Democrat from Ohio

As a presidential candidate, Representative Dennis Kucinich interests me. (It's koo-SINN-itch I think - I get more of my news in print than TV so I had to look it up to get the pronounciation)

I know he's got a bit of a rep, but I'm not sure this is deserved (and I'm not sure how much of it is based on western stereotypes like the ones which link personal power and competency with physical attributes). We'll see. I just started researching him. Background-wise he seems interesting, and he's one of the few who isn't equivocal on gay marriage (and wasn't even back in the last presidential election). Oh, and he voted against the PATRIOT act (senate roll call, house roll call).

I am not a single issue voter. But a candidate's position on a topic, if too far from what I consider reasonable (and also if not outweighed by other attritubes) can break support for me. Lack of support for ensuring safe, funded, and effective reproductive freedom and for protecting the privacy of reproductive health decisions is a definite deal breaker for me. So I looked the candidates up on the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

NARAL presents a selection of statements from each candidate on abortion and reproductive freedom policies in the US.

Kucinich:
"What the Supreme Court did was quite invasive of that very sacred sphere of a woman's health and privacy… But if our society is truly committed to life, then all of us need to close ranks behind a program which will show real concern for life. And that includes prenatal care, postnatal care, child care, a living wage, universal health care -- and the end of war,' he said. 'Then we will have achieved a much more tolerable expression of support for life than the Supreme Court did.'"
[Carla Marinucci, Abortion Ruling Puts Candidates on the Spot, San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2007.]

One thing which struck me in reading the statements is that I don't see anything in the Kucinich collection which evokes the necessity of god and religion as part of this particular health choice. I noticed the lack of this in his statements after I noticed the presence of it in the statements of the two media and money favored candidates (Clinton and Obama).

Clinton:
Abortion "should be a constitutionally protected decision made not by the Government, not by the majority … but between a woman, her doctor, and her faith in God."
[152 Congressional Record S35-07, January 25, 2007.]

Obama:
"You know, I think that most Americans recognize that this is a profoundly difficult issue for the women and families who make these decisions. They don't make them casually. And I trust women to make these decisions in conjunction with their doctors and their families and their clergy."
[Transcript from Democratic Presidential Debate in South Carolina, MSNBC, April 26, 2007.]

Whatever happened to the notion of "keep your rosaries off my ovaries"? That wasn't just a catchy protest chant. It had a point. This "and god" shit annoys me - and I find I am consistently more tolerant of religious belief than most people in my particular age, education level, socio-economic class, and region cohort. I think religion is a kind of principle and value system. It is a tool for exploring and developing applications of moral reasoning, principles of human interaction with one another, with other organisms, and with the non-animate environment. It's not nothing and I am not dismissive of religion or religious people, not out of hand at least. But what drives me right up a tree (and down the other side) is the tendency in a religion-saturated society to reverse this relation. That is, rather than view religious belief and study as a type of value system, the tendency becomes to see value systems as a whole as a kind of religion. And that's just fucked up.

The candidate statements on reproductive health choices include god and the ministers of god. On one level, this inclusion rather innocuously (in and of itself) suggests to the public that the candidate believes in god or at least understands a great number of the public believe in god. On another level, the one I see it on, it is a pandering to the notion that someone might not be able to make this decision without appealing directly and specifically to a higher moral authority than their own. Again, keep in mind that for those people who are religious, that individual religious belief is part of the personal moral authority.

Having to say it, putting it in there explicitly, is at best redundant. At worst, it suggests the candidates who have to include it are using it as a subtle qualification which is meant to resonate with the religious among the voters - the qualification being "I support a woman's right to choose a path which is correct based on what her religion tells her". And this is tacitly empowering religious leaders and institutions with a say in not just the choices of the women who CHOOSE to follow that particular religion or who CHOOSE to involve that religion's teachings in this choice, but a say in how and what all women decide.

We sure don't need more of that. At least I don't.

I know Kucinich does not have a career long history of pro-choice ideology. But his statements on the issue of abortion access and abortion as a procedure in general simply strike me as relatively sincere and considered.

(here's a discussion on Democracy Now involving Kucinich, among others, on the war in Iraq)