Why Abortion Became ABORTION

Last week, Aspazia wrote a series of posts, entitled "Missives from Grove," about her trip to Grove, Oklahoma to talk with people who remembered Dr. William Jennings Bryan Henrie, a country doctor who was arrested in 1962 for performing abortions. It is an incredibly touching discussion of the complexities of abortion in the Bible Belt before the topic's complete politicization. Please read them if you have not, yet had a chance. If that series is not nominated for a Koufax award, there is no justice in the blogosphere.

Aspazia was accompanied on the interviews by a conservative local reporter who was trying her best to shoehorn the views of the older generation into the contemporary intellectual trenches, but despite the efforts, continued to fail. The discussion then was not the discussion now. Back then abortion was not ABORTION. In the discussion attached to these reflections, a conversation began about why that transition occurred. Here are some additional thoughts on that topic.

Aristotle teaches us that there are always different ways to answer why questions. One is to cite what he calls "the efficient cause" -- that is, explain how it came to be. This is what we usually mean by cause -- what was the domino that knocked into this one, tipping it over? In this case, what historical factors led to the elevation of abortion to the exclusion of virtually all else in contemporary moral discourse? Another is the "final cause," that is, what end is being served by something, finding that for the sake of which it was done. It is looking not at what knocked over the domino, but why the dominoes were tipped in the first place. For what purpose was abortion elevated? The third aspect we'll discuss is the formal cause, what is the structure that makes the thing what it is. What are the rhetorical moves that allowed abortion to dwarf the rest of the pressing issues that we need to take seriously as a society?

The Efficient Cause
As there have been a number of very good expositions on the use of abortion in the rise of the religious right, let me merely point you to two wonderful sources. Thomas Frank has an excellent chapter in What's The Matter With Kansas where he traces back to 1991 and the "Mercy Summer" in Wichita when the football stadium was packed to the rafters with anti-abortion activists. The hyper-enthusiasm surrounding the issue, seeing that many people with that much passion for the cause in one place, he argues, caused a gestalt switch in the minds of abortion foes and turned abortion into ABORTION. Michelle Goldberg in Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism traces the movement and the use of abortion back farther in an integrated history of the rise of Christian evangelical political power. The stories they tell are compelling from a number of angles and well worth the read.

The Final Cause
What turned abortion into ABORTION is the fact that on both sides of the argument ABORTION is not about abortion, it is about larger political aspirations and ramifications. This is not to say that pro-choice advocates do not truly want abortion to be safe and legal, nor is it to say that pro-life advocates do not want abortion to become illegal and to cease. Both do; BUT, while they have views on abortion, ABORTION means something much larger -- it has become a symbolic place in the political landscape that, like Jerusalem, holds radically different, but equally sacred meaning for both camps.

To the pro-life camp, ABORTION is the central battleground in the fight to Christianize American law, culture, and politics. It is not the morality of abortion which is important, it is the symbolism. There are lots of things that are seen by the religious right as immoral but legal, but none of these have the effect of abortion, none of these give rise to mass and often violent protest, and none of these are giving rise to back door attempts to plant legislative time bombs, like double homicide charges for murdering pregnant women or outlawing embryonic stem-cell research, that would serve to establish legal foundations for later abortion rulings in the courts. Abortion became ABORTION because it relates to contemporary secular approaches to sex and feminism, what the movement sees as two major hurdles to becoming a Christian nation. It is here that sex outside of wedlock and the promotion of women's rights can be tied to the death of innocents, the most horrific of wrongs. So if the Christianization cannot triumph here, it is doomed. But if it succeeds here, it will give rise to momentum that will break the backs of the secular opponents and the tide will roll Christianity to its rightful place as the foundation for this nation. ABORTION is seen as the leading edge of the front line in the war for the soul of the nation.

To the pro-choice camp, ABORTION is representative of every advance that women have made in their work to become full citizens and autonomous humans. The major successes of the movement to include women in the social contract as equal partners are at most only a couple of generations old. It is not even 100 years since women have been guaranteed the right to vote in the US. It is only since 1964, a scant 42 years since civil rights for women were guaranteed by law. And workplace rules and wages continue to be live issues that require continuing the fight. The hard-won advances are still green and not so entrenched that there is not fear of losing the them...Especially when there are social forces conspiring against them. ABORTION is not about abortion, it is about women having the right to control their bodies, it is about the right to be fully human and not mere vessels for fertilization. If women lose the right to abortion on demand, the fear is that women will lose the autonomy, the humanity, that they have finally gained and that the tide will have changed and other advances will be under attack. The slippery slope back to the days of immoral dehumanization will have begun.

For both sides, the question really has little to do with the morality or legality of abortion. The larger question of what it symbolizes and the momentum of who wins the battle is what turned abortion into ABORTION.

The Formal Cause
But there is another way of looking at what turned abortion into ABORTION and that is the form of the rhetoric, the ways of arguing that we see in the contemporary discussion. Because of linguist George Lakoff's work, much has been made of what he calls "framing" and there is no doubt that this is happening in this discussion. But there is another rhetorical trick that was crucial in the transformation of abortion into ABORTION.

Framing is the act of setting the parameters for discussion by choosing the language of the debate. What Lakoff shows is that words are not just "Hello, my name is" stickers that we put on things, they come with ways of seeing the world packed into them. Selecting certain words instead of others limits the discussion by putting certain topics on the table and others off the table. Both sides have done this in their choice of designators. "Pro-choice" frames the issue in terms of liberty and who wants to oppose freedoms to choose? "Pro-life" frames the issue in terms of the life or death of a fetus and who wants to be pro-death? The selection of the name is designed not only to designate which side one is on, but also to elevate (in a fallacious question-begging fashion) one part of the complex inter-related moral issues that are operative in this incredibly difficult ethical question.

But what we see is more than framing. We see another trick which I will term "caging". The idea behind caging is to take a series of related issues that you do not want acted upon and selecting a small single issue to pull attention way from all the rest. Like magicians who will do something flamboyant and fascinating with their left hand to keep you from seeing what they are doing with their right hand, the idea is to make one insignificant issue the focus of all attention in order to make sure that all other related issues are ignored. As long as there is a raucous passionate debate around that issue and it is made to seem of paramount importance, then the assumption by most listeners is that a fair and open debate on all issues is taking place and no one will notice what you are doing with regard to the other issues.

In this way, women's rights have been caged by ABORTION. All the time, effort, and money that could be going into furthering women's rights on a number of fronts are sucked into the ABORTION fight. Not only that, but how to cage the issue is determined by what issue is easiest to frame when let out of the cage. If conservatives chose to openly fight against voting rights or equal pay for equal work legislation, it would put them clearly on the side of immoral support of injustice and they would lose quickly and decisively. But by caging women's rights and only letting ABORTION out of the cage, any possible advances on the women's rights front are stopped in their tracks and pro-lifers can portray themselves as the defenders of families and innocent life, not the opponents of women's rights.

In the same way, civil rights issues have been caged with only affirmative action set outside the cage. We can bring the civil rights charge to a halt by focusing all attention only on hiring in a small set of cases. Again, this is made more effective when the caging is combined with framing -- affirmative action is only to be addressed in terms of quotas. In this way, the advancement of civil rights legislation not only stops, but those stopping it do so by portraying themselves as opposing discrimination.

The framing and caging of environmental issues have not worked in concert and has been less successful. The framing is in terms of jobs vs. spotted owls. The caging has been around national parks. Pay attention, virtually the only time you will hear discussion from the administration about environmental issues is in terms of protecting or using the national parks and national forests. These are important places, but far from the most important environmental issues facing us today. But by caging the other issues, snowmobiles in Yellowstone will take up the resources to fight the real problems.

Gay rights? Cage questions about hate crimes, workplace discrimination, housing discrimination,... only let out marriage. Then frame it in terms of "protecting the family." Cage and frame.


Abortion, thus, became ABORTION for several reasons. (1) It is an issue that historically took on a life of its own and became a rallying point, (2) it is deeply symbolic in struggles on both sides of the political spectrum that makes it ground zero in the culture war, and (3) it is an effective way to cage off other issues that those with certain agendas want off the table.

Economic Justice and Caging

Our friend Oxymoronic Philosopher has a very nice meditation on an editorial by Beth Shulman -- well worth the read. It was in thinking about a point made in Shulman's wonderful book, The Betrayal of Work, that I first realized the rhetorical trick I have come to call "caging."

Caging is a way to defeat policy proposals on a set of related issues by designing public discourse in a way that makes sure that those issues never get raised. This is the rhetorical version of an intentional walk in baseball -- you don't deal with the next batter in the order, you decide who you want to pitch to. You take a whole segment of the political discussion and put it in a cage, letting out only that single issue you want in front of the public. As long as the chosen topic has an air of contention and you can spark passionate debate around it (the louder, the better), the single issue will draw all the attention and no one will notice everything you've artfully kept off the table.

We discussed a couple of examples a few weeks ago (see the link for the difference between caging and framing). On the morally wrong side of the civil rights movement? No problem, just make sure that the only discussion around race and justice that you let out of the cage is affirmative action. That will be enough to use up all the activist oxygen in the room and the rest of the concerns just disappear. Getting your moral butt kicked over questions of gender fairness and women's rights? Just take all of it and put it in a cage, only letting out abortion. In order to defend abortion, women's organizations and advocates will devote all their time and effort to that fight and not push forward on other fronts. In fact, within the abortion debate itself, we've seen caging. Don't discuss all of abortion, the only procedure worth talking about is D&C that is done in the last trimester. Reduce the whole reduced matter even further. How low will you go? Seen as bad guys for preferring corporate profits at the expense of God's green Earth? No biggie -- just put all ecological issues in a cage and only let out National Parks and drilling in ANWR. All those green groups will have their focus pulled off of the other nasty things the contributor to your campaign are doing to save a piece of land in nowhere Alaska.

What Shulman points out in The Betrayal of Work is the caging that we see around questions of economic justice. She begins by pointing out that we have a whole slew of underpaid positions where people work hard for long hours and still are unable to achieve a humane standard of living. In the Clinton welfare reform mania, the argument peddled was Reagan's updated version of the Protestant work ethic -- all people who could work should work because working was the honorable way to feed one's family. Employment in the larger market economy was seen as a moral imperative. Any able bodied person who was not contributing to the marketplace, by virtue of not contributing to the overall financial structure of our nation, is a despicable person not deserving of concern or help regardless of personal circumstances. Using phrases like "family values," raising one's children was not seen as legitimate work because you were not punching a time clock and selling your labor to someone who could profit from it.

Now, those people who insist that all people work jobs -- any jobs -- in order to support their families, must surely also argue that anyone who follows their advice and works full time in a position in the marketplace should be able to feed his or, more often, her family, right? I mean if you are arguing that working any job is imperative for living a decent life, then one ought to be able to live a decent life while working any job. It seems logically and ethically necessary for those who championed welfare reform to also stand strongly in favor of a mandatory livable wage...um...well...it would seem that way wouldn't it...

But those folks, in fact, are by in large not in favor of progressively dealing with these questions and oppose remedies for purely financial reasons (follow the money...follow the political contributions...(cough)Chamber of Commerce(cough)morally bankrupt?(cough)...). How should we deal with this moral hotspot?

Why, cage it, of course.

The only issue we will allow on the floor is worker retraining. If people are in dead end low paying jobs, we'll talk about nothing other than how to get them more education so they can get better jobs. This seems caring, this seems compassionate. We are giving them a hand to reach the ladder so they can climb up the social hierarchy by themselves. We are teaching them to fish. What could be nicer?

But notice what is left in the cage... Let's set aside all of the problems of child care, how they can afford to go without a paycheck while training, their anxiety towards schooling in the first place,..., and say for the sake of argument that these job training programs are successful for many of these workers and they do leave to become data entry folks or nursing assistants and get slightly higher pay. Do the dead end jobs they left suddenly vanish like Siegfried and Roy's scantily dressed assistant?

Of course not, they are filled by someone else who is now caught in the horrible situation of the working poor. There will always be people in these jobs. Training some people to do other jobs is a red herring that takes our eyes off of the questions about how to humanely treat those who fill these jobs. Those poorly paid jobs, many with no benefits, will always have people in them and instead of asking the hard question about economic justice, we are led to questions of job training and whether it ought to be church-based groups that offer it, tax credits,... Et voila, POOF, what happened to the discussions of minimum wage increases, about mandatory livable wages, about guaranteed health insurance,...? Where are they? You'll find them, of course, in the cage, right where they know you won't look.

Why You Can't Depoliticize Abortion

Scott over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money has an interesting amplification of Dana's post on the futility of the calls to depoliticize abortion. Both are worth a read, but there is a crucial point missing from both of these, which I discussed here, that warrants rehashing.

Dana's point is a pragmatic one.

"I dream about a world in which women's health choices are de-politicized, but alas, I don't live in one. So until I do, it's something I'll be looking out for in every election. Conservatives certainly are."

Abortion has always been politicized, she argues, and as such those like Will Saletan who call for a negotiated third way are really advising Democrats that we would be better off bringing a knife to a political gun fight.

Scott argues that the depoliticization is impossible because abortion satisfies two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an issue to be necessarily political:

We've already been through this with respect to the Iraq War, but you can't "de-politicize" an issue that is a) salient, and b) on which substantial groups of people have fundamentally incommensurable views.

The Iraq analogy is a good one, but for a reason that neither Scott nor Dana address.

It is not merely because there are deeply held, mutually exclusive viewpoints on an issue as salient as reproductive rights that we possess our bifurcated political situation. To understand what is happening it is crucial to see that there is a slickly designed equivocation in our political discussions. There is a difference between abortion and *ABORTION*. Our discourse concerns *ABORTION* and has little if anything to do with abortion. *ABORTION* is a wholly political animal. To depoliticize *ABORTION* would be tantamount to creating Steven Wright's famed "dehydrated water." What is crucial to understand, but missed by many, is that *ABORTION* has eaten abortion such that any time we think we're talking about abortion, we have no choice but to descend into the terms of *ABORTION* and this was done intentionally.

If it were possible to decouple them and to have a conversation about abortion, then views like Saletan's in which we act in such a way to minimize the number of unwanted pregnancies would provide us with hope of being able to bridge the cultural divide and come to policy changes that would better the world and the lives of those in it. He can't figure out why pro-lifers aren't in favor of common sense measures like funding contraception. If they really are so deeply committed to making sure abortions do not occur, then surely they would be strongly in favor of any policy that would allow us to avoid the precondition for the possibility of an abortion. What makes Saletan's discussion so naive that you want to pat him on the head and buy him an ice cream cone is that the silly boy thinks that when he hears people talking about *ABORTION*, he thinks they are really talking about abortion.

*ABORTION* is a front, a shill issue, for those who are pushing a radical Evangelical Christian theocratic agenda. Those leading the charge against *ABORTION* are not interested in pragmatic policy options to that would bring about fewer abortions, they are interested in Christianizing American law, culture, and politics. Pragmatism is every bit as much an enemy to them as opposing ideology. It isn't a question of helping women avoid unfortunate and undesired circumstances for them. *ABORTION* is the leading edge, the public face of their righteous crusade between absolute good and anyone who disagrees with them. They do not merely want to decrease the number of abortions, they want to make sure that unmarried people don't have sex, they want to make sure that abortions are made illegal and punishable by law, they want their Dominionist worldview and the policies that they see as springing from it to be unassailably instantiated.

Why use *ABORTION* for this? This requires understanding one of the most effective conservative rhetorical gambits of the last couple decades, what we can call the "cage and frame" strategy. Framing, as discussed by linguist George Lakoff, is the act of setting the parameters for discussion by choosing the language of the debate. What Lakoff shows is that words are not just "Hello, my name is" stickers that we put on things, they come with ways of seeing the world packed into them. Selecting certain words instead of others limits the discussion by putting certain topics on the table and others off the table. Both sides have done this in their choice of designators. "Pro-choice" frames the issue in terms of liberty and who wants to oppose freedoms to choose? "Pro-life" frames the issue in terms of the life or death of a fetus and who wants to be pro-death? The selection of the name is designed not only to designate which side one is on, but also to elevate (in a fallacious question-begging fashion) one part of the complex of inter-related moral issues in this incredibly difficult ethical question.

But what we see is more than framing. We see another trick which I term "caging" in which one takes a series of related issues that you do not want acted upon and then selects a small single issue to pull attention way from all the rest. Like magicians who will do something flamboyant and fascinating with their left hand to keep you from seeing what they are doing with their right hand, the idea is to make one insignificant issue the focus of all attention in order to make sure that all other related issues are ignored. As long as there is a raucous passionate debate around that issue and it is made to seem of paramount importance, then the assumption by most listeners is that a fair and open debate on all issues is taking place and no one will notice what you are doing with regard to the other issues.

In this way, women's rights have been caged by abortion. All the time, effort, and money that could be going into furthering women's rights on a number of fronts are sucked into the abortion fight. Not only that, but how to cage the issue is determined by what issue is easiest to frame when let out of the cage. If conservatives chose to openly fight against voting rights or equal pay for equal work legislation, it would put them clearly on the side of immoral support of injustice and they would lose quickly and decisively. But by caging women's rights and only letting abortion out of the cage, any possible advances on the women's rights front are stopped in their tracks and pro-lifers can portray themselves as the defenders of families and innocent life, not the opponents of women's rights.

In the same way, civil rights issues have been caged with only affirmative action set outside the cage. We can bring the civil rights charge to a halt by focusing all attention only on hiring in a small set of cases. Again, this is made more effective when the caging is combined with framing -- affirmative action is only to be addressed in terms of quotas. In this way, the advancement of civil rights legislation not only stops, but those stopping it do so by portraying themselves as opposing discrimination.

Gay rights? Cage questions about hate crimes, workplace discrimination, housing discrimination,... only let out marriage. Then frame it in terms of "protecting the family." Cage and frame.

You cage all but the issue that is easiest for you to frame and for this reason, abortion was selected. The murder of innocent babies by promiscuous fornicators to protect their hedonistic lifestyle was seen as the perfect high-ground from which to attack the Fort Sumter of contemporary secular American politics. And it was in this role that abortion became *ABORTION*. When we talk about about reproductive rights, we are fighting a proxy battle. Yes, protecting reproductive rights is important, but that is not really what is happening here. *ABORTION* is not just about abortion, a salient issue on which substantial groups of people have fundamentally incommensurable views. No, *ABORTION* is the "Battle of the Bulg(ing Belly)" in the culture wars. It is their recruiting mechanism, their rallying cry, the place they've chosen to make their definitive stand. If they can't win substantial battles on that hill, on the most easily framable ground there is, their movement withers.

Abortion cannot be depoliticized because one of the most important political developments of the late 20th/early 21st century developments in American politics --the movement that began with Goldwater's defeat and Nixon's Southern strategy, moved through Gingrich's Contract with America and its sponsorship by the Christian Coalition, and reached its high water mark with Bush's re-election -- has staked its very existence on making sure that abortion is inseparable from *ABORTION*. As such, you can't depoliticize abortion without depoliticizing *ABORTION*. And you can't depoliticize *ABORTION* without depoliticizing politics itself. But that, of course, would be like dehydrating water.

The Charlie Brown-ization of Political Ethics

[For those new to the Playground, I've been working on a book entitled, Was It Morally Good For You, Too?: A How-To Guide to Ethics in Sex, Politics, and Other Dirty Words. One of the ideas I've been working to nail down is a rhetorical move to undermine ethical conversation in this society that I call "caging." Here is a lengthy excerpt which is my latest attempt to explicate the move. Comments would be gratefully appreciated.]

Ethical issues have become political footballs. But like Charlie Brown, whenever liberals go to kick it and push their agenda forward, the right, like Lucy, pulls the ball away, leaving progressives to look like fools lying on the ground “Waaaaaah…THUMP.” What’s the trick and why do liberals keep falling for it over and over and over again?

There is no denying that political issues almost always have inextricably moral dimensions. At the same time, the words “ethics,” “morality,” and “values” have been so abused in partisan rhetoric that they have lost virtually all meaning. It was a good move, at first. If you can wrap your position in a cloak of righteousness, whether it is morally upright or not, it makes your policy proposal unassailable. And if you can get the media to buy in, you’re golden. That’s how it came to be that people who want to ensure that gay and lesbian Americans could be openly discriminated against would be called “values voters” while those who argue that bigotry is wrong are somehow opposing morality.

On the one hand, this is nothing new. When Cato the Elder campaigned long and hard for a Roman pre-emptive invasion of Carthage, he used explicitly moral terms in which to couch his plan to lay siege to a city that had done nothing to harm. To this day, G. Gordon Liddy, continues to claim that the nefarious and illegal tactics of the Nixon administration were morally justified.

But, on the other hand, there have always been voices of true moral clarity making demands for social change that derive from high ethical principles; in John Adams’ vehement and gorgeously articulate opposition to slavery and in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s words and deeds to secure women the vote. This moral-based approach was the driving force of 20th century American politics. The liberation movements of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, movements for the rights of seniors and the disabled strove to incorporate all Americans into the political fabric of the nation. The ultimate sacrifice was risked and paid by many activists who worked tirelessly so that every member of this nation would be seen as true citizens equal under the law. It was there in the labor movement’s efforts to clean up the “jungle” that claimed the limbs and lives of exploited workers who toiled in unsafe workplaces for unrelenting hours for unfair wages and whose children had little hope of avoiding the fate of their parents. And it was embodied in the environmental movement’s work to change our relationship to the land we inhabit, to clean up rivers that caught fire because of corporate polluters, save species that were in grave danger of extinction, and protect our families from dangerous industrial chemicals that were in our air, water, and food. It is truly remarkable to see how different the nation is at the turn of this new century when compared to the last.

After the combination of McCarthyism, ending up on the wrong side of the civil rights and women’s rights movements and Watergate had exacted its toll on the moral standing of American conservatism, the Democrats’ sleaze and abuses of power gave the right an opening that they seized with both hands. They saw that the path back to influence required claiming moral superiority. But when your platform is centered around opposition to civil rights and women’s rights, enshrining bigotry and discrimination towards gays and lesbians in the law, undermining environmental protection so that corporations can make more money, opposition to paying workers a living wage, decreasing the nutritional value of school lunches so that needy children get fewer vegetables,… How in the world could they get around all of the problematic moral baggage?

Two words: cage and frame.

In her book, The Betrayal of Work, Beth Shulman points out a nifty red herring that gets pulled whenever questions about a livable wage get brought up. You saw it in Reagan’s rhetoric – including that usurped by Bill Clinton's welfare reform mania – and you see it again today. The first step is to argue that work is a moral imperative. Any able bodied person not contributing to the economy is a lazy, shiftless, good for nothing deserving only of contempt. Anyone not punching a time clock does not deserve government help.

Now, it seems to follow that if you believe that everyone should work for a living, then you ought to support the notion that anyone who does a fair days labor ought to be able to feed his, or more often her, family and afford rent or mortgage in a safe, livable space. If you argue that you should work for a living then surely you would support a mandatory livable wage for that work. That, of course, is not the case.

Whenever questions about a livable wage come up, they always shift the discussion to job training and community college funding. The idea is that if these people are not earning much money because they are in dead end jobs, we’ll show them how to get better jobs and that will solve their problem. Not only do we teach a man to fish, but we teach him how to land the big ones. What a thoughtful idea.

But notice what the magician’s other hand was doing… Let’s say that Tanya was trapped in a dead-end job that took long hours, had no insurance benefits, was physically dangerous, and did not provide enough money to cover expenses for her and her child. We give Tanya job training and she becomes a data entry specialist and has a better lot in life. But what about the job that Tanya left? It’s still there, it’s still long, hard, underpaid, uninsured, and dangerous. Only now it is filled by Juanita…and it still does not provide enough to feed, clothe, and shelter her family.

The move to job training and community college funding is an extremely clever rhetorical trick because what it does is draw your eye to the specific person working the dead-end job and away from the people who will invariably be working that dead-end job. The point is that there will always be someone in that position and the real question is whether that worker, be it Tonya, Juanita, or whomever, will get the reward we expect for doing an honest day’s work. There is no doubt that we need to do more in terms of affordable higher education and having been a community college instructor myself, I cannot say enough wonderful things about the work they do. Similarly, job training is a fantastic thing, especially in an economy that is rapidly changing from being manufacturing-based to service-based. But steering the conversation to these issues has the effect of taking the other issues that industry groups and the Chamber of Commerce don’t even want discussed – mandatory health coverage, livable wages, humane treatment of workers – and like Siegfried and Roy’s scantily dressed assistant, POOF, they are nowhere to be found.

But further, we have shifted the locus of responsibility completely. We can now say that if we have enough available slots in the local community college or job training center that anyone who ends up in a dead-end job is the one to blame. We no longer have to consider them or the real questions of social justice. It is their fault and no one else’s that they have that job. If only they had the initiative, they wouldn’t be there. POOF, no more thoughts about those people working hard, doing tough, dirty, nasty jobs for hours on end that we want done for us.

The trick here is one that we see all across the spectrum of contemporary moral issues and it has two moving parts. The first has been pointed out by linguist George Lakoff who has termed it “framing.” Lakoff points out that words are not mere “hello my name is” badges that we stick on things. Rather, words come pregnant with emotional and normative connotation. Hence, the way we choose to express a given question will affect what the initial tug on the hearer will be. If we take the inheritance tax and ask whether rich kids should get gobs of money tax free for having been born with a silver spoon in their mouth, it gets a different response than when you ask whether the death tax on everything you spent a lifetime laboring for and which you choose to leave your loving family is fair. In the abortion debate, both sides are trying their damnedest to claim the frame. Is it a question about choice – after all who wants your choices legislated away? Or is it about life because everyone, of course, prefers life to death. Lakoff picks up on something that Friedrich Nietzsche also held a century before: he who controls the vocabulary holds the power.

But framing, powerful as it is, is only half the trick. You want to be able to favorably frame the issues that people see, but you don’t want them to see the issues you can’t easily frame. Like a pitcher who intentionally walks a slugger to get to the batter hitting behind him, you want to be able to pick and choose who you have to pitch to. If you think a batter could hurt you, you want to take the bat out of his hands.

The trick here is what I term “caging.” When you have a collection of related issues and you want absolutely none of them discussed, what you want to do is to keep them all in a cage. In order to make sure no one opens the cage to let them out, the key is to pick one issue that you will turn into the token concern and let it and it alone out of the cage. The key to success here is that it needs to be an issue that you can easily frame in a way that favors your side, but also an issue that is near and dear to the heart of your political opponents, a fight that they will refuse to give up at any cost.

Once that issue is framed and placed in the public conversation, you now need to motivate your side to think that winning the battle on this issue is essential to saving civilization, the security of their family, the continuance of their faith...something both big and ephemeral, something that makes sense intuitively, but something that is not directly measurable except through cherry picked examples of how bad it is out there. This will keep your folks in line behind your position on this sacrificial lamb of an issue.

The other side will see the passion of their political opponents and sense that they, too, must rush to the defense of their side lest they lose on this important issue. All of their advocacy groups will funnel time, money, energy, and media attention to the issue you've selected...money, time, and attention that used to go to the other issues in the cage. Like a pitcher who intentionally walks a big slugger to pitch to the weaker batter that follows, you decide which battle to fight and which ones languish harmlessly in the cage.

It is crucial that you not win a quick victory. Like the U.S. government feeding military intelligence to both parties in the Iran/Iraq war, you want the conflict to continue. The point is for it to suck all the oxygen out of the room leaving the issues you didn't want discussed to quickly asphyxiate and this requires being a resource drain on both sides. The argument must be loud, constant, and if possible, highly uncivil. The passion around the issue will give the false impression of completely open debate, thereby camouflaging your move to cage the widest majority of issues and the incivility will give rise to cynicism in the vast majority of non-activists in the middle. They'll want some compromise between the sides on the token issue and get completely turned off to any related debate. In other words, they won't give a damn whether there are other issues in the cage at all. The activists will be distracted and the non-activists will not pay attention. The "cage and frame" gambit therefore assures that no progress will be made on issues you want completely off the table.

Where do we see caging and framing? Don't want women's issues to be discussed? Let abortion out of the cage. Don't want environmental issues to be discussed? Let drilling in the Arctic National wildlife Refuge out of the cage. Don't want bigotry and discrimination against gays and lesbians discussed? Let gay marriage out of the cage. Don't want civil rights discussed? Let affirmative action in hiring out of the cage. Don't want to talk about helping needy children? Let out of the cage discussions of the sexual habits of the underclass. Cage and frame, cage and frame, cage and frame.

The beauty of the move is that it is a perfect rhetorical trap. If your opponent fails to take the bait, they lose an issue near and dear to their hearts and if they try to point to the other issues still in the cage, you can accuse them of changing the subject. When this is done in the heat of battle, it makes their positions on all of those issues seem weak. As if they don't have the goods to stand and fight on the issue at hand. Like John Kerry refusing to refute the Swift Boat attacks in the 2004 Presidential election, not buying into the scam will make you look pathetic and vulnerable to even more attacks.

So is there no answer to it? There is a way to liberate the imprisoned moral issues. But the key is that it cannot happen in the middle of the debate. It must happen in a measured, careful discussion; one that treats all concerns open-mindedly and which allows for careful, creative alternatives to be considered. We need to authentically consider competing views with an eye towards understanding the insights that come from all sides of the discussion. This is not to say that one direction or another is not to be preferred, but we need to try to strip away as much of the faux framing as possible and see what are the real trade offs and sacrifices we make with each option, what are the possible ways of finding compromise, if any, and consider the moral nature, costs, and benefits of each possible alternative. We need civil fucking discourse: civil in allowing every voice a seat at the table, but uncivil in rigorous assessing each and mercilessly rejecting those views that fail to meet rational muster. We need to think hard and talk to each other in a way that is designed to push forward good faith approaches to finding truth, not in a way designed to push forward a political agenda. Honest, robust conversation is the key to the cage.

The Winner in Last Night's Debate? Frank Luntz

Last night on Logo, a gay-focused cable station, most of the Democratic candidates attended a forum to discuss GLBT issues (Biden and Dodd were no-shows as were all of the Republicans who were also invited to participate). The winner of that debate, Frank Luntz.

There was universal agreement on preventing discrimination in housing, the workplace, the military, on everything except...yup, gay marriage. The two bottom tier candidates, Gravel and Kucinich, had no problem with it; but the front-runners, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, all said they're in favor of separate but equal civil unions. Why would that be? Why are prominent Democrats no longer afraid to stand up in front of an openly gay and lesbian crowd, face tough questions about their stances on human rights, but in the end gingerly tip-toeing around this one question about equal rights under the law?

The answer has nothing to do with the issue itself, but with the incredible success of a rhetorical strategy employed by the right that we can call "cage and frame." The move has, as the name denotes, two steps. One of them, framing, has been elucidated by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who correctly points out that the words we use are not mere "hello, my name is" stickers that we apply to objects in the world allowing us to refer to objects in a value-free way. Words, rather, are pregnant with worldviews, with assumptions about how things work and beliefs about their harmfulness or helpfulness. Our names for things are frames that cast the things we talk about in a certain light, a light that will highlight some aspect of the thing in a way that will lead us towards or away from certain views of it.

Notice how we call it "gay marriage" instead of "universal marriage." The name that we give the issue frames the debate around whether them, the scary other, those "weird gay people," should be given a right, and not about whether or not legal marriage with its privileges like hospital visitation, inheritance, and power of attorney should be free from bigotry should be a part of our laws. Of course, it is about that, but the name, like a magician's misdirection, leads your mind in one direction and not the other.

But that framing is not the only thing that is happening here. The second part to the rhetorical trick is caging. The idea here to take a collection of related issues that you want buried away from the public eye, concerns on which you not only don't want action, but you don't even want discussed, and you group them together. Of those, you pick one, generally the one that is easiest for you to frame in a way favorable to your cause and put it and it alone on the table. All other issues are put in a cage, safely beyond the consciousness of the general public because the one you've allowed out of the cage sucks up all the oxygen in the room. As long as you present a boisterous debate -- the more noisy, rage-filled, and contentious the better. Because of the displayed passion by those on both sides, people will be fooled into thinking that there is free and open discourse about all issues. Meanwhile, you've tied it all up and made sure that nothing would happen on any of them.

And that is precisely what we saw last night. The right has successfully caged all gay rights issues except for universal marriage. This gave the disappointingly cowardly front-runners the cover they needed to put on a strong face and say that they were more than willing to stand with those in favor of human rights...right up to the point of marriage. Why could they not go that step when there is absolutely no difference philosophically? Because we have allowed the right to cage all the other issues and frame this one.

What we saw last night was not only evidence that their strategy is successful, but also a reinforcement of the frame from our side, reinforcement in the Pavlovian sense that only makes the bigoted and morally problematic political baggage more deeply entrenched in how the issue is approached anytime, anywhere. Who won the debate? Frank Luntz, the man who masterminded the strategy, and all those who stand against full and legitimate equality under the law of all Americans. I am thrilled that the step was taken to bring GLBT issues out into an open forum widely attended by most of those vying for the Democratic nomination, but deeply disappointed at what they ended up doing with the opportunity.