Cite?
From here.
It seems to be a secondhand report.
Our local editor yanked it too. Mumbled something about abortion not being an appropriate topic for a cartoon. :smack:
He went on to say that he’s tired of Garry Trudeau throwing these little hand grenades at him.
Cartoons and cartoon strips are not always funny. Doonesbury is put on the editorial pages of some papers, and there are times when that’s the most appropriate place for it.
I notice that the Dallas Morning News is running the Slut arc, but the Fort Worth Star Telegram is running the alternate arc.
You know they put the series on the editorial page don’t you? I have been reading it there in dead tree version all week.
You cannot be pro-life and feminist. Pro-lifers want to force women through law to be unable to get abortions. I’ve yet to see a pro-lifer argue that abortions should be readily available but unnecessary. A truly feminist position against abortions would be to be pro-choice and simply convince women not to utilize abortion services. That’s how you be feminist and pro-life.
Its so easily to illustrate this point with the famous Voltaire quote, though apparently it was misattributed, that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Flip that and it becomes “I disapprove of abortions, but I will defend to the death your right to have them.”
I don’t know; he didn’t say.
Hell, I had better luck communicating with a guy I disagreed with!
I’m sure you’ve seen that bumper sticker that says: Abortion stops a beating heart.
When do you think there will be a bumper sticker that says: Pregnancy can stop a beating heart–the woman’s. ?
Never mind. Not gonna happen.
That… doesn’t make sense. The point of Voltaire’s quote was that speech doesn’t explicitly cause injury, whereas abortion once the foetus is conscious does. Of course, one could argue that there’s an analogue in that determining an adequate cut-off point for speech is inherently harmful, just as discovering one for a woman’s right to do what she wishes with her body is, but that’s by no means apparent.
“You don’t even deserve to be aborted!”?
Not a strict analog, just a useful paraphrase.
Lots of people (myself included, though I didn’t make the quote above), are personally bothered by abortions, but think as part of a free society it is necessary to recognize that others have freedoms and to sometimes defend freedoms we don’t like. It’s wider than the point Voltaire made, but still useful phrasing.
How’s your college logic class going, anyway?
Tiny nitpick:
No actual evidence that Voltaire was actually responsible forthat quote.
Nonsense! Was it not Socrates who said “The unexamined fetus is not worth living”
Or René Descartes who famously opined non cogita, ergo abortio “It doesn’t think therefore I abort"
Well perhaps then you’ve heard of a guy named Friedrich Nietzsche who said “God is dead! He remains dead! And you have killed him with your wonton sluttiness”
Remember folks, your right to swing your transvaginal probe ends at my vagina (were I to have one).
What exactly is wonton sluttiness? Are they doing it in the soup?
Right, but you can see why it’s a poor analogy to the debate, yes?
“If you don’t like robbery, then don’t rob anyone! But don’t tell me what to do with my life!”
We have laws against robbery because we wish to protect the victims of robbery, not because we wish to control the lives of would-be robbers.
The abortion debate hinges on one side’s belief that the unborn fetus is a human being and deserves the protection of the law, and the other side’s belief that this is not the case. You cannot usefully argue against this split by declaring that you defend abortion as a matter of freedom, because the other side believes the freedom you’re discussing is the freedom to end the life of a human being. THAT is the disagreement that must be addressed.
Ah spelling mistakes. You dim sum, you lose some.
As far as I’m aware, the existence of society is to facilitate the greater good for all participants. One can hold that limiting freedoms (such as freedom of movement or speech) will entail greater damages to society than permitting them, but the point isn’t to uphold something damaging to society, it’s to prevent greater damage to society by eliminating the possibility for freedoms to be curtailed.
I think it’d be incredibly short-sighted to stand up for a freedom that harms society (or to use another phrase, that one disagrees with), if not within the context that proscribing the freedom will lead to greater harm to society. In fact, without that in mind, what is an adequate determinant for what freedoms people should not be able to enjoy? I won’t pull a slippery slope, but as someone with roughly Utilitarian principles, it seems like that position would be a roughly anarchist/normative moral relativistic one.
This thread is quickly deteriorating…I’m going for a wok.
Yeah, I get that. Like I said, I didn’t take it as an actual analogy, just a borrowing of phrase.
[tangent]Fully agree. I think ideally law should be amoral. Lots of lawyers I’ve talked with, though, don’t see that. [/tangent]
Yeah, I get that. I tried to highlight that upthread, in fact. All I got, though, was the observation that if anyone thinks a first trimester fetus is a human, they are stupid beyond belief.
I guess I must concede it’s not even a good borrowing of phrase, then.
I’ll throw this out, though: if you really want to end abortion, and your desire to end abortion is stronger than your desire to punish people who perform them, or undergo them, give single moms economically viable alternatives.
Outlawing abortion doesn’t end it. Not at all.It’s easy to pretend abortion goes away, but it doesn’t. Goes on at the same rate.
What does severely decrease abortion is providing jobs for single moms.
Of the L.A. Times? No, I did not know that. I wouldn’t have known about the switcheroo in the funny pages if someone hadn’t left a copy out in the lunchroom at work.
I used to think this. Recently I’m starting to wonder if Der Trihs wasn’t right all along, and the abortion debate actually hinges on one side’s belief that women are sluts and prostitutes if they choose to have recreational sex and should be punished with public humiliation, invasive and embarrassing state mandated sexual assault by medical professionals and unwanted children if they accidentally get pregnant.