Ah, the words of another fake “pro-lifer.” Instead of playing these word games, why don’t you just admit that there’s nothing pro-life about you?
I would like to see a cite for this statement. I have never met a pro-choice person who had any problem with what a pregnant woman chose to do with her situation.
OTOH, I find that most pro-choicers believe adoption is THE situation to an unplanned pregnancy mean adoption by a married couple–single people, gay and lesbian couples need not apply.
When a lesbian my sister knew got pregant by rape, she and her longtime partner decided to have and raise the child. She went to the local Planned Parenthood and told the protestors that they had changed her mind and she and her lesbian partner would raise the child. They all said to “consider the best needs of the child and give it up for adoption to a ‘real’ couple.” Think about it.
First thank you, I know this subject has been a hot button issue for you through many threads, and know there was some personal link. This helps define some of it.
But please rethink my point while giving me the opportunity to restate it.
Simply there are people willing to help other people through love and support - this should be encouraged.
Person ‘A’ might have a heart for people in situation X, Person B might have a heart for people in situation Y. This is I believe the human ideal, ‘A’ helping people they naturally care about and B helping people they naturally care about and A and B not attacking each other, but working in their individual fields to serve a greater good.
We get into trouble when Person A instead of helping people in situation X, start attacking person B or criticizing people with situation Y. This I believe is the barrier I talked about.
In my above description and other posts I was simply saying there are people who care about and support women who have had abortions. Are you questioning that and is this what you were asking for a cite for? To make it clear I am not saying it will be the same people who support women who chose to carry their baby to term - that would in general be a different group. But there is caring in all segments of humanity.
The protestors generally found in PP are working to tear down and acting against humans helping humans. IMHO their energy is misfocused and should be into lifting people up in what their heart cares for. It would seem like many of them may be great supporters of mothers caring for children who need assistance. All that protesting and hatred could be channeled to supporting love and caring, and that amount missing is hurting those mothers with children who need it.
Going further with this, ‘not having any problem’ does not equal ‘loving support from the heart’.
Offering loving support is fulfilling a desire of the heart, Just because a pro-choice person does not have any problem with a woman carrying a child to term, that does not mean she has a natural desire to help the mother and new baby in need as that might not be what motivates them. This is OK, natural and normal, as well as people who will help mother and child when help is needed.
Yeah, a lot of them don’t support the state’s choice to end the lives of murderers, so how can they call themselves pro-choice? 
Pro-life and pro-choice are stupid labels for the very fact that they’re far too broad to be accurate. I like pro-legal abortion and anti-abortion better, and don’t mind being called the latter, though apparently I’m supposed to.
vivalostwages, I have a hypothetical for you too. Say Jonsey Wayne Gary is on death row for killing eight people, and he’s slated to die by lethal injection in six months. But then bunch of anti-death penalty people succeed in getting the death penalty overturned in the state that was going to put him to death. Jonsey’s sentence is commuted to live in prison, just like the anti-DP people hoped for.
Two years from now - eighteen months after he would have been put to death - Jonsey kills two guards and escapes. While on the lam he kills six more people. Do the anti-DP folks who got him and other murderers off death row have a moral obligation to step up and help support the families of the people he killed? Do those who are against the death penalty ever address this aspect?
I’ve got another hypothetical for you. A state executes a man who was convicted of killing his family in an arson fire. After the execution, serious evidence comes out that the conviction was based on junk fire science. The state starts an investigation to find out what exactly happened, but the governor squelches the investigation, meaning we’ll never really know if an innocent life was taken by the state. This governor then goes on to get cheers over his execution policy at a subsequent political debate.
Oh, wait. That’s not a hypothetical, that actually happened. There’s ample evidence that our justice system is flawed and that it routinely convicts innocent people. If you were actually concerned about innocent life, you would be deeply worried about the reality of our justice system instead of spewing outlandish hypotheticals.
Or, you could answer my question and tell me wtf that had to do with abortion 
I already did. The majority of anti-choicers in the US are not interested in protecting innocent life. The majority of them, just like you, don’t care at all about life, innocent or otherwise.
Of course, you’ll try and distract, because you don’t want people pointing out what your actual beliefs are.:p:p
So you’re saying that pregnant young girl has nothing to fear in keeping her baby because, even though she might be as poor a Haitian for the rest of her life, she’ll get some love and emotional support?
You know how arrogant you come off when you tell people what their “actual beliefs” are? It’s a jackass move.
Many Catholics (to take an example) oppose the Iraq War, and capital punishment, and euthanasia, and human stem cell research, and abortion. Others look to church doctrine that is certainly debatable, but that has been sincerely thought out, and under doctrines such as the “just war” theory, can self-consistently oppose abortion and support some wars (I know, you don’t think Iraq is a just war – neither do I.).
The idiotic categorical statements that have been rampant in this thread (“pro lifers don’t care about children, just about forcing mothers to give birth,” “pro lifers picket and harass women,” “your real motives can’t be concern for human life because I disagree with you nah nah nah”) establish one thing that became clear to me long ago in reading MSM coverage of this issue: absolutist abortion rights supporters (and thus most mainstream journalists) don’t really know a whole lot about the (fairly diverse) anti-abortion-on-demand movement. Many of them have clearly never personally known any or many self-identified pro lifers. The Washington Post ombudsman admitted after complaints poured in over the disparate coverage given to Earth Day (x pages) vs. the protest of the 20th anniversary of Roe (x/20) – “it’s just that none of us really knew anyone who attended to Roe march and everyone had a bunch of friends at Earth Day.”
I’ll expand on an observation I made earlier – most of the self-identified pro lifers I know are young to middle aged Catholic women who either are or want to be moms. I suppose some clownish attempt could be (will be) made to argue that they are acting under the brainwashing of some Big Evil White Patriarchy and acting against self-interest. But assuming – just assuming – that’s not the case, and that (to show a little more respect for, well, the intelligence and independent thought of women) some women really do think they acting in the interests of innocent human life, out of maternal sympathy, respect for the downtrodden – who are you to tell them what they “really believe?”
Whatever, dude. I already acknowledged that there were some people who genuinely took these issues to heart. Your inability to read doesn’t constitute a jackass move on my part.
I’m fully aware what “just war” doctrine is, and there are many people of all religions, including Catholics, who don’t give two hoots about it. Remember, in the run up to the Iraq war, the people who were urging caution and delay were shouted down as traitors and nitwits. People who demonize those urging caution in war are not serious about just war theory, and I’m not going to pretend they are. If you took a measured approach, good for you, but you are not in the majority of the anti-choice movement.
Where were all these people when it became clear what had happened in Iraq? I’m supposed to believe that a group that’s organized enough to prevent the Federal government from funding abortions magically couldn’t pull it together when it came to the unnecessary deaths of 100K people? Or should I look at the polling data on the Iraq war, and conclude that the majority of them just didn’t care? Ricky Perry is proudly waving his execution record around, despite the fact that he squashed an investigation into determining whether he executed an innocent man. Do you really think that if the majority of the pro-life movement were following something along the lines of Catholic teaching, he would have the balls to do that? He knows he can wave his execution record around because most of his constituents don’t care that an innocent man may have been executed.
I don’t know too many pro-lifer/anti-choicers/whatever who would fit your mold.
Well, no. I’ll humor you though and tell you what my beliefs are:
-Abortion is wrong nine times out of ten.
-I’m okay with capital punishment as long as it’s limited.
-I don’t have any problems with the Afghan War; can’t say the same for the Iraq War.
-I’m totally against foreign military interventions, such as in the case of Libya.
Mmm… Anything else I missed?
Not even close to what I was saying.
You made the assertion, out of only your opinion, that “the majority” who identified as pro-life were liars who had some other “actual motive” that they were deviously concealing. Occam didn’t and doesn’t work in your favor.
Again, you don’t have any empirical evidence for the overlap (or lack thereof) between those who opposed abortion and those who opposed Iraq. Pat Buchanan and a lot of paleocons did both. Conversely, many neocons don’t give a rats ass about stopping abortion but were frothing at the mouth about needing to go to war. It’s more of the same broad brush. More importantly, you’re misguided in your apparent belief that someone is necessarily a liar or a hypocrite (or both) if he doesn’t support every cause that is consistent with a cause he does choose to support. That’s not necessarily how human nature works. It’s entirely possible to have single-issue voters (that’s how the phrase arises) who sincerely believe in “their” issue while not “doing enough” (in your eyes) to support every issue that (you think) should logically flow from the issue they do support. Catholic teaching (for instance) speaks aspirationally of a “seamless garment” when it comes to respect-for-life issues, such that just war is every bit as important as anti abortion. But, it’s aspirational at best.
You’re also missing a chronological element. Many/most who form the core of the pro-life movement became “radicalized” as it were on the issue during the battles of the '70s-'90s over the Supreme Court and anti-Roe efforts. This happened to be an era when the U.S. was nursing its wounds from Vietnam and was not embarked on any large scale foreign military adventurism. (It was involved in small scale, often shady covert action, but that’s another story). There was no defining horror or fiasco of the U.S. mass killing civilians for dubious neocon motives. So that didn’t become a defining core issue for them. That makes them evil or liars or hypocrites or obligates them to take on a new cause with just as much vigor as the one they’ve supported for 20 years? I just don’t think that’s anything like the reasonable standard. Note that when the Post guy said that the Earth Day crowd didn’t overlap much with the pro life crowd, he (and I) were not implying that one crowd was insincere or lying about its lofty (or believed-to-be lofty) respective motives just because they didn’t turn out to support the other crowd’s equally lofty motive. Nor do I remember anyone gauging whether Al Gore was a “liar” about his expressed environmental concerns because he didn’t make a documentary against the Iraq war.
Here’s survey data:
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
only about one-in-ten (11 percent) Americans hold a “consistent ethic of life” position, opposing legalized abortion and capital punishment.
[/QUOTE]
And
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
Support for capital punishment is virtually identical to the general population among Americans who say abortion should be illegal (69 percent) and among those who identify as “pro-life” (69 percent).
[/QUOTE]
And
Now, if we had a justice system that was pretty good at weeding out innocent people, I might be willing to concede that this is an ethically consistent position. But we don’t. Our justice system is fraught with error, and anybody supporting the death penalty with our current justice system is not serious about protecting innocent life.
I’ll have to dig deeper for this polling data, since Iraq is older news. I’ll get it when I have a moment.
If they support the death penalty in our current system, if that is their personal belief, then they do not care about innocent life. And the polling data clearly shows that most pro-lifers support the death penalty.
Does just war theory say that you should demonize war opponents?
It makes the people who cheered the Iraq war hypocrites and liars. If you didn’t support the Iraq war, or if you supported it, but were saddened or upset by the result, I don’t consider you a hypocrite or a liar. It’s the ones who acted like blood-thirsty nutsacks, who cheered on the war like it was a football game, who demonized war opponents, who argued against any sort of investigation or reprucussions for the Bush administration–those are the people who I have a beef with. Those people do not believe in protecting innocent life, and they are hypocrites and liars, and I’m going to keep calling them out.
This is just bone-dead stupid. Al Gore spoke out forcefully against the Iraq war and was heavily criticized for doing so.
This is a generalized “you” not a specific “you.”
He didn’t do enough because he didn’t win a Nobel Prize. I think he was being disingenuous about BOTH his environmentalism and his anti-war sentiments. What a jerk!
See how easy it is when we start playing amateur psychologist (or, um, God) about what people’s “real belief” or “real motives” are?
Here’s what you said:
ETA bolding mine.
That was the part I called the jerk-like part. I stand by that because you have not so far come close to providing:
(a) evidence or something like evidence that a “majority” (50.0001%) of people who identify as pro-life were in fact pro-Iraq war and had not a scintilla of a moral rationale or defense for it and affirmatively “demonized” and lied about war opponents or questioned their patriotism. (This seems to be your latest argument for the conditions that make it plain that pro-life people are necessarily lying about their motives). You won’t find those statistics, I reckon, both because they’re not compiled and they’re unlikely to be true.
(b) a plausible rational, Occam-friendly reason for why millions upon millions of people would purport to be concerned about a certain group of human innocent lives but be lying through their teeth about their motives. Often when people say they want X because of Y, the explanation is, yep, Y. But I’d be curious to know what you think the real reason is that all those church ladies I know are volunteering for pro-life causes, and why they don’t just come out and admit that this [INSERT RANDOM MADE UP SPECULATION THAT IMPLIES THAT YOU ALONE KNOW WHAT IS IN THE HUMAN HEART] is their “real” motivation. You can disagree with them over whether what they’re trying to protect is human life, you can critique their inconsistency (IYHO) for not getting riled up about another threat to different groups of human life. But you don’t just get to say that “the majority” of them are liars because they didn’t get the right amount enraged about the right (IYHO) unjust threats to human life.
I see that it’s easy for you to make nonsensical arguments instead of actually addressing my points.
Ha, ha, ha! I provided polling data about the death penalty, which I notice you completely ignore because it’s evidence in favor of my point.
Uh, uh. Apparently you want to disappear the run-up to the Iraq war down the memory hole, but I’m not going to let you. But this, of course, is more nonsensical argumentation. I’ll get the polling data on Iraq, which I’m sure you when then ignore. And I’m not going to be constrained by this ridiculous interpretation of yours. People’s actions (such as demonizing their opponents) are indicative of whether they take life issues seriously. Polling tells us how many people fall into this category. I know you want to try and pretend that the Catholic-ish viewpoint is the majority one (something which I’ve already proved is false regarding the death penalty), but it’s not. At least I’m providing polling data for my claims. You are making completely unsubstantiated claims and think this is supposed to be meaningful.
I have no idea what your church ladies believe (man, your arguments are moving to ridiculous). how am I supposed to know what individuals you personally know believe? The polling data I’ve already posted shows that the majority of self-identified pro-lifers do not care about protecting innocent life. I will provide additional evidence when I get a moment, and my evidence so far is much better than your church lady anecdotes.
BrightNShiny and Huerta88, you both need to back off on the personal comments. Address the actual statements in the posts and avoid comments on the motivation, tactics, or rhetorical devices of your opponent.
[ /Moderating ]
Eloquent as a sledge hammer as always but very nice. I never once thought to paint pro-lifers as rapists but I guess I just hadn’t given you enough time. I’m not being sarcastic either, I loved your point.