ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

While I was cutting up vegetables for dinner tonight, my boyfriend was reading me this quiz he found linked from NPR that polls you on your views with respect to various political issues, which is then supposed to match you up to the presidential candidate to whom you relate the best. One of the things the quiz does is to ask you to select how important various issues are to you, I guess to determine the relative strength of your answers. It was interesting, because a few weeks ago we had a sort of discussion about this type of thing and I realized how wide the gaps are between ambivalence, indifference, and actually caring about an issue.

What had happened was, we were lying awake and we started having this discussion about the presidential debates. This was right after the stupid Hillary “Republican playbook” comment that got so much attention, and I was telling him how annoying I find Hillary and how I would rather not have her be the first woman president, and he was telling me how he doesn’t really find any of them all that great, since winning a big popularity contest and being a strong, effective leader are often kind of mutually exclusive traits.

Anyway, we got into this discussion and while we share similar political views, the strength of our opinions on individual issues varies significantly. From a philosophical standpoint, we are both pro-choice and we both oppose gun-control. But as we talked about it, I realized our opinions are not as closely matched as I thought. He would rule out a candidate based on their advocacy of gun control, but would not care as much whether they were anti-abortion. I can sort of understand why. He is interested in firearms as a hobby, and will never need an abortion, so I can see why his priorities are like that. And for my part, I oppose gun-control in a very general, nebulous way. I have little interest in guns for their own sake and probably won’t ever bother to own one. I don’t see the harm in having things like time-limits and preventing people with records or psychiatric disturbances from gaining (legal) access to guns. So to me, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker if a politician favored gun-control a la District of Columbia. I would consider it misguided and sort of stupid, but wouldn’t feel like it signaled the end of the world.

Abortion, on the other hand. People start talking crazy religious nonsense about abortions being a sin, and I start thinking, faith based initiative, and I start thinking, ten commandments in the schools, and I start thinking, the governor of Georgia tried to cure their drought by telling people to pray for it instead of telling them to use less damn water, and I start thinking, Fred Phelps, Sam Brownback, Billy Graham, and I start thinking about all the other crazy religious nonsense that makes me feel like we’re not as far from a theocracy as I’d like, and I start thinking, we are going to be living out The Handmaid’s Tale in ten years! That’s the path I take on abortion. It’s more of a symbol to me than anything. I don’t want an abortion. I don’t care if other people personally think abortions are wrong and don’t want them for themselves. But I hate the disgusting self-righteousness that makes them think they can use their religiously motivated attitudes to try and control what other people do.

My boyfriend wants to keep guns legal so that when the zombie apocalypse comes, he’ll be prepared. Whereas, if that happens, guns won’t make any difference to me because I’m physically weak and will be jonesing for brains by the time the first wave of the undead has come through. I want to keep abortion legal because I view it as a symbol of personal freedom that if taken away will in my mind leave us living in basically a misogynistic religiously conservative theocracy. Whereas, if that happens, it won’t make as much of a difference to him because he’s a man.

So it can be an interesting thing to consider where your priorities lie on the map of your relative political attitudes.

On that note, I took the quiz and was interested to find that I was matched to Rudy Giuliani. He is pro-choice. And anti-gun!