The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff Page B
Authors: George Lakoff
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matters. These were practical issues. What this book made clear was that the issue was fundamentally moral—a matter of love and commitment. All people should be free to marry whoever they love and want to be committed to for life. Progressives began using that message more and more frequently beginning a decade ago, and we have seen the right to marry progress by leaps and bounds.
Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters.
What have been called “women’s issues” are also freedom issues, and these have not been adequately framed as such. In general:
• Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue.
• Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.
Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free. Control over a woman’s body arises in a wide variety of cases:
• Sex education. For women especially, sex education is required for control over one’s body, since women need education about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases that can affect future childbirth, how sex can lead to pregnancy, and how reproduction can be controlled.
• Control of reproduction. Reproduction occurs through women’s bodies and affects those bodies in a great many ways. Women need to be in control of whether or when they reproduce. Thus access to family planning advice, birth control methods, and abortion are issues of control of a woman over her body.
• Forced ultrasounds and attacks on family planning. Forcing a woman to undergo humiliation in order to exert control over her own body is a freedom issue. For example, forcing a woman, as in Texas, to have a mostly male-administered ultrasound twenty-four hours before an abortion, or allowing anti-abortion advocates to hound her on her way to a clinic, is a freedom issue for women. Passing laws that make it impossible to keep family planning clinics open is also a violation of women’s freedom.
• Humiliating victims of sex crimes. A free woman has control over her own body. Sex that violates that control includes rape, drugging a woman in order to have sex, exerting physical or psychological force to have sex, and so on. Police and courts who humiliate a woman who has been raped are violating her freedom.
These are all freedom issues. They are rooted in circumstances that apply to women, but they are special cases of the freedom of all human beings to control their own bodies.
There are also circumstances where women are not being treated like other human beings on an institutional level—in significant ways:
• Equal pay for equal work. This is not just an equality issue. It is an issue of whether women are being treated like any other human being would, or should, be treated.
• Equality in the rating of ability for a position in an institution. In a free society, gender should make no difference in whether or not a person gets a job, a promotion, admission to an academic program, nomination for political office, and so on.
These, too, are freedom issues. You are not free when you are not treated like other human beings with respect to how you function in an institution.
Equality and freedom are not separate issues. Discrimination is a denial of freedom. Freedom is more general. It has to do with a clear path (no one standing in your way or placing obstacles) or with possessions you have a right to. It is freedom that is at the heart of democracy. And it is freedom that concerns everyone who has needs, dreams, and goals.
The present Democratic framing is the War on Women. I don’t know if it is a good money-raising tactic. But it is not effective framing beyond strong feminist progressives. Strict father morality is partly about preserving male authority over women by claiming protectiveness and support of women—anything but a war against them. Conservative women, too, tend to
Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters.
What have been called “women’s issues” are also freedom issues, and these have not been adequately framed as such. In general:
• Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue.
• Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.
Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free. Control over a woman’s body arises in a wide variety of cases:
• Sex education. For women especially, sex education is required for control over one’s body, since women need education about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases that can affect future childbirth, how sex can lead to pregnancy, and how reproduction can be controlled.
• Control of reproduction. Reproduction occurs through women’s bodies and affects those bodies in a great many ways. Women need to be in control of whether or when they reproduce. Thus access to family planning advice, birth control methods, and abortion are issues of control of a woman over her body.
• Forced ultrasounds and attacks on family planning. Forcing a woman to undergo humiliation in order to exert control over her own body is a freedom issue. For example, forcing a woman, as in Texas, to have a mostly male-administered ultrasound twenty-four hours before an abortion, or allowing anti-abortion advocates to hound her on her way to a clinic, is a freedom issue for women. Passing laws that make it impossible to keep family planning clinics open is also a violation of women’s freedom.
• Humiliating victims of sex crimes. A free woman has control over her own body. Sex that violates that control includes rape, drugging a woman in order to have sex, exerting physical or psychological force to have sex, and so on. Police and courts who humiliate a woman who has been raped are violating her freedom.
These are all freedom issues. They are rooted in circumstances that apply to women, but they are special cases of the freedom of all human beings to control their own bodies.
There are also circumstances where women are not being treated like other human beings on an institutional level—in significant ways:
• Equal pay for equal work. This is not just an equality issue. It is an issue of whether women are being treated like any other human being would, or should, be treated.
• Equality in the rating of ability for a position in an institution. In a free society, gender should make no difference in whether or not a person gets a job, a promotion, admission to an academic program, nomination for political office, and so on.
These, too, are freedom issues. You are not free when you are not treated like other human beings with respect to how you function in an institution.
Equality and freedom are not separate issues. Discrimination is a denial of freedom. Freedom is more general. It has to do with a clear path (no one standing in your way or placing obstacles) or with possessions you have a right to. It is freedom that is at the heart of democracy. And it is freedom that concerns everyone who has needs, dreams, and goals.
The present Democratic framing is the War on Women. I don’t know if it is a good money-raising tactic. But it is not effective framing beyond strong feminist progressives. Strict father morality is partly about preserving male authority over women by claiming protectiveness and support of women—anything but a war against them. Conservative women, too, tend to
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