UsernameEmailRegionInterestAOL IMICQ IDYahoo! IDMSN IDJabber

Vexed by James Mumford review – provocative plea for political nuance

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/23/vexed-ethics-beyond-political-tribes-james-mumford-review

An academic’s argument for policy that bridges the left-right divide exposes the shortcomings of political ‘package deals’

Brendon Kaluza-Graham was born in Spokane, Washington, to parents who were just 14 and 16. His life was split between his separated mother and father and both sets of grandparents, before he was killed, aged 25, by a single bullet to the back of the head. It was fired from a 9mm handgun, as he drove a car he had stolen away from the driveway where he had found it.

The man responsible was one Gail Gerlach. As this book puts it, Gerlach was “an avowed Reaganite conservative”, supporter of the right to bear arms and anti-abortion activist, who could not “fathom how a society that prohibits prostitution, class A drugs, even driving without a seatbelt, can tolerate the killing of an unborn child”. At his trial in 2014, Gerlach’s acquittal on charges of manslaughter sparked no end of controversy, but this alleged legal and moral travesty formed only part of the story. What Gerlach surely symbolised most of all was the fissures that run through the politics of the American right, and the fact that its “pro-life” convictions barely conceal outrageous contradictions.

Continue reading...