The Fable of a Post-Roe World

There’s an old story I learned as a child. It wasn’t particularly religious, even though I lived in a conservative Christian home, but it was born somewhere in Greek history, somewhere among the pages of Aesop’s Fables, a story we all know as The Boy Who Cried Wolf. To recap, a young shepherd is tending his sheep in boredom, desperate for “a little company and some excitement,” so he plays tricks on the villagers, telling them there’s a wolf, over and over, until they no longer believe him, just when he so desperately needs to be believed. But at its core, it led me, it led us, it leads all readers and all hearers to consider that lies are always linear and easily proven false. Not so.

Last October, the halls in our school were adorned with campaign posters, about 40-50 kids all wanting to play a role in Student Government, which made me so proud. But at one point, I happened to notice several of the same posters had been slashed. Based on a familiar hunch, I was pretty sure I knew who ripped them and why, so I didn’t ask for anyone to show me the video surveillance. I simply went to that child and asked. He said no. At that point, I began walking with him and talking, then asked again. He said no. We walked a little more, chatting about other things, then I asked a third time and he stopped walking. He looked down at the ground and said yes, he was the one who had ripped the posters. He also told me why. None of it was justified, of course, but we dealt with it calmly and constructively. Because that’s how linear lies work. Someone fibs, someone else calls them on it, applies a little pressure, and the truth comes out.

But not all lies. For example, everyone reading this right now can name a person in their family for whom life hasn’t worked out so well. Health. Finances. Unemployment. And chances are, everyone reading this right now has had to help out that family member at some point, whether willingly or otherwise, simply because you knew it was the right thing to do. That’s essentially welfare, helping out someone who needs it, someone who fell into tough times. And that’s essentially what both major American political parties supported in the United States for most of the 20th Century until Ronald Reagan campaigned against the embellished notion of “welfare queens” who were milking the system. Ever since Reagan, there’s been a fairly common thread of insults and misinformation about poverty and homelessness among his party, a belief that everyone oughta just pull up their bootstraps and figure it out. To hell with the fact that they may lack bootstraps or the physical strength to pull them up. That was an example of a non-linear lie. Get on a stage and tell your audience that poor people are wasting your tax dollars and you’ll suddenly look at every poor person with a second glance of suspicion, like they PREFER to be poor, so they can get your money. That’s garbage. And everyone knows it. But it becomes harder to prove false when you can’t put your finger on anyone specific, when you can’t look out at a field of sheep and verify the absence of wolves.

Consider Nixon and the Watergate Burglary in 1972, Bush and the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump and the 2020 Election. These are the loudest and most obvious examples of leaders pushing a false narrative in order to get a political result. With Nixon, it required more than a year of reporting to get the truth out. With Bush, it took more than a decade. With Trump, well, we’re still in the middle of investigating that mess of a crap show.

But with all eyes on the Supreme Court of late, I wanted to speak less to the big lies and more to the little ones. More specifically, to one particular lie that’s always and frustratingly harder to spot. It’s the kind of lie that’s both proactive and deflective. It’s the lie that involves falsely accusing someone else of wrongdoing so that when you do it and someone sees you doing it and someone says that you’re doing it, you’ve already done enough legwork to make sure that any words they use are your words, not theirs. The term “fake news” is a great example, because if you can effectively claim that legitimate reporters, even those with bias, are “fake,” then you can spill out as much fake news of your own as you want and they won’t be able to use the word fake. Because you’ve already gotten ahead of the terms.

Case in point. When I was growing up conservative, the conversation about America was that all judges were liberal activists, or at least most of them. And even as I entered adulthood, I found that many conservatives would tell me to vote “no” on my ballot for all judicial reappointments, even if I didn’t know who they were or what they believed or how they dealt with the cases in their courtrooms. Just vote no. They’re all activists with an agenda. I’ve even got a book that was gifted to me in 2007 called “God On Trial,” which essentially made the case that America is a “religious battlefield.”

And that’s precisely the problem. It’s the proactive, deflective lie. It’s the argument that convinces a significant part of the population that there’s a war going on, that they need to be armed, that everyone is out to get them. So in essence, if this part of the population DOES actually do something wrong, or DOES actually deserve to be held accountable, they’ll be ready to go on the attack, as if they were above the law, above the truth.

In 1973, when Roe v Wade was decided, 7-2, the court was already leaning 5-4 conservative. And get this, one of the dissenting votes was a liberal. But for my entire life, all I’ve heard about is the “activist” judges that wrongly decided that case, that they all had agendas, that the case needed to be overturned. Never mind that no one I knew had actually read the case file, or studied the verdict, or examined the evidence, or considered the ramifications of a nation in which states could, then, and may, now, criminalize a woman for decisions that ought to remain between her and a doctor, just as the court conceded with great difficulty in 1973. Believe me, I’ve read the full case, and it doesn’t favor party politics, because a woman’s body, a woman’s privacy, a woman’s life, ought never to be a pawn of partisanship.

My friends, it may seem mysterious, how a minority party could accomplish so much against the will of the American majority. But it’s not all that mysterious. They control the terms by making them up or using them before anyone else does. They control the narrative by telling people there are monsters and threats and things to be afraid of, so that when they themselves do monstrous, threatening, fearful things, the rest of us won’t be able to use the same words. And unfortunately, there are no pastures, no fields, no simple collection of sheep for which we can all, in cooperation, step outside and agree that the boy was lying. What we have, instead, may look something like this:

There once was a man who harassed, abused, and victimized women without consequence. When the villagers decided to protect at least some of those women, the man thought upon a plan by which he could remove those protections. He rushed into another village and proclaimed that the first village was filled with corrupt villagers and evil women. This other village could not see the first village, so they took the man at his word, never taking the few extra steps to visit with the people he had accused of corruption and evil. This pleased the man so much that a few days afterwards, he went to yet another village and did the same. Eventually, the village that sought to protect the women from the harassing, abusive, victimizing man noticed a hill of armed people from other villages, pointing weapons at them and shouting slurs. Over time, the armed villagers made their way into the first village and threw all the women back at the man, allowing him to do with them as he pleased, ignoring the protections once instituted. Eventually, a wise man of the first village said: A liar will always be believed, so long as he goes to enough places, shouts in enough places, and so long as the people listening to the liar never even consider the possibility that they’re being lied to, or that there may be more to the story.

Welcome to the Fable of a Post-Roe World.