Republicans don't give a CHIP about children's health care

The BBQ Pit
241

His sincerity is not the issue. Now, I might wonder how someone apparently intelligent enough to function in the world could possibly believe that a bit of protein or a zygote is a sentient human being. When does this mythical human being come into existence among the myriad and complex steps of conception and gestation so that it’s equivalent to an actual child? Perhaps even days prior to conception, when the gentleman has a gleam in his eye and charms the lady with a fine gift? Since all the biological machinery is at that point loaded with all the requisite DNA encoding, why not? Failure to procreate at that point would be tantamount to infanticide, and indeed at some point the Catholics believed, and perhaps some still do, that under such circumstances the condom or the birth control pill is a murder weapon.

But I digress. His sincerity is not the issue. I’m not concerned about sincerity since it’s likely that the street corner lunatic or the asylum resident is also sincere about his particular delusional fantasies. What should be of great concern to anyone promoting an enlightened and reason-based society is when delusional fantasies become enacted into law that mandates everyone’s behavior. To put it more charitably, everyone is entitled to their beliefs about when human life begins, but they are not entitled to ignore the equally valid beliefs of large numbers of reasonable, thoughtful people who disagree with their particular views. They are not entitled to impose their unsubstantiated arbitrary articles of faith on everyone else in a rational secular society that long ago rejected dictatorship, theocracy, and magic as the basis of governance.

I don’t mean to pick on Bricker because obviously he’s not the only one pushing this nonsense, but since he’s among the most vocal, it seems fair.

And the ultimate irony is this apparent passion for protecting the zygote while dismissing health care for sick and needy children because, after all, there are “a kajillion worthy causes” to spend money on, and obviously, massive tax cuts for the rich are more important.

The whole thing is about as ethical as joining a mob to shut down an abortion clinic because of how much you love God’s children, and then, meeting a needy child in the street on the way home, kicking him in the face because you have better things to do with your money than handing it out to beggars. It just seethes of shameless sanctimonious hypocrisy and a good helping of self-delusion.

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When was that claim ever made (emphasis added)?

It’s a scientific fact that a “new being” is formed when the parental DNA come together and create new chromosomes. I don’t call that a “person”, but it is not objectively true that it can’t be a person. And, like I said, unless those anti-abortion folks are advocating allowing the parents to kill babies, there is no logical disconnect between “abortion is murder” and “parents have a personal responsibility to feed and care their children”. There might be a logical disconnect between “we should provide free healthcare to fetuses” and “we should not provide free healthcare to children”, but I don’t see anyone making those statements either.

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Right here. Specifically the statements that:
… How many unborn children died for the sake of your ideology?

Do you understand that my view of your support of abortion means that I think your ideology is leading to millions of legal, sanctioned deaths of innocent human children?
So apparently abortion at any arbitrary unspecified time = “legal sanctioned death of an innocent human child” – i.e.- a person.

What is a “being”? No medical theorist or practitioner would try to argue objectively that this is a “person” by any rational definition. It might become a person. Or it might not (the number of undetected natural miscarriages is actually remarkably high). Another thing that “might become” a person is any male’s lustful glance at any female of childbearing age. Does that impose a moral obligation to make it so? The point is, that although there are many definitions of “person”, a zygote is not it, no matter how much you might want to stretch the argument. There is not a sentience or consciousness that is being terminated by any stretch of semantics.

At best, we have a highly abstract philosophical debate which also involves critical tradeoffs between whatever position one takes on this abstraction and the intimate personal rights of the mother as well as the potential best interests of the unborn child. It’s a very, very poor basis for restrictive laws to arbitrarily give precedence to some philosophical abstraction over the real-world personal rights of the mother and the real-world consequences of the continued pregnancy.

Anyway, back to “person”. A good expansive definition is this one:
A person is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility.

You may agree with that or you may prefer a different one. However, by no rational definition is this a person.

I also want to address this separately:

I agree, there is not a disconnect there. But when, to use your own words, has anyone tried to claim that parents don’t have a responsibility for their children? That isn’t what the argument is about. The real claim Republicans make is “abortion is murder” but also “government has no responsibility to provide health care for children (and they would prefer to add 'no other social assistance, either, including food) even when parents don’t have the means to do so themselves.” And that *is a logical disconnect – a huge gaping hole of hypocrisy.

Some of these Republican lunatics are so demented that they plainly prefer to risk the mother’s life rather than terminate even a first-trimester pregnancy. “Abortion is murder”, but killing the mother is no big deal (admittedly, a minority view, but some of these idiots have expressed it). And of course they’re happy to let a child be born into grinding poverty but won’t spend a dime to help assure its health care or nutrition, just as long as the damn thing gets born. Hypocrisy abounds!

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It’s going to be a real hard sell to convince anybody that you care about the safety of the babies if you want to withdraw all support for them the second they’re squirted out.

It’s much, much more plausible that the opposition of abortion is all about punishing sluts.

Also, there’s nothing much going on in this thread to convince me that the republican party isn’t the party of evil. CHIP is being opposed on no grounds whatsoever - leading to the obvious conclusion that republicans are, at best, sociopathic with regards to the health and safety of children.

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And it’s virtually impossible to believe those views are based on a religion which you insist cannot be believed piecemeal, when those views are in sharp contradiction to anything its divine prophet ever said anywhere near the subject.

246

It appears Bricker has novel theories of economics. A standard for economic success, endorsed even by the Republioturd hypocrites themselves, is job creation. The U.S. employment-population ratio was never higher than it was during the “high-tax” Clinton years. Gopsters will complain that this is inflated by loss of “family values” — wives working or women remaining single — so let’s consider the official unemployment rate. Obama was able to fight this down from 10% at the height of the Bush Depression; it is now 4.2%. Unemployment has never been below about 3.9% except during World Wars I and II.

I’m sure Bricker will defend this ignorance by selectively quoting the very post I just quoted:

IOW, Bricker is not discussing America, but rather some hypothetical what-if alternate-reality country, in which unemployment is still way too high, the rich really are oppressed, and the poor too coddled. This is my big complaint about him. Like a parrot he repeats arguments that may have had some merit in other environments — Pinochet’s right-wing violence really did increase Chile’s GDP — but are irrelevant to present-day U.S.; and indeed have been thoroughly discredited. (Recall again that Clinton’s tax hikes were partly responsible for one of the most economically successful eras in American history.)

Re-reading the thread, some of the comments directed at Bricker seem almost disrespectful. I’ll take the opportunity to ask Bricker some questions. He can win back our respect and confidence if he demonstrates familiarity with the country as it is now, rather than the hypothetical country of his fantasies.

@ Bricker — Do you think GOP tax plans are aimed at helping the middle class, or are they intended to help primarily the rich?

@ Bricker — Is your eagerness to let children fester in disease so that the economy can be stimulated with tax cuts for the rich, based on a hope to get the present 4.2% unemployment rate all the way down to its effective minimum, 4.0%?

@ Bricker — Do you think GOP plans for health care are what our country needs? Can you summarize those plans for us? (The GOP hasn’t.)

@ Bricker — Do you approve of Zinke’s old high school chums getting a $300 million contract despite having no relevant experience?

@ Bricker — Regarding the conversation between Trump and a Gold Star widow, who do you think is lying? Trump and his Chief of Staff, or the Congresswoman?

@ Bricker — Do you believe in AGW? What do you think of Pruitt’s appointment?

@ Bricker — Who do you think has a higher IQ? Trump or Smellerson?

@ Bricker — You’ve got Gorsuch on the Supreme Court now to vote with Clarence Thomas. Was it worth it?

@ Bricker — Trump and the GOP are rejecting TPPA, NAFTA, even perhaps NATO. Do you approve of this?

We’re here to help. Demonstrate some basic knowledge about the real America, not the socialist-oppressed country in your fantasies, and we can move the discussion forward.

247

In the long-term their child is dead and they’re bankrupt due to medical bills.

248

Can we just stop with this shit? Please? I will gladly grant that there are some inconsistencies in the pro-life position. I will equally grant that most pro-lifers haven’t really thought the consequences of their position through (although I’d doubt Bricker is one of those people), that many thought experiments lead to really unpleasant places, and so on and so forth. Granted.

But this shit is an opinion almost entirely projected upon most pro-lifers. It does not pass an ideological turing test. I have never met a pro-lifer in real life who actually believed this. I have never met a pro-lifer in real life who would describe their beliefs as anything like that. And when you look at pro-lifers who aren’t Rush Limbaugh, you can hear them saying (granted, often phenomenally tactless or stupid) things about how women should see the children as gifts.

You know how I know most pro-lifers don’t hold this opinion? Here’s the key hint:

Most people do not hold positions they consider disgusting. And yeah, it is disgusting to see children as punishment for sexual behavior. That’s why you almost never see anyone say that, even in private. Because most people get that that’s fucking awful, and don’t believe it.

Jesus. You’re not going to reach anyone by badly strawmanning their opinions.

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Most pro-lifers I’ve meet have made it clear that women having sex outside of the bonds of wedlock (what’s with all the imprisonment metaphors associated with being the old ball and chain?) is a bad thing and the women who do it are bad and bad things should happen to them. They also tut tut at them and their little problems that they have coming for them for what they did - they should have known it could happen and now they have to deal with the consequences.

It’s not so much that the babies are the punishment - the situation is the punishment, and the babies are merely an integral part of it.

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The conclusion I would draw from that is that you probably need to get out more, because frankly I think that says more about you than about people who actually are pro-life. Not that such people as you describe don’t exist, but that somehow that is typical of most folks in the pro-life camp.

251

Explain why interest in the kid vanishes at birth.

252

But then they do punish the babies by taking away CHIP.

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Well, they’re all quite polite about it. But they know who’s at fault.

Of the many, many, many conservatives I know and have known (I live in Idaho!), there’s always this strange dichotomy - they’re all generally quite nice (except my dad who is about the most self-centered and selfish person I know - his mom doted on him her whole life) - but they all also have this judgemental side to them, which often is expressed in a very earnest concerned way. How far the earnestness lasts before shifting to steely inflexibility is reflective of how nice and caring they really are (and how annoying they think you’re being for not agreeing).

They have their opinions, which usually are actually somebody else’s opinions that they’ve been told are God’s opinions, and those opinions, being of divine providence, are utterly inflexible. And as conservatives they have a strong sense of responsibility, consequences, and guilt. People who get themselves into trouble are expected to get themselves out of it - possibly with the aid of family and friends (which may include their church group), but certainly not asking the aid of anybody who’s unwilling to help. None of that government assistance nonsense, absolutely not.

And yes, extramarital sex is totally a sin, and the fact that pregnancy is a direct consequence of that sinful act is not overlooked. The child is precious, but the mother screwed up and deserves no sympathy, and these two facts are in no way incompatible at all.

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They see that as punishing “the poor” - a category that doesn’t include babies in their minds. “The poor” are expected to take care of themselves, and if they are unable to take care of their babies because you ripped away their ability to take care of their babies, that’s their own fault for not having a backup plan or something.

255

I was a security guard in an abortion clinic, and I didn’t see any indication the protestors thought women getting abortions were evil for getting pregnant. It was all about the embryos. The protests were often religiously explicit in nature, never explicitly secular, and definitely based on the idea that abortion is bad and pregnancy’s the bomb.

The people who tried to burn the place down repeatedly making security necessary neglected to leave any sign of how they felt about pregnant women either way.

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You get that it’s not just for babies, right?

If someone with that view sees a grown man being set upon by a would-be killer, said someone would shout SELF-DEFENSE OR DEFENSE OF OTHERS when rushing to foil the attack. You want money, for to hire a cop who’ll be on hand to quick-draw his sidearm when interrupting the next would-be attacker? Hell, yeah, he’ll pay up!

But once he’s done his part to save that man’s life – well, he’s done, right? I mean, he’ll pay taxes, he’ll even risk his own life, to protect a grown man or a baby from this or that would-be killer; that’s the deal, we’re all on Team Fighting Crime. But if that grown man then asks for a nice MLT sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomatoes are ripe, well, that’s another story, isn’t it?

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Yeah. I don’t dispute that. Most pro-lifers also don’t think that non-marital sex is a good thing. That doesn’t mean these people believe that children are a “punishment” for premarital sex.

Ask yourself if this passes an ideological turing test.

258

I’ve never met any of those, but then, the only people I’ve met who were 100% against provoking an abortion were men who refused to believe there is such a thing as ectopic pregnancies (the last one got “small wonder you can’t get laid” from an absolute pro-choice and me, a pro-choice pro-lifer*). In general the argument shorthands to “if it’s viable, let it be born; being inconvenient should not get you killed.” Every single pro-life woman I know, no matter how radical, will also accept “in a bad medical situation in which it is not possible to save both the child and the mother, saving the mother is a perfectly valid choice;” they may dislike that choice enormously or accept it with alacrity, but they can think themselves in that situation and understand it.

  • Abortion should be legal and covered, but so should preventive measures or having the baby (whether to keep or not). First give people an actual choice, then try to convince them to let the fetus become a baby.
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In Spanish we call those people beatos. In RCC terminology, a beatus is someone who has been recognized as maybe perhaps possibly if the paperwork gets finished someday being declared an official saint, but who hasn’t been declared one yet. In the slang version, someone who is very very worried for everybody else’s soul while merrily, say… denying people the right to celebrate the Sabbath.

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That would probably be because you apparently didn’t understand it. I don’t know what you would accept as proof, and since my statement was about what I believe, I gave you a small sample of the information that led me to that belief. That is far more proof than I have ever seen for the effectiveness of “trickle-down” or for the existence of a God, for that matter.