I support prenatal care for all. But those on this thread who claim this legislative action denies prenatal care to anyone are flat wrong. Generally speaking, a doctor or other healthcare provider cannot treat a minor without the consent of a parent or guardian. That's sensible and is the law, as far as I know, in all 50 states. What this bill tried to do is make an exception to that rule. Minors can still get prenatal care; there just has to be parental consent for it. -- Robert Franklin

This paragraph doesn't make any sense - you're directly contradicting yourself. If you're denying prenatal care to minors without parental consent, then you are, in fact, denying prenatal care to someone. If you're not denying prenatal care to anyone, then you're providing it to minors without parental consent. You don't get to have it both ways.

Do you support prenatal care for all - including minors whose parents do not consent - or do you support denying medical care?

I.e., do you agree with your statement "I support prenatal care for all" or with your statement "...a doctor or other healthcare provider cannot treat a minor without the consent of a parent or guardian. That's sensible..."?

(I agree that consistent nomenclature regarding fetuses is better.)

The fact that some parents make bad decisions doesn't mean that my support for parental involvement in children's lives and prenatal care for all are mutually exclusive positions.

Of course not. But if your support for parental involvement includes excluding prenatal care for minors without parental consent, which you described as "sensible", then those are mutually exclusive positions. So far it looks to me like you're either (A) trying to pretend you didn't say that or (B) trying to pretend that denying care without parental consent somehow magically isn't denying care. Your answers look like spin to me, I think at this point you're deliberately dodging my question.

Do you actually have a point, boy? You bitch about Islam when Muslims are criticized, you bitch about it when they're not, and your tone doesn't change in the slightest.

You don't have a solution, you don't have a suggestion, you don't have anything pro-active to say at all. You're just a fount of pure hate speech.

it's not "hate speech" just because it is repeated more than once

or because you think the content of what is being expressed is problematic.

Correct. It's hate speech because it's hateful. The repetition makes it obsessive and frequently out of place, adding evidence to the attribution of hate.

In reality the concept of hate speech, if it is to mean anything other than "bad and destructive ideas" has to have a defintion which is "viewpoint neutral" which is difficult and maybe impossible.

I'm not a relativist, so I don't really have a problem with that.

you are going to have to have some rational way to distinguish between criticism and hate

then, which in this case clearly hasn't been done.

It's harder than that, but for this case, satisfying your distinction is pretty simple: the speech under discussion is clearly not simply criticism (despite including some).

although since 1-2 billion people are not going to all decide to renounce Islam becaue outsiders criticise it

any useful discussion has to be based on the premise that there is SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE in it that can be the basis for reform/reformation/alteration-into-something-completely-different-than-it currently-is/however-you-want-to-describe-it.

Has happened before. Is happening now. Will happen again. That's the least of our problems, really.

Am I to take your premise as being that Muslims are fundamentally incapable of reform? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that assertion is? (Or how hateful?)

"...the unpleasant-but-natural reality of sexual attraction to post-pubescent teenagers..."

Speak for yourself, please. Your personal kinks shouldn't be extrapolated to the general populace (as Freud should have known!).

I can't tell if you (A) simply didn't understand the term "post-pubescent teenager", (B) are being sarcastic, or (C) just have a very skewed vision of reality. I don't think there's any sexual attraction more "natural" (in a normal-in-nature sense) than an attraction to a physically sexually matured member of the same species of the opposite gender.

So, a woman is in bed with a man she might want to kill, and he suspects. I think I already saw that movie.

It's painfully obvious at this point that the Democrats aren't nearly as interested in investigating constitutional abuses as they are in investigating partisan abuses. I can't decide if this is the strength of the two party system, or its weakness.

I think this is just a story that spread like wildfire through U.S. bloggers and the Associated Press, without anyone realizing it had already been decided.

According to the AP article, the government has appealed the March ruling you're referring to, and thus the case is not settled as of that publication (2005-04-03).

Michael Sullivan, point-blank accusing letter writers of pedophilia on circumstantial grounds is frankly offensive. You should be ashamed of yourself.

So, you respond to my criticism of your practice of making vile baseless accusations by making more baseless accusations. I'd be disappointed, but that was exactly what I was expecting from you.

"Why vote for the lesser evil?"

Whenever somebody says they get Playboy for the articles, they should be sent the Indonesian version.

Ms. Havrilesky's playful jabs at men's intelligence and the size/functioning of their brains strikes me as ironic.

It is ironic. You're taking her way too seriously.

still can't decipher Tom's last paragraph

Don't waste your time.

"Tomredtoon" is just this weeks incarnation.

He's here every week. He's apparently on a personal crusade to slam Heather every chance he gets for the sin of being a better writer than he is.