One of my facebook friends commented on my cross-posting of yesterday's Real Art entry on that piece of legislation that would outlaw state abortion clinic hindrance laws. While he describes himself as pro-choice, he cautioned me to be more sympathetic to the pro-life movement because "They genuinely believe that abortion is murder."
Yeah, well, I disagree.
I don't know, Dee. Self-righteousness is a very curious thing.Excelsior!
It's really easy to get all weepy about the millions of "dead babies" when you never actually have to talk to them or deal with their having a real existence. That is, these are the same people, generally, who also want to cut food stamps, education funding, etc.--a lot of them don't even believe in birth control. I would be more inclined to believe all the weeping and gnashing of teeth if such attitudes extended to fetuses which actually become real live human beings. But, for the most part, it's all about these abstract entities, the fetus-as-human construct, instead of actual people.
Do you realize that this wasn't even a Protestant thing until the late 70s? The Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, supported Roe v Wade at first. It was only after Francis Schaeffer and a few other misguided fundamentalist theologians worked tirelessly to tie abortion to euthanasia, free love, civic unrest, and lots of other shit freaking out American Christians, that Protestants in the US came over to what had previously been thought of as only a Catholic issue. That is, the rise of anti-abortion attitudes coincided very neatly, a little too neatly, with the rise of the so-called New Right, which was, and continues to be, a massive cultural reaction to the social changes and movements of the 60s.
You simply cannot separate the anti-abortion movement from pissed-off conservative attitudes about everything else they hate. So abortion is just a whipping boy. An intangible, abstract concept that "proves" they're right and liberals are wrong. I mean, OF COURSE they're going to latch onto it. They've got the perfect victims to defend, "people" who can never comment on the situation themselves, "people" who liberals "murder." I kind of used to see it from the point of view you're asserting here, that, well okay, they think it's murder, so I should cut them some slack, even though they're wrong.
Not anymore. It's all bullshit. Just a way to brand liberals as evil. They really don't care about life, or they'd put their money where their mouth is. I mean, in their minds, they may very well believe their own bullshit, but that's well within the scope of normal human psychology. And it doesn't make it any less bullshit.
I don't take the pro-life movement, nor any of its ideas, seriously at all.
UPDATE: Dee lost his mind in response to my comment, and defriended me because of my know-it-all tone. Oh well, you lose a few.
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