I’m not talking about the law, I’m talking about whether or not a fetus’s status is relevant with respect to the abortion issue.
I wouldn’t be able to justify killing and eating chickens under that assumption. I don’t agree that the assumption is correct, but my mind is limber enough to discuss the idea conceptually.
This has nothing to do with legal relevance, it has to do with honest debate. You made the statement that fetal status is irrelevant. Your only support of that statement is claiming the SCOTUS said it’s irrelevant, thus it must be so. Did you defer to the SCOTUS when they ruled on the Bush/Gore election? Do you consider all of their decisions correct? If the next SCOTUS overturns Roe v Wade, will you accept that decision and adjust your arguments accordingly? I think I know the answers to these questions, and it ain’t “yes”.
Stop using the SCOTUS as a crutch, it sucks, they’re just as political as the next guy, and they don’t have a monopoly on right and wrong.
I don’t remember exactly, but surely you remember posting it, no?
I agree 100% with your statement that, in our current suystem, the constitution means whatever the SCOTUS says it means. This implies that, by definition, the SCOTUS cannot be “wrong”. So, if you agree with that, then we’re on the same page wrt to the legality issue.
But I don’t think people are trying to argue about what the current legal reality is-- they are talking about their own moral assessment of the act, and it doesn’t follow that you can quote the SCOTUS to back up your moral position.
I am not religious, not even slightly. Your insistent strawman that the personhood of the foetus is a solely religious position is fucking annoying, quite apart from its blatant falseness.
I am not in the US, and am debating the issue of abortion (specifically the nature of the debate surrounding abortion), not the issue of what the presently-decided law of the United States happens to be. And nor, several posts ago, were you.
The United States Constitution is, believe it or not, not an arbiter of objective truth.
SCOTUS, believe it or not, do not invariably deal in objective analysis of the interpretation of the document which (remember) does not deal in objective truth.
I leave you to ponder the implications of these facts, and hope that you will come to the appropriate conclusion. I say “hope,” of course, but I rather feel that the word “forlornly” fits in there with a degree of inevitability. Your sudden insistence that we are not debating the issue, but rather a matter of law, is absolutely typical of your godawful approach to debate. Your prior insistence that the foetus is simply not a consideration is now forgotten (yet not recanted); you fall back instead on the facile and trivial argument that the law as it stands in one country happens to currently coincide with your opinion. Oh, well done. Well done indeed. Where, one wonders, is this moral certitude when discussing the issue of SSM, for example? Surely since the decided law of the land points in one direction at present, there can be no further discussion on the matter; all other points of view are irrelevant. Ah, no, silly me; I’m forgetting that “objectivity” is henceforth defined as the intersection of reality with your opinions. How foolish.
I don’t get this. All of a sudden we’re not talking about the law, we’re talking about “objective moral truth?”
Bullshit. The abortion issue IS the debate over legality? What the hell else is it? Cheesteak says this:
If you’re not talking about relevance to the LAW then what other relevance is there? Relevance to the abortion issue, you say? Well isn’t the abortion issue a battle over the law?
Dead Badger says this:
Well, no shit, Sherlock, but the abortion issue isn’t ABOUT “objective truth.” There is NO SUCH THING as “objective moral truth.” It doesn’t exist and so is pointless to argue about. If the abortion issue is not a debate about what should be legal then it’s just a fucking circle jerk.
Badger again:
What else IS the issue but a matter of law? The morality of it? The morality of it is whatever each individual thinks it is.
[quote]
Your prior insistence that the foetus is simply not a consideration is now forgotten (yet not recanted);
'Forgotten?" What are you talking about? It seems to me like I’ve been doing nothing BUT pounding the point that the status of the fetus is irrelevant for the last several posts.
The very subjectivity of the moral value of fetuses is what makes the question irrelevant. There is no wrong answer to that. Everybody’s answer is correct and so where does that leave us?
No, didshit, I cited ROE to support my assertion about LEGAL relevance. I never said SCOTUS was an “arbiter of objective truth.” There IS no objective moral truth and only an idiot would try to convince somebody else that such a thing existed.
Bullshit. There have been many instances of you advocating laws be made to suit your own point of view. Including your opinion on religious topics(making ceremonial deism illegal, outlawing homeschools from teaching creationism, etc.) and your views on moral topics(i.e. abortion).
If someone, other than you, asks for cites, they will be provided. If you can’t recall what you have said and your own behaviors then I am under no obligation to remind you. Plus I’ve been down this road with you, i.e. identifying your bullshit, in the past and it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Will I do the research to provide links for someone else who may want evidence? Sure. For you? No.
Actually, no, I don’t. I usually accept SCOTUS decisions as authoritative even if I don’t like them. I can’t swear that I’ve never said I thought a decision was “wrong,” but I still accept the question as (at least temporarily) settled.
I’m not TRYING to back up my moral position. I’m trying to argue for what I think the LAW should be, based on the rights enumerated in the Constitution and explicated by SCOTUS. If I’ve given any other impression, my bad. I have no interest in changing anyone’s moral position as long as they don’t try to fuck with the law. I think all moral positions, including my own, are irrelevant to the issue.
Yes, you utter, complete dipstick, we are debating objectivity and whether subjectivity has any place in legislation. We are debating this because, and please pay attention here:
YOU BROUGHT IT UP!
Could this possibly be any plainer? Jesus H. fucking Christ, it’s like trying to nail jelly to an arsehole. We weren’t ever talking about the fucking law, we were debating your mindbogglingly stupid fucking statement that because there’s no objective answer to when the foetus becomes a person that this could never ever be a consideration in the abortion debate. You made the fucking assertion, I disputed it, and for you to now turn round and pretend that you were debating the present state of law in the US is just so utterly mendacious, so blatantly dishonest, so utterly, butt-fuckingly stupid as to take one’s breath away. Unbelievably, you are actually competing with duffer for today’s most stupid Pit performance, and duffer can’t even tell the difference between advocating free speech and advocating fucking children.
I learned my lesson about expecting rational discussion from Diogenes a while ago. Apparently, changing the goalposts around and then insisting that the debate actually concerns something completely different is a trick he’s gotten quite some mileage out of.
And the comparison to duffer is not really apropos; duffer at least flees like the pussy he is when he gets cornered; Diogenes is never happy until he’s completely ruined the thread.
You do have a tendancy to omit the “I think” part when you state whether something is right or wrong, so maybe that’s the part you don’t remember. But it’s not really important.
People use their own sense of what’s moral to inform them of what the law should be, not just what’s in the constitution. You do it, too, so don’t tell us otherwise.
Taking these bullshit examples one at a time. I’ve said that I think “Ceremonial Deism” is a bogus loophole designed to get around the Establishment Clause. I don’t know what you mean by “making ceremonial deism illegal” other than that I think that the First Amendment prohibition on state endorsement of religion should be enforced. That’s not a “moral” opinion on my part, it’s a legal one and it doesn’t include any desire to prohibit any individual citizen’s free practice of religion.
i’ve never said that it should be illegal for homeschool’s to teach creationism. I’ve just said that homeschooled kids should have to pass a test on evolutionary theory. I’ve never said that they should have to believe it’s true or that their parents should be allowed to teach them whatever religious fairy tale they want right alongside it.
"My views on moral topics (like abortion)? What does that even mean? What am I trying to make illegal** with my arguments on the abortion issue. I don’t even see it as a moral issue but as a legal one.
Let’s try again, tell me something I’ve said I want to make ILLEGAL because I think it’s IMMORAL.
Sure, and you are using the current status of the law as proof that the current law is correct. If someone disagrees with SCOTUS and the idea that fetal status is irrelevant, you dismiss the argument because SCOTUS said so. We’re not even allowed to propose the idea that fetal status is deservedly part of the debate.
If you think it’s true that fetal status is irrelevant, then debate that point.
You seem to be forgetting that much of what is in the constutition itself is based on our (collective) sense of morality. Prohibitions against slavery, allowing women to vote, equal protection before the law… do you think those don’t have a moral component?
If we weren’t ever talking about the law, then I don’t know what the fuck we WERE talking about because there is no other point to the abortion debate.
I’ll try again, it has already been decided by the US Supreme Court that the question of whether a fetus is a person is legally irrelevant. It it’s legally irrelevant than it’s irrelevant to the abortion debate because the abortion debate is nothing BUT a debate over the law.
The REASON that SCOTUS said it was irrelevant is completely sound and I agree with it…it’s because it’s a question without a factual answer. Unanswerable questions cannot logically be settled by the state, so the question of the “moral value” of a fetus can never have any relevance to the abortion debate. All it can EVER boil down to is “yes it is!” “No it’s not!”
You call me an idiot but read your own fucking post. You first claim that we’re talking about legislation and then start screaming that we weren’t talking about the law. Legislation IS the law, you fucking nutsack.
Many of us think the constitution and the laws should not reflect our own personal sense of morality when that morality isn’t about physically hurting someone. Most of us think it’s immoral to cheat on your spouse, but we don’t want to make it illegal. But that doesn’t take morality out of the equation, or we wouldn’t have anti-discrimiation laws, minimum wage laws, or laws allowing welfare payments to poor people. You and are both areligious, so there isn’t a conflict between what we think is moral and what our (non-existent) religious tells us what is moral, but most people are religious, and it’s not possible for them to always make the distinciton between what the personally think is moral and what their religion tells them is moral. And even among the areligious we can’t agree what is moral and what is not.
And that right there is where some people in the “right to choose” lobby try very hard to convince the “pro-life” lobby that they are not for a right to choose, but in their hearts, they actually don’t like babies, or are too dumb to notice the wait for adoptable babies. Come on.
It’s certainly more convenient to have an abortion. Obviously there’s something attractive about it, or people wouldn’t do it. But (and this is the ENTIRE point of the debate, which it seems nearly everyone here is trying to show you) if the fetus is a “person”, then we have the duty to protect it, and not dispose of it, any more than you can ram people out of your way on the road because it would be more convenient to you. If the fetus is a person, then abortion deprives it of the most fundamental right imaginable.
If the fetus is not a person, then who cares much, really? This is why the people who make real arguments for abortion hate it when the other side talks about how the heart is beating and so on, because it plants the idea that the fetus is fully human, but just in need of some help for a while, much the same as a patient with Alzheimers.
To chant that the debate is not about whether the fetus is human is ridiculous, because if you ask the other side what their issue is, they’ll tell you that it’s the idea of killing a human for being inconvenient.
Btw, I can’t find a way personally to not think of it as human. I would think that the fundamental definition of human would be “could conceivably have sex with me or my sister and reproduce another human”, in other words, having the right DNA.