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What Neither Obama or McCain Understands
What stops me from assisting Sen. Obama beyond supporting his bid against Sen. Clinton is that there is no sign that he has recognized the depth of disrespect for life which connects mercenary wars with mercenary abortion. They are connected. When the easy taking of life for nuanced and un-supportable economic reasons becomes commonplace policy, the nation state incrementally dismantles rights that are less dramatic until there is no substantive bill of rights left. Life is certainly the basic right on which all others rest.
Sen. McCain does not seem to recognize this either, or care.
You can't ignore such a disease and expect to recover from it.
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Comments (18)
Very short-sighted on your part...You can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I am a Republican. I started to sit this election out...what a cop out. If you don't vote, you lose your bitching rights. This country needs what Obama has to offer. Is he a perfect candidate? Probably not. There aren't any on the planet. But he's pretty darn good. I'm enthusiastically supporting him and I hope you'll get off your butt and do the same. There are too many people actively working against him for us to have the luxury of being passive about this. If we don't work as hard to get him elected as they are working against him, we're screwed.
August 22, 2008 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
God love you for saying so, and so passionately, sir.
August 22, 2008 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
small note...I'm a girl (an old one!)
August 22, 2008 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hesitate, but can you expand on "mercenary abortion"? Perhaps you distinguish abortion provided for free from that as a paid service?
If you refer to Obama dodging a definition of "beginning of life", it is not as easy as some think to pin it down. Simply saying "at conception" raises the question of what that means. Does it mean when the sperm penetrates, or when the egg implants? If the former, what about a ectopic pregnancy? Which do you think should die, the mother or the egg?
If the latter, then morning-after is contraception, not abortion. If the former, intercourse is murder since most fertilized eggs do not implant successfully. A conceptual Holocaust has been ongoing for a billion years by now, by that definition.
August 22, 2008 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
PLUS, John McCain w/o so much as a pause for breath, answered "at conception" then proceeded to back stem cell research. So, in effect, as someone on this sight mentioned a few days back, John McCain advocates experimenting on human babies....hmmmm.
August 22, 2008 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like it, I like it.
August 22, 2008 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
...except he would weasel by saying he meant non-embryonic stem cells.
August 22, 2008 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom, uncertainty about the exact point of human life, if we are talking about human life, ought to motivate us all to give the earlier theoretical point the benefit of the doubt.
It certainly should not be used as a reason not to protect the unborn throughout the great majority or plurality of term.
But let's not just stop there...let's talk about mercenary war compared to elective abortion; the former being killing to insure material standard of living and the latter killing to avoid individual financial challenges of taking care of a child while building a career, education etc. One's a mass material motive and another individual.
More on that later. I'm being called away.
August 22, 2008 9:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
When the easy taking of life for nuanced and un-supportable economic reasons becomes commonplace policy, the nation state incrementally dismantles rights that are less dramatic until there is no substantive bill of rights left.
Mike, can you back up this assertion with data from countries that have experienced this dismantling of rights due to "mercenary abortions"? No, you can't.
Just some of the countries that deny (have denied) reproductive health rights to women: Chile under the Pinochet regime, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Romania under the Ceaucescu regime, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Honduras, Haiti, Somalia, Laos, Yemen, Niger .... Need I go on?
So you might as well support Obama. Heading down the road you want to take is not a cure for anything political or economic, or for that matter, life and death.
August 22, 2008 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Shell, you need to understand the source of Mike's position. Mike believes that God implants a soul into a zygote at the moment that the two gametes combine. That makes the ensuing single-celled organism a human being, a status that it can never lose until it dies.
The Catholic Church teaches that when a situation arises where a continuing pregnancy will inevitably lead to the death of the mother, nature must be allowed to take its course. This is not something the Church spends a lot of time and effor advertising, but it is dogma.
As a practicing Catholic, Mike believes that a clump of cells has already been given a soul and is a person with the same rights as you and I. To cause the death of this person is to commit murder.
BTW, I invite Mike to correct any misstatements I may have made about his beliefs.
August 22, 2008 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tank, thanks for reminding me about the unspoken parts of the argument, Life and the Big Bang Theory (you left that part out! hopefully experienced at the same time that the gammys and the ziggys meet up)! :-)
And as Tom Wright(ly) pointed out. There is a problem with the whole "mercenary abortions" thing, also. My karma is all for running over that dogma immediately.
So, Mike, are we talking sex, politics, religion, wars or economics?
August 22, 2008 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not a Catholic. Do I need to be to point out that eviscerating or dismembering or stabbing in the neck an unborn human life is just patently wrong? Being unborn is merely a matter of location and degrees of dependence.
We have no right to kill someone merely for coming onto our property, especially if we engaged in conduct that amounts to an invitation. And we have no right to judge value of a human being based on how much utility their life has to us and to others.
Beyond that, so many things that we say make an unborn human life "nothing but cells," their dependence, their need, their simplicity...are also true of children born.
August 22, 2008 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes I can.
Russia:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html
For many years, legal abortion was the mainstay for birth control in the USSR then RF. A quote from the brief:
"Contributing to the low fertility in Russia has been an abortion rate that is among the highest in the world. For decades, abortion was the main method in Russia for limiting births. In recent years, as the availability of effective contraceptives has increased, the number of abortions has declined.1"
Birth control was used to decrease per capita outlays by the employment state ... to relieve pressure on resources. Because the atheist state taught that human beings don't have souls, materialism (in the form of economic deterministic theory) justified the policy. Human lives were merely material units, the numbers of which could be manipulated to serve the material ends of the state.
August 23, 2008 7:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've been supporting positions on issues, not the image or promises of the candidate. I've written before asking for specific policies or plans Obama has for de facto eliminating abortions and being aggressive about it. I'd like to see similar discussion on the right about statutes or amendments that greatly restrict wars for mercenary gain, whether it is lucrative energy supplies, fat defense contracts or whatever.
I'm in agreement that Obama has said true things about the ills of partisanship and the need for curing those ills. However, unless he, you, and the rest of us address the specific problem we have with mass homicide for material gain that is the chief subtext of elective abortion and oil wars, all the nicety on the surface can't justify the rot within.
August 22, 2008 9:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mike, first of all, lets all deal with the facts, not rhetoric.
90% of all abortions are performed in the first trimester, approximately 86% of those by using electric vacuum aspiration and 14% by non-surgical use of drugs. When performed after the first trimester, the procedures include dilation and evacuation and induction of labor.(p.15) So, lay off the eviscerating or dismembering or stabbing in the neck stuff.
If you really, really, really want to stop abortions, the answer is easy. Make contraception safe, affordable and easy to obtain. That's all there is to it. If stopping abortions was your main goal, you would already know that.
And let me know when you get pregnant how you would handle a variety of situations. Until then, I find your comparison of women's decisions with mass homicides and fat defense contracts stupid, unintelligent, out of touch and downright offensive. And for that you owe a big apology.
August 22, 2008 11:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Talk about rhetoric Seashell...vacuum aspiration dismembers and eviscerates the unborn. She doesn't stay intact.
Maybe you'd care to tell us how the "non-surgical drugs" work and why they are only used 14% of the time.
August 23, 2008 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mike, vacuum aspiration is used in the FIRST trimester. Think what you want about when life begins, but you can't eviscerate and dismember a little tiny speck that has not yet membered or viscerated. No fetal pain before 20 weeks, and even that little milestone has not been established.
Your Russian brief from Rand said NOTHING about any declines in the rights of the people being due to abortions. It said fertility RATES decline, not human or civil or any other rights.
Vacuum aspiration is the preferred method for terminations because it is the safest procedure and has little to no complications for women. However, the rate of medical abortions has increased from 6% in 2001 to 14% today. They are still on the newish side.
With that stuff out of the way, how about addressing (1) the issue of contraception as the best way to eliminate most abortions and (2) your total lack of knowledge and concern for women's health and reproductive rights.
August 23, 2008 12:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seashell,
The first trimester covers more than the 'speck' stage as if dimensions determined life in the first place. Vacuum aspiration doesn't leave what you call a lump of tissue or cells intact. I don't see it as a mere lump of cells, but of human life growing. So obviously, it is dismembering (pulling apart the constituent parts or member parts or cells of a living unity). You're splitting hairs semantically.
The RAND study brief doesn't get into the political aspect of abortion motives, it just gives us the data that abortion was the major birth control policy of the USSR over the years which has Russia today in a population pickle. That fact is not in dispute. Neither is the well accepted fact that the USSR did not respect life before or after born, and my argument ties that disrespect together with pre-birth disrespect for life.
Do you seriously suggest that the USSR was a regime that respected life or that someone making the observation that it didn't respect life is incorrect? Either suggestion is a farce.
I've deal with the contraception issue in another posting directed to you...refer you there. Good night.
August 25, 2008 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
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