Harriet McBryde Johnson and Peter Singer, a love story
In some ways, it’s a classic pairing. She’s the passionate old South belle, he’s the cool Northern rationalist. Both are smart, serious, and successful. And they meet under, um, adverse circumstances. I think it’d make a great Hollywood movie.
These are both real people. Harriet McBryde Johnson is a disability rights lawyer and lobbyist in NC, sharp, severely disabled and devastatingly effective. Peter Singer is a bioethics professor at Princeton, whose moral calculus prohibits eating a hamburger but accepts offing babies and adults whose remaining functionality don’t make the grade. Naturally, he’s fairly controversial, and Johnson’s group, Not Dead Yet, substantially disrupted Princeton on the occasion of his hiring. (And yes, Johnson has weighed in on Schiavo in Slate, a nice piece, but not the one I want to talk about.)
And they have met, face to face. The story I want you to read is Unspeakable Conversations, written by Johnson, published in the NYT Magazine. It’s a wonderful, very personal piece, full not only of her philosophy, tactics, and life, but also of the evolution of her relationship with Singer. The intensity of emotion is there from the beginning. “Should I shake hands with the Evil One?” He turns out to be a nice guy, but weren’t the SS officers also nice, went home and played with their kids?
For the movie, of course, you’d have to Hollywoodize it. They fall in love, get married, natch. It’s a chick flick, raising big moral themes and playing in the art houses, so it’s got to have a sad ending. Maybe work takes them apart, as she goes off to Washington as a political appointee, and he takes up with some floozy undergrad. Doesn’t matter how you end it, it’d be a great story.