The Right Tries to Usurp the Words “Life” and “Family”

By Rob Schofield

It has long been understood that things like packaging and labeling are important in politics and the societal “battle of ideas.” Theodore White’s bestseller The Making of the President 1960 made millions aware of the way in which JFK was the first president to be packaged and sold like a box of laundry detergent.

Long before that, Vladimir Lenin pulled off one of the slickest political marketing coups of all time when he managed to convert a win by his small band of hard line followers on a procedural vote into a political label (“Bolshevik” – which translates to “men of the majority”) that helped propel their eventual takeover of the Russian state. In one of the more bone-headed moves in political history, many of his more numerous and moderate adversaries took on the moniker “Menshevik” – “men of the minority.”  

In modern times, of course, the packaging and labeling wars are growing ever more sophisticated – especially on the extreme right. From the “Moral Majority” to “Compassionate Conservative” to the attempt to weaken air pollution and logging rules under programs called the “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives, to the repeated effort of market fundamentalist think tanks to conflate an extremist, anti-government agenda under the heading “freedom” (as in the so-called “Freedom Budget”), the right is persistent and, often, quite shameless.  

Last week, North Carolina was treated to another dose of this kind of absurd repackaging when the JW Pope Civitas Institute released it’s “Life and Family Issues Recap” of the 2007 session of the North Carolina General Assembly. According to the report, the issues of “life” and “family” are primarily about an extreme, back-to-the-19^th century social agenda that’s dedicated to making end of life decisions more complicated and difficult, banning abortion in all circumstances, limiting the rights of gays and lesbians, and limiting access to information about human sexuality.

Here, for instance, is the report’s complete summary of the 2007 budget bill as it relates to “life” and “family”:

2007-2009 Budget (HB 1473/ S.L. 2007-323)

Status: Signed by Governor Easley on July 31, 2007

Cost: At least $4.8 million for abortion and family planning services

As in past years, the FY2007-FY2009 budget appropriated a maximum of $50,000 annually for the State Abortion Fund, which may be used only to pay for abortion in cases of rape, incest, or risk to the life of the mother. The DHHS budget also allocated $4.1 million for family planning services and an additional $85,710 for “teen pregnancy prevention initiatives.” In addition, the budget provided $275,000 in new funding for the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Coalition of North Caro­lina, as well as $81,911 to create a new position to “provide leadership and direct the clinical activities” of the state’s Family Planning and Reproductive Health Unit. The budget also included a new appropriation of $200,000 in annual recurring funding for “family planning services” for uninsured women not eligible for Medicaid (i.e., illegal immigrants).

Although the report contains only a limited amount of direct analysis or commentary, it’s pretty darned clear from the issues included (and excluded) and the tone of many of the summaries just what the author is attempting to convey. According to the report, family planning is a term that should appear in quotations (i.e. “family planning” — as if the idea of birth control is a specious or objectionable concept), the HPV, hepatitis A and rotavirus vaccines are “controversial,” and in vitro fertilization is a questionable practice.

Reality Check

By just about any standard, the Pope Civitas report is strange. First of all, unlike most of the group’s reports, the “Life and Family Issues Recap” makes very little effort to stake out and/or explain positions on the issues it addresses. With the exception of an opening paragraph and its critique of a bipartisan bill to simplify and clarify the right to make advance medical directives, all of the summaries are presented as if they were merely neutral reports regarding the contents and status of several individual bills.

The editorializing is instead implicit in the selection of bills included, the categories the report uses and the more subtle ways the summaries characterize various proposals. Thus, a report on the “life” and “family” issues implicated in the 2007 session of the General Assembly — a session that lasted more than six months and featured the consideration of thousands of bills — confines its reporting to four bills that passed and 17 proposals that failed. The failed bills are divided into four categories: “Life Issues,” “Marriage,” “Homosexuality” and “Sex Education/HPV Vaccine.”

Nowhere in the report on “life” and “family” issues of the 2007 session are the following topics addressed:

• Health Care
• The Environment
• Childcare
• Education
• Domestic Violence
• Juvenile Justice
• Gun Violence
• Poverty
• Hunger
• Affordable Housing
• The Death Penalty
• Parks and Recreation

In short, the “Life and Family Recap” is nothing more than thumbnail sketch of what happened to a small subset of bills – almost all of which come from the “for” or “against” agendas of a narrow band of the religious right. Though mostly harmless in and of itself, the report deserves to be called out for at least a couple of additional reasons – both of which relate to the labeling and packaging battles of today’s public policy wars.

First, of course, is the attempt to misappropriate the words “life” and “family.” Notwithstanding the fact that these words may have come to be, in effect, code words with particular meanings for the religious right, any group which purports to engage in serious public policy analysis for a general audience ought to be able to do a better job of explaining what the heck they’re talking about.

To the extent that the use of the words “life” and “family” in this way is actually a part of a broader and intentional strategy to capture them for the use of far right (something that seems a more plausible explanation than mere carelessness) it deserves to be resisted at every opportunity. By any objective standard, these words have vastly broader meanings than the narrow ones ascribed to them by Pope Civitas.

The second reason to flag the report is to question what it says for the Pope Civitas agenda itself. Unlike its fellow travelers in the Pope, Inc. stable, the Locke Foundation, the Civitas group is extremely vague about its overarching philosophy. According to its website, the central objective of the group is “providing conservative solutions for North Carolina’s pressing issues.”    

To which many a reasonable person might respond: “What makes banning abortion or in vitro fertilization or family planning or making advanced medical directives more difficult to pursue ‘conservative’?” Many modern American “conservatives” clearly support all of those things. Many even see that support as born of their mistrust of government when it comes to the question of their most personal and private decisions.    

In the years to come, it seems likely that the competitors in America’s ongoing battle of ideas will continue to wrestle for control of words and labels. If the recent Pope Civitas report is any indication, however, the far right has begun to overreach.