4 take-aways from "abortion rights activist bullied" story

My dear friends on the Left went into a serious tizzy last week over the story of an abortion-rights activist who was "bullied" by the state government.

In fact, NARAL Pro-Choice Arizona executive director Kat Sabine doesn't know from bullying, as a (ahem) columnist last week presciently pointed out. She got a letter from a division of the state licensing department that included a form for her to fill out. Which she in fact filled out and returned. Which ended the "bullying" kerfuffle, except for all the whining on the part of her defenders, most of whom made clear that a fundamental principle of modern politics is that government is to be used to hammer the other guys, not the good people of the Left.

All in all, the Sabine Affair was a very minor incident that, nevertheless, exposed some fundamental elements of our never-ending Left-Right political schisms.

Here are four of them:

1) Especially when it involves abortion-rights activism and activists, no incident is ever minor, and every inconvenience is to be treated as though it will cause Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to get a majority of the Supreme Court on their side.

2) If you make fun of a saint of pro-choice politics, you will be labelled "anti-choice" (and all sorts of unprintable things), even if you say nothing of your own abortion politics. Among those who tolerate no dissent, everyone who steps out of line is a heretic.

3) People of the Left are just as capable of falling for the most bizarre conspiracy theories as right-wing zanies. The very idea of the permanent state bureaucracy acting as a tool of the Right is just as preposterous as the idea of the permanent federal bureaucracy carrying out subversive missions on behalf of conservatives. The IRS does the bidding of the Left, not the Right. Everybody knows that. And nobody in the Arizona Department of Health Services healthcare-facility licensing department is about to "harass" anyone, much less an abortion-rights activist, just because the Republican Legislature passed a minor bill disliked by abortion-rights activists and the ACLU.

4) Speaking of Republican-passed laws: The Sabine Affair was not about harassment at all, if "harassment" is to be defined as an illegal or inappropriate action of government. It was about the Left's annoyance is with the state law that prompted the letter to Sabine in the first place. The law directs the ADHS licensing department to respond to complaints about possible unlicensed health-care facilities, even if they come to the agency anonymously. Truth be told, it is entirely possible that Sabine's defenders are correct that the law was used by pro-life activists who just wanted to harass Sabine (although there is just as much evidence that the complaint may have been logged legitimately, even if, ultimately, it was proved to have been in error).

But either way, the problem lies not with ADHS, which was unfairly accused of harassment, but with the Legislature, which passed a law that political activists could abuse.