Rosa Brooks says abortion is passé, the right's new thing is torture: "Today, though, the GOP's interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey's views on abortion -- and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either." You can also look up the Ascent of Rudy in this regard.
« Way Back When | Main | Brother, Can You Spare a Suddenly Not-so-Valuable Dime? »
The New Litmus Test
10 Nov 2007 12:27 pm
Comments (37)
Is the AG able to do that much about abortion? My sense was that especially under this administration, torture becomes a bigger issue.
I don't buy it. I don't think any other pro-choice Republican could have ascended the way Rudy has without actually changing their viewpoint a la Mitt Romney. Rudy has cultivated a persona that resonates with the modern GOP, and no other candidate has that. For whatever reason, people are willing to look beyond his views on abortion. None of this is enough to conclude that the issue of torture has trumped abortion for the modern GOP.
Keep in mind that abortion really is just about treating women as men's property. Rudy has shown he teats his women as property so its all good!
Matthew Stuhar has a point. I do not think it is torture, so much as animosity to Liberals that is the number one issue for the modern GOP. And this is the proper perspective on torture -- their reason for advocating torture is that it so upsets the Liberals, and that it used to be the case that whatever GWB did was right, and changin course now would cause too much confusion.
For actual governing GOP members, cronyism seems to be the thing -- another win for Rudy.
Rudy has cultivated a persona that resonates with the modern GOP, and no other candidate has that.
It is sobering to contemplate that there are enough voters out there who don't want to hear anything from their president beyond two words --
"Get 'em" -- to elect a president.
They're not even that particular about who the 'them' is.
Wow -- the soul of the fetus, the need to torture, the freedom of the king to act without constraint -- they really do have a pre-911AD mindset.
How tragic it is that our country, once known for high values, is now reduced to debating the pro's and con's of torture. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, says he attacked us due to our foreign policy favoring Israel. (See "The 9/11 Commission Report" p.147.) We then responded to 9/11 by morphing into Israel: occupying Muslim lands, bombing civilians, disregarding the Geneva Conventions, etc. Because we are Siamese twins with Israel,who is hated throughout the world for her heinous occupations, we feel we must secure our oil supplies by force as we preemptively trash all Israel's enemies. In contrast, consider China, who feels no need to occupy Muslim countries and who happily buys oil even from Iran. This is because China is not joined by the hip to Israel. A far better US policy would be to endorse the fair and just Arab League Peace Plan. If Israel pefers wars and occupations, she should do it by herself, without American blood or money.
This is a laboratory experiment that allows to determine why so many folks are opposed to abortion.
At least in USA, this opposition correlates with "general wingnut positions", against sex education, equal right for gays, maintaining punitive system of justice, bombing uppity furriners, and now, torture.
The second and third item are a bit confusing, because they are covered under the rubric of "traditional morality". Traditional morality had some elemements that were cheerfully abandoned: opposition to divorce or deference to teachers (rather than making lists of "dangerous professors").
So we can formulate chicken and egg problem: are adherents of "traditional morality" so eager to bash, verbally and otherwise, assorted other folks like girls that graduate from highschool without virginity, women who chose not to carry fetuses to term, gays, welfare receipients, because of the tradition and its dictates, or they pick those elements of the tradition that allow them to bash other folks. You know, to feel more secure, or superior, or more together.
So under hypothesis "traditional morality is the egg", Guliani has chances of a snowball in hell, as soon as "the base realizes his true positions". Under hypothesis number two Guliani is perfect. Even ferrets are not safe from his wrath!
About pre-911AD mind set: I am a bit more familiar with France ca. 600 AD because of reading Gregory of Tours. If you were a peasant, well, bad luck. Otherwise, the rules of conduct could be savage, but followed rather closely. An accused noble or cleric had a right to fair trial, in the case of the former could be trial by mortal combat with results that were sometimes inconclusive: what to do if both champions died? The king could examine other evidence and clear your name posthoumusly.
Currently, torture is covered by a treaty, and breaking a treaty was a big no-no. It would make the king an oathbreaker. Oaths were the cornerstone of social order, and oaths to an oathbreaker would be void.
What I am trying to say is that I see here 20th-century fuehrerprinzip with its spirit of free improvisation (making shit as you go along) rather than some tradition-bound authocracy.
Re J. E. Dundee
I see that we have a new Israel basher on the blog spreading his lies and distortions. After a visit to Mr. Dundees' blog, it becomes clear that he either has no idea of the situation in Palestine or he is a god damn lying sob. For Mr. Dundees' information, the Arabs consider all of Palestine to be occupied territory and their object is the removal of a Jewish state from the region. I do agree with Mr. Dundee that aid to Israel should be phased out, thus freeing the Government of Israel to crush the Palestinian terrorists once and for all by taking a page from the Hafaz Assad playbook and applying Hama rules to them.
Those of you who seek to make every single comment section turn into a pro / anti "Israel" / "Palestinians" fest, please just stop it.
Re:Wow -- the soul of the fetus, the need to torture, the freedom of the king to act without constraint -- they really do have a pre-911AD mindse
Wow: the idea that unborn children can have their brains suctioned out and be chopped up and tossed into lavatories, and that parents should be able to genetically 'improve' their offspring, and that a practice that is three times as likely to destroy the life of a black baby than a white baby is something to be proud of, and that the unborn child is the property of its mother. you people really do have a pre-1945 AD mindset.
I'm on the left btw but abortion is a travesty of everything that the left is supposed to stand for.
I'm on the left btw but abortion is a travesty of everything that the left is supposed to stand for.
Really? Me too. In fact, I'm pro-torture, anti-abortion, very much in favor of the Iraq War, a flat tax, and the death penalty-- especially for illegal immmigrants--and I'm convinced that Giuliani is the only candidate who can save America from the Islamofascist threat. Fortunately, though, I'm still on the left and not a damn Republican.
Mr. Gary,
Do you think there is anything remotely 'left' about abortion? or about 'choice'? People who are actually on the left recognize that the choices we make are largely the product of what society teaches us, and that women choose abortion because society has taught them that they and their baby are worthless, and refuses to give them the economic, social and spiritual support that they need.
Abortion is a way for a decadent late-capitalist society to deal with the problem of having to care for the children of the poor, or addressing poverty so that the mothers and fathers have the resources to care for them themselves. The solution that late-capitalist society comes to is instead of caring for the babies to ensure that they are never born in the first place.
Ask yourself whether the hard-left governments in Latin America are pro-abortion; no, not one of them, in fact they are strongly pro-natalist.
James Gary: Hector has posted on this topic before and he is clearly sincere. I have never seen any evidence that he holds the other positions you attribute to him. It should be noted, however, that in reality hard-leftist governments have historically been pro-legal abortion, including the U.S.S.R., most Warsaw Pact nations (an exception being Romania), Cuba, China, and North Korea.
"Abortion is a way for a decadent late-capitalist society to deal with the problem of having to care for the children of the poor, or addressing poverty so that the mothers and fathers have the resources to care for them themselves. The solution that late-capitalist society comes to is instead of caring for the babies to ensure that they are never born in the first place."
While I agree that American capitalist society does not devote sufficient resources to address poverty, I'm not certain I agree that the purpose of this neglect is to increase abortion rates amongst the poor. It certainly wouldn't explain why middle and upper class women have abortions since they often have sufficient income to expend on child rearing.
If it is, in fact, true that abortion is a product of moral decadence, what is it that you propose? Does societal decadence negate a woman's autonomy? Do we criminalize abortion? Do we imprison women who have abortions? If we don't, why not? Aren't they “complicit”?
I don't think the distinction between what is or is not left is so easily made, especially in the case of abortion.
El Cid does not wish to hear any more about the Israeli/Palestinian issue,and yet this is the root of all our problems. The Iraq Study Group Report states that "The US will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the US deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict." Sadly, for 60 years the Israel-Lobby-dominated media has either presented only one side of this issue or hushed it up completely, and we see where that policy has taken us.
El Cid does not wish to hear any more about the Israeli/Palestinian issue,and yet this is the root of all our problems.
Unfortunately, Eleanor, this thread is supposed to be a discussion about torture vs. abortion as the litmus test for credibility in the Republican party. If you won't post on the topic, please don't post at all.
Re Eleanor Lambertson
Another Israel basher has joined the ranks on this blog. I have a flash for Ms. Lambertson. Mr. Olmert, Mr. Abbas, Mr. Maashal, and Mr. Haniyeh could sign a peace agreement tomorrow morning and it would have no affect whatever on the situation in Iraq. The Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis therein couldn't care less about the machinations in Palestine; they have their own fish to fry.
I don't think there should be any avoidance of discussions of Israeli or Palestinian politics, whether it be from paranoids who think that the Jewish guy who created the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers controls the universe, or from maniacs who dread that at any moment Hamas will push Tel Aviv into the sea and so we got to show 'em what's what before that happens.
I do disagree that it should fill up the comments section of each and every post on any topic whatsoever.
I cautiously second El Cid. Perhaps we could have "Armadeddon Thursday" to vent our views, and at other days we could only make a reference to our arguments by numbers. Perhaps one could establish, say, 6 positions on the issue, and list 10-20 favorite arguments for each.
James Gary: I have a very different opinion about abortion than you do. In a nutshell, I see "immortal soul" as a useful concept, and before we can reasonable believe that the soul resides in a fetus, abortion is just like any other operation. And deciding that "we solve any doubt in favor of life" ignores that this solves the doubt against liberty.
However, the point here is that for most of abortion opponents the main attraction is not what they defend but what they bash. Give them a different foil and they can accept that. So the "issue" of "single-issue-abortion-opponents" is often (or most often) something very different than abortion.
It occasionally happens that people support the same position for rather different reasons. E.g. I favor expansion of nuclear power as a tool to slow down global warming. Most proponents of nuclear power do not care about that issue at all, even if they cite it in a perfunctory manner.
Certainly this thread is about torture, yet who are the big torture advocates? The Israel Lobby/neocon/warmongers. It is impossible to intelligently discuss a subject without delving into the underlying issues from which the subject took root. Before the so-called war on terror, torture was not the litmus test. Thus Pat Robertson supports Giuliani regardless of his stance on abortion. Apparently these two hooked up on a plane returning from Israel where they discussed their common interests: Israel and prostate cancer. One can see the similarity.
Piotr,
So you agree that the immortal soul is a good useful concept. Good, so do I. I also agree that we can't KNOW for sure that the soul takes up residence in the fetus at any specific time. But my question would be, what do you think is your best guess at when it does? At conception? Implantation? The beginning of brain development? At birth?
I don't know any better than anyone else. But it would seem to me that the biggest qualitative changes in the narrative of the developing child happen at conception (when the complete genetic code is formed) or at implantation (when the fetus begins physically developing). any other change strikes me as quantitative and somewhat arbitrary, and therefore a much less likely beginning to the start of life.
I'm not a believer that the early Church was right about everything, and the fact that they believed life began at conception does not necessarily make it true, But on other issues where I might disagree with the early church, like about whether the apocalypse was really just around the corner, or about whether birth control is wrong, I have other grounds for believing that they were wrong. On the question of the beginning of life, since none of us has certain knowledge that could settle the matter one way or another, it might make sense to give prima facie acceptance to the position of the early church.
I'm not sure whether implantation or conception is a better candidate for the beginning of personhood but I'm fairly confident that no other time could be it.
Certainly this thread is about torture, yet who are the big torture advocates? The Israel Lobby/neocon/warmongers.
You've got a bunch of loaded terms in there but you are sort of right.
The intellectual force behind torture as a public policy especially before 9/11 consisted of liberal Jews apologizing for Israel and that was pretty much it (see Alan Dershowitz for the prototype).
The reason (which is going to look nuts when history looks back on this) that it was something worth having a debate about was that when the Ugly American right got to weigh in on things and write their usual "In defense of ... (fill in slavery, torture, raping nuns in Guatemala or whatever) they couldn't be dismissed because by the magic of "balance" we have these liberals who believe in torturing the Muslims so by the Golden Means Falacy that they live by it must not only be an idea worth consideration, it must be a great idea because it makes some sort of split among the chattering liberal elite.
"So you agree that the immortal soul is a good useful concept. Good, so do I. I also agree that we can't KNOW for sure that the soul takes up residence in the fetus at any specific time. But my question would be, what do you think is your best guess at when it does? At conception? Implantation? The beginning of brain development? At birth?
I don't know any better than anyone else. But it would seem to me that the biggest qualitative changes in the narrative of the developing child happen at conception (when the complete genetic code is formed) or at implantation (when the fetus begins physically developing). any other change strikes me as quantitative and somewhat arbitrary, and therefore a much less likely beginning to the start of life."
Except why should you're opinion on this issue matter more than the woman who is actually carrying the fetus in her own body? Since when should any concept relating to an "immortal soul" be anywhere near legislation in a secular state? When you decide that your idea of when a soul exists in a fetus trumps others, you take away a woman's right to practice her own religious beliefs how they are relevant to her own body. It's easy to be against abortion when you won't ever have to face the choice.
It's easy to be for abortion when you're not the one being aborted. On strictly secular, rational grounds, the reason why my opinion should matter more is because it's the more risk-averse one. The cost of making an error in one direction (the loss of the baby's life) is greater than the cost of making an error in the other (loss of the woman's 'liberty'.)
I believe that it makes little sense to define the beginning of life as anything but either conception or implantation. But even if all the rational arguments were on the pro-choice side, I would still wish for a society in which abortion was illegal. Because whatever we may decide through rational argument, the intuitions of our heart are ultimately a better guide, and if you strip away the layers through which we bury those intuitions, they tell us clearly that children are supposed to be cherished and cared for by our society, and not killed.
"It's easy to be for abortion when you're not the one being aborted. On strictly secular, rational grounds, the reason why my opinion should matter more is because it's the more risk-averse one. The cost of making an error in one direction (the loss of the baby's life) is greater than the cost of making an error in the other (loss of the woman's 'liberty'.)
I believe that it makes little sense to define the beginning of life as anything but either conception or implantation. But even if all the rational arguments were on the pro-choice side, I would still wish for a society in which abortion was illegal. Because whatever we may decide through rational argument, the intuitions of our heart are ultimately a better guide, and if you strip away the layers through which we bury those intuitions, they tell us clearly that children are supposed to be cherished and cared for by our society, and not killed.
Posted by Hector | November 11, 2007 10:08 AM"
"Risk-averse" towards what? We're never going to know the answer to when life begins, but we have a general societal consensus worldwide that a baby that is fully born is alive. If we based policies on being risk-averse, we would criminalize the financial sector since that whole sector is full of risk. It's risky to not have a curfew every night at 8 PM, so why not have a police state that made sure everyone was safe? What's a little loss of liberty if we make sure that no child is ever harmed? So basically you're saying that rational argumentation doesn't matter as long as what you think makes you feel better. No wonder you're so pro-fetus, considering that your grasp of logic is equal to that of a fetus. And they say that feminist liberals are the squishy ones. By your logic, we should look towards states like Guatemala and El Salvador where abortion is illegal and they lock women up for it as models of morality. All this does is force abortion networks underground. I know respected people in Chile that on the side perform illegal abortions for a price. All this does is mean that wealthy women get to choose and poor women don't, meaning that poor women have to be more "moral" while the rich get to do what they want.
I, personally, wish to openly endorse the view that I don't care if I had been aborted or not.
And that is primarily because at the time of being an early fetus, I wasn't a person, I wasn't in possession of a mind, and so there was no "I" to have known in the slightest whether or not I was developing or being aborted in that matter.
Similarly, I don't get neurotic over "had my parents never met" questions because, sensibly, if that were the case I simply wouldn't be here to worry about it.
And I'm also not pestered by bizarre and paranoid supernaturalistic thoughts about my ghostly spirit wandering the Earth moaning about having been aborted or never having been created in the first place, mostly because I'm not a crazy person.
Reality man,
I was trying to point out the limits of rational thought by indicating that our minds and reason can be more easily led into temptation than our hearts. It's easy to construct well reasoned arguments in favor of abortion, torture, economic exploitation, the destruction of the environment or atomic warfare. It's more difficult, say, to answer the entreaties of the one being tortured, "Why am I being hurt?" and it's even more difficult to try to think how you would justify to the soul of an unborn child, why you destroyed him or her ere they were born. We are less likely to be led into evil if we heed our deepest moral feelings and intuitions than if we rely on who can construct the more ingenious flights of rhetoric. As the proverb goes, an illiterate grandmother from a Campanian village knows more of the nature of God than Aristotle ever did.
I value 'liberty' in general far less than you probably do, so yes I would give up a good deal of liberty to have a fairer, safer, more just and more loving society. I do recognize a place for liberty, but life comes first, especially the lives of the most innocent, harmless denizens of society. When we see a child be it born or unborn our first impulse as a society should be to rock it in our arms and let it play with our fingers and make it laugh, not to suck out its brains and throw it into a waste bin.
I hate abortion because I love babies. That's the beginning and the end of my reasons.
Fetuses are not American citizens according to the Constitution, which defines citizens as those "born or naturalized in the United States."
"I hate abortion because I love babies. That's the beginning and the end of my reasons.
Posted by Hector | November 11, 2007 7:42 PM"
Nothing in your rant convinced me that a fetus = a baby with a soul like we see in Gerber ads, so basically you wasted a lot of words saying nothing. When your first principle is based on an assumption, such as zygote = baby with a soul, that can only be "proved" by sharing your religious beliefs, you aren't actually arguing anything worth arguing in a secular society.
Re Hector
I have a flash for Mr. Hector. What a woman does with her body is none of his god damn business.
Last night I set up a meeting with a couple of hundred souls of aborted fetuses and as yet unborn babies, and by about a 70 - 30% split they agreed that the government should not claim the authority to prevent women from having an abortion within the normal limits such procedures are usually placed.
Just so you know, and all, that I did respect the views of the non-existent, and they overwhelmingly agree with me.
SLC,
Oh, I disagree. It's every bit my business as it is the business of every decent citizen. Just because you choose to abdicate your duties to the common good on the altar of 'freedom' 'choice' 'liberty' and I don't know what else, doesn't mean the rest of us are as intellectually lazy.
The business about 'whatever you choose to do is none of my business' is supposed to be what the Republicans and the conservatives say. Whatever a capitalist chooses to do to his worker, whatever a business chooses to do with its product, whatever a landowner chooses to do to the environment, is none of my business. Well I disagree, it's all my business, and so is abortion.
Women do not seek abortions because they want them, they seek them because society has denied them the financial and social support that they need for themselves and their children, and has persuaded them that they and their babies are worthless. Abortion is a sign that society has failed women by forcing them to destroy the fruit of their own wombs. I believe that a truly just society would draw women out of the false consciousness that makes them think they want abortions and will ensure that they follow the path that is conducive to their own emotional and spiritual welfare.
It's interesting, isn't it, that women are more likely to be pro-life than men (except for young men).
Hector,
Can you provide me with a good explanation of why we should regard the rights of an unborn fetus equivalently to the rights of a born citizen before a single nerve cell has formed?
You start with a reasonable argument about souls, but then proceed to a completely unreasonable conclusion- that conception is the best non-arbitrary decision making point. Conception is merely a scientifically precise point- it is certainly arbitrary for the purposes of this debate because we are talking about souls not genetic identity. Furthermore, this assumption is hugely inconvenient to women and couples who find themselves pregnant, but do not wish to embark on the immense and life-changing undertaking of having a child. Why not choose the far more reasonable decision point- the formation of the brain- as a point that balances any reasonable conception of personhood with an opportunity to provide women with far greater control over pregnancy issues?
You also greatly discredit your argument by backing it up with the claim that we should 'cherish children' and that you 'love babies'. This indicates to me that your beliefs are based on foolish sentimentalism, which has no place in informing how the state should use its privilege of coercive force. I hate babies. And we should cherish children in their development so they grow up as better functioning adults. Forcing women to have children they would not otherwise choose to have is likely to have precisely the opposite effect.
Finally, let me just add that I am not conceeding the argument that the formation of personhood or the possession of a soul with regards to a fetus ends this debate. Just because you need a kidney transplant to live does not mean I am required by law to donate mine. The fetus' development requires a considerable physical sacrifice and risk on the part of the mother. A person cannot always use legal authority to impose on another's physical person even if their own life depends on it.
Also, leftist South American governments are anti-abortion b/c their populations are mostly Catholic. I would argue that this religiosity actually poisons the degree to which those societies reflect leftist ideals.
My belief that human life was created by space aliens means that my views on abortion are automatically correct.
unbondableness befit unexpressively genitalia antirobin erenow epirrhematic turanianism
http://www.geocities.com/ozzygreenday/ >Green Day and Ozzy
http://www.medical-coding.net
Comments closed November 24, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
That is a wonderful editorial:
...the debate about torture goes to the very heart of what (if anything) this country stands for. Do we want to be the nation imagined by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, a nation with "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," committed to a vision of human dignity and unalienable rights, limited government and the rule of law?
Posted by Bill Gardner | November 10, 2007 12:55 PM