Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

Since it’s election season, for those of you who are interested in the politics of the religious right or of Washington State, I’ve included a second brief article below this one, a post from the Daily Kos entitled: Don’t Make Our Mistake. It’s about local Washington politics and a new stealth strategy that involves changing seats to “nonpartisan” before running Religious Right candidates in liberal areas.

The most controversial check I write each year is the one that goes to a small nonprofit called Project Prevention. Project Prevention pays drug addicts and chronic alcoholics to get permanent or long term birth control. Director Barbara Harris founded the Project after adopting not one or two but four drug addicted babies from the same mother. She watched them scream and writhe inconsolably, backs arched and hands clenched, and she said, “Enough.”

Reproductive rights organizations that I support like Planned Parenthood and NARAL don’t approve of Barbara’s work. It operates in a bioethical gray zone that makes them uncomfortable, and should. Here is their reasoning: Payment has the power to manipulate people into decisions they will regret. An addict may be desperate enough for a fix that she’d sell her soul let alone her ability to reproduce.

I think they are right. Addiction does make people that desperate, and a decision born of desperation is a decision coerced. Consequently, addiction pits two things I cherish against each other. One of them is reproductive freedom. I believe passionately that parenthood is one of the richest, most spiritual dimensions of life, and that we collectively should neither obligate nor restrict it without overwhelming cause.

I also believe is that childhood is a precious trust, and we should bring children into this world only if we are prepared to honor that trust –to give them a decent shot at flourishing. Under the wrong circumstances childhood can be a living hell. And that is far more likely to be the case when children are the unintended product of unprotected sex, with the judgment of involved parties clouded by addiction.

When our ancestors had no control over fertility, childbearing wasn’t a moral decision. But now it is. I tell my children that we are responsible for what we have control over; power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Contraception is one of humanity’s newfound powers. So it is that contraceptives bring a new dimension of moral decision making to the human race. And as someone who has influence over another person’s reproductive decisions through my charitable giving, I end up having to weigh moral questions.

In my experience, we encounter moral dilemmas most often when two good things or two bad things are pitted against each other. It’s easy to say that childhood health is a good thing or to say that personal freedom is a good thing. But which matters more – the freedom of women to reproduce as they choose, or the right of children to have a healthy start in life?

As a woman, I am utterly grateful that my culture, U.S. Laws, scientific advances and financial privilege, gave me a high level of reproductive freedom. I had the freedom to defer childbearing—to go to school, travel, and heal my childhood wounds first. I had the freedom to abort an unhealthy fetus. I had the freedom, finally, to bring two chosen daughters into a solid marriage with a bounty of love and life experiences to share. When I think of my own life, I value reproductive freedom a lot—for people I love like my daughters, but also for people I’ve never met.

But is it the needs of women or children that go most to the core for me? Mercifully, they often are aligned. Still, how do I weigh them when they come into conflict?

One way I get insight into my own hierarchy of values is by looking at what I do. Throughout my adult life, my most compelling efforts (grad school, work, volunteering, giving, writing) have been about making room for a little more delight and a little less pain in this world. To me more reproductive freedom and fewer addicted babies both matter because they serve this end. But if I look closely at my own history, one of these values trumps the other. The lettering I painstakingly stuck on my car as a young therapist said, “Children deserve to be planned for and chosen.” Years later, I was instantly smitten with a quirky warm political co-conspirator, Patricia, who declared that she was pro-choice because, “All babies deserve to have their toes kissed.”

My checks to Project Prevention fit a pattern—they tell me that over all these years, my values—in this area, at least—haven’t changed. All babies do deserve to have their toes kissed, and their knees and elbows and unclenched hands. It is a bonus that, from the sound of things, most of Project Prevention’s efforts—inspired by Barbara’s babies—are giving women healthy (new) beginnings in life too.

Don’t Make Our Mistake!

Last year voters in King County Washington (aka Seattle and surroundings) were faced with a charter amendment making all county races nonpartisan. Liberals like me, sick of elected who cared more about the party than the people, voted for it in droves, and it passed. I thought — dimwit that I am — that people would be forced to vote on issues rather than tribal loyalties. Turns out the whole thing was a right wing ploy that is being propagated across the country.

It is only in liberal districts, where an “R” after your name on the ballot has become a badge of shame, that these lovely populist initiatives are springing up. (King County is one of the most liberal places in the country.) The ploy was so transparent in one North Carolina municipality that the Justice Department refused to approve the move to “nonpartisan” appointments. Then the Right countered by crowing that Blacks were too stupid to vote without partisan labels. Turns out maybe we’re all too stupid to vote without labels.

In King County, as soon as the initiative passed, the same people who funded the initiative put up a stealth Religious Right candidate for county exec. Susan Hutchison was on the board of the creationist Discovery Institute for ten years. She has a multi-year relationship with the Washington Policy Center, a haven for free market fundamentalists. (At their recent gala she stood up and crowed about reagonomist Steve Moore who then crowed about Fox News and teabagging.) She gave money to Mike Huckabee over John McCain. At a governor’s prayer breakfast before she announced her candidacy, she exhorted electeds to use their bully pulpit to trumpet the path to salvation. AAAND It looks like she is may win in a county that is wildly at odds with her values.

So who duped me? The campaign to make races nonpartisan was kicked off by a developer named George Rowley who spent 70k of his money to sucker us. He was joined by two wireless magnates – Bruce McCaw and John Stanton. Together Stanton and Rowley provided $313,000, over 80% of the money spent by — get this — “Citizens for Independent Government.” Gee. I’m a citizen for independent government…

The Hutchison campaign just happens to be run out of a house owned by McCaw’s company. And low and behold, he and his wife have put almost 30K into her campaign and attack ads against her progressive Democrat opponent, Dow Constantine. Stanton and his wife are in for 3,200 to Hutchison, and it looks like George Rowley, through a group called Eastside Business Alliance, is in for another 28k give or take.

Here’s the brilliant part of their tactic. Because the race is “non-partisan” and Susan Hutchison calls herself a “non-partisan” and a “moderate” the local papers refuse to call her out for the Religious Right mainliner that she actually is. Her whole campaign strategy has been to be a tabula rasa onto which voters could project their desires for a fresh face and a new approach. (Since Dems were in power in King County when the economy crashed, they were responsible, don’t ya know.) Funny, snotty renegade media is finally kicking in to spread the word about the Palin wannabe who is inches away from the County Exec seat, (here, here, and here — don’t miss the last 5 sec on the kid one and the elephant one.) But it may be too late. Why didn’t I clue in when Republican candidate for governor Dino Rossi refused to put Republican as his party last year?!

Spread the word. This ploy, called “going stealth,” may be coming to a liberal locality near you!