“206. Clayton E. Cramer:
THAT was FREAKIN’ AWESOME and AMEN!”
Thank you. I went from reluctantly pro-choice to reluctantly pro-life largely because of my research into antebellum slavery apologetics, and the abolitionist battle. The parallels between defenders of slavery and defenders of unlimited abortion were startling–right down to:
1. It’s a Constitutional right. (And in both cases, the word never appears there–although it is clear that “bound to labor” was intended by the Framers to cover slavery, along with apprentices.)
2. The Supreme Court not only upheld the right, but did so in a way that dramatically expanded it from some states to all states. (Dred Scott.)
3. The decision was immediately controversial, and provoked a firestorm of protest.
4. The Democrats were the party of slavery, and Republicans were the party in opposition.
5. Proslavery advocates engaged in the most interesting circumlocutions to avoid admitting what they were discussing. They didn’t admit that a master owned a slave–just owned his labor.
6. Proslavery advocates argued that slavery wasn’t just in the best interests of the master, but even in the best interests of the slave. (“Every child a wanted child.”) Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! went so far as to define slavery as a traditional form of socialism, and how slavery was so good for slaves that poor whites should sell themselves into slavery to get the benefits of being enslaved. (And yes, the parallels to Marx’s writings are so strong that slavery historians have looked for evidence that Marx might have read Fitzhugh’s work.)
7. Proslavery judges referred to abolitionists as “semi-religious fanatics” and argued that “real” Christians would never oppose holding slaves.
8. Like FACES, the Fugitive Slave Act federalized what had formerly been a state crime, because the state laws were not vigorously enforced, and juries in many rural areas of the North were beginning to have large numbers of abolitionist leaning jurors. By comparison, trial under the Fugitive Slave Act was in big cities where Democrats were dominant, and were unsympathetic to abolitionism. In addition, just like FACES, the Fugitive Slave Act relied on enormous fines ($1000, equivalent to perhaps $20,000 or $30,000 today) to break the financial back of the abolition movement–just like FACES with its $20,000 fines was designed to break the back of the modern abortion clinic blockade movement.
