Yes, you’re right. Self-righteousness underpins a lot of this, and the “sinners” of society (e.g. fornicating women, addicts, the poor) are easy targets.
I think big business gets a pass because conservatives tend to give industry a massive benefit of the doubt. This mentality stems from fear, I think; there is the perception that when a business screws up, holding them accountable means society has to suffer. Political rhetoric trains us to think this way. Why is corporate welfare okay, when social welfare is satanically communist? CEOs are making millions of dollars every year and have access to every tax shelter imaginable, and yet we’re told they need their taxes cut even more. Why? To benefit us all. Conservatives seem to accept these pro-business “truths” quite readily, but reject comparable notions that favor the lesser among us. Liberals seem to be the opposite.
Being able to proclaim that the Others are Evil feels good and allows one to suspend rational analysis of what makes them tick, in favor of slogans. It may impair developing effective strategies to counter them, and hinder reaching out to the undecided.
It is what it is. The belief that an egg with some sperm on it is somehow inbued with a magical fairy spirit and that “killing” it will anger the sky god is goofball superstition. Sorry.
The opposition to torture is absolutely rooted in scientific/medical reality. What are you talking about? It’s not a mere belief that torture causes suffering. It is a religious belief, and nothing else, that an insentient clump of cells is a “baby.”
This is a straw man. Abortion “immediately before birth” doesn’t happen. Very few abortions (a fraction of 1%) happen in the 3rd trimester, and those only happen for medically necessary reasons (usually when the fetus is already dead or dying).
There is no such thiong as an abortion 10 minutes before a fetus is born, so the question is fallacious.
I was very anti-abortion until I started reading some anti-abortion literature and frankly, it scared the hell out of me. I’ve since done a 180 degree turn around.
I’ve had run-ins with the anti-aborts protesting outside our local Planned Parenthood, and it’s sickening to see such anti-women behavior in action. They harass every person going in there. I’ve seen them chase women down the block and physically stop them, standing in front of them and demanding they take their literature. When I told one such protestor that she was guilty of assault after seeing her grab a woman’s arm to keep her from walking away, she said “Don’t listen to her. She just wants you to have an abortion.”
The fact that they refuse the label “anti-abortion” (which they are) while calling the other side “pro-abortion” (which we’re not) offends me.
Two of the best things ever said about the abortion battle:
I don’t know if I’m pro-choice or pro-life. But I know I like the pro-chioice people better than the pro-life people–Andy Rooney
It’s not a war over what’s legal. It’s a war over who’s right."–Stephen King in Insomnia.
I would caution everyone in this thread on both sides of the issues about attributing a blanket motivation to a very large and diverse group of people.
Some pro-lifers may be misogynists. Most, in my experience, are not. Some religious people or organizations are anti-sex. Most are not, although most religions do preach chastity outside of marriage for women and men. Many pro-lifers pay far too little attention to children after they are born; but many others are involved in all kinds of social and community programs to support children and mothers.
Anyone who can say with a straight face “Pro-lifers really just hate women” is just ignorant, akin to someone who would say “Pro-choicers are just selfish and don’t want to deal with the consequences of their sinful lifestyles.” Both statements indicate someone who is more interested in demonizing the opposition then really understanding them.
True. And, as Jackmanii says, sometimes it feels good to get together with a lot of like-minded people and call the other side names, which is why we get so much of it on the SDMB.
Part of it for the pro-abortion side is fear. Roe v. Wade gave them everything (almost) that they wanted, and they didn’t have to persuade a majority of the populace or anything - five Supreme Court Justices decided to impose their own ideas on the rest of the country. But since they had what they wanted handed to them by judicial fiat, it is threatening when any of the commoners act as if they were citizens instead of subjects.
That underlies a good bit of the fury with which the pro-abortion side will defend even horrors like late-term abortions (often by lying about it), or even argue that minors should be able to abort their pregnancies (but not drink a beer or have their ears pierced). Although to be fair, more commonly abortion for minors is defended with the assumption that most most fathers and pro-life parents, are incestuous and abusive monsters.
My experience, at least hereabouts, is that you can have a perfectly civil discussion with pro-abortionists, providing you agree with them. Disagree even slightly, and the raving, at least from the rabid types, begins almost at once.
I read Randy Alcorn’s book “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Chioce Questions.” Please noter that the title is the only place he uses the word “pro-chioce.” Everywhere else, it’s “pro-abortion,” and every fetus is “he.” He also devotes pages to the horrors of abortion (mental problems, breat cancer, infertility, yada, yada, yada), but says very little about the down side of adoption. Every time adoption is mentioned, it’s always tied to a “lovely Christian married couple.” No gays need apply, I guess. He summed up his philosophy in one sentence “It’s reasonable for a person to live with a temporary inconvenience if the only alternative is the death of a human being.” I ewonder if he applies the same principle to someone needing a kidney transplant. Being forced to donate a kidney is much less inconvenient and temporary than housing something in your utureus for nine months.
When a civil judgement was awarded against Alcorn for his anti-abortion activities, he immediately “pulled an OJ” and became The Pastor Without a Paycheck.
Standard disclaimer: I’m strongly pro-choice, abortion on demand should be available up to delivery, family planning services should be eligible for government subsidies to the same extent as comparable medical procedures, etc.
While I agree that rape exceptions fit in very nicely with the “it’s about controlling women” narrative – and even that said narrative is a (subconscious) motivating factor in many cases – I think that such a pat description is unduly condemnatory. There are *several *other ways to reconcile opposition to abortion rights with support for rape exceptions. I think that all of these are true in part:
– The simplest explanation is competing interests, as suggested above. Abortion is ethically distasteful, but forcing a rape victim to carry her pregnancy to term is even more distasteful.
– Related to above, while it would *seem *as if believing abortion to be murder should trump all other ethical concerns, there’s no reason that this necessarily must be so. Society has always recognized that not all murders are equally reprehensible: premeditated killing is worse than a crime of passion is worse than a drunk driving fatality. In some ways, for many people, whether they realize it or not, abortion falls more on the drunk driving side of the scale.
– Even for those who believe intellectually that abortion is morally equivalent to the premeditated killing of a child or adult, that’s the kind of rationally held opinion that often doesn’t translate well to emotional, *visceral *disdain – the thing being killed is unseen and therefore largely abstract, thus your gut may not feel the same kind of outrage that your head does – and it’s generally emotion that drives our actions and preferences, not logic. Many anti-abortion folks are *intellectually *outraged by abortion, but emotionally perturbed by the idea of a rape victim without recourse, since that is *not *abstract. Emotion frequently wins out.
– Finally, there’s nothing about believing abortion to be murder that precludes a consequentialist outlook. It will frequently be the case that a particular restriction on abortion will only be politically feasible if it includes a rape exception. And, as should be clear, this is very much a “damned if you do damned if don’t” issue for pro-lifers: concede a rape exception and you open yourself up to criticism that *obviously *you don’t care about the fetus and just want to oppress women; oppose a rape exception and you get in return a lot more additional scorn and outrage than you do grudging respect from the other side of the debate.
This is a faulty generalization. Pro-life does not equal “Republican.” I know many pro-lifers who vote Democratic (including me), and many more who “hold their nose” and vote Republican because of the abortion issue but would rather be supporting the Democrats on a whole host of other issues.
Again you can’t equate the pro-life movement with the GOP platform. A huge number of pro-lifers are single-issue voters. When the rare pro-life Democrat runs for office, they tend to do very will with that demographic (but of course lose pro-choice votes, which is why they tend not to win).
Most pro-lifers accept the carve-outs for rape and incest not because they’re ideal, but because they are practical. If you want to pass a law that limits abortion, it’s easier to pass one that makes exceptions for those cases. Most pro-lifers I’ve known would admit that, in an ideal world, rape and incest would not result in an abortion either.
And to answer the question that I’m often asked: “How can you vote Democrat if you’re pro-life?” My answer is that I think it’s pretty clear, looking at the last forty years, that the social policies of the Democratic party have been more successful at lowering the abortion rate than the policies of the Republican party have been. And, at the same time, I’m not comfortable requiring the majority of Americans to conform to my view that a fetus is a person when I believe it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree on that point.
“I tell [the cadets] there’s been a lot of confusion about waterboarding. Is it unlawful, and is it a war crime to do that? Yes! We’re very clear about that.”
Col. Maritza Ryan, head of West Point’s Law Department.
[QUOTE=Qin Shi Huangdi]
So of like how the majority of abolitionists remained peaceful in their methods until the American Civil War actually broke out? Were they not serious?
[/QUOTE]
I think it is very interesting you use this example. The majority of abolitionists didn’t see slaves as having the same rights as white people. They didn’t support social equality. They didn’t support voting rights. They very often supported forced resettlement to Africa. While progressive for their time, by modern standards many of them were extremely racist. Their view was often that slavery degraded the slaver as much as the slave. It’s comparable to a modern view many hold to do with animal cruelty - that animals themselves don’t have rights, but that cruelty to animals should still be outlawed.
This isn’t meant to critique the abolitionist movement, though I have a lot more respect for Brown than many of the others. However, I think the anti-abortion movement is similar - though people protest that a fetus is a human being with equal rights, the majority don’t believe it. That’s not totally inconsistent, of course - it is possible to think that a fetus is less than human, but still shouldn’t be eliminated on demand. But it doesn’t fit in very well with the soul at conception argument that people make.
If anti-abortionists thought fetus were people with full rights, I would think they would fall more on the spectrum with John Brown.
I’m under the impression that “3rd trimester abortions” and “partial birth abortions” are not synonymous. If that’s the case, then I don’t believe your cites back up your claim; the first point, that very few abortions happen in the 3rd trimester, is not opposed by a cite that an abortion advocate has lied about how common they are, because we don’t know how common he’s now claiming they are. I mean, say he originally claimed that they accounted for 0.1% of all abortions, and is now claiming they account for 0.8%, then the two points are in accord, not opposition. The second point seems to have a problem with suspiciously specific denial; most partial birth abortions are performed on healhy mothers with healthy babies (as an aside, seemingly a surprising term being used for what medically is not a baby by medical professionals), but the claim is that they are not necessary in terms of protecting the woman - what about the fetus? Continued health of the fetus doesn’t seem to be referred to, and that could well fulfil the second point of providing medical necessity.
I’m slightly wary, I must admit, of cites of opinion rather than studies. Certainly we may assume that the Surgeon General and those medical professionals keep up to date on research in order to form the basis of their opinions, but i’m still wary of there being a layer of opinion between fact and my own understanding. Beyond that, your first cite is 14 years old, and your second are both 15 years old, which limits their effectiveness and calls into question the extent to which term usage is the same.
There was a whole thread on just a single piece of the above post.
Sex without consequences is fine for the Goose but in this case, it isn’t fine for the Gander. This inequality is bullshit.
in comes the many folks saying that a man can’t have a baby HINT: he also can’t decide not to
There has been a lot written about this. Unfortunately, I don’t have any references to hand at the moment, but, yes, there is a basic principal in American conservatism that it is always bad to remove the negative consequences of acts they decide are wrong.
I seem to recall an incident during the Bush administration in which someone was arguing against abstinence-only sex education based on studies showing that it was ineffective. The answer back was something like “Studies don’t matter because morality trumps facts.”
Since many of you anti-choicers supported Bush and his destroying Iraq to the tune of getting hundreds of thousands killed for no reason, I find it hard to take your claims regarding the sanctity of human life seriously.
Exactly. In my experience, the majority of anti-abortionists (granted, I live in the Bible Belt) are also anti-real-sex-ed, anti-handing-out-condoms, and generally anti-women-in-control-of-their-sexuality. You’d think if you don’t want people to have abortions you’d want to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, but these are exactly the same people, often, who demand abstinence-only programs that have been proven ineffective.
Adding to that, the church has a financial vested interest in controlling the sexuality of women. If the church did not place restrictions on when and and and with whom women can have sex, then we might have sex with many different men. The paternity of any resulting children would then be in question. Because men were mostly the landowners, men were mostly the tithing payers. Control of female sexuality is about controlling property: the wife is an asset because with her additional assets can be created. These assets are known as heirs. Heirs inherit the estate, make more assets, and pay tithing. Men may not wish to bequeath their estate upon children they did not father.
It’s not just the church controlling hearts and minds… follow the money.
I would love to see every woman considering abortion to have the baby and give it to a gay or lesbian couple That would really put a stick into the wheels of the anti-abortion group.
If life begins at conception, how come anti-aborts are not protesting at in-vitro clinics?