Books and Tolerance

 I have a confession to make. I am addicted to book reviews. This stems from my addiction to reading books, of course. As I grow older, the realization that I won’t be able to read all the books on my list before my time to join the Celestial Design Committee grows ever more acute. The book reviews in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Atlantic, and others allow me to at least peek at a wide variety of books. 

A book review is like a Polaroid snapshot through another person's eyes. I have written some reviews (not NYT material) and found the process interesting. The reviewer’s biases will always be there. Reading one review tells you something about the book as well as the reviewer. I often disagree with the reviewer but that is human. Reading is a personal experience and the purpose of books is to expand understanding and knowledge about our world. No one sees the world through the same set of lenses.

I am behind in my book review reading, but I came across and read this one this morning: The Foundling by Ann Leary. This is a book of historical fiction and I realize fiction reading is one of my deficiencies. I was intrigued; the book is set in Pennsylvania in the late 1920s and deals with the horror of the Progressive Age, eugenics. The review’s author, Beatriz Williams, convinced me that this was a book that I should read. Eugenics has a real American foundation and was carried out in a variety of ways. All of the ways involved keeping women from having children because they were deemed by some authority to be unworthy of continuing their “bloodline”. 

Of course, with the recent SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the long precedent of Roe v Wade, this book is germane now. Women are being treated as second-class citizens at best by a movement with distinct echoes of the eugenics movement of the past. The thread connecting the gross error of Progressive Age eugenics with the evangelical anti-abortion faction today is the persecution of behavior that one group doesn’t like. The science, medicine, law, and ethics that the Progressives of the early 20th century used to justify eugenics were maximally flawed. The basis that the Dobbs ruling rests on is equally flawed scientifically, legally, medically, and ethically. It is also grossly flawed historically; Alito’s thinking is totally ahistorical.

Thus Dobbs. As Jennifer Rubin points out, the pain and suffering of women is already happening and will simply accelerate as a result of this nonsense. Rape victims, including children, being forced to carry to term. Fetal death and ectopic pregnancies where prompt intervention is thwarted. Physicians being compelled to violate their oath to care for patients by threats of arrest and prosecution. This is reality as I write.

We should not forget Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion on Dobbs in which he said other rights deemed protected under the Fourteenth Amendment (contraception, same-sex marriage, same-sex consensual sexual relations – but interestingly, not interracial marriage – hmm?) were also up for review by SCOTUS. My personal thoughts about Thomas and his wife Ginni are frankly unprintable. He will be happy to take us back to another place and time. Maybe SCOTUS wants to rethink Amendment XIX too.

There is much being written already about the Dobbs decision and its fallout. SCOTUS is behaving as a full-fledged arm of the GOP that believes that it can read the minds of the dead Founding Fathers instead of as a judicial body that considers people other than white males. There will be books written about this and they will be on my list to read. Put them on yours, too. We need citizens informed by facts, not ideologies. We cannot descend into roaring bigotry, misogyny, and intolerance without risking our democracy. Be angry as hell and VOTE EN MASSE THIS NOVEMBER.

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