Tuesday's election meant many things to many people, but for the pro-choice community, it was an epic smackdown of the religious right that wants to control how you have sex, who you have sex with, how many children you have, and even how you die -- a religious right so stuck on its own sense of self-importance that they actively fight against science, in no small part because the roads of reason don't uphold their mystical worldview and need to be shut down.  Ballot initiatives on abortion, stem cell research, and the right to die with dignity (and outside the reach of right wingers who need to mind their own business) all broke for the pro-choice side, with the one exception of Proposition 8 in California.  The punishing hand of the right reached far enough to hurt gays and lesbians.  But otherwise, the losses should be humbling to the religious right.   

Seriously, normal people would crumple in defeat after the death blows the hard right has received over the years.  Certainly, feminists have given up after lesser defeats (The ERA, for instance).  And this was an ass-whupping.  For the third time, parental notification has been defeated in California.  The personhood amendment in Colorado was beaten 3 to 1.  In South Dakota, the abortion ban went to the polls in a dead heat, but was demolished at the ballot box with a 55-45 vote.  

This was a direct repeat of what happened in South Dakota in 2006, when the ban looked alive going into the polls and was sucking dirt before it was over.  But it also gives us a clue as to why the anti-choice religious right will not give up, even in the face of humiliating defeats (and it's not just because they have no shame).  That so many South Dakotans tell pollsters they're undecided on the ban and then turn pro-choice in the privacy of the ballot box tells us a lot about how the religious right creates the illusion of consensus in certain parts of the country through loud mouth guilt trips.  My pet theory about undecided voters is that they're mostly conflict-averse people who fear registering an opinion because they know it will offend others.  Which is fine, of course, but in communities where the religious right has a big megaphone, the people who refuse to resist them create the illusion of agreement, which allows the right to perpetuate the myth that they're a silent majority.    

The other thing that keeps the religious right going is that they cherish the battle over the victory. It gives them community and gives their lives meaning.  In his book American Fascists, Chris Hedges describes the way that the religious right preys on people who are confused, unhappy, or in crisis and offers them a simple solution: blame all your problems on liberalism, especially abortion. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

The stories many in this movement tell are stories of failure--personal, communal, and sometimes economic.  They are stories of public and private institutions that are increasingly distant and irrelevant, stories of loneliness and abuse.  Isolation, the plague of the modern industrial society, has torn apart networks of extended families and communities.  It has empowered this new movement of dreamers, who bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world and fill the resulting emptiness with a new world where time stops and all problems are solved.

As Hedges notes, abortion in particular is blamed for all problems.  Women who come to the religious right with lifetimes of sorrow and abuse are told that any abortions they may have had are the source of all their problems.  From that perspective, it would almost be a bad thing for abortion to be banned, and for the soldiers of the right to realize that it didn't immediately usher utopia in.  

But more importantly, the belief that God is coming down to wipe out all the sinners and purify the world means that winning or losing is less important than fighting.  When victory is certain in your eyes, then the fight is ultimately about the fight, and all it gets you -- a community, a sense of moral superiority, a scapegoat on which to blame all your problems.  They won't quit fighting because every time they get to gloat about how morally superior they are to the fornicators, they win. 

In fact, Bob Enyart of Colorado Right to Life admitted as much, when he was quoted saying, "Part of our goal was to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it's not reasonable to expect an institution to correct its own error. Our goal is to increase the social tension over abortion."  He was trying to explain why they backed a ballot initiative they knew would lose.  

We on the left have our own versions of this.  I've tangled with militant vegans, utopian leftists, and people who still think Ralph Nader is awesome.  Often, you get the strong impression that they oppose positive developments that fall short of their definition of perfection, saying that there's a danger in dramatically improving people's lives because they become "complacent," and feeling calm and putting down weapons is considered a worse problem than grinding misery that can be alleviated.  But the volatile weapon of religion makes the moral superiority trip even worse, because it's assumed that an objective third party is watching, and therefore the only way to lose is to quit fighting.   

So they will keep fighting, because as long as they're fighting, they're winning.  It's up to us to figure out how to keep resisting without becoming demoralized.