I met a self-described Constitutionalist the other day at the mountain and had a fairly amicable discussion in person despite our radically different views. Thirty-four year-old Dinah was hard to miss, as she has the Founding Fathers tattooed on her right arm.
"You must be very patriotic,” I said inquisitively (thinking to myself, wow, she must really love America!). She was sitting at the top of the mountain resting after her climb and explained that she is in fact a Constitutionalist and had gotten the tattoo in 2009.
“A what?”
“Basically we need to have our basic rights, the freedom of expression…sometimes you’re going to offend people...” she began. “People are always looking to the government to solve their problems, when the answer is within themselves.”
This was the first time I’d met a Constitutionalist (at least that I knew), but I gathered it went deeper than simply having basic rights. Dinah, who currently sells cars for a living at a workplace of mostly men, is originally from Rome, GA, but has also lived in Florida, California, and tiny towns in North and South Georgia. I told her I’d look up "Constitutionalist" when I got home (and what a search history I have!).
“The Founding Fathers were pretty incredible,” she continued, adding that George Washington is her favorite president. “The impression he left with his men was so tremendous that we have not seen anything like it since,” she said.
Well, I reminded her how Creek Indian chiefs met on the top of Stone Mountain with one Col. Marinus Willett at George Washington’s request on June 9, 1790, and 225 years ago this year, he signed the Treaty of New York on August 7. The next year, Washington would visit Georgia, Savannah and Augusta specifically, and by 1821, the Creeks would later cede most all of their land to the State of Georgia via the Treaty of Indian Springs.
Dinah mentioned that a few years ago she was the victim of physical violence in California, born of racism between blacks and Mexicans, which she described as worse in her opinion than any Southern racism she’s seen. I recognized that it was a traumatic experience. She is also stridently anti-abortion, and I wondered if there was a connection. I spent the next half hour being unapologetically pro-choice as she and I peacefully walked down the mountain together talking about the issue.
“I appreciate that you have your opinions, but I'll say up front that I’m pro-choice,” began my preamble. “I’m surprised that you of all people, who don’t want the government telling you what to do, would be for them legislating reproductive rights and telling women what to do with their bodies,” I offered. "You seem like a strong woman."
“But it’s the unborn child's life not the mother's,” she retorted.
“So, it’s two lives, the mother and the child, then, so whose life is more valuable? Do you know how many boyfriends and even doctors pressure women into abortions? Isn’t each case a unique and personal matter that shouldn’t be ours to judge? What about end-of-life and right-to-die ethics? If abortion were not legal, wouldn’t it still occur, except in dangerous conditions?” Everything was on the table.
For the most part, it went on like a civil ping-pong game, and Dinah is honestly likable, albeit a tad intimidating. I lamented that her arguments seemed so black-and-white and that she, or anyone, could believe so much misleading information about abortion and Planned Parenthood, and, hey, she probably pitied and vilified me for believing in women’s right to choose.
Then I lobbed the anti-vaxxer ball.
“Well, you’re against the government mandating that parents vaccinate their children, right, so isn’t not vaccinating potentially killing children (and therefore a form of late-term abortion)?” Aristotelian syllogisms are not beneath me.
She thought for a minute, and then, to my surprise, conceded that vaccinating and not vaccinating are potentially both killing children.
Of course I also asked her how she felt about killing animals. What’s so pro-life about that? Ohhh riiight, people eat them to live, so human life is more valuable than an animal’s? What if the deer was pregnant? What about eating kutti pi? I went there.
[heads spinning]
And how is not helping the thousands of orphaned children around the world that need immediate care and protection any less important than a “silent genocide” or actual genocide still occurring around the world? Or helping the scores of valuable human beings afflicted with mental illness that fill our shelters, hospitals, and jails? Just as she told me to look up Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, with a tone that implied I’d be googling the devil, and Gianna Jessen, who survived her mother’s abortion attempt in 1977, I told her light-heartedly that her homework was to read up on the history of women’s reproductive rights, and women’s rights in general, as well as to read what Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister, recently had to say about being pro-life:
"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is." (Sister Joan Chittister)
These dialogues hardly ever have winners. Maybe I challenged someone to think differently, for even a brief moment, or maybe not. Probably not. But the public debate has gone on a long time and probably always will. It is sometimes enough to be reminded that others have different beliefs than our own and to talk. As we said goodbye in the parking lot, I genuinely thanked Dinah and suggested that since she’s so devoted to the subject, perhaps she should not be selling cars. Beyond literal adherence to the original U.S. Constitution, I hope I reminded her that there is so much life out there for "we, the people," to take care of and to protect, from the atomic and embryonic to the terrestrial and galactic, notwithstanding our own fragile lives, entire cultures at risk of being extinguished, and all of those who die so unjustly without basic human and civil rights. Here's to the Founding Mothers! Oh, wait...
