The Tortured Prophets Department
J.D. Long-Garcia wants to live in the 1830s but WITH all of the racists.
As I’m sure you saw, last week the Arizona state legislature repealed their anti-abortion law, which had become a flashpoint among flashpoints in the era of state-level post-Dobbs legislation. You have probably seen at least a few stories about this law over the past several weeks, so you already know that it bans basically all abortion procedures at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, no exceptions for the health of the mother, and mandatory jail time for anyone who is convicted of breaking the law, which could include women, doctors, or anyone who helps them. You probably also know that the law was written in 1864, which is notably before Arizona was a state, before women could vote, before multiple advances in standards of medical care, and before the country had reached a consensus on whether slavery was bad1. You may also know that the territorial legislator who shepherded the 1864 law into being at one point was regularly having sex with a twelve-year-old girl.
As soon as the state supreme court upheld this law, everybody knew what a massive political shift this represented. Donald Trump disowned the law and encouraged the Arizona legislature to repeal it. Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate and former Nobel Laureate in biochemistry TV dumbass Kari Lake immediately reversed her position on the law in order to have any chance to stay competitive in her election. And it’s obvious why all of this was unpopular: it was draconian, it was archaic, it was explicitly about patriarchal control, passed by a man who married three different teenage girls. The nightmare Handmaid’s Tale scenario that abortion rights activists had warned about, in which disgusting men who want to control and exploit women’s bodies have the sole power to do so, in which the health care system and the carceral state are merged together, had come true. Plenty of people who claimed to be “pro-life”, who claimed to care about protecting the dignity and rights of the unborn, knew they had to distance themselves from this, knew they didn’t want to take credit for a world in which the violent enforcement and imprisonment mechanisms of the state were used to track down doctors regardless of circumstances or context. It was obvious, even to Catholics who treated abortion as their top political priority: the instrument of the 1864 law was far too blunt to address this complex moral issue. It sacrificed too much of the dignity and lives of others to justify the protection it claimed to offer. No Catholic, especially a Catholic who wanted to present himself as someone with intellectual credibility, with even a passing familiarity with the complex moral and theological traditions of the church, could possibly be on board with this.
I found a guy.
I’ve actually found this guy before. His name is J.D. Long-Garcia, he’s a senior editor for America magazine, and he has, incredibly, made the race for “worst J.D. in Catholic media” very competitive. I had written about a separate America op-ed that Long-Garcia had composed in 2022, where he attended the March for Life and was appalled, at this event in which Nick Fuentes and his white supremacist friends had a prominent presence, that pro-choice Catholics would dare use a projector in their activism and advocacy. Long-Garcia didn’t like those activists using their Catholic identity as a backdrop for what he considered appalling and cruel political views, at an event in which Catholic identity is explicitly used to support Donald Trump and violent white supremacy. At the time, I responded, in a line that I still think is pretty good, that “Making a pun on the word “projecting” at this point is more blunt and stupid than even Long-Garcia deserves.”
Anyways, this is all to say that Long-Garcia loved the 1864 Arizona law. He just ran a piece at America last week actually titled “The repeal of Arizona’s abortion ban is more than a political loss”, which begins with the line “In Arizona, where I live, we briefly had on the books one of the most pro-life laws in the nation.” Long-Garcia continues explaining why he wanted the law to stay on the books:
“I believe that human life begins at the moment of conception. But “believe” is the wrong word because it is a scientific fact…I do not consider an abortion as a loss of merely one person, for most children lost to abortion would have had children themselves, and their children would have had children. Abortion statistics cannot describe the value of each unique human being, but they also fail to calculate the loss of the infinite goodness and beauty they and their descendants might have brought into the world. Directly ending human life—at any stage—tears the metaphysical tapestry of existence.”
That’s why the 1864 law had to stay, you see. What you won’t find in Long-Garcia’s lament of the Arizona law’s repeal is anything that I mentioned at the top of this essay: the details of the law, the way it got made, the people who made it, the chilling implications for the healthcare system, and the blunt force behind it. He doesn't even bring them up to callously dismiss them. You probably knew about all of those pieces of context because this law has been in the national news a lot. Long-Garcia does not give the impression that he ever bothered to learn about them; rather, he comes across as a man who heard “it’s a ban and it’s like, a pretty strong ban,” and he thought “oh that’s good, we want a stronger ban because that means less abortion, and also there's a metaphysical tapestry of existence in there somewhere.”
Also absent from Long-Garcia’s piece is any perspective, anywhere, from anyone who has ever been pregnant, anyone who has had to receive obstetric care, anyone who has had to receive emergency obstetric care, anyone whose pregnancy has not gone as planned. Presumably, if Long-Garcia saw a woman on the operating table going into sepsis and needing a D&E procedure - which Arizona’s law would ban - he would say something like “you’re being a real whiny bitch right now2.” If Long-Garcia’s wife had a ectopic pregnancy - and under the 1864 law, it’s unlikely she would be able to find the care she needed to survive in Arizona - he would presumably say something like “damn, it was nice knowing you I guess.” Long-Garcia knows people who have gotten abortions; he has to, statistically. He also, likely, knows people who have gotten abortions for pregnancies that they very much wanted. You know people in both of those groups, and I do too. You know people that would have suffered immeasurably, and likely would have died, if the 1864 law had been in effect in their state. You also know who is going to suffer the most from laws designed to put people in prison very quickly: those who are already poor and marginalized. Long-Garcia does not appear to have given them a single thought, certainly compared to whatever the “metaphysical tapestry of existence” is. Making even a half-assed effort to listen to any of these people, or understand that they exist in the first place, could have led Long-Garcia to write a different piece then “well, this law was pro-life, and now it’s not the law anymore, and that sucks.”
I would have assumed that doing this sort of legwork and thinking is part of Long-Garcia's job at the Jesuit review of faith and culture, but it appears that his job, instead, is to wait for the bulb that says “abortion” to light up, and then push the button in front of him that shits out an essay. Intellectually and morally, he is on par with a lab rat in a maze. J.D. Long-Garcia is not a serious person and his ideas are not worthy of serious consideration. If you rapped your knuckles on his head, you’d hear a faint metallic echo. Thankfully, Long-Garcia does not make policy for his church or his state, so the only real response that he deserves is mockery. So, Mr. Long-Garcia, if you ever read this: get bent.
With that out of the way, there is something else we should consider: there are plenty of people who do make policy - state legislators, bishops - that believe similar things to what Long-Garcia believes. And what undergirds those beliefs is an iron commitment to refusing to learn any new information, refusing to encounter anyone whose experience and circumstances may challenge your assumptions about God, the world, and your role in easing the suffering in front of you.
I don’t write for the Jesuit review of faith and culture - and I’ve got a feeling that the senior editors won’t be taking my pitches after today - but I did actually go to a Jesuit high school, so I had four years worth of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm crammed into my brain in between Latin classes and serving JUG3. Experience, reflection, action. Experience, reflection, action. I’m hearing my sophomore year English teacher say it over and over: experience, reflection, action. You witness something or listen to someone, then you think about it, then it causes you to act differently than you did before. I feel like I should not expect, in Long-Garcia’s piece, in the actions of the bishops, in the current anti-abortion movement, so much grotesque pride in a complete lack of experience and reflection. The thinking that Long-Garcia laid out, and to which other more powerful people also subscribe, is bad because it’s ignorant - in this fantasy world, every pregnancy is viable and perfectly healthy and the healthcare system is affordable and easy to navigate, and the only people that would ever need a procedure banned by the 1864 law was some selfish girlboss who liked having casual sex, probably while doing illegal drugs - but it’s also bad because it’s not Catholic. It is not Catholic to wait for the lightbulb to come on and press the button in response. It is not Catholic to not listen, to not seek out, to not have your world shaken, to not have to think about it for a while, to not have to crumple up and rewrite the personal theology you’ve been writing in your head all of this time. I came to view and define abortion and it’s political response the way I do because I listened, and I learned a lot from the people around me, and I reflected on what the best way was to address the suffering that was right in front of me. And doing that is what made me feel like I could be a good Catholic, a good practitioner of a faith whose God tells me that He is alive today in the suffering person that I encounter, in front of me, every day. And maybe I’m completely wrong about all of this, what the hell do I know. But you can’t convince me that I’m worse at this than the senior editor at America magazine. Trying to understand anyone else’s perspective, making any effort to learn or think before writing his piece on such a polarizing topic, is the absolute least Long-Garcia could do. Hell, even I read his shitty essay.
I guess I’m not entirely sure whether we’ve actually reached that consensus.
I’m paraphrasing, I don’t know how the guy talks.
This was just meant as a throwaway reference to two common experiences at Jesuit high schools. I want to make it very clear that I never served JUG because I was a very good boy in school.