Let’s be clear about something first and foremost. The scandal to which I refer is not the actual rape of children by individual priests (though that is scandal enough), but rather the decision by members of the Church hierarchy to cover up these crimes, transfer known rapists to new parishes they knew would be awash in fresh victims, and openly and unabashedly prioritize the reputation of the Church above the welfare of children.

Here’s a portion of a document that then Cardinal Ratzinger sent to the Oakland Diocese regarding child rapist Father Stephen Kiesle:

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.

Keep in mind that the “petitioner” whose young age Ratzinger was so anxious about, was not one of the victims Kiesle tied up and raped (who in this particular case were eleven and thirteen) but rather Father Kiesle himself who was the tender age of 38.

Kiesle went on to rape again and again and again.

It strains the boundaries of my humanity to comprehend how such a moral calculus was made, how Cardinal Ratzinger could have so brazenly disregarded the welfare of children whom he had to know would fall victim to this serial sadist.

But what depresses me anew is the fact that Ratzinger is now resigning voluntarily from his position as Pope, rather than being dragged from that office in disgrace to face prosecution in any number of jurisdictions. I, like some of the journalists who actually exposed these crimes, was naively under the impression that bringing them to light would motivate people and their legal representatives to take action.

I was wrong.

The truth doesn’t matter. It is merely raw material to be molded and shaped according to our emotional needs. Or ignored if that suits us. We are not, as I once naively believed, a truth-seeking species. We are a comfort-seeking species. And for reasons I can’t fully fathom we are more comfortable with continuing to endanger children than we are with bringing their institutional victimizers to justice. We don’t even bother to dispute the facts. (They are indisputable.) We simply turn away.

Shame on all of us.

Oh and check out the new cover too.

Happy listening!

And stay tuned for the sequel, (Re)Cycler.

We did that.

All of us.

And we can change it too.

But only if we stop taking the coward’s way out. Yes, the NRA has money and members, but they do not cast your vote for you. If you vote for a politician who supports the easy availability of assault rifles, then you enabled this crime. Own up to it. And make a change. Let your elected leaders know that you will no longer tolerate the status quo. Our children are too precious. And we have lost too many of them. It’s time to step up.

Fear not, I’m here to dispel these misconceptions.

1. Makers Versus Takers
It is quite popular among Romney supporters (and Romney himself) to claim that those of us on the other side of the political fence are all on government assistance or, at the very least, not paying taxes. Let me put your mind at ease. Every Obama supporter I know (and I know a lot) works for a living, pays taxes, and does not receive any government assistance (unless you count social security, which everyone over a certain age receives regardless of his or her politics). Obama supporters love job creators. Many of us are job creators. The more jobs the better, we say. In fact, if you were to look at the directional flow of federal tax dollars you would see that it goes from blue states to red states, not vice versa, which means the whole makers versus takers argument is exactly backwards.

2. Moral Relativism
Obama supporters tend to support abortion rights, gay rights, and access to contraception. To many on the other side, this indicates our unequivocal surrender to the forces of immorality. Alas, you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not immorality or even amorality that’s at the heart of these positions. It’s compassion, that most Christian of all values. We support abortion rights because allowing the government to harvest women’s bodies against their will is ghastly and cruel. We love women. Some of our best friends are women. We support gay rights because we believe that love is a beautiful thing, something to be celebrated not criminalized. We support access to contraception because nearly every woman in America uses it at some point in her life in order to manage her fertility responsibly. We like reproductive responsibility. Those on the other side of this issue seem to believe that there is something immoral about using birth control, which, to us, is a cruel, backwards, and deluded belief. In short, our support of these things stems from a very deep-seated morality, not the absence of morality.

3. Tax and spend
Obama supporters want their taxes to be as low as possible. We’re not masochists. We work hard for our money and we do not like to see it wasted. For example, many of us are stunned at the cost of the Iraq war, which many of us did not support. We would like a balanced budget and we would like to eliminate the national debt. Most of us, however, are unwilling to do so on the backs of the neediest Americans. Do you know why? Because the global financial collapse that led us to this sorry point was not caused by the neediest Americans. It was caused by the wealthiest–primarily bankers. To responsibly deal with our fiscal problems, we need to raise revenues. Yes, we can talk about cutting where necessary (how about the military?). And, yes, we need to consider raising the retirement age so that social security can be solvent. But we simply can not pull ourselves out of debt without raising taxes. Who can most easily afford to pay higher taxes? The rich. So step up, rich people. And maybe next time, think twice about causing a global financial melt down.

4. Hating capitalism
Obama supporters do not hate capitalism. We hate crony capitalism. We hate corrupt capitalism. We love entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs. We work within the free market system. And many of us do quite well. We do, however, acknowledge that the economy has shifted such that wealth is accumulating upward, creating a desperately unstable situation of haves and have-nots. A new Golden Age, if you will. We’re not happy about this. And in so far as the chumminess between the financial services sector and our elected leaders has brought about this new Golden Age, we want it changed. We want a fair market, so that capitalism can do what it does best–unleash human potential within a truly meritocratic system.

So there. That’s who we are. Perhaps we’re not as different from you as you thought we were. Perhaps there are things we can learn from each other. We’re all in it together, so the more we can find common ground, the better.

So to my LGBT friends out there and to everyone who sees this as the universal human rights issue that it truly is, I say, well done. You led the president to this moment. He couldn’t–and wouldn’t–have done it without you.

I’ll be in fabulous NYC this week to take part in David Levithan’s NYC Teen Author Festival. For those of you who don’t know David, he’s the genius who delivered Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games to the world.

As part of the general celebration of all things dystopian, I’ll be speaking on a panel called Things Fall Apart: World Building and World Destroying in YA, along with other dystopian YA authors, Anna Carey, Sarah Beth Durst, Jeff Hirsch, Andy Marino, Lissa Price, and Jon Skovron. Chris Shoemaker will moderate. Come and test your knowledge of popular dystopian themes!

Where: New York Public Library, 42nd Street Branch, Bergen Forum

When: Wednesday, March 28 from 6PM to 8PM

Why: Because when the blank hits the blank, you really want to be ready.

I’ll also be reading at the Kipp Academy on Thursday but I think you have to be a student there to attend, so maybe you can just read to yourself that day.

Here’s a full schedule of events featuring some of the top YA authors of the moment.

Come and be inspired!

So, if, for example, the woman’s pregnancy turns out to be ectopic–which almost never results in a live birth, and is frequently fatal to the mother if not terminated–the doctor can just withhold that information. And if the woman dies along with her baby, well that’s just too bad for her.

Such a law violates so many basic principles of medicine, not to mention civil society, it’s hard to even write them out. Are doctors Gods now? Are women finally reduced to nothing but vessels to be used by others for purposes beyond their control? Have America’s Republican lawmakers (and, yes, I’m sorry to say, this whole descent into a dystopian misogyny of Margaret Atwood proportions is primarily, if not exclusively, at the behest of Republicans) lost their everloving minds?

This kind of law does not represent the behavior of a civilized first world nation. This is the kind of law, to put it bluntly, that the Taliban would enact. Way to go Arizona Senate. WTF?

In short: nuh-uh.

I shall elaborate.

1. To religious leaders:

Any organization that consistently threatens women’s freedom, health or privacy will no longer be given a free pass simply because its philosophy is rooted in religion. Magical thinking is no excuse for corrupting civil society or eroding basic human rights. We fought long and hard for our equality and we’re not going back. As you are unelected and do not even represent the views of your own members in many cases, we will no longer offer you a seat at the public policy table.

2. To the men who can’t stop talking about our uteruses, our sex lives, or our use or non-use of contraceptives:

Having non-procreative sex is something the vast majority of people do. You are free to forego this pleasure. But you are not free to impose your largely defeated worldview on those of us who have rejected it. We are going to go right ahead and organize society–including the delivery of healthcare in a more cost-effective and inclusive manner–with the presumption that birth control is a non-controversial and, in fact, basic element of women’s health. We take the pill for a variety of reasons, some of them sex-related, others not. You are free to complain about this, but any attempt to deprive us of this medicine or shame us for using it will be crushed.

3. To women:

The existence of women who are different from you is not an existential threat so you really can relax. No one is trying to force you to burn your bra, abandon your children, pursue a high-powered career, breastfeed your child, not breastfeed your child, abort your fetus/embryo/baby/zygote/blastocyst or whatever you choose to call it, marry, not marry, gay marry, fornicate, procreate, or engage in an “open marriage.” So please, just go on living your life the best way you can and feel free to inform us on Facebook about how it’s going. But do stop insisting that my somewhat different existence is a violation of your freedom. I promise you, it is not.

In my effort to zero in on a world class heavy weight champion of a story, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, freewriting, staring blankly, bookshelf reorganizing, etc.

Then I came upon Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck. It’s a deck of cards he and Peter Schmidt created in 1975 as a means of solving creative problems. Basically, if you’re stuck, you pick a card out of the deck, read it, and see if it sends you anywhere useful.

Here are some examples and how they were (possibly) useful to me:

“Discover your formulas and abandon them.”

Of course, being an incredibly original writer of deep artistic integrity, I would never rely on anything so lowly as a formula to write novels. Formulas are for people who lack imagination.

Yeah right, my formulas were so obvious they practically jumped off the page and slapped me in the face. Basically I write about outsiders who are morally challenged by circumstances and who are dangerously susceptible to bad influences whom they mistake as positive role models. I won’t break it down for you by book, but trust me, all three novels (and the one I just finished) fit this description.

So what would happen if I abandoned this formula? Or more intriguingly, what would happen if I subverted this formula? I’d have to write about an insider who is inherently morally challenged and who meets a bad influence who turns out to be a positive role model.

So many possibilities.

Here’s another one from the Oblique Strategies Deck:

“What is the reality of the situation?”

Well, being equipped with the ability to see beyond the obvious into the meta-truths at the heart of our collective hallucination, the answer, which I typed furiously into my Between Novels Journal, was clear:

The world is on the cusp of a global economic breakdown leading potentially to widespread hunger, looting, and war. Or as someone once said (I was too lazy to google it) “any society is only three meals away from a revolution.” Also, the entrenched powerful are currently committed to preventing any rescue from this dire economic situation because they fear the loss of their power and money more than the collapse of civilization itself. They would rather cling to their power and money in a decaying, even apocalyptic world, than to cede anything to the underclass. This will not end well. For anyone.

Yeah, I think there may be a story in there.

Or not. Who knows.

Like many medical procedures, there’s a risk of infection, and when the procedure was done-obviously you open up the womb to outside instruments and other things when you have a surgery done. And unfortunately, as a result of that, several days after the surgery she-my wife had an infection in the uterus which caused her to go into labor. And the baby was delivered, and Gabriel was 21-plus weeks old and he was born alive. And he lived for two hours, and he was not old enough or well-developed enough to have survived beyond that. And so we gave comfort care to him for those two hours in which he lived.

It’s possible that the above represents the sum total of the story. It’s also possible, as others have claimed, that once the infection took hold, Senator Santorum and his wife elected to administer antibiotics in order to save her life, knowing that to do so was to bring on labor before the baby was viable outside the womb. In other words, Rick Santorum chose a procedure which would terminate his wife’s pregnancy in order to save her life.

Can you blame him?

Much has been made of the fact that the Santorums later brought the baby, which they named Gabriel, home so that their other children could see him and say good-bye. A mass was performed at their home, which Santorum believed would be more personal than sending his baby directly to a funeral home. I know that some people find this gruesome, but I completely understand it. Clearly, the Santorum’s loved this little baby and were heartbroken at his death. People cope with grief in a variety of ways and personally I have no trouble empathizing with the Santorums in this matter. I hope it gave them and their children some comfort to know that they took care of little Gabriel in the best way they could. And I hope that afterward they were surrounded by loving and empathetic family and friends who helped them mourn his passing.

But clearly empathy is not what Santorum took away from the experience. In fact it is the one thing that seems to be utterly lacking in Santorum’s public positioning on the subject of reproductive rights.

From the moment they discovered all was not right with the pregnancy, he and his wife had choices. They chose a risky surgery, which they knew would endanger their son’s life. Later, if the stories are true, they chose to administer antibiotics, which they knew would end his life. The fact that he was born alive and survived for 2 hours may provide them with some moral cover, but it in no way changes the fact that their choices–the risky surgery and (possibly) the application of antibiotics, caused their baby to be born before the age of viability.

Santorum claims that this experience is what solidified his across-the-board opposition to abortion. He has painted the incident as a demonstration of how a dyed-in-the-wool abortion opponent must inevitably act in the face of tragic circumstances. But this is hogwash. The Santorums could have chosen not to perform the surgery in the first place. The baby might have survived. They admit there was a chance he would have. They could additionally have chosen not to administer antibiotics, something Santorum’s wife, apparently, considered. They also could have chosen to terminate the pregnancy once they discovered the problem in the first place. The point is they had, and made, choices. They made the choices that made the most sense to them. Maybe you would have chosen differently. I think, given the same circumstances, I probably would have made the same choices. If anything, the Santorum’s experience is a demonstration of the dignity and compassion of choice. Biology can be cruel and capricious, thrusting us into horrifying choices we may feel ill-equipped to make. But make them we must. Sometimes they work out for the best, sometimes they don’t.

I believe the Santorums behaved with grace, dignity, and love under enormously tragic circumstances. And if they were a private couple minding their own business, I would leave it that. But they are a very public couple attempting to foist their absolutist reproductive philosphy on the rest of us. Therefore it is our responsibility to examine what they claim to be the foundation of this philosophy. The Santorums claim that their experience with little Gabriel bolstered beliefs they already had on the subject of reproductive rights. But I believe the experience was actually a direct challenge to their absolutist philosophy. I think they feel guilty for making choices that ultimately led to the death of their baby. And in response they have recast the experience–quite possibly with critical deletions–in order to nullify its guilt-causing components. They want, and perhaps need, to believe that they did everything they could to save their baby’s life and that they did nothing to hasten his demise. But the facts simply don’t line up this way.

To be clear, I do not believe the Santorums should feel guilty about the choices they made. They saved a mother’s life. But the fact of the matter is that simply by exerting their right to make choices which would lead to the premature delivery of their baby, they stepped way out of their pro-life comfort zone. And instead of being honest with themselves about it and allowing the experience to educate them on the bewildering and sometimes cruel nuances of pregnancy in the real world, they have bent the facts to their pre-conceived philosophy.

On a personal level, I can’t really fault them for doing this. It’s called cognitive disconnect and people do it all the time. It’s the reason why the segments of the population most vocally pro-life are the ones having the most abortions. It’s why the segments of the population most in favor of “family values” are the ones getting the most divorces. It’s human weakness, a tendency to bend reason to our emotional needs. I would let it go, were it not for the fact that Rick Santorum is running for president and wants to impose his absolutist philosophy on the entire nation!

I feel for him and his loss. I honestly do. But would it be asking too much for the man to step outside of his own worldview for a single moment to spare some empathy for the people whose tragic stories he can’t possibly know? Right now a husband is struggling with the same kinds of choices he had to make. Somewhere a woman is struggling with another tragic choice he couldn’t possibly understand. The absolutist pro-life philosophy only works in the abstract. When reality intrudes, a whole world of nuance opens up. This is why the most ardent anti-choicers sometimes find themselves making choices they once demonized and why the government has no place legislating such deeply personal decisions.

A little humility, Mr. Santorum. Some respect, please, for the families undergoing painful decisions right now. Some empathy for the women of this country who only want to know that if and when tragic circumstances arise, their fate will be determined by themselves and their loved ones, and not by an opportunistic politician trying to score points.

And incidentally, for what it’s worth, I think you behaved heroically in protecting your wife and I’m glad you had the choice.