In my recent Ron Paul rant post, I cited a comment I received via email from a woman whom I will not name, because I do not have her permission. I have exchanged emails and comments with her in the past, and I tend to identify her more with the socialist grouping she belongs to than anything else.

Here is that exchange again:

HER: “Hi. Saw your Counterpunch article. Guess you’ve abandoned women for the Gold Standard, huh?”

My reply: “More than half of Iraqis are women. Half of the billions who are immiserated by dollar hegemony are women… Paul’s position on choice is exactly that of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid was put in that position by a unanimous vote of the other D senators!”

The challenge to my admittedly provocative, “devil’s advocate” suggestion was even more glib than the throwaway suggestion on voting Paul (I have said in so many words, between the lines, that the probability that Paul would actually win is about on par with a comet hitting my house).

But I responded even more glibly still… and in that process I failed to take account that this person is not solely a member of a type of organization for which I have some growing reservations… she is a woman, and my publication of this exchange — with my numerical balance sheet approach — minimized the experiences of all women.

That Democrats like Reid are defenders of patriarchy does not justify my point-scoring reply. Paul’s opposition to reproductive choice is real, and a cause for concern, as should Kucinich’s (reversed for the election) position against abortion be. There are other issues related to Kucinich on gender… but that’s not what I’m here for.

A very dear friend noted to me:

You cannot sway a woman to vote away her right to chose, not even in the primaries as a short term tactic, by telling her that you’ve run the numbers and you can prove that her human rights are currently expendable because there are more pressing concerns, more people over here (in prisons, overseas, etc) who need those rights more than she needs hers, that it is 3 billion people vs. 40 million people, and she falls into the 40 million, so her rights aren’t something she should be bothered with. The reason you can’t win her over here in this way is that you are trying to rationalize something that is at its heart, irrational. I don’t mean that as a negative, irrational as in having no basis in truth, I mean that it’s an emotional response that is part of a woman’s experience, in the same way that rape is part of her shared known experience, even if she hasn’t personally been raped – she’s lived through that fear in some way, lived through the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, or thought through what if I were raped and couldn’t get an abortion . Trying to argue that out of a person with logic instead of coming at it from an empathetic standpoint is like trying to rationally argue the PTSD out of a person… I’ve been looking at Mandelbrot images, and that’s how the right to chose is, it’s the pregnancy itself, but it’s losing your job, it’s having your boss threaten disciplinary action against you for getting pregnant, it’s losing your ability to support yourself, it’s having someone smash your head against a wall and having to take it because you need a roof over your head.

That sums it up about as well as I could ever hope for.

Friends support us when we are right; and they warn us when we are wrong.

I was wrong.

I apologize, to my correspondent, to my friend who corrected me, and to all women.

Stan Goff, January 7, 2008.