Matthew 5:17 Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
I think we can say pretty confidently that the impact on women is much more immediate, physical and direct.
And child support isn’t intended to balance that - it’s not intended to equalize the costs of bearing or dealing with a child at all. It’s intended to cover half of the financial costs, that’s all. Perhaps if a punitive element was added it would do more.
Plus I gather that dodging child support isn’t exactly uncommon. I know my brother (with full custody) gets no child support whatsoever - the mother is unemployed (but her husband is not).
I know we keep jumping around in this debate, but remember the debate. The accusation was that these laws control a woman’s sexuality.
When making the decision to have sex, the effects of a law banning abortion would be equally off in the future for both men and women.
The effects aren’t even close to equal. If the man gets away with just paying child support that is nothing compared to both paying your half and also having the bear and raise the child on your own. (Remember, I’ve seen this in action - gender-flipped, of course. And of course no child support is happening anyway.)
And you gotta remember the optics on this. The people who are directly effected by an unwanted pregnancy are the women. Men don’t get pregnant. The pregnancy is the ‘consequence’ that pro-lifers are wielding against the wicked (so to speak). After the birth, well, pro-lifers seem to never think about what happens after the birth. At that point the divinely-implemented punishment is over, so who cares about anything after that?
If I said that, you might have a point. But I didn’t say that.
Are you equally sanguine about the old laws in England banning homosexuality? They certainly involved control of sexual morality and had been part of Western society for thousands of years. Not quite respect for life, but if you remember the ranting about allowing SSM from the religious, pretty close.
I’d think that the assertion would be that they attempt to control sexuality. Actually controlling anyone’s sexuality is a bit tough, as history has shown us.
Are you saying that it is impossible to influence, at least, sexuality, or its expression? Just before I was in college there were strict rules prohibiting members of the opposite sex from staying the night. They did not eliminate all sex, but they sure cut it down.
“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” Matthew 7:1
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:3-5
“Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” Matthew 16:28
Are these principles ignored by every single church leader in the world? Nope. Are they frequently ignored by many church leaders? Yes.
I dunno what you thought you said, but you actually said that the effects would be “equally off in the future”, which on its own would seem to be untrue - the man is only forced to feel effects after the birth, and the woman gets a several month head start. So how “far off in the future” the effects are is not equal for men and women.
And of course the scope and impact of the effects are different as well. If one were inclined to view an unwanted pregnancy as God’s punishment of the woman’s promiscuity alone it wouldn’t be hard to hold that view.
Heck, wasn’t childbirth being unpleasant supposedly an explicit punishment for the misbehavior of a woman? The notion that pregnancy=punishment is built into the bible!
Jesus fulfilled the law by dying on the Cross.
But this is getting into a hijack.
Other verses tell Leaders to guide their flock, but this is a bit of a hijack.
Under an abortion ban, a guy’s litmus test for a female sex partner will simply be, “Keep the child or give the child up for adoption?” And it will be easy for him to recommend adoption because it won’t be him who has to deal with the embarrassment of everyone knowing he gave his precious little baby away. Only the woman will have to deal with that shame.
I’ll say it again: it’s about controlling people, particularly women. It’s not controlling how many times they can go to the bathroom or necessarily whether they can have sex. It’s a mentality in which women are fuck toys. The laws debase women.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’d bet the farm that this guy supports strict abortion ban because…JESUS. :rolleyes: Yet this guy thinks the Christian thing to do is to beat the shit out of his wife for not getting her clothes off fast enough.
I’ll tell you all this. I grew up in Dixieland. I know how this mentality works, the dichotomy between public morality and private behavior, “Do as I say, not as I do.” They’re interested in controlling how other people behave because they like power. The religious South and evangelical America is an authoritarian society, and a white supremacist and patriarchal one at that. That’s really all you need to know.
Are you asking my opinion about the Lawrence decision or about sodomy laws in general?
I’ve said before in some of these threads that I think that in modern U.S. or any first world society that laws against sodomy, fornication, adultery, or homosexuality are foolish in the extreme; that people do not or should not care what adults do in their bedrooms and are a ridiculous waste of law enforcement resources, and to the extent that these actions cause no public harm to anyone, a person should be left to their own moral choices to conduct or refrain from these activities.
That being said, if I was a judge, I would have to scratch my head to find some sort of fundamental constitutional right to do any of these things as they have been regulated for thousands of years, and for over a hundred years after the passage of the 14th Amendment with nary a thought that this amendment did anything to change the prior order. Sexual freedom is definitely a good thing in many ways, but a modern understanding does not create a constitutional right.
I’m not being snarky, so please help me out. If I wanted to treat women as fuck toys, shouldn’t I want legal abortion so I do not have to be responsible for this child I create with this woman?
Yes, and yes.
Reread my post about patriarchy. Surprisingly to some, patriarchy is actually not a system whereby the malefolk get the maximum possible freedom. It’s just that women get by far the shittier end of the stick.
Yes it’s about control, and yes all laws are about control but societies have run the gamut from “we have some traditions and generally accepted suggestions for how you ought to behave” all the way over to “every aspect of life is dictated and there are punishments for each and every deviation from that”.
I meant to add (to the original post): Pre-patriarchal society probably held that providing for children was the entire tribe’s responsibility. Patriarchy made it the specific responsibility of each child’s parents. This gave males a lot more reason to be sure that the babies born to the women to whom they were married were indeed their babies. There’s an interlocking set of beliefs, rules, customs, etc about sex, sexuality, and reproduction and they do sort of come as a boxed set if you see what I mean.
Above, clairobscur writes:
But I wasn’t intending to recount a sequence of events. I was basically saying “pretend you’re designing a social system” and pointing out the functionality of the patriarchal provisions for establishing a rather tight control. I was also basically saying that the people wishing to eliminate abortion rights seem to want a return to this viewpoint and the social norms that go with them. They like the boxed set.
That’s certainly not an illogical or unreasonable question to ask, UV. But logic aside, what I’m really getting at here is that most men simply don’t think about abortion as a men’s issue - it’s women’s shit. But it’s women’s shit that they can exploit for their own political gain, and it naturally reinforces a patriarchal order in which men feel more emboldened to disrespect women and use them as they please. If you look at really conservative societies that restrict women’s rights, there’s often a lot of violence and sexual violence against women. There’s a not-so-coincidental debasement of women’s status in society. In these ultra-backwards religious societies, they cook, clean, and fuck - that’s it.
“Logic aside”, indeed.
Ranting about reinforcing the patriarchal order might make a degree of sense if so many anti-abortion rights types weren’t women.
The overwhelming factor here is fervent opposition to Killing Unborn Babies, not Serving The Patriarchy.
I would normally say that misrepresenting one’s enemies’ motives is harmful to the cause, but in this case it’s just dishonest.
Good point.
And I think another thing that bears mentioning is that if you look at it from the other side- specifically from the Catholic Church’s perspective, it’s fairly coherent, if restrictive to everyone.
The Catholic position in a nutshell is that people, not just women, shouldn’t be having sex outside of potentially procreative sex. Basically if it’s not PIV sex with the potential that the woman gets pregnant, then people shouldn’t be engaging in it AT ALL, because it’s a perversion of the sex act that God engineered for people.
The upshot of that is that birth control, and the various forms of sodomy (as they call anything that’s not PIV sex) are pretty much all sinful in the eyes of the Church. They don’t draw a distinction between heterosexual and homosexual sodomy- the sinful part isn’t the same-sex part, but rather the non-procreative part. (bet you didn’t know that!). Homosexuality in and of itself is not considered sinful. Birth control is considered to be inherently evil because it interferes with that procreative potential even when the actual sex is of the approved sort.
The issue in this day and age isn’t so much with the consistency or whatever of the Church’s policies, but rather that a lot of people don’t agree with the idea that people shouldn’t be having sex of whatever kind they want, whenever they want.
THAT is the fundamental disconnect. It’s not that the Church wants to control women and not men, but rather that they expect everyone to toe a certain line that is fairly out of step with society, and probably has been for centuries.
Seen in the light of the above policies, abortion is kind of like you doubled down on it, and then set it on fire. In their view, you’re taking the living, unique fruit of this act ordained by God and deliberately and artificially destroying it for what amount’s to convenience’s sake. They also believe that the child is fully human at the moment of conception and don’t draw an ethical, moral or practical distinction between killing it via an abortion at 5 weeks, murdering a 5 year old, or murdering a 95 year old.
Personally, I suspect that the Catholic Church will eventually relent on birth control, especially the sorts that prevent conception as opposed to implantation, but I don’t see them ever relenting on abortion.
The other thing is that the anti-abortion side isn’t a monolithic bloc- it’s a weird coalition of Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, and people who just don’t believe in aborting fetuses for whatever reason. You can’t really apply blanket notions like many here are doing- it’s as stupid as saying that pro-choice people are “for murdering babies”. We know that’s not true, and that people have various reasons for being pro-choice, up to and including being against abortion except as the very last resort, but believing that the choice is a woman’s to make, not theirs, and that she’s the one who will have to deal with the consequences. (personally I feel like the vast majority of pro-choice people feel this way)
I wonder how many Catholics adhere to the Church’s rules on contraception? And how much does that kind of disobedience damage the Church’s credibility with its adherents?