CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States
There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .
A Few Words to the Anti-Abortion Movement
this entry brought to you by handsome boy modeling school, "magnetizing"
I was reading an interview with a man named Randall Terry in Playboy, which was about abortion. Terry is an anti-abortionist.
What strikes me about the anti-abortion movement is how their only argument always comes down to God. Always. I have never once read or seen an interview with someone who is against abortion who did not bring up God in some way. I'm not saying that, in order to listen, I would need some sort of atheist antiabortionist. What I am saying is, why can't they frame an argument without God? Why does it always come to God?
If an atheist chooses to have an abortion, clearly she doesn't care about the God argument. And if a believer chooses to have an abortion-- Randall Terry uses the statistic "50 million children", so let's assume that those numbers are real for the sake of argument, and let's also assume that the statistic that 80 something percent of Americans believe in God is also true; surely most of the 50 million women believe in God-- then she's obviously made peace with God on her decision. What the hell could an antiabortionist hope to gain with the God argument? Whose mind are they hoping to change with it? All it does is rile up one side of the country, and either angers or dulls the other side. But it's not as if this is an argument that can actually change minds. Why not have a rational argument about it? Why haven't I ever heard a single one? I'm not so pigheaded as to think that I'm automatically right on the side of abortion, and I understand that abortion is an extremely complicated issue-- certainly much more complicated than "baby killing", which abortion is so often lowered to-- so why not approach the subject with a multi-faceted, reason based argument? Yet they never do.
Nevertheless, Terry brings up a few points in the interview that I would like to address here.
Randall Terry:How can I look the other way after 50 million children have been slaughtered in unthinkable ways?... We in pro-life movement have to learn from past social revolutions and be relentless in our pursuit of justice even when it makes people uncomfortable. Like seeing pictures of aborted babies-- think how many times you have seen images of Nazi concentration camps. They show reality. We need to show the American people the reality of the killing of the unborn.
You know what? Fair's fair, and you're right. The problem is, who is it that should choose what to show? If we're going to have a fair and balanced portrayal of what aborted fetuses look like, then fine. The problem with your side is they don't know how to portray things in a balanced way. Anyone that's ever seen anti-abortion videos know that they're made like propaganda, edited in the most traumatic ways, scored with heart-tugging or terrifying music. The photos of the holocaust didn't need sensational captions below them and the videos of the survivors didn't need to be shockingly cut together with an ominous announcer and terrifying music. Their mere existence was enough. If you can promise to show just footage with nothing sensational and exploitive added on top, then I don't see the problem with showing the ugly side of abortion. Unfortunately, up to this point, your side has a reputation for doing that far more than they do it the fair way.
If there is no God, there is no such thing as right and wrong, good and evil. There are only preferences and what you can pull off with rhetoric, deception or the barrel of a gun. The 1960s gave us the rejection of authority and of moral absolutes, the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution that included child killing and the rejection of the sacrament marriage.
Ah, here we go. There it is. It didn't take very long for you to get to God, did it? How about this? You can start the trajectory of man's disillusionment with God as to the Industrial Revolution. In fact, if you were to ask a culture analyst on the state of religion in the 1950's, he would've said that religion was on its way out, and was less important then than ever before. You can blame it on the 1960's if you like, trying to pin it on the Sexual Revolution, the Women's Rights Movement, and of course the Civil Rights Movement, the latter of which people of your position are loath to actually say out loud (of course because you know you'll be accused of being an asshole), but that's really what you're getting at. We were better off before blacks and women got all uppity. But it turns out that your argument is flawed; this all got put in motion long before you think.
As for the holy sacrament of marriage, you people-- and by "you people", I mean the traditional nuclear white family from the 1950s that is so fetishized by conservatives-- ruined it for yourselves. If you hadn't created so many fucked up families that put on fake plastic smiles and hated one another on the inside, you wouldn't have created anything for disillusioned young people to rebel against. I'm sick and tired of hearing about the disillusionment of marriage. It's not like my generation just up and decided we didn't like to be married and stayed married. We learned it from watching you, okay?
So if one person decides it's okay for them to have sex with children or abort their own children or become a prostitute or drug addict, we have no right to condemn that behavior, because there's no such thing as good and evil.
...Right, because we live in a world where people who have sex with children, prostitutes, and drug addicts, are not condemned. It's funny how you started off with a sensible argument and have gone down a typical road of rhetorical nonsense. This stuff may make sense to somebody, but you're not going to be changing any minds with these arguments, buddy.
America has never had a genuine debate about child killing.... If the media showed abortion the way they showed the Vietnam war or apartheid in South Africa, this holocaust would already be over.
Your usage of the word "holocaust" and "child killing" is exactly the kind of wordage that turns off people and immediately stops any sort of rational debate you pretend to care about. It's not that they're turned off by the truth-- sure, some are, but it's unfair to accuse that of everybody. They're turned off by sensationalism. And just like they groan and turn the station when the media latches on to the latest threat to humanity-- does anybody pay any attention to terror levels any more?-- they grow tired of the constant blustery of your side. Your words are meant to strike hard and fast, to shock people into listening to you, but they have the opposite reaction: they dullen the nerves, they turn people off. If you could avoid gross hyperbole, maybe we could actually start to have this debate. But in reality, I have an idea that if we as a nation were to have an honest-to-god rational debate, our side would win, because your side of the argument isn't based on reason, it's based on faith, and when the two of those go head to head in something approaching a real debate, reason always wins, and faith always ends up name calling-- which is what "child killing" and "holocaust" being thrown around willy-nilly add up to. Again, I'm not saying that abortion is right, what I'm saying is that your side has, up to this point, failed to create an actual debate. You might be right that America never had a genuine debate about child killing, but that's exactly the problem. You're arguing about child killing, we're arguing about a woman's right to choose. They're two different things. Obviously you don't think so, and that's fine. But you need to frame the debate on the same level; you don't debate something that should be on a rational level with wild blustery. If you people had learned this, you might've overturned Roe Vs. Wade years ago. I'm not saying that you won't overturn it, and god forbid that you do, but the only way you'll get your goal is if our next President is insane enough to nominate an insanely conservative Supreme Court justice who already has political motivations to overturn it; a "national debate" could never do it.
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with love from CRS @ 10:28 AM
2 Comments:
do we get to use profanity frequently in order for the "debate" which you are trying to "intelligently" have to move forward? you can rail on Randall Terry for inflammatory rhetoric if you yourself use the same.
Wow. I must have been reading a different post because nowhere throughout did I read anything inflammatory. Not only that, but I only counted TWO swear words throughout - I hardly think that constitutes as "frequent". Also, neither of those two swear words were meant to be "name-calling."
The point of this post wasn't to debate swear words or usage of, but to point out the fact that the only argument for Pro-Lifers comes down to God.
Your comment doesn't negate anything he has written and it just went to prove his point that you cannot come up with a rational debate when it comes to abortion.
