Tony Perkins' genital politics

So back on Wednesday the House of Representatives passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, approving funding for the State Department and the Peace Corps for another two years. The official summary for H.R. 2410 reads:

"Other purposes" you say? Ah, Tony Perkins smells a fundraising opportunity. Those "other purposes" may provide the fodder for something he can use to terrify the members of his Family Research Council, and if he can keep them scared, he can keep them writing checks. So Perkins sifted through the 342 pages of this appropriations bill and found there a couple of items that might loosen the sphincters and purse strings of his eager-to-be-frightened followers.

If you're familiar with Perkins' career, you won't be surprised to learn that these two things are the same two things he's always shrieking about: Abortion and homosexuality. When you've had as much practice as Perkins has, it's not hard to sniff out traces of these in every omnibus appropriations bill and then to elevate them to its primary themes so that you can pretend that a bill "to authorize appropriations for the Department of State and the Peace Corps for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, to modernize the Foreign Service, to authorize democratic, economic, and social development assistance for Pakistan, to authorize security assistance for Pakistan, and for other purposes" is nothing more than a Yes/No vote on abortion and gays.

This is, after all, how Perkins reads the Gospels. None of those books contains even a hint of anything that can be wrestled into a statement on abortion and gays, but he treats them all as treatises defending his peculiarly obsessive strain of genital politics.

Perkins' "Eeek! Gays!" response to H.R. 2410 is at least somewhat explainable. What has his panties in a twist is this section, 140 pages in:

Sec. 333 also contains a provision stating that reports tracking systematic and legal discrimination in other countries will now keep track of discrimination based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity" as well as the religious and ethnic discrimination they previously tracked. Perkins is happy that these reports keep track of systematic and legal discrimination against Christians in countries in which they are a religious minority, but he's appalled at the notion that the State Department would also be concerned by the exact same kinds of bias and oppression when it is exercised against "actual or perceived" sex or gender minorities.

Rights for me but not for thee is the opposite of the rule of law. It's also the opposite of the Golden Rule. Opposing this section of this bill is impossible to reconcile with the Family Research Council's claim to "hate the sin but love the sinner." Perkins & Co. believe that homosexual sex is a sin, and that GLBT people need to pray away the gay — to get saved and let Jesus straighten them out. I understand that view, but I don't follow the leap from such a belief to the idea that we must ignore and implicitly condone the imprisonment or disenfranchisement of GLBT in other nations.

Perkins says that Sec. 333 above constitutes a "radical agenda" that would mean "one of the State Department's biggest priorities would be pressuring other countries to overturn laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior."

Perkins isn't just exaggerating by saying this would become "one of the State Department's biggest priorities," he's lying. It is not possible that he believes his own hyperbole here or his own deliberate distortion. The language of the bill is timid and requires no measurable outcomes. It says that the secretary of state "shall work … to encourage" the "reform or repeal" of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Just imagine if the bill directed the secretary "to encourage the reform" of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, would Perkins then accept the claim that this was "one of the State Department's biggest priorities"? Of course not.

Note also the liar Tony Perkins' blanket approval of "laws that restrict homosexual and transsexual behavior." He thinks it is wrong to encourage the reform of laws "criminalizing homosexuality or consensual homosexual conduct." He approves of such laws. And more than that, he approves of laws "restricting the enjoyment of fundamental freedoms … by homosexual individuals." He wants to outlaw gayness and gay sex and he favors laws denying GLBT people the rights of free speech, free assembly, free exercise of their religion, the right to bear arms, to own property, to vote, etc. He favors such laws abroad and he favors such laws here at home.

So for Tony Perkins, restricting fundamental human rights is OK provided it's only for an unpopular minority. That argument always works out so well. …

It takes a bit more imagination for Perkins to characterize H.R. 2410 as an abortion bill, but the man has no shortage of imagination when it comes to injecting abortion politics anywhere and everywhere that he possibly can. Here is how Perkins introduces his diatribe against this bill for the funding of the State Department and the Peace Corps:

I'm not quite sure what "an international abortion headquarters" is supposed to describe, but it's hard to see how the Office of Global Women's Issues, as described in the legislation, would be anything of the sort. See if you can figure out what Perkins is talking about from the text of the bill:

Note that nothing in the above mentions abortion or reproductive health at all. Perkins is certain, though, that everything listed there as the agenda of the Office for Global Women’s Issues means one and only one thing: abortion. All that talk about integrating women and empowering them to become full and equal members of society is, to Perkins, nothing more than code words for abortion, abortion, abortion. And therefore, since Perkins is opposed to abortion, he concludes that he must oppose the empowerment of women and any effort to integrate them as full and equal members of male society.

That "therefore" in the preceding sentence is where so much of the anti-abortion movement either goes off the rails or shows itself to never have been on the rails in the first place. That "therefore" does not follow.

Tony Perkins is not a good person nor an honest broker, so let's set him aside for the moment to consider how a different person — someone truthful and arguing in good faith — might approach something like this Office for Global Women's Issues.

I used to work on anti-Apartheid stuff with a woman named Leah who was a devout Catholic who believed in the full humanity of the unborn from the moment of conception. Because of that premise, she argued that the unborn had a "right to life" which, in the case of abortion, she believed should outweigh the competing rights of the mother. She did not deny the existence or the validity or the importance of those competing rights, but simply argued that in this one circumstance, the unborn person's rights trumped them. Given her premise, that's a reasonable conclusion. It parallels the logic of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that your right to extend your arm ends where my nose begins.

But I'm afraid that people like Leah have not become the leading voices of the anti-abortion movement in this country. The leading voices belong to those who do not simply argue that one set of competing rights ought to outweigh the other, but who argue that only one set of competing rights is legitimate. Because my nose exists, they argue, you have no right, ever, to extend your arm. This is the sweeping non-sequitur we hear all the time from people like Perkins. He isn't satisfied to argue that a "right to life" for the unborn deserves to be weighed against the competing rights of the mother or of all women, but instead he races beyond anywhere his premise suggests or allows to insist that no such rights of the mother or of all women even exist.

We saw this absurdity on display here in Pennsylvania when it got our former junior senator, Rick Santorum, laughed out of office. Roe v. Wade was decided, in part, on the recognition of the fundamental right to privacy. Santorum's purported belief in the full humanity of the unborn ought therefore to have led him to argue that the right to privacy was, in the case of abortion, outweighed by the competing rights of the unborn, but Santorum wasn't satisfied to make that claim. Instead, he went mad. Santorum declared that the right to privacy does not exist, that any claim to such a right was a "myth," and that all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. He thus became an advocate not merely of "big government," but of boundless government. He was thus invited, by a huge bipartisan majority, to return to the, um, private sector.

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council are here following Santorum off the same cliff, repeating his lunacy as it applies to "gender integration and women’s empowerment." Perkins goes far, far beyond what logically flows from or is required by his premise of a commitment to a "right to life" for the unborn, choosing instead to deny, denounce and reject the very existence of any rights that might possibly compete with it.

As evidence that gender integration and the empowerment of women are simply code words for "unlimited abortion," (meaning only and exclusively that), Perkins quotes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "We are now an administration that will protect the rights of women, including their rights to reproductive health care." If reproductive health care might be construed to include legal abortion, then Perkins concludes that women must be denied reproductive health care. And if "protecting the rights of women" necessarily entails reproductive health care, then Perkins concludes that he must oppose rights for women — all rights for women. Thus he arrives at this astonishing place of fierce opposition to the integration and empowerment of women anywhere on earth.

Again, Perkins' position does not logically flow from his alleged premise of rights for the unborn. That premise does not and cannot carry him to the place at which he has arrived. So how did he get there?

I think it's safe to assume that this is where he has arrived because this is where he always intended to go. Tony Perkins opposes gender integration and women's empowerment. He opposes protecting the rights of women and he opposes women having any right to reproductive health care. He claims that he opposes all of these things based on his opposition to abortion, but that train won't get him there. He got there all on his own. Concern for the rights of the unborn had nothing to do with it.