies at five times the rate of white women and twice the rate of Hispanic women. Though, his original argument wasn't that nuanced, Santorum delivered a persuasive performance:
"Reverend Sharpton, there is no debate. That entity at the moment of conception is alive and it is genetically human. You were that entity at some point, [Hannity] was that entity, everybody was that entity. It is a human life," Santorum continued. "The person who's most robbed of their civil right is that child in the womb."
After a heated back-and-forth exchange, during which a game of defining "human life" versus "personhood" ensued, Santorum stated that Justice Blackmun, the judge responsible for delivering the Roe v. Wade opinion in 1973, argued that human life does not equate to being a person, and that is the "exact" argument used to justify slavery:
"That is an exact distortion of what you said," Sharpton immediately responded, "we're not debating whether or not at any stage blacks were human, we were debating that all blacks ... at any stage at any age were less than human ... it was two different things."
Yes, they were two different things; however, there are several other "things" that seem to be getting ignored.
First among them is the fact that Rev. Sharpton should stop using the three-fifths of a human argument to build upon the emotional vulnerability of African American people.
The three-fifths compromise was essentially implemented not to dehumanize slaves -- we were already considered property prior to that "improvement" -- but to ensure that the North gained political power.
While the Good Ole Party would have us believe that its motivation for suggesting the federal ratio was to end slavery, the truth is much more cynical:
Had slaves been considered complete persons at that pivotal point in history, slave owners would have continued their reign in the White House because population directly impacts congressional representation. With slaves included, the South disproportionately outnumbered the North.
Though the motives were extremely self-serving, without the compromise it is safe to say that our path from the plantation would have been longer. Prior to the three-fifths law, slaves were considered no more than chattel, and if Dixiecrats had their way, we still would be.
The second "thing" that needs to be addressed is the slightly overlooked fact that women are not simply mindless breeders. Throughout the entire testosterone-driven dialogue, I heard heated debate over the rights and definition of fetuses and of African American people.
Yet, I heard not one defending the rights of women to have control over their own bodies. Not only did I hear no defense, I heard no offense, which suggests that our rights aren't even worth being mentioned in the game plan.
The third "thing" is Hannity's misleading use of statistics, where he adds race into the equation. I have written articles on the high abortion rate within the African American community, as well as the strategic placement of Planned Parenthoods in multicultural neighborhoods, and I never trivialize those facts.
However, enough is enough.
There is no reason why three adult men should be on national television debating the state of African American women's uteruses.
National abortion statistics come from only two major sources: the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control. California, Louisiana and New Hampshire do not report abortion data to the federal government. With California accounting for more abortions than any other state, to say the statistics are accurate would be stretching the truth.
It goes without saying that white, middle- to- upper-class women are not beating down the door to Planned Parenthood for their abortions, so to make black women the face of abortion based on incomplete statistics is extremely negligent and superficial.
Roe v. Wade will never be overturned, and everyone is fully aware of that fact; however, Republican strategists are intelligent enough to realize that the overwhelming majority of African Americans are pro-life.
With this in mind, they repeatedly manufacture futile debates to coincide with election buzz, with the purpose of pandering to a bloc that historically votes with its pockets, not its sense of morality.
This is clearly not a matter of black or white, but it is a definitely one that is black and white. Sifting through all the rhetoric and reason, the heart of the matter needs to be brought back into focus.
Whether you believe life begins at conception, 24 weeks or at birth, the only relevant question is should a woman have the right to make her own decisions regarding her own body?
We could discuss the fact that in 2006, Santorum voted against funding that would have provided increased access to preventive health care and family services for women, thus decreasing the number of abortions, and then dissect the many ways that makes him a hypocrite.
However, we really should be discussing why in 2011, 146 years after the official end of slavery and 90 years after women were granted the right to vote, we're having this conversation at all.
Watch the debate here:
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