Charen’s Christie redux Nov 12^th

Mona Charen takes issue with Chris Christie’s plea for drug treatment. She says the notion that anyone is opposed to drug treatment is a “straw man.” She asks, “Who is opposed to drug and alcohol treatment?” The answer is only those who have to pay for it. Then she gets to the nub of her problem with addiction: she says that “There are some (and I would include myself) who think addiction is not like multiple myeloma or autism; there is an element of choice in the former and not the latter.” I would guess, just offhand, that Ms. Mona Charen has never been addicted to anything and therefore she doesn’t really know what she is talking about.

This “element of choice” that Charen mentions is the standard excuse used by the Charens and other moralists to lay blame. Laying blame is of great importance for these people; if you cannot assign blame you cannot assign guilt; if you can assign guilt you can assign punishment. The result is obvious; drug offenders are guilty and surely should be punished so judges send drug offenders to jail and not to treatment. After all don’t we all have “free will?”

Referring to Christie, Charen maintains that, “Christie has raised some substantive issues in this race (entitlements for example)…But this looks like an exercise in the kind of moral exhibitionism that has become so common on the left and that Christie ought to be above.”  This “moral exhibitionism that has become so common on the left” is apparently totally absent from the right. It does seem clear that what conservatives like Charen are interested in conserving is money, not people.

 Then Charen tells us, “Treatment is not any sort of panacea for addiction, either, …a psychiatrist estimates that between 40 and 60 percent of participants drop out within the first few weeks or months…while effective treatment takes at least a year.” Treatment may not be “any sort of panacea” but it is considerably better than no treatment at all.  Alcoholics fall off the wagon all the time; the remedy is to get right back on.

Then Charen goes after Christie’s comments that it’s easy to be prolife while for the nine months they’re in the womb…but when they get out that’s when it gets tough. Charen says that this is “a tired and familiar charge from the left.” She goes on to claim that no post-partum care can possibly compensate for dismembering an infant in the womb. No one said it did. Charen says that “over 2000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC)… provide aid during the first year of life (and sometimes beyond).”

The primary purpose of CPCs is to prevent pregnant women from having abortions, anything else is strictly secondary. From the available information about their policies it appears that they will do or say anything to achieve their purpose. They provide false information about the risks of abortion and even the risks of some perfectly safe contraceptive practices. Since CPCs are tasked with persuading pregnant women not to have abortions regardless of their circumstances,  a woman who requests information about how, or where, to obtain a safe abortion will find the CPC refusing to provide it. These CPCs were started by the Family Research Council, an ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian group based in Colorado Springs. Their concern for infants with severe congenital defects whose parents need financial help does not exist in their advertising. Charen here is simply directing women to an appallingly deceptive organization and she should be ashamed of herself.