Comments Elsewhere

Hey, look, it’s another male Leftist pissing all over other social justice movements in order to demand attention for his pet cause:

Political discourse in this nation centers on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and there is a real paucity of debate on matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans, such as the stunning loss of manufacturing jobs.

It may very well be true that abortion has never actually impacted on Ephraim Harel’s daily life; but since in the real world over a million women have abortions every year, and about one in three American women will need an abortion by the time she reaches age 45 (and the women who need them are, incidentally, disproportionately working-class), it’s a pretty damn important issue for the daily lives of a lot of ordinary Americans. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this leaves not a few of us with the lingering impression that women’s daily lives just don’t matter very much to some male Leftists.

Harel’s perfectly right to remind the Left of the importance of labor organizing, to call for more aggressive unionism, and to question the AFL-CIO’s ongoing efforts to act as if they were running a PAC rather than a labor union. These are all things worth saying, and views worth promoting. But they are not worth saying or promoting at the expense of women’s struggle for control over their own bodies and their own lives. Goodbye to all that.