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Caligastia
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quote:
Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
What's so special about birth? |
It's the point at which a being begins to have the experiences that will have a great effect on the creation of their personality.
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shawnmmcc
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Elok has a very good point on popular culture, and how those truly interested in helping eliminate abortion as an alternative could better put their efforts to work. I would like to see abortion largely ended. You might find this contradictory, I am pro-choice anti-abortion, which means I am for a person's right to choose, but I truly hope it won't be abortion. However, choice to me is the primary focus, and the critical item. Ben, once the government starts to legislate choices, where does it end. You in fact make my point for me.
I mention "substance use (vs. abuse)" and when you parse me, you state "This restriction has nothing to do with the other issues you throw into the mix, with substance abuse and consented sex." Exactly, and I will let the historical and legislative history make my point for me. "Moralism" laws, including abortion, and also attacks on homosexuals, people with different life-styles, etc. don't stop at just one issue. The record of those groups is very clear, and one reason I am now pro-choice. I may dislike abortion, but I dislike your alternative, government legislated morality. I feel that smoking pot is foolish and stupid, but as long as you don't operate heavy machinery or motorized conveyances while under the influence, I will defend your right. The idea of gay sex may make me have a slight "yech" reaction, but that is not my business and that's my problem, their right to freedom is what truly affects me. Being a true libetarian means defending other people's right to do things you disagree with.
A protest is "instant gratification" because the results are immediate (you have the protest), and occur in a supportive social structure that tells you in the here-and-now you've done good. Compared to volunteer work like Big Brothers/Big Sisters, it is instant gratification and your not realizing that makes me suspicious of your credentials.
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Irrelevant to the issue. I could boast of my accomplishments, but right now, they mean squat to what has actually been accomplished in either Canada or the US. |
Like bloody blue blases they are irrelevant. Please, boast of your accomplishments in outreach programs for disadvantaged youth, at-risk adolescents, etc. They show a real commitment, and a realization that the problems are deep seated and that the real problem, which is teen pregnancy and irresponsible behavior, will take more than just weekends off with a bunch of signs.
On the personhood issue, I'll nail you with the same thing that hit me like a brick while a was a teenager, and did a semester (roughly five months) of volunteer work with special needs children. We had one who was just this side of a vegetable. Please give me a some behavioral point that distinguishes that person from an animal, not some vague statement about they are still a person, etc.
I did some research after that. Are you familiar with microcephaly? During the more blunt and less politically correct days, those with the condition were known as microcephalic idiots. You shine a flashlight to their skulls at birth, and it glows. The cranial cavity is full of fluid, all they have is the brain stem, the reptile brain. Without life support they quickly die.
Since they will never be aware, in fact it is impossible, do you or I have the right to tell those parents they have to go through the pregnancy, in fact they have to put the wife at risk delivering this doomed creature? Okay, now lets look at retardation. At what point do we draw the line. Like most real world cases, there is a vast grey area that is very messy. I err on the side of freedom.
Ben, beware of surrendering those freedoms, on the altar of abortion as murder. Once you surrender one, you set yourself up for the next, and then the next. If conservative Islam suddenly had the right to impose Sharia on you (including banning you from any ministries among Moslems) would you respect them? They can quote chapter and verse of their holy texts. Or would you say "That's different." Which is exactly my point.
I used to agree with those that thought Jefferson was wrong, the the "Wall" model of the separation of Church and state was incorrect. As I grow older, and realize that while my knowledge grows linearly the volume of what I don't know grows exponentially, I come to better appreciate the wisdom of some of the "dead white males." Jefferson understood the threat to freedom that people of faith who want to impose morality are. I wish another model worked, but historically the man was right. As you are arguing morality, based on sacred texts and your interpetation, and your right to impose that model on me, and I am arguing ethics and the preeminence of freedom, will we continue to be opposed. It's part of the tension that makes democracy great.
Sava didn't exactly do a threadjack. The tension of the abortion debate, and the way it's serves as a lightning rod for the social conservatives, fundamentalists, libetarians, and liberals highlights very well the issues that separate Americans, and why there are no "average" Americans. It's why many Europeans cannot comprehend US-style politics. If you want a more accurate model, look at the moslem, jewish, and hindu countries where you have a significantly involved conservative religious community attempting to pass laws on morality. That model serves much better for understanding US politics instead of a European model, though the Republic of Ireland did a pretty good job until EU membership and it's monetary benefits pretty much relaxed the Catholic Church's stranglehold on morality laws - not that it still doesn't have influence, note I said stranglehold for the nitpickers  .
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Ben Kenobi
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McGregornobi!
Oct 2002
time: 21:33
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Shawnmcc:
quote:
The record of those groups is very clear, and one reason I am now pro-choice.
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What groups? How do you know I belong to such groups?
There is only one issue up here, all the others have nothing to do with this issue, and that is abortion.
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Being a true libetarian means defending other people's right to do things you disagree with.
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If the unborn child is a person, then she comes under the same protection as the rest of us. Therefore, it would seem that this is the main question to resolve, what is the unborn child?
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A protest is "instant gratification" because the results are immediate (you have the protest), and occur in a supportive social structure that tells you in the here-and-now you've done good.
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We do not see the results of our efforts. Very rarely will someone come to us and say that they changed their mind. More often, they will walk off, and we hope that some do.
The goal of the protests is not just to 'get the message out,' but to save lives. Until we know that we have changed people's minds, only then will we have succeeded.
And even then, every abortion is in sense a failure, because it means there are people we have not reached.
So tell me again, how protests provide 'instant gratification.'
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They show a real commitment, and a realization that the problems are deep seated and that the real problem, which is teen pregnancy and irresponsible behavior, will take more than just weekends off with a bunch of signs.
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I agree that women need help with their pregnancies, and that it is not enough just to ban abortion.
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and did a semester (roughly five months) of volunteer work with special needs children. We had one who was just this side of a vegetable.
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So if the vegetable is nothing more than a sack of meat, why not slit their throat and put them out of their misery? After all, that's what abortion would do to them before they are born.
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Since they will never be aware, in fact it is impossible, do you or I have the right to tell those parents they have to go through the pregnancy, in fact they have to put the wife at risk delivering this doomed creature?
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We are all doomed creatures, from the moment of our conception. Why shorten the lives of others?
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I err on the side of freedom.
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Like a slaveowner errs on the side of property rights, Such freedom costs lives.
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If conservative Islam suddenly had the right to impose Sharia on you (including banning you from any ministries among Moslems) would you respect them? They can quote chapter and verse of their holy texts. Or would you say "That's different." Which is exactly my point.
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We do not have the right to strip others of their rights, one man's rights ends where another man's begin. Just as they would be wrong to bar me from practicing my beliefs, so are we wrong to kill innocent children.
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As you are arguing morality, based on sacred texts and your interpetation,
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Where in this thread have I quoted scripture? One need not be religious to know that it is wrong to kill children.
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I am arguing ethics and the preeminence of freedom,
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And so you impose your values on me.
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shawnmmcc
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No I don't impose my values on you. YOU are free not to practice abortion. If the anti-abortion movement has it's choice, and my wife and I discover our next child is hideously deformed, then we are the individuals who will not have a choice. A red herring, and also the argument of a fanatic - someone is imposing their values on you by refusing to subscribe to your beliefs.
By the way, you are a member of the pro-life faction, or anti-abortion, self-identified by your actions (you engage in the protests) and your rhetoric. I DID NOT state you were in fact a member of those groups, please do not quote out of context.
quote:
Exactly, and I will let the historical and legislative history make my point for me. "Moralism" laws, including abortion, and also attacks on homosexuals, people with different life-styles, etc. don't stop at just one issue. The record of those groups is very clear, and one reason I am now pro-choice. |
[/URL]
Those groups include the Catholic Church, moral majority, Southern Baptist Convention, certain other Baptist conventions, some Methodist groups, some Orthodox Jewish groups, conservative to moderate Islam, and that is just off the top of my head. I know you aren't a member of the last two considering your posts in the past, or have you converted in the last month? Therefor you are drawing a false conclusion and assuming guilt by association.
By the way, I've noticed a reference to Mennonites on one of your previsou posts. However, the group I am referencing, and I had thought I had made that clear, is the group of ANY WHO WISH TO IMPOSE THEIR MORALITY ON ME VIA LEGISLATION. There, in caps. Are you a member? You are by your own frank admission, because you would use legislation to coerce on me your own sense of morality.
OK, Ben, Japher just had a horrible post (I read it after my previous post - you posted on it also). Are you willing to pay the expenses, and sit with that child born inside out, waiting for it to die in agony? If not, then butt out of other people's private lives. You still don't mention your ministries. Moral cowardice. They are germane. Send me the adoption papers you have on a special needs child. Severe autism, micro- or anacephaly (by the way my description in the prior post was anacephaly, microcephaly is almost as bad, I transposed which was which), etc. Ones not caused by the birth mother's behavior, but by pure rotten genetic luck. Otherwise, like most (though I have met a very few who I do respect and HAVE those credentials) get off your moralizing high horse, and live your moral life while I attempt to live my ethical one.
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shawnmmcc
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DaShi, thank you. I should have made it a simple post like that, it's just Ben got under my skin.
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shawnmmcc
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Both groups, left and right, want to ram their concept of "unacceptable" behavior down everbody else's throat. Whether it's outlawing marijuana, abortion, homosexual relations, and sexuality outside marraige on the right, or "gun control", anti-hunting (excuse me, blood sports), or cigarette smoking on the left they all want to coerce my private behavior - please understand smoking tobacco or cannabis in places without good air circulation is the ONE exception, and at that point it's not PRIVATE, is it?!
I strongly suspect most Americans simply want to be left along, and a pox on both extremes with their agendas. The problem is that the extremes vote in disproportionately high numbers, and until the great central mass of Americans do that, especially in primaries, than we will continue to have lousy representations. Who here (in the USA) voted in the last primary?
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shawnmmcc
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Park Avenue, why don't you go read the so called "Patriot Act." It is the biggest assault on personal freedom since WW2. This is not just my own opinion, but muliple commentators. Go ahead and read it - the sharing of info between intelligence and the police communities for criminal investigations, using warrants through a secret court that is largely unaccountable, the ability to not only go through your library records but to put in prison a librarian who shares that piece of info, charging US citizens outside of war zones (in the domestic US, the war zone bit is germane to previous Supreme Court rulings) in military tribunals that do not even follow the Unified Code of Military Conduct, etc.
The basis on whether you are placed in this shadow justice system - presidential fiat. I'm not willing to trust ANY president with that kind of power. By the way, I'm one of those who like John McCain, that communist hippy pinko . You know, the man who had the pulp beaten out of him so many times that they had to rebreak his limbs after he got out of the POW camp to restraighten them, while Mr. Chickenhawk, who scored exactly the lowest passing score (statistically very unlikely, though I'll grant it's possible) vaulted ahead of over 2000 other candidates and avoided the war. The man who ran against nation building, who f****d up the occupation of Iraq because he permitted an advisor (Rumsfeld) to make a tame intelligence group who blew off the military and CIA experts, who predicted EVERY problem we are now having, and then tried to find and muzzle the whistle blowers (that they had ignored all the advice) using, yes, you guessed it, The Patriot Act - give the man a free lobotomy. Yeah, right, I'd want him to fix my country to (I'll be just happy if the Democrats can nominate someone good enough that Bush stops sorting out OUR country).
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SpencerH
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Co-Ruler of my patch of land south of Birmingham Alabama
Feb 2002
time: 23:33
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quote:
Originally posted by shawnmmcc
No I don't impose my values on you. YOU are free not to practice abortion. If the anti-abortion movement has it's choice, and my wife and I discover our next child is hideously deformed, then we are the individuals who will not have a choice. A red herring, and also the argument of a fanatic - someone is imposing their values on you by refusing to subscribe to your beliefs. |
Societal values determine our laws i.e. as a group we decide what behaviours we will and will not accept. Some of those laws will clearly restrict some individual choices.
For me the question is whether the benefit to society, as a whole, justifys the restriction of choice. I am not free to kill the moron who is driving at 30mph in a 50 zone. As a group, we have decided that the benefits to society by restricting murder is more important than the loss of individual choice. On the other hand, we have the right to free speech which allows the Nazi's to have parades etc. In that case the individual choice is deemed more important than any presumed benefits to the society.
For now, the abortion question favors the choice of (one of) the individual(s) over society. Personally, I think that's a mistake. There are undervalued societal costs to abortion, as it is abused now, that go beyond the personal benefits to any individuals.
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20-01-2004 08:55
Really?
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