I find Glenn Greenwald's defense of Ron Paul's anti-abortion record deeply bizarre. "Look over here, he likes the Constitution" doesn't exactly respond to concerns that, in a Ron Paul world, tens of millions of women will be forced to use their bodies to bear children against their will. I'm less than pleased that my civil liberties are being abrogated, but I'm not willing to sell reproductive rights down the river for it. And the invocation of Harry Reid as some sort of thou-art-a-hypocrite trump card is strange, too. Reid is the parliamentary general for a pro-choice Caucus. He has done nothing to impose his pro-life views on the Senate Democrats. If Glenn Greenwald is asking whether I believe Harry Reid's policy positions should be elevated into a national political platform through a presidential run, I'll happily explain to him why that would be a bad idea. Meanwhile, Greenwald's efforts to suggest that progressive have to choose between civil rights and choice is deeply misguided. He sneers that Dana should provide him with a list of "candidates with sterling records across the board on liberty, war-making and constitutional rights," and while I make no claims to sterling records for anyone (and I surely don't believe Paul has a sterling record on "liberty" as defined by anyone but Lew Rockwell), Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Barack Obama all seem to have respectable records on those issues, and none of them combine those positions with virulent race baiting or hostility to reproductive freedoms. As it happens, I think this is all a bit beside the point, as Paul isn't going to win and thus his abhorrent positions on issues secondary to his candidacy don't strike me as terribly dangerous. He's a protest candidacy, and a useful one at that. But I'm astonished to watch progressives get their back up when others among their number point out that Paul is the keeper of some reprehensible flames. If you believe that civil rights must come at the price of reproductive freedoms, or vice versa, I assure you that you will end up with neither. These political positions are of a piece, particularly within the progressive coalition, and I'm surprised to see Greenwald react with such hostility to an accurate representation of Ron Paul's record, and its deep and disappointing flaws.
