*Actually* Pro Life: Our Principles

Happy Pride! Let’s get back to basics.

I do fundamentally agree with Benji Franklin here. A huge catalyst for our 2025 pivot towards courting a much wider audience was AOC’s postmortem of the 2024 election: “We can’t just be right. We have to be effective.”

But at the same time, Benj, we have to also agree on the fundamentals — human rights — and that we won’t compromise on those.

And as discussed in my first APL post, from the very beginning, the founders left the door open for our fundamentals to be — at best! — up for discussion, at worst, blissfully ignored while their very own slave-children tended to their expansive gardens.

So while we’re definitely trying to reach way, way more people where they are in their every day lives, we’re simultaneously making it as clear as humanly possible that these eight basics — the *Actually* Pro Life Principles — are absolutely non-negotiable.

They are the ground-floor, and they start and end with our golden rule: that no life is worth more than another.

Here are the Principles, laid out”

Now, will we drag the *Actually* Pro Life Principles out, by name, in all of our content, all of the time? No.

But we’ll also never, ever negotiate on them.

Because, per AOC, we are still — more than ever — wholeheartedly dedicated to being righteously, obnoxiously “right”.

But we are also more aware than ever that reaching more people in ways that might otherwise not seem related to our foundation — again, that no life is worth more than another — and converting some small percentage of that much, much larger audience of parents or bird-nerds or sci-fi or reality TV fans, may be even more “effective” than force-feeding people their vegetables all of the time.

It’s why launching an (award-winning) parenting podcast and reality TV podcast in successive years does actually make sense alongside slapping *Actually* Pro Life on t-shirts and stickers (and just in time for Pride month, no less!).

Can you be someone who loves The Traitors but who doesn’t think everyone deserves clean air? Totally. But also — and this distinction is super important — go fuck yourself.

We’re looking for people who OBVIOUSLY believe everyone deserves clean air, and are actually willing to fight for it, who will gladly — effusively — bring receipts for both their actions and the measurable progress they’re working towards, and who ALSO remember playing Mafia IRL before they had kids, who are just so tired now, and who are thus living vicariously through Alan Cumming’s fabulous outfits on The Traitors.

Maybe you’ve never even had to think about whether or not you, yourself, have access to these basics, or how you might be intentionally deprived of them, much less while you crushed Love Island.

That’s great for you, and I’m in the same boat, just swap out Love Island for GBBO.

On the other hand, do you know how many people get kicked off Medicaid simply for fucking up paperwork?

Or who are actively deciding between paying their rent or paying for AC?

Who live in a state where that state offers more for a private school voucher than they spend per student in their public schools?

Who live in a country unrecognized by most of the other countries, who’ve been the victims of a systematic genocide for going on three years?

Who have no hospitals, no schools, no food, no water? Who have no safety, or a home, or equal standing of any kind under international law?

The answer: a lot. A lot of people are currently deprived of any combination of these eight Principle requirements.

Fewer people than there used to be, but still — a lot. Please see the OWID chart that underpins so much of our work:

Of the eight Principles, “equal standing” can feel the least tangible.

But if “the housing theory of everything” applies, and we believe it does, then we have to agree that without equal standing under the law, no one can truly expect or enjoy freedom.

Take, for example, the X-Men.

Maybe you do not prefer to equate Alan Cumming in The Traitors to Alan Cumming’s genuinely heart-felt portrayal of Nightcrawler in X-2.

Maybe X-Men to the genocide in Palestine feels like a stretch, but that’s possibly only because you didn’t pay enough attention to the X-Men’s situation in the first place:

Societal “others”, most born that way, who faced a never-ending threat of state-sponsored extermination but who also struggled to simultaneously love and prove themselves, and who still showed up to save the day, for everyone.

How to achieve the equity mutants deserved was, of course, up for discussion — and many of the best discussions between Professor X and Magneto illustrated those struggles, however much their friendship was dwarfed and their debates acted out in real-time by the terrible mutant-on-mutant violence around them and by them.

But — and this is key — whether or not mutants fundamentally deserved equal standing and safety, a home, or a school, was never, ever up for negotiation by either school.

Likewise, our Principles are steadfast, but the actions we recommend, and the new Positions they take — much more on those soon — represent a myriad of ways to measurably show up for the issues of our time, whatever your resources.

Organize for candidates who know exactly what it feels like to be hungry, and who know that hunger is a policy choice. Donate to groups fighting to get lead pipes out of the ground, out of communities, and out of schools, or who fund pediatric cancer research, or disaster relief for American-funded wars all over the world.

You know how long we deprived women and Black people the right to vote, you know how long we enforced separate but equal, but do you know how long and until how recently gay men were deprived of the opportunity to donate blood in this country? To quite literally give a part of themselves for someone else’s benefit, despite how we’ve disadvantaged them?

2023.

This, despite perennial blood shortages and radical improvements to blood supply screening for everything from HIV antibodies to the West Nile virus.

If you didn’t know the answer to that, it’s probably because you didn’t have to know.

But now I’m telling you — you have to know.

Do you know how Wolverine got his claws? Have you heard of Henrietta Lacks or the Tuskegee study?

Without equal standing, permission — consent — is just some abstract concept, waved away by white supremacy and the power-hungry religious right.

The most affecting history and stories tend to blend heroes and victims who never asked to be either and somehow ended up both because some of us decided some lives are in fact worth much more than others, and not enough other people said no.

I’ve said on our parenting podcast, Not Right Now, that I categorically made my parenting a little easier by establishing a firm set of “no’s”, and everything else is (within reason) up for discussion. Similarly (lol), Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called Long Walk Home, where he described how a “flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we'll do and what we won’t.”

Like Meatloaf, though, Bruce didn’t — in particular that song — describe what we’ll do and what we won’t, so it’s easy to imagine a billionaire Boomer rock star doing a drive-by of the so-called inalienable rights Jefferson wrote with fingers crossed behind his back.

But then again, considering Bruce’s long history of calling America on our bullshit, even if the dumbest among us continually refuse to read the lyrics, I would encourage you to consider his actual take might be one of two alternatives:

Obviously, as Hamilton, Wicked, Bohemian Rhapsody, and more recently, Michael, very selectively taught us, it really matters who lives, who dies, and who tells your story.

American history and literature are, at best, like the 1970’s more international X-Men and 1990’s Nightcrawler and Storm, a quilt-work of perspectives that help illustrate who we are and what we’re capable of, of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

They show plainly how inequitable so much of that progress has been, here at home and in all the countries around the world we have affected in so many ways. Their stories form a quilt woven by authors and writers and directors who are the descendants of people who left their homes and ancestral homelands and who specifically came here looking for a better life, or for religious freedom, or who were brought here against their will never having had any freedom at all.

No home, no equal standing, no provisions, much less guarantees, of healthcare, clean air, water, healthy food, safety, or an education.

Consider those authors and that history in full, and all of our resources, and it’s clear that if anyone is indebted to and capable of putting a very loud label on these eight Principles and fighting for them in every way we can, it should — theoretically — be us.

But the bad guys are real, and the call is coming from inside the house, and their methods, like in The Traitors — disinformation and group-think among them — are not trivial, or easily defeated.

We can never compromise on our Principles, but we don’t have to be heroes.

We do, though, have an obligation to continue fighting The Long Defeat, and it has to continue with all of us — it’s together, or nothing, of course — and whatever your flavor of podcast, it has to be explicitly (more explicitly than ever, it seems) be grounded in Principles that are inarguable, even inalienable, that are fundamentally and measurably *Actually* Pro Life.

Together or nothing,

— Quinn