That’s not true for all who oppose abortion. The position that life begins prior to birth is not held only by people due to religious belief.
[/QUOTE]
In fact, I am not Christian. Never have been. So “because Jesus” can’t apply.
You can be banned for trolling even if you believe what are posting. And you can be banned for lots of other things besides trolling, so I don’t think you’ve hit on anything particularly enlightening there. Rack up enough warnings, and you get banned.
GD is at it’s best when people don’t make claims that can’t be supported with facts.
Meh. There are lots of atheists on this board, and we don’t need a lecture from DT to tell us that adding God into the equation makes things more, not less, complicated. However, it’s not “special coddling” to treat other people with respect.
Thanks for your cites. More cites will ALWAYS improve your posts.
That said, I see a ginormous difference between your rhetoric and the ugly rhetoric of the anti-choicers. The anti-choicers are using ugly words to describe the indisputable behavior of folks who have abortions (i.e., women who have abortions are indisputable terminating a fetus; the anti-choicers describe that behavior as murdering a baby). You, however, are using ugly words to describe what you imagine to be the motives of anti-choices (i.e., they indisputably want to make abortion illegal; you describe their MOTIVES as being a hatred of women). Not only are you using ugly language, but you’re also using it to describe motives that are nowhere near universally acknowledged as real motives.
If instead you stayed away from describing motives and stuck to describing actions, your behavior would be equivalent. Leave off the reason why anti-choicers are waging a war on women, just talk about a war on women, and I suspect you’re on some firmer ground, although not yet rising to the level of genuine discourse any more than the “babykiller” anti-choicers are engaging in genuine discourse.
My opinion, anyway.
And they’ve come here specifically to troll us. Even said so on their own board.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying about abortions. People have honestly held beliefs about it - that it’s killing a child. But those beliefs are inaccurate and not based on anything rational. Therefore it’s unreasonable to allow those beliefs to frame the discussion.
It’s also unreasonable to pretend that calling a woman a murderer and a baby killer is not just as inflammatory as calling anti-abortion foes, woman-haters.
Oh, I really would recommend that you give reading a try. Who knows - you might even find that it’s useful.
There is no accurate answer to the question: when does a fetus become a human, and so no answer can be called “inaccurate”. The term isn’t even applicable. The answer depends on how one defines “human”, which depends on one’s belief system, and since it’s perfectly rational to oppose murder, the pro-life position is perfectly rational, within that belief system.
Regardless, you probably won’t get into trouble for holding that ‘inaccurate’ belief, despite the fact that a majority of Mods AND posters on this board are pro-choice to one degree or another, as long as you don’t flame and use abusive language or explosive rhetoric. While, ironically, even if you hold what is the majority viewpoint here, and even if the Mod or Mods in question agree with your basic opinion, if you flame you will get a warning.
Which is as it should be. I hope DT learns the lesson, but based on this thread and his past actions I’m guessing he won’t and will be banned fairly soon, as it’s obvious that the Mods here aren’t screwing around anymore, no matter what your position is.
The fetus is always human. What it’s not is a child. Therefore calling woman who get abortions, “child-killers”, or referring to an abortion as “killing a child”, is inaccurate and inflammatory.
Furthermore, murder is a specific legal term, even if, in casual conversation, it’s used to mean killing, generically. Not every killing of a human is murder. There are different legal penalties for different types of killing. Sometimes, there are no penalties at all - and rightly so. Abortion is one of those times.
Just because a human gets killed doesn’t make it murder. Beliefs and the imprecisions of casual conversation have nothing to do with it. Deliberately saying murder to refer to an abortion is inflammatory and, yes, inaccurate.
And for the record, I oppose the death penalty in all cases, but it’s not murder, either, and the people who carry it out are not murderers.
So what? By that token, DT thinks conservatives hate and want to oppress women, and he should be allowed to express that opinion.
I know DT’s posting well enough to be sure that Terr’s statements were not what prompted him to spew bile all over that thread, but I certainly agree with other posters who think that they are inflammatory and also deserve to be modded.
Not going to debate you here. I’ll just say that what you stated is not objectively true-- it depends on your definition of “child” and you don’t get to own the definition.
The reason I’ve been stressing the inaccuracy of the term “child-killer” is that it highlights the inflammatory nature of the term. That term is used, not because it’s correct, but because it’s designed to inflame emotion and prejudice the argument.
I do, in fact, think the mods of Great Debates should forbid using inflammatory language, especially when it’s not even correct.
We don’t have to debate this, but if you want to play dictionary tag off that statement of mine, we should start with the definition of fetus.
It’s not my definition. “Fetus” is a medical term to describe a stage of pre-natal development. Children are post-natal fetuses. Therefore, whatever terms casual conversation might use, it is inaccurate to call women who get abortions, “child-killers”.
As I said above, deliberately choosing the most inflammatory language should be discouraged in Great Debates, I think.
Well, let’s be realistic. You said
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Because they hate women, and wish to oppress and torment them. Forbidding abortion is just a useful club for them to beat on women with.
They don’t care at all about the “unborn”; their behavior simply does not fit their claimed motivation. They show no concern at all for the health of the fetus, and none for the baby they’ve forced to be born. Nor do they care if the fetus is doomed to die, or already dead, so long as they can force the woman to birth it. Nor in places where they can get away with it have they hesitated to condemn women to a slow death by forbidding them an abortion to save their life. Nor have they showed any great interest in actually doing anything that reduces the number of abortions; only in making them less safe and more degrading.
The so-called anti-abortion movement is a hate movement directed at women, nothing more. A more successful, gender targeted equivalent of the KKK.
[/QUOTE]
It was total bullshit and lies when you said and you knew it was. But you said it anyway, simply because you wanted to bray like a jackass. JC was right in warning you and frankly I hope it’s the last warning you get.
Perhaps, sometimes. Not always.
Words can have more than one meaning, you know. You don’t get to pick the only meaning people can use. That is all.
Language doesn’t neatly classify things into one thing or the other. There are often overlaps… Surely the main reason “child-killer” is offensive is that word “killer” at the end.
[QUOTE=Merneith]
The reason I’ve been stressing the inaccuracy of the term “child-killer” is that it highlights the inflammatory nature of the term. That term is used, not because it’s correct, but because it’s designed to inflame emotion and prejudice the argument.
I do, in fact, think the mods of Great Debates should forbid using inflammatory language, especially when it’s not even correct.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not a Mod, but my guess is that the statement ‘child killer’ is ambiguous. I mean, to someone who is pro-life and thinks a fetus actually IS a ‘child’, then it’s a fairly accurate statement. They think the fetus is a child, and it’s obviously being ‘killed’…thus ‘child killer’ is an accurate term, FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE. I’m actually on the fence on this one…it’s really skating close to the edge of the ice, and I’m not sure the Mod(s) shouldn’t have at least pointed it out and said something along the lines of ‘back off…you are getting close to the edge of insult. No warning issued…THIS time’.
However, saying that the pro-life crowd are all in it to torture women, have them die and are the equivalent of a modern and successful KKK is…well, hardly ambiguous. Even if one assumes DT actually believes that (and I believe he does), it’s still over the top inflammatory…and deliberately so. DT COULD have said pretty much exactly the same thing and stayed within the bounds of civil discussion dictated by the rules of this board. He CHOSE not too. Why? Because he’s gotten away with it in the past.
She does if she is the one who is pregnant.
To imply a woman who has evaluated her situation, abilities, and options, and decided that it would not be advisable to have a child a killer or murderer is inflammatory.
ETA: I certainly don’t find “child-killer” ambiguous.
Trihs got a mod note for this? Did he get mod notes for each of the roughly 3000 near-identical expressions of the same rhetoric? His private message inbox must be nothing but mod notes.
Right. I’m sure there are many occasions when it’s not meant in a shrill, inflammatory way and rather is a sober appeal to reason. I just can’t recall any.
There’s a difference between tossing the “child-killer” grenade into a debate, and going completely over the top by saying something like “Pro-choicers hate children and want to harm women, and push abortion because it gratifies their blood-lust” (which would sort of be an anti-abortion rights mirror-image of DT’s posting style). Just not as big a difference as some appear to think.
In my opinion neither sort of comment belongs in GD.
Right, magellan01 (and Terr). That’s why I qualified the correlation as a very imperfect one. This was well expressed by several posters in the original thread.
But I’m pretty sure it’s a good explanation for how the two positions came to be associated with each other strongly enough that politicians and political parties have tended to exploit and encourage the link beyond the purely religious.
But enough of this hijack.