I actually agree that from a consistency standpoint, you do have to say that rape babies are gifts from God that should not be aborted if you believe life begins at conception.
I take this position as good evidence that such a standpoint is mind-fuckingly ludicrous.
We’ve had this discussion before. “What’s the Matter with Kansas” (and the other states nearby) is they’ll vote for what they think is morally right (pro-life, pro-gun anti-gay marraige) even if it’s against their economic interest. I myself admit to being a Kansas Republican (even though that group has been called all kinds of nasty names on this board), and live near this area, and know a lot of people from the area (all rural farmers, all staunchy Repulican) so I understand where they’re coming from.
Indianapolis and the NW help counteract some of the conservatism here, but Monroe County (where Bloomington is) also does too. However combined it isn’t a whole lot.
However the state has moved left. In 2000 and 2004 the GOP won the presidency by 20-22%. In 2008 Obama won by 1%.
This 2012 election has shown Romney winning by 5-12%. Before the debates Obama was only behind by about 5-6, now he is behind 11-12%. But still, going from a 21% margin for Bush vs Gore/Kerry vs an 11% margin for Romney is still a move to the left, the state went from 60/40 to about 55/45 (and before Obama blew the debate, it was about 53/47). Maybe Indiana, like NC, will not be a swing state per se but in elections when the democrats are experience a strong wind at their back these will be states the GOP can no longer take for granted.
Hereis an interesting 538 article about Indiana.
A good friend from over here is from small-town Indiana. He’s told me some rather horrifying tales about conservatism in that state. One of them was being told by his teachers in the classroom that Catholics will burn in Hell, no ifs, ands or buts. I can only take comfort in the notion that they must be shitting themselves knowing that no matter how they vote, there’s a Catholic on the ticket, heh.
That is not too controversial by Indiana standards IMO. I wonder if rural parts of America are the same all over the US in regards to that. The radicalism and stupidity aren’t really shocking anymore.
Indiana: the middle finger of Dixie.
It is entirely possible to be pro-life and still permit exceptions for rape. Pregnancy is the foreseeable result of consensual intercourse. If the intercourse is not consensual, thats an entirely different analysis. Same goes for pregnancies that threatens the mother with death or disability.
Yeah, but it’s a pretty nasty view of God. New ‘persons’ are being created in women’s wombs by the thousands every day, and God needs to take advantage of a rape to create one more?
And Mormons?
By just over 15 and 20 points respectively, actually; but yeah, given that in 2004 Kerry won Illinois and lost Ohio by only two points, it clearly shows that this year’s likely Romney win is far from a fluke.
Not if, like Mourdock, you believe that from the moment of conception, it is a fully human baby. (Just to be clear, I’m with drewtwo99 in not sharing this belief but sticking up for its consistency.)
Your pro-life viewpoint sounds like it is more anti-abortion than pro-life. That is, it is about disapproval of female promiscuity rather than protecting the “unborn”. Is that correct?
Let me frame it this way, as a thought experiment:
Suppose a woman is kidnapped and held in one of those sex-slave dungeons you occasionally hear about (and presumably there are others we never hear about). She becomes pregnant and has the baby (again, this has definitely happened in real life, multiple times).
One day, she is up in the main house doing housework under the supervision of her kidnapper, while the baby sleeps in a crib. She decides to make a move, and grabs a lighter and uses a spray bottle of cleaning fluid as a torch, aiming it right at her abductor’s face. This blinds and disables him, leaving him moaning on the floor. It also sets the house on fire. The baby’s crib is right next to the front door, so it would be trivially easy for her to grab baby on the way out the door. Does she have any ethical responsibility to do so, or should it be fine for her to leave the baby to perish since s/he was conceived by rape?
My Catholic high school teacher grew up in Indiana and she said that as a child she was told that Catholics are not Christians.
However, that was a long time ago. I wonder whether anti-Catholic prejudice is really all that common. Religious conservatism has changed a lot in the last 40 years, with people lining up along lines of abortion, prayer in schools, etc., rather than on Catholic-Protestant divides.
By all means, lose the baby. If God wants him around bad enough that he was willing to have you raped to get that done, he should find it trivially easy to put out a house fire to keep the child alive. After all, he wanted the kid not me so let him protect him. He is infinitely more suited to the task than I could ever be.
Personally, I’d probably take the kid along since we’re both just victims of a cruel and evil God and victims need to stick together. Of course, all of this assuming that I felt that God loves micromanagement so much that he gets that hands on over childbirth. I don’t think that at all.
What if the scenario is just a little bit different. What if it’s a grown adult stranger in the crib by the door. Would that change things? To me, it really wouldn’t. What makes this even an issue is the term trivially easy. Should you help another human being if they need it and it’s trivially easy? I think you should.
I see no trivially easy way to help a fetus though so in that scenario, the fetus is on it’s own. I guess I can see a big difference between fetus and human and what protections they are entitled to and how far I’m willing to go to help them.
He never said, but from my experience elsewhere, I would imagine that Mormons were viewed as some abstract, distant threat contained to one small hellhole and not part of a vast, worldwide conspiracy.
This is the first presidential election in the history of the country in which there’s not a single WASP candidate, that old American standby, on a major-party ticket, and I suspect a lot of folks in red states are being thrown into a tizzy over it.
That seems to be a common tenet of the more fundamentalist Christian sects. I know a Thai fundie Christian over here and once overheard him explain in all seriousness to another Thai that Catholics are not Christians. He did not know I was listening and could understand what he was saying. I kept out of it, especially since there was an American Catholic nearby who did not have a clue to what was being said. No sense stirring up shit.
Fair point! My analogy would work better if, oh I don’t know, the dungeon were in a cabin in the mountains and the woman would have to hike many miles with baby in tow.
But my main point was that the person saying they are “pro-life”, but yet not if it’s not through consensual sex, seems to me to have a view that is not centered around the idea of protecting “human life” that “begins at conception”.
BTW as an atheist who has a couple good friends who are devout Protestants, and who had a Catholic best friend in high school and was formerly married to a Catholic, I can *totally *see why Protestants would be leery of considering Catholics (or Mormons) Christians. I think they’re all bunk, mind you, but Catholicism really stirred in a lot of pagan stuff that I’m sure Jesus and his disciples would not have been cool with. (Not that they would have been cool with most Protestantism today either, but the problems there are of a different sort and not so blatantly obvious in many cases.)
I agree with most of what SlackerInc said. I don’t really think one can claim that they’re pro-life unless they desire a foetus to be given the provisions of a child - in real life, the life of an adult and a child may be balanced, so that’s an understandable exception. However, no-one would say that it would be acceptable to kill the product of a rape post-partum. There’s a different level of accounting going on there. Remember, anyone seeking an abortion does not desire to carry the baby to term, for whatever reason (performance error in using contraception, ignorance about proper usage of contraception or fertility, or any other reason). To allow for rape exceptions just splits them into the “deserving” category, when women who weren’t raped may be even less prepared to bear a child.
As for the Catholicism not being considered Christian, that’d be anachronistic and an example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy in my mind. I don’t think there’s a single major sect that doesn’t diverge from the Gospels to some significant degree (at least on the subject of pacifism or duty towards the poor).
All I know is that on Election Day …no booze…even in restaurants. ( no beer,wine, liquor sold on Sundays, but you can get it in restaurants)