Wow, are you dug in. . .
What a brilliantly un-empathetic response to my original claim of your lack of empathy.
Your emotions do not change reality. The fact is that the same people who purport to believe that abortion is murder and must be stopped at all costs are working to take away sex education and birth control of all kinds, and the lack of those things is statistically linked to an increase in unwanted pregnancies and abortion.
You can find someone else to pat you on the back for your “empathy,” which here appears to be shorthand for “mealy-mouthed relativism that refuses to allow me to see who is clearly lying about what their real beliefs are and side unambiguously with the only people that have a real argument for their position,” which is the pro-abortion-rights side. The “pro-life” people are wrong. Period. They are liars and hypocrites. Period, objectively verifiable fact to boot. There’s no need to sugarcoat what they are about or try to “empathize” with Christofascists.
Who is patting who on the back? Read some Sun Tzu then hit an art shop for a narrower brush. Not all pro-life protesters hate the world and create fake beliefs to fight it with.
Your argument against the pro-lifers fails to take into account their desire that sex only occurs in a marriage. As loony, naive and misguided it may be those are their beliefs. If you understood their position you would realize that within their belief system they are not hypocrites and liars. Possibly misguided and wrong, but not hypocrites.
I totally stared slack-jawed as this page loaded, as I read the title to mean “Abortion Demonstration (IE: a how-to forum) in DC.” I was like, “Jesus Christ, first the protesters have dead fetus pictures, then they have dead fetuses, and NOW they actually SHOW abortions! Icky.”
(Clearly, I’m very mature with my “icky” sentiment).
But I also agree fully that I can certainly see where they would equate abortion to killing babies, killing baby to taking lives, taking millions of lives a year to what Hitler did. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily mirror that sentiment myself or anything, it’s just that I can perhaps see their reasoning. That said, the venue was less than appropriate and I fully agree that a line was crossed.
I know that when I was at that museum about this time last year, there were survivors of the Holocaust (and their families, naturally) both visiting and working there. While some of those folks certainly share the same ideologies of the protesters, I can certainly imagine how they may have felt that something particularly special, remembering something horrible was being disrespected and under appreciated by some harpy-esque protesters.
Lenin:
Hey, um, I happen to be a member of the “other side,” and personally, I’m also in favor of comprehensive sex ed, I’m in favor of birth control being accessible to those who want it, I think the gory aborted-fetus posters are reprehensible, and I’m not “just angry at the world and looking for an excuse to start a fight.” So, there is at least one of us. Possibly more. Unless of course you’d rather just write me off as an evil liar and not give it any more thought. I guess that’s your right.
I was unaware that the Catholic Church supports all forms of birth control in the context of marriage. Please provide a cite for this.
That’s what I was ranting about. It is the choice of venue that appalled me. I’ve seen the comparison between abortion and the Holocaust before. I think it is specious, but that isn’t the point here. I should have known better to post something like this and not expect it to descend into an argument over whether anti-abortion campaigners are hypocrites…
I fell into my own fucking broad brush trap. The pro-lifers I know are Evangelical Protestants and are fully supportive of birth control in the context of marriage.
Plus, they (well some of “they”) tend to be accepting if not always supportive of birth control outside of marriage as well. They would prefer that people wait for sex until marriage, but they would rather there not be a need for abortion in either case.
I agree that if you think abortion = killing children, you should be het up about it and try to stop it.
However, it also seems to me that many of the most vocal pro-life advocates do not at all act as though they equate zygotes, embryos, and fetuses with born children. As is often pointed out, people generally don’t have funerals for six-week miscarriages. And if it’s a “baby” with a right to life, it shouldn’t matter how it was conceived (rape, incest), it should have an equal right. Frankly, there are distinct underlying messages that being “pro-life” seems more about enforcing the sexual purity of women through the punishment of forced pregnancy and birth.
So while any individual may truly believe they are in it to save the “babies,” I still cast a rather jaundiced eye on these groups and such stunts by them.
Didn’t PETA try something like this?
Irrelevant. If they aren’t willing to bend on that point in order to reduce the number of situations in which people will seek out abortions, then either 1)they don’t really believe that abortion is murder, or 2)they don’t really believe that murder is all that serious a matter. QED.
There was an article in the Times Magazine a while ago about a growing evangelical movement to paint various forms of birth control as dangerous. Then we have the evangelical Protestants in the White House opposing teaching about birth control in school.
I don’t know anyone who thinks that a high abortion rate is a good thing. One would hope that abortion opponents would be out there supporting access to birth control, since this would have a far more immediate impact on the abortion rate than waiting for a liberal Supreme Court Justice to die. Perhaps they don’t do it to avoid alienating the Catholics, or perhaps there is a subtext of trying to reduce the evils of premarital sex by making the impact worse on women.
I understand and agree with this, and I would think Steve MB does too. I am not arguing that, hell I haven’t even thrown my “hear! hear!” in with the OP’s anger at using a Holocaust memorial as a place to protest, which I am also in agreement with.
I do think that some people fail to understand how black and white certain aspects of sexual morality are for some (maybe most) of the pro-lifers. Premarital sex is wrong! Abortion is wrong! End of story, protest abortion, fight against birth control for unmarried people. They see a problem in the world, as most people do, that there are too many single mothers, too many broken homes, too much pain. They want to fix it in a way that fits with their bible. It has to fit with their bible or God won’t bless their efforts. That’s it. They have to wedge their actions into a moral framework from a much less sophisticated and technologically savvy past.
They either can’t see, or accept as an unfortunate paradox, that preventing access to birth control and not providing education will cause more abortions to be needed. They are doing the best they can within their moral framework. We may all disagree with them, but we still need to understand where they are coming from to fight them effectively.
As an aside, many of the Evangelicals I know are pro-birth control, pro-Noah’s Flood and Creationism and anti-evolution. A full bag of mixed nuts, I tell ya.
Poultry in a gas chamber, IIRC.
Illinois, of course.
They were smoking a turkey? Why wasn’t I invited?
Great. I am now visualizing Billy Mays brandishing a speculum and bellowing about Oxy-Tot.
Okay, now maybe you can read my mind and tell me what I think about free market economics, or maybe you could analyze my position on how to deal with homeless people or domestic violence. Sure would be nice to have all that sorted out, since you so clearly know more about how I think than I do.
I agree with this statement 100%. While I think there are some anti-abortion people who believe that the fetus should be saved at all costs, the majority of these so-called pro-life people are more interested in punishing women for being sluts than “saving the children”.