Flip-Flopping

The Sweetest Thing taught me little, but I hope to heaven it’s not the only movie I see this weekend, thereby forfeiting scandalously my plan to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. what I have learned, however, is that Roger Kumble maybe has a thing for Selma Blair, who is, herself, quite a good comic actress. She is absolutely great in Cruel Intentions—threatening to steal scenes from Sarah Michelle Gellar, which is surely much trickier than the mincemeat she makes of Ryan Phillippe (”I can be sexy!”). Additionally, Cameron Diaz remains a great comic actress. I would never have wanted to see this movie (the trailers were awful) if I hadn’t bought into the profile Esquire did of Ms. Diaz a few months before release. They made this movie seem to be nothing short of comic genius. And while that’s a stretch, I surely laughed a whole lot during the flick—largely, admittedly, because it’s so filthy. But in a good way. In a way that There’s Something About Mary certainly wasn’t, and in a way that transcends even the comic hijinks of, say, American Pie. Oh well.

I was remembering an old Dennis Miller HBO special I’d taped in the early ’90s or so. I laughed a lot then, but now I only really remember one scene, wherein Miller explains that he’s pro-choice about everything in life, including abortion. I then remembered that, at the time, I didn’t really sit too comfortably with the comment. And then I remembered why:

I used to be pro-life.

These are things one doesn’t want to remember while taking a shower, understand. Furthermore, understand that though I was pro-life, I was never anti-choice, or at least, I thought I wasn’t—turns out it’s impossible to be pro-choice but anti-abortion. I had read Roe v. Wade, I knew about penumbrae, and I agreed that the Constitution was fully in support of abortion during the first trimester. I was just, you know, into religion and felt that my faith compelled me not to support abortion. I squirmed when I saw some female comic joke about going to get an abortion even though she wasn’t pregnant—just to stick it to the pro-lifers. The same joke makes me squirm now, too, but for totally different reasons.

The vocal pro-choice stance adopted by the Digable Planets on Reachin’ also made me queasy—and I wasn’t getting into them until I was a senior in high school. So even then, at age 18, I was still more or less pro-life.

This is rather disturbing, actually. I thought that all my silly reactionary flirtations were deep in my youth—but 18 wasn’t all that long ago. So what changed? I guess ditching religion changed. Well, “ditch” isn’t the right word. I never really bought into the whole Papal Infallibility thing, and I always questioned the tenets of my faith. In fact, during those rare Masses when the priest would list off a bunch of things, and the congregation would have to respond “yes, I believe” or whatever, I’d always spend a few seconds thinking the things through. Usually it was no big deal, but once the priest would start talking about Satan… I mean, do I really believe in Satan? Let’s be real, here.

So what changed is that I didn’t need the RCC to tell me anymore about morality. Sure, having a few rabidly atheist friends in college (Hi Andreas! Hi James!) helped push this along, but once I started realising that I was letting the RCC tell me what to think and feel, then things started getting really awry. And that’s the thing: abortion is moral. There are millions of permutations of the situation in which a person needs to get an abortion where it is the moral thing. In fact, whenever “needs” is the verb in action, abortion the answer must, by definition, be morally sound. That comic I mentioned above was being a jackass since she wasn’t viewing the situation morally. She was taking a self-righteous, unfunny, stance that completely rid the situation of its deep ethical dilemmas. No one, and this is an oft-repeated line, but apparently must be, since the anti-choice crowd still sticks to it, walks into a clinic to have an invasive procedure done to their body for the fuck of it. The fanatics demand waiting periods—what, like people run into a clinic like they do into Walgreen’s for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s at 3am? Do these assholes really think that the women haven’t already spent a lot of time thinking this through? the same holds true for parental notification. Notification suggests that the procedure is whimsical, something one can undergo impetuously. This is so totally absurd that it doesn’t even bear much more mentioning. Yet they continue to protest. They continue to shoot at doctors. They continue to adopt a selective morality that ignores entirely what is going on right in front of them.

I mean, not to get all anecdotal here, but when I helped a friend though one of these incidents, it sort of put it all into perspective. It was a rather common-type situation, I would imagine, the sort that the anti-choice crowd salivates over: she made a mistake, had unprotected sex, and got pregnant. There was no rape, no incest, nothing. Just a heat of passion mistake. But she knew, deep inside, that she couldn’t have the child. And she worried. She fretted. She had second-doubts. But ultimately, she knew. The answer was clear, and she made the right—the moral—move.

And for this she deserves to be villified? Who on eart do the anti-choicers think they are? Even back when I was pro-life, I always said “my religion is against abortion, but I don’t think that my religion should dictate the moral code of the state.” And who would I have been, being all self-righteous with my friend? “Well, this Pope guy sez you’re a sinner, and I follow him, so, I’m sorry you fucked up and failed to follow my religion’s doctrine, even though you are not of my religion. But, we can’t really be friends, either.” I would have been an asshole. A terrible friend. A life preserver in a stormy sea coated entirely in grease or Teflon. “You’ll be in my prayers, though.” I would have deserved a slap to the face. Some compassionate church that teaches compassion and forgiveness I was a part of…

I’ll close with this, something that made me wince a decade ago, but now is fully what I support:

“The fascists are some heavy dudes
They don’t really give a damn about life
They just don’t want a woman to
Control her body or have the right to choose
But baby that ain’t nothin
They just want a male finger on the button”