Pro-life Politics, Polarization, and Partisanship

Why I’m Leaving DFLA and What’s Next

After conducting research using smartphone location data in 2015 and 2016, behavioral economists M. Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla came to the conclusion that politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners were 30 to 50 minutes shorter than ones that were politically uniform. These findings might be startling to some, but for others — indeed those that have discussed election results, vaccines, mandates, and other American issues with family members — it shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Polarization is a problem. In fact, for Americans, I would say it is the issue, one that we deal with in our homes, our work environments, and in our lives online.

Leaving DFLA was a difficult choice. As someone wholly dedicated to the pro-life cause, I wanted nothing more than to effectively communicate pro-life ideology while creating respectful conversations around these values. Though, after only a year of serving in my role, I have found that communicating such values across the political divide might be too difficult a task, at least while the most prominent leaders in the pro-life movement are engaged in culture war politics.

Just this summer, Students for Life of America wrote on Twitter “Men cannot be mothers”, an obvious slight to trans individuals, a community where, according to Forbes, 52% of those that identify as transgender or non-binary seriously contemplated suicide in 2020. That’s over half.

What’s remarkably disturbing about this behavior is the punching down, the intentional rattling of a community that is already dealing with a staggering suicide rate as well as physical violence committed against them. If being Pro-Life means only protecting the unborn, then the term is essentially meaningless. After all, everyone is pro-life for something, right? The question is, then, what are we pro-death for?

As another example, Abby Johnson, a champion of the Pro-Life movement, and former Planned Parenthood director with over 170,000 followers just wrote on Twitter this last September, “Hey idiot liberals who have apparently never seen someone ride horseback…this is a rein, not a whip. God bless our border patrol.” The picture, as you may have seen, is of a man as he is barreled down upon by a Border Patrol Agent on a horse.

The details of these two examples aren’t what’s important here. This has nothing to do with the lines we draw in the sand, or whether you believe a rein can be a used as a whip, or if you believe a man cannot be a mother. Though, behind our ideas and our worldviews, there are human beings with plenty to lose, communities of people that, quite literally, want to die because of the pain they experience on a daily basis.

Behind our conversations about the border, there are those that are doing everything they can to survive, to bring their children to a place where there might be opportunity.

It’s the vitriol we carry when we draw our lines like canyons, when we use words less like bridges and more like arrows drenched in oil and lit ablaze. It’s not that we don’t know how to talk to one another, it’s that we don’t know how to talk to one another without inflicting deep wounds and pain.

The reverse, I believe, may also be true, that we might not know how to receive information from another camp without viewing it as an act of war; and while these examples are minuscule, just a couple drops in the proverbial ocean, just turn on the television if you need further proof. Open up Twitter. Look at what your uncle, grandmother, brother, or sister has to say on Facebook.

The issue is polarization.

Though, strangely enough, I don’t think many of us are as far away from one another as we believe. Chris Bail, Duke professor and director of The Polarization Lab, is a computational scientist and expert in the field of political polarization and violent extremism. His most recent book “Breaking the Social Media Prism” published in April of 2021 argues with stunning clarity that false polarization, which is, as he writes, “the tendency for people to overestimate the amount of ideological difference between themselves and people from other political parties” is more rampant than we might believe.

The Pew Research Center in 2018 conducted a national survey and found that 55% of Republicans thought that those in the Democratic Party were “extremely liberal.” On the other hand, over a third of Democrats described their counterparts as “extremely conservative”. All of this might seem fair depending on which camp you find yourself in. Indeed, even if you don’t ascribe to a camp you might find yourself pointing at both sides in the same manner. But the strangeness I mentioned earlier has little to do with how we view one another, but how off we truly might be.

As Bail argues further in his book, only 3% of Americans identify themselves as “extremely liberal” or “extremely conservative”, and as Bob Dylan once argued over thirty years ago in his album Empire Burlesque, “What looks large from a distance, close-up ain’t never that big.”

Over the past few years I’ve learned that everyone has something to say, but not everyone is saying it well. Everyone has an opinion, but not all give space for others to be heard. All of this has led me to reconsider my role in the world, and, more specifically, my role as a communicator. The American Values Coalition is an organization that I’m excited to be a part of, and we are wholly dedicated to bridging the political divide with our actions and words.

Simply put, we want to bring people together.

I’m thankful for my time at DFLA. During my tenure, I met so many wonderful people who are dedicated to protecting life and are trying to break ideological divides.

I am excited to dedicate and focus my work moving forward away from single issues, and to the deeper systemic problems our country is facing.

If you’re interested in what we’re doing at American Values Coalition, please follow us on our website at americanvalues.org.