This piece was written by myself in collaboration with a wise and wonderful friend. Her insights contribute incalculably to this piece though she chooses not to be attributed. Still I wanted to note her and thank her additions and edits to the work. This piece was written in response to a Newsweek article by Anna Quindlin that can be read by clicking here.

First, I want to say that I agree. We societally care more about beauty than brains. The office of the President is far more "sexier" than the chamber of the Supreme Court. America loves celebrity, considers thin the most physically important attribute for beauty, hates "elitists" and "academics" and anyone who thinks they are smart. The proof is that there are exponentially more tabloids than newspapers in the newspaper racks, there are more celebrity news magazines than news magazines in the periodical rack, and more people go to blockbuster and pay for movies than go to the library and check out books for free.

That said, I don’t think there’s anything great about any of those 9 Supreme Court judges. Perhaps in her day Ruth Bader Ginsberg was termed a cougar, but it’s not 1962 anymore. Kennedy’s dead, and if the conservative powers that attempt to maintain the status quo have anything to do with it, Obama probably will be by fall. This isn’t the way of the world, but it is the way of the American empire. We may not have the political power we think we have. We can’t necessarily vote for change candidates because whether it is Kennedy or it is Lincoln or it is McKinley, they’ll shoot them. But we also shouldn’t settle for the alternative, because whether it is Bush or Nixon or Woodrow Wilson, we tend to find ourselves in prolonged wars of ego, not justice.

Beyond that, it is a look at politics. America likes to pride itself on being a free country. Kids in parks and playgrounds will snip at a each other and claim their swing because "it’s a free country." When it comes to politics, it has always been a free country for the insiders. Whether that was white men, or later white men and black men, or eventually white men, black men, black women, and white women. Voting (an overrated source of power) has always been selective.

Even today, dead people vote in elections, while living persons of particular (usually out of the mainstream) demographics are intentionally disenfranchised. Felons are banned from voting for life. Even if that felony were committed at 14 and they’ve spent the last 50 years paying taxes on time and never so much as picking up a speeding ticket. We have a system based on exclusion of different opinions. We have a system that goes out of its way to cheat people out of their "inalienable rights" just to make sure the CEOs of US Steel or GE or ExxonMobile or Halliburton or whoever the monopoly du jour is— remains. And there are and always will be faulty economically conservative arguments that claim when the companies do well, the people below them get the residual benefits. I guess that might be true, if the people below them happen to be in the country they are outsourcing to.

How can we say gas prices need to be raised when Chevron and ExxonMobile turn 10+ billion dollar new record profits every quarter? It’s price fixing allowed by politicians who line their pockets, and that mentality carries over.

No politician has the gall to attempt to pass legislation that matters. The modus operandi is "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" and these legislatures look at their million dollar homes on their 164,000 dollar salaries and think "well something must be working." Disregarding the fact that just because wall street ticks at a high selling point doesn’t mean that the other 99% of the country who cannot live off the little stock they have, if any, are losing their homes to foreclosure or going to sleep with hungry children crying or dying of easily preventable (or worse, curable) illnesses since they cannot afford health care.

If no politician will pass decent legislation to protect Americans against greed, why would any of them truly put their neck out for the hot button issues such as gay marriage, abortion, or otherwise. They won’t. The argument that Quindlin makes is that the Supreme Court justices are capable of doing it, but I assure you they won’t either. They know that if you try to force a horse to drink, all you’ll get is a hoof in the groin.

Forcing America to eradicate abortion is as effective as Americans lobbying their government to stop the Iraq War. We are a self-interested people. It is that American Dream. And while that isn’t necessarily good or bad, it means that when you try to legislate morality, all you do is end up with assassinations and backroom abortions.

As cliché as it sounds, true change must come from within. If we truly want to stop abortions, we cannot rely on laws. Unless we outlaw every coat hanger, staircase, or substance to be abused, and put monitor bracelets on every doctor with the knowhow, it’s useless. Politically, if America truly is a land of the free, then legislated morality cannot be undertaken. But I understand that laws are close to morals and are certainly based on them. And there is a responsibility of the government to take care of all persons, which could be argued to include unborn fetus’. And that is the only compelling argument to make abortion illegal.

In this election we should be voting for change. When times get tough, women are more likely to have abortions, kids are more likely to turn to drugs, and parents are more likely to commit suicide. Look around. Things are not all that great right now, unless of course you’re a CEO of an energy company. If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could honestly cut down on the amount of desperate women who simply do not want to bring another baby into a crappy word. Seventy-seven percent of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant. Maybe we should vote for Hillary, have more women making decisions for women. I suppose many thought George W. Bush would protect their unborn fetus; but they forget he’d later send their grown child to die in war.

I agree that our votes matter. Judges matter. Everything we do matters to some degree. But I think the underlying issue is change within. If you step back and look at abortion, you have to question why is this woman threatening to terminate this life? What do we need to do as a society? What are we not doing right now as a society? Both the military ethic and the abortion ethic are grounded in the same belief: Life is cheap. Iraqi life. Fetal life.

The language of the war lobby and the abortion lobby is from the same glossary of evasions. No one likes war, say the generals. No one likes abortions, says NOW. But let’s keep the killing option, just in case. And cases keep coming. If Iraqis are causing trouble, or Libyans, Grenadans or Panamanians, bomb them. If fetuses pose problems, destroy them. In August 2001, President George W. Bush told Americans that he worried about "a culture that devalues life," and that he believed that, as President of the United States, he has "an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world."

That belief lies behind Bush’s denial of federal government funds for stem-cell research that could encourage the destruction of human embryos. Although the Bush administration acknowledged that some scientists believe stem cell research could offer new ways of treating diseases that affect 128 million Americans, this prospect evidently did not, in Bush’s view, justify destroying human embryos.

Two Februarys ago, the military this same president commands aimed a missile at a house in Damadola, a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border. 18 people were killed, among them five children. The target of the attack, Al Qaeda’s number two men, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were not among the dead. Bush did not apologize for the attack, nor did he reprimand those who ordered it. Apparently, he believes that the chance of killing an important terrorist leader is sufficient justification for firing a missile that will almost certainly kill innocent human beings.

Other American politicians took the same stance. Senator Trent Lott, a conservative Republican and a prominent opponent of abortion said of the attack: "Absolutely, we should do it." Senator John McCain also expressed regret for the civilian deaths, but added, "I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again."

It would be hard for the current administration to say that it wouldn’t do the same thing again, because it has done it many times before. On November 1, 2001, American planes bombed Ishaq Suleiman, a group of mud huts, because a Taliban truck had been parked in one of the streets. The truck left before the bomb hit, but 12 local villagers were killed and 14 were injured. There are many more such stories of innocent lives being lost in the war in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, too, American attacks have taken the lives of many civilians. Again, one of many examples will suffice. On April 5, 2003, a civilian neighborhood in Basra was bombed. The target was General Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" because of his use of chemical weapons against Iraqis. One bomb hit the home of the Hamoodi family, a respected, educated family, none of whose members belonged to the ruling Baath Party. Of the extended family of 14, ten were killed, including an infant, a two-year-old baby, a 10-year-old boy, and a 12-year-old girl. Four months later, Majid was captured alive; the bombs had missed their intended target.

This consistent pattern of readiness to inflict civilian casualties, often when striking targets that are not of vital military significance, suggests that Bush and other pro-life American leaders have less concern for the lives of innocent human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, than they have for human embryos. This is a bizarre set of priorities. No parents grieve for a lost embryo in the way that they would grieve over the death of a child. No embryos are capable of suffering, or have hopes or desires for the future that are abruptly cut off by their death.

It might be possible to justify the loss of innocent human life in Damadola by a utilitarian calculation that killing AlQaeda’s leaders will, in the long run, save a larger number of innocent human beings. After all, if they remain at large, they may succeed in carrying out further terrorist attacks that take hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives. Bush, however, cannot rely on that argument, for it is precisely the kind of justification that he rejects when it comes to destroying embryos in order to save, in the long run, those dying from diseases for which we currently have no cure.

Other moralists will say that the difference between destroying embryos for research purposes and killing civilians in military attacks is that the former is deliberate killing, whereas the latter deaths are "collateral damage" – unintended, if foreseeable, side-effects of a justifiable act of war. We can grant that it was not the primary intention of those who planned and authorized the attack on Damadola to kill innocent people. We can also accept that al-Zawahiri is undoubtedly a dangerous foe, still active in a terrorist movement, and that he is a legitimate military target. Perhaps this particular attack can be justified on those grounds.

Nevertheless, the doctrine that it is acceptable to take actions that will foreseeably kill innocent people can have the effect of leading us to treat more lightly than we should the deaths of those killed. That, it seems, is what has happened somewhere in the American chain of command. The presence of a Taliban truck does not justify bombing a village in which civilians are going about their daily lives. Killing innocent people in order to bring a kind of rough justice to "Chemical Ali" – a particularly nasty member of Saddam’s military elite, but one who at the time of the raid was no longer in command of military forces – is wrong.

A culture that allows and even endorses such tactics is not one that is genuinely committed to encouraging respect for life. We can be quite sure that American forces would not have acted in the same way if the civilians nearby had been other Americans.

I’d like to believe Obama, Hillary, Mr. McCain, or any of the judges can make some sort of difference in how American values life. But as always, I’m skeptical. And though all of this may seem like a random flurry of thoughts, I do believe that the most important change that is going to make a real positive difference has to start internally and within the smaller community. It’s why smart people aren’t presidents or even working for the government. They know better. They know that in order to make things happen, you can’t waste time playing political games.