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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
...is that people's unwillingness to look up to him as a martyr for being arrested is not about abortion, Obama, the Catholic Church, or Notre Dame. It's about public versus private property. Terry et al will not be arrested for expressing their beliefs, but for trespassing on Notre Dame's campus.
Terry is an American citizen with the right to free speech and the right to peaceful protest. As distasteful and counterproductive his chosen method is (wheeling around a baby carriage with a bloodied doll inside), it does fit the parameters of free speech and peaceful protest...so long as he is protesting on public land. Were he being arrested for doing this on a public sidewalk in South Bend, he'd have a point about government censorship of his beliefs.
BUT, neither he nor anyone else has the right to hold a protest on private property without the property owner's permission. Unless he wants pro-choice groups to be legally allowed to picket on his church's property, he needs to quit claiming that he's in moral right here. the He can't even claim that this particular protest, unlike the abortion clinic blockades of the 1980s, has the potential to protect any baby in immediate danger of abortion.
In short, Randall Terry is going to get arrested in order to promote not the pro-life movement, but to promote Randall Terry.
And that--even though I'm pro-life myself--disgusts me.
Here's a small nit to pick: Operation Rescue was founded in 1986.
So Kissling errs in paragraph 2 when she writes: The Operation Rescue zealot turned off a lot of working-class people who were nervous about whether abortion might have become "too easy" years back, by unleashing a few thousand die-hards who began chaining themselves to clinic doors and barging into operating rooms in the '70s to "save the babies."
Change that from '70s to mid-80s and you've got it right.
Typo on my part. Operation Rescue was in part a response to the frustration fundamentalists felt with Reagan and the Supreme Court. They felt they were never going to overturn Roe and turned to violence.
For the first time sincd they began polling on the issue, Gallup reports that a majority of people are not pro-choice. I think the tide is pro-life, not pro-death.
And his little traveling theater of the absurd
Always was a little attention loving little
Scheming little turd...
The number of abortion clinics in America are far less than when Operation Rescue started. Dilation and Extraction is illegal and women face more legal obstacles than ever. I guess this all might be a moot point with the morning after pill and RU486 but still less than 1 year of Obama doesn't erase 20 years of GOP dominance and the last 8 years with Bush.
For the first time sincd they began polling on the issue, Gallup reports that a majority of people are not pro-choice.
Wrong. The Gallup poll reports that a more people define themselves as "pro-life" than "pro-choice". However, support for legalized abortion remains unchanged.
Apparently, the term "pro-life" no longer means, "opposed to legal abortion". Which is a problem for the wingnuts. Another piece of their "brand" appears to be falling apart.
to tell you the truth. really now - you don't expect them to have any honor whatsoever, do you?
You can twist stats all you want, but, at any minimum, there is not gigantic pro-death majority.
in other words, bullpoopie.
Women are moral adults and agents; they think about abortion in complex and thoughtful ways and they should be trusted to make the decision.--Frances Kissling
True by half- give or take a half. Let's be honest here, the fudge job is insulting- there is nothing truly moral about abortion.
It's a harsh, crude, and downright brutal necessity.
Peel away the agonizing semantics and abortion is an axe job on an entity that if left to grow would, in fact, result in a human- NOT an advanced cancer of some sort.
If this WAS simply a cancer the 'moral' agents wouldn't require nearly as much complex thought to determine its future.
Abortion is the guillotine of hope.
It was she, afterall, who wrote:
"To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun."
I think that Ms. Sanger is as lousy an icon for your movement as Mr. Terry is for mine.
To the troll claiming that a majority of Americans are pro-life:
Actually, if you read that poll instead of quoting conservative talking points, around half of respondents didn't identify themselves as either pro-choice or pro-life. Only among people who chose one side or the other did the pro-life identification slightly edge out the pro-choice identification. There was no majority, but the plurality did not identify themselves as one or the other. Questions that ask about support for legal abortion are a better measure.
But calling him "pro-life" is a perversion of language. This man has cheered on murder, the murder of doctors, all in support of his own personal jihad. Terry's just lucky his extremism is of the Christian variety instead of Muslim, otherwise he'd be rotting in a cell in Guantanamo right about now.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/more-about-unbearable-lightness-of.html
You, like many of the pro-life demonstrators as well, miss the point.
No one should object to the president of the United States addressing the class--and in the process discussing anything he wishes. A University has a right to invite anyone they wish.
But, they should not be conferring an honorary degree on him, which implies approval of his body of work which does include, whether you personally agree or not , behavior contrary to fundamental moral principles of the Catholic Church, even if, in your view, those principles are quite marginal.
There are plenty of moral arguments for abortion, starting with knowing that the live you may give some child could be in extreme poverty, or in an abusive home, or a life of some kind of hellish deformity.
There is no moral high ground in pawning off a child onto someone else to raise, if you have the means to abort it.
In some cases abortion is the ONLY moral choice.
I don't care what you call it - sweet lovey dovey gift of yaweh or bone sucking parasite, if it's not growing in YOUR body, you simply have no say or even a RIGHT to say what someone else does with THEIR body. The old biblical standard should apply here: a fetus is not human until their first independent breath. The rights of the mother trump the rights of whatever she grows inside her.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
