Good for you, Jonah, for saying what you think and believe in. The problem is not the abortion issue itself, but how our crummy political system stands in the way of dealing with it properly.
Our winner-take-all system was not able to come up with politically satisfying solutions for regulating abortions, and so the Supreme Court had to step in. Anytime the Supreme Court has to make policy, that’s a failure of our political system.
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In proportional voting, abortion tends to be dealt with better. In proportional voting, there is no game in the voting booth and all voters are represented by their actual votes. Yes, the number of women sitting in the seats is much higher as well. We can almost call district voting a male democracy and proportional voting a regular democracy. The two basic systems do really differ a lot.
Solutions are forged in the chamber where the entire voting population is heard. It’s not red and blue and nothing else, like we have here. When talking about green, the green speak their own truth because they are actually present — and everyone hears them. There is no spin to make green blue like we do here, or to make green red (though that’s a bit harder and it’s probably going to end up with red declaring green a fallacy, as something to go to war for).
I heard that in the Netherlands the Christian party was part of the coalition that made abortion legal. In the House of Representatives, it was a game of give and take. The Christians wanted abortion to be possible only for the shortest period during pregnancy, and to accept that position the social-democrats demanded more education and outreach. The Netherlands has one of the lowest rates of abortion in the world with a young population receiving excellent sex education and medical centers everywhere. I read that child pregnancy there is one-fifth the rate of winner-take-all United Kingdom.
Here, the young are shamelessly left to figure things out for themselves. Thankfully the internet is helping some, though you can imagine it is not the best form of education.
Our system is dumb, and I mean that in the unrefined manner. It is dull when it comes to finding good solutions, and it is crude when it comes to issues that require fine-tuning. Yes, it doesn’t help that men are selected disproportionately in our system. Or the rich. Or the elderly.
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The US Constitution shows us a way out of our crummy system. It’s a first step we can take, today.
Two things are going on at the same time.
One.
The US Constitution specifically gives powers to Fed and State levels. Notice to the right how Cities and Counties are behaving as if they were given those powers, too.
They were not.
Two.
The 14th Amendment requires governments to put the better system in place, if available. Governments cannot discriminate. Our political system discriminates against green, yellow and orange — we don’t have any of it and that is totally unnatural.
Where the Fed and States were given powers to do things a bit the way they see fit, the local level does not have those powers; they must follow the US Constitution exactly as described.
That means we should have proportional voting in place, today, in our cities and counties.
When there are just two seats on a city council, the difference between both systems can be made clear already. The minimum number of voters represented in our system is always 50 percent plus one vote.
In proportional voting, however, each additional seat makes that minimum go up. With two seats the minimum number of voters able to point their finger toward the person in the seats they voted for increased to 66.67 percent. That’s the minimum.
If a council has four seats, then 80 percent of the voters can point their fingers toward the actual person they voted for. Minimum.
For national assemblies with proportional voting and naturally more seats, close to everyone can do that. Close to 100 percent.
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The US constitution allows us to take that first step today at the local level. There are more than 30,000 cities, townships and counties, and we only need a handful to show how that system is indeed better and likely all would want to follow. Instead of Hans Brinker putting his finger in the dike, we need him to pull out that finger and let political freedom flow.
Once the local level has shown us the way, the State constitutions are fairly easy to change (US Constitution is not that easy to change, at all, and perhaps we don’t need to if local and state levels are delivering full democracy).
Keep saying what you are saying, Jonah, your voice needs to be heard. But let’s all give each others voices equal importance. Our current system has winners and it mutes the losers. That is so bad and it truly does not help in making abortion something well-regulated and part of a larger program in which education is an important tool.
