I was driving when I posted that (safely at a red light using voice-to-text, I assure you!) and wasn’t able to dig up a cite.
I too believe they should be able to. But I also believe they should be able to even if it was enthusiastically consensual sex with someone they are completely unrelated to. I can’t wrap my head around “abortion is murdering poor widdle babies, but you should still be able to murder them in cases of rape and incest”. Thus I think being prolife with a rape exception in particular (not sure what to think about the incest one) is not “compassionate” at all, but representative of a punitive disapprobation toward “sluts”.
I wish I had an answer. But when you have a sizeable chunk of the population listening to everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth and still thinking he’s somehow a champion for the little guy, nothing amazes me.
Like he saw on TV thousands of muslims in New Jersey cheering after 9/11. Or when he says he will take on the corporate special interests. Bullshit - he is a corporate special interest. He’s going to fix the tax code and wages and health insurance systems to protect the workers? He’s not going to stack the deck for business? Right. He’s made his fortune on the backs of the little guy, and screwing anyone who gets in his way. Like being a slum lord trying to drive tenants out of a rent controlled apartment building so he could tear it down. Suing anyone and everyone to keep from having to pay his debts.
The only “little guy” Donald cares about is in his trousers.
Abortion is a unique condition: it is the only situation I can think of where one life is completely and wholly dependent upon one specific other person. There are times when someone is dependent upon another, but the another is interchangeable with anyone else who would care to step in. Children can go to foster care and get adopted. Patients in ICU have rotating nursing staff and doctors on call. Organ donations have to be screened for matching factors, and some of those are pretty rare, but they are still more varied than just one person, and we don’t force donations on anyone.
So the two values in conflict are the value of the sanctity of life versus the value of personal physical autonomy.
If you hold the first foremost and you define a pregnancy at any point as a human life that can sense and feel, then you will feel that life trumps choice, that terminating the pregnancy at that point is murder. We all agree murder is wrong, but we don’t always agree on what constitutes murder.
Whereas if you hold personal autonomy as foremost, then you feel the mother’s right to her person and body overrules the termination of a pregnancy at any point, and that it isn’t murder, even if it results in a death.
The problem is that it is very difficult to argue the primacy of one value to someone who holds the other value. It doesn’t make one side medieval, it simply means definitions are different.
Where the line is for where the life becomes sacrosanct, within Pro-Lifers and within Pro-Choicers, is a personal decision that isn’t consistent within either crowd. Thus Roe v. Wade’s compromise on limiting late term abortions but protecting early ones.
Science can inform us about the stages of development, when breathing starts, when pain reactions can be observed, when brain waves can be detected, etc. Advancements in medical technology can move the line for viability earlier and earlier, such that the fetus can be removed and survive in incubators and whatnot. Maybe someday we will have transplants and artificial wombs to work with. But until those days, we’re stuck with the mother being the host.
But the determination of what makes a life is something of a philosophical position, and so science can’t tell us the answer. The people who hold life starts at conception are ultimately on just as solid ground as the people who hold that it starts at birth. Or really the people that define it at some midway point. Define “life” and then you can try to answer the question, but the crowds are using different definitions, so they will never agree.
Unless we can actually discover a soul and identify when said soul is imparted to the fetus. Yeah, I can barely type that with a straight face.
Yeah, I’m aware that it is an extreme position even within the Pro Life camp, but the rape/incest exceptions are predicated on throwing in another value: the idea that the pregnancies caused and children born in such cases will be a constant and painful reminder of the trauma of the experience. Plus, there is the value that a woman choosing to have sex is more culpable than a woman who is forced. Ergo, the woman who chose sex had her choice. She could have chosen birth control, multiple forms, or even abstinence. Or praying to convince God she shouldn’t be pregnant right now, in these circumstances. So there’s an element of blame with respect to regular abortions.
But you are correct, the word “sizable” leaves a lot of wiggle room, and even if there is only one person in a thousand that holds that belief, that’s still ~3,000 people in the U.S. Tiny as a fraction of the population as a whole, but sizable if you stick them all in one room. 15% of the population is much larger than that. It’s larger than many other constituencies.
Population over age 65: 14.4%
German ancestry: 15.2%
Irish ancestry: 10.8%
Polish ancestry: 3.2%
non Hispanic Black: 12.2%
Jewish religion: 1.7%
That was a very cogent & well-argued summary. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Not that it’s news to any of us, but it’s always valuable to have a good crib sheet.
There are a bunch of second-order issues you left out, but that’s the nature of a summary. Since that’s not what this thread is about I’ll stop here.
Returning mostly to politics …
It is interesting that some very prominent politicians are falling over themselves to embrace values favored by only 15% of the electorate. In a majority-wins-the-election system pissing off 85% of the electorate seems a less-than-obvious strategy. Clearly something else is at work.
But the way multiway primaries work, and given the intensity of the 15%, it is understandable even if self-defeating. Remember, Jeb was going to lose the primary to win the general, and we all saw how that worked out.
Said another way, if you have to be an extremist to win a primary (presidential or otherwise), then long term the party that’s more extreme will lose more general elections. That’s probably a feature not a bug.
The problem comes in when we have legislative districts that for legit cultural or economic reasons or for illegit gerrymandering reasons are pre-built to be unassailable bastions for one party or the other.
That’s how you get deadlocked do-nothing or hard-over steamroller legislatures.
IMO today we’re a blue nation full of red counties. And becoming more of both over time. The current noisy and ineffective situation will continue for a very long time.
It’s this exactly. Abortion is probably the only issue where I’m more aligned with the extreme right (although not completely). If you believe that an aborted baby’s 14th amendment rights are violated, what difference does it make if the baby is the result of rape or incest?
Too soon for sure, but here’s some speculation on possible Cruz running mates: Who will Ted Cruz pick as his running mate?
Nikki Haley wouldn’t be a terrible pick. Glenn Beck, seriously? No mention of Kasich, probably because he has said he doesn’t want to be on the ticket as VP. But he makes those comments while he’s running for president and probably doesn’t want to look like he’s willing to settle. I think Kasich would be a good selection.
Glenn Beck is a far better choice.
No, not better. But more appropriate.
Beck would be more amusing. In a sick sort of way…
Part of it is obviously the primary vs general system, where the dynamics require moving more extreme for the party base and then trying to be more centrist to appeal to the general.
But I think there’s more too it. The right wing side of the country has been getting more and more extreme for decades, and the Tea Party folks have pushed that. Couple that with the general frustration over the politics of Washington, and the driver that has the outsiders getting more support also works to have the candidates fighting to out-conservative each other. Thus you get Cruz, who ran for Senate by blasting his Republican primary opponent as “too moderate”. That’s right, not even liberal, just moderate. And so that pushes Cruz to finally have to commit to no amnesty, when he was trying very hard to focus on blocking illegal immigration and leave the issue of those currently here for later. Similarly, it makes Bush and Kasich impossible. And so when the trend is to run to the right, that bleeds over even to abortion, where the 15% “no exceptions” is where the candidates find themselves. Because otherwise, they are “too moderate”.
Cruz has swept all 34 pledged delegates in Colorado.
If he does win the nomination it’s going to be because of precisely the level of attention his campaign pays to detail and nuts-and-bolts displayed here.
To reiterate: no one knows how to play the game better than Ted Cruz. The guy’s a diabolical genius.
If only he’d use his powers for good.
He’s your hope for not having your nominee be Trump. So, deal with it in whatever way you can tell yourself is honorable.
It would be a terrible pick… for Nikki Haley. Stuff really doesn’t look good for the GOP this cycle and she’ll get all the smears and bad press of a presidential campaign dragging down her numbers with none of the advantages of eventually being vice president.
Probably is the best pick for Cruz though.
We won’t know how crazy Cruz is until (if) he gets the nomination.
All candidates run to the wings in the primaries. Hillary and Bernie have been saying absolutely nutty stuff to please their bases. So nutty that even Paul Krugman had to take Bernie behind the woodshed.
The question is, how much of the nonsense on both sides is pandering, and how much of it is truly felt? We’ll find out when we see how far they are willing to tack back to the center once the nomination battles are over.
My guess is that Cruz will change the tone of his rhetoric significantly, if not the substance. But he’ll be pushing his ideas as ways to help the poor, minorities, students, etc. He’ll walk back his abortion comments by saying that states should decide and it’s none of his business.
Trump will completely flip. He’ll sound like a progressive if he gets the nomination, and by the time the Presidential election comes along he may even try to beat Hillary by going to the left of her. The man has no principles and can’t hold a coherent thought to save his life, so he’ll go wherever he thinks the votes are.
Bernie will stay true to his ideals - and lose horribly to Cruz if he’s nominated. Would he beat Trump? I have no idea. I don’t believe the U.S. is ready for a hard core socialist/communist. He’ll lose worse than Mondale and Dukakis did. The country has moved left since them, but not nearly enough. I think.
Hillary will do what the Clintons always do - she’ll triangulate. The day after she gets the nomination she’ll discover that she really loves businesses, and she’ll find some prominent social justice warrior to throw under the bus. She’ll notice that immigration really is an issue that needs to be dealt with, and she’ll talk endlessly about how ruthless she’ll be in the war on terror. Then she’ll try to do what her husband did and try to find that fine line to walk that doesn’t enrage any of her constituents while peeling off moderate Republicans and independents. Whether she has the skill to do that is not clear.
“Hard core socialist/communist.” lol