:rolleyes: Are you really thinking that legal and moral are the same thing? Thank Og they are often not! Most of us probably think it’s immoral to lie to one’s spouse, but who would want that to be illegal?
Bricker, I don’t see where you ever responded to this post. Probably because it fell at the end of a page, though.
Interesting that you regard an insurance company’s determination as dispositive. Would you show the same reverence for an insurance company in other circumstances?
The insurance company’s determination is not based on the possibility of saving the life of the unborn child. It is that child’s medical interests that are being advanced by this legislation.
And as Richard Parker has pointed out, Casey does suggest that the government has an interest in the unborn life.
It does not begin. It continues.
I disagree that the last claim should be the law.
And what happens when citizens of a representative democracy disagree about what the laws of that democracy should be?
(A) One of them gets to decide, by emphatically stating his view as undeniable fact
(B) All citizens of the political unit participate in periodic elections to choose leaders; those leaders make the law; those laws are reviewed by another governmental branch for consistency with a previously-agreed-upon supreme law of the land
It’s not an insurance company’s determination. The part I quoted comes directly from a practice bulletin published by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I linked to an Aetna document because the ACOG’s materials are paywalled.
ETA: that’s what the asterisk was supposed to be pointing to in the original.
It’s called “sarcasm”. He was poking fun at Bricker, who does indeed hold the view you join us in scorning.
Therefore pi is so exactly three! 
Hey why don’t we combine Bricker’s two favorite nit-pick zones into one piece of legislation
Statute: Women must get a sonogram in order to vote.
It’s no big deal and lower women turn out should help Republicans so it’s all good.
(1) Never happened although such a bill was proposed.
(2) There is a key difference between the two. Pi’s definition is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. A law purporting to change pi to 3 is simply changing the definition of the word – not changing the ratio. With respect to when a human life begins and is worthy of legal protection – if you truly believe that’s a matter that can be as objectively determined as the ratio between a circle’s diameter and circumference, then it’s clear you don’t understand the matter.
OK. My other points stand: the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists was not making a medical determination about the best interests of the unborn child.
Yeah, what Elvis says.
Specifically I was referring to the voter ID debate on this board. Where Bricker was very much for it, even though it impacted lower income and minorities much harder than anyone else. Even when it was pointed out that the amount of cases of voter fraud (which the voter ID law supposedly addresses) is orders of magnitude less than the number of minorities and poor who would be barred from voting he supported it.
When asked how he could support such an immoral position, his defense was roughly, it was legal.
You have done a historically poor job of accurately relaying my arguments. It seems to me as though you deliberately misrepresent my arguments in order to weaken my apparently rhetorical position.
In fact, the position I took was: it’s not immoral.
And then you laughed that the law was on your side and haw haw haw, or some such.
If I have misrepresented you, I genuinely apologize, but it is likely owing to the fact that your positions and opinions are fairly slimy and you often don’t say what you mean because of your arrogant desire to be Mr. Socratic.
So, you think it’s moral to make it harder for tens of thousands of minorities to vote if it keeps a small handful of in-person fraudulent votes from being cast? Specifically when the people who will find it harder to vote will more likely support the party opposed to the one making the law?
Can I get you on the record, counselor?
Yes, under the circumstances that exist here: namely, that the “making it harder” consists only of requiring that all voters identify themselves with a free, state-provided photo ID.
And given the broad public support for this basic identification requirement, taking the opposite position – that such a rule is immoral – requires that you assign immoral motives to vast swaths of the public.
You’re glossing over details like the amount of effort involved, lowering the amount of early voting, reducing the amount of polling stations, yada yada. In any case it’s clear that your position is pretty similar to what I said.
Are you really that inept at reasoning? Vast swaths of the public don’t need to be immoral, they can have a limited understanding of the issue, or be ignorant of the specifics, or simply never have thought much about it. Shit, they just might be swayed by the kind of dishonest rhetoric that you love so much.
Wow, every once in awhile I forget how bad at thinking some of you guys are.
It’s SOP in most of the developed world for citizens to have a government IDs and to use it for such things as voting. There is nothing “immoral” about that. We Americans have a history of being leery of a national ID like most of the rest of the world, but that is a peculiarity of our country, not some stance based on superior morals.
In the case of voter ID, most people prefer to require it, as long as some state designated ID is an option for those who don’t already have some form of ID like a driver’s license. The idea that having such an ID is some huge burden on any class of people is absurd. As noted it’s SOP almost everywhere. We’re the oddballs here.
I haven’t made any particularly strong arguments in favor of reducing early voting or reducing the number of polling stations, have I?
I agree that voter ID in a vacuum, is reasonable. But other countries have near universal ID posession. In the US it isn’t the same.
Now if you want to insure that we have near universal ID posession, and then require it for voting, sure. Good on you, in fact.
The difference is that Republican laws shooting for ID aren’t doing that. They’re depending on the lack of IDs among the poor and minorities to give them electoral advantage. They have said as much. Blacks and the poor are citizens, and they deserve a vote as much as you, Bricker, or I do.
We killed smallpox, we can get everyone an ID, lets get that done before requiring it to vote, yes?
Bricker, I don’t really want to join the pile on, but I would like to understand how nuanced your views are. If it could be proven to you via a controlled study that using the high resolution invasive sonogram equipment does not lessen the rate that abortions were carried out, would you, personally, be willing to get rid of the statute? How about if I was able to show that the lower resolution external sonograms were just as (in)effective at reducing the abortion rate, would you be willing to throw away Virginia’s statute that mandates the internal probe in favor of something less invasive?
The thing is, it strikes me as a rational civil libertarian and fiscal conservative that a lot of these medically unnecessary and expensive procedures are aimed not at saving the potential child’s life through informing the mother about the life inside her, but are instead aimed as slut-shaming the pregnant woman. After all, if Conservatives were truly concerned reducing the number of abortions, they would not be so against sex education or birth control programs. These two programs, whatever else they do, have been consistently shown to reduce abortions.
It seems to me, many conservatives would rather our young women and men go out into the world ignorant of their options and risks and vulnerable to their turbo-charged reproductive drive. I do understand that Catholics (you are Catholic, correct?) are also against birth control, but their stance against sex education is mystifying if they really want to make abortion more rare. Regardless of why they have these beliefs, I am sure you agree that one group of whatever denomination should not be able to foist their religious beliefs about birth control on the rest of the country, right?