Joe Biden disappoints again...

 ...and I don't mean because his oddly timed speech interrupted a show I was just starting to enjoy watching.

He seemed oddly morose at first--it would have been more odd if he hadn't shown any sympathy at all, but for a minute there I was wondering if he was going to get around to making a point--until I remembered that he had lost a son, himself; albeit under very different circumstances.

Then he tore into the gun lobby as if the only problem was that Congress and voters were simply afraid of gun manufacturers.

The same gun lobby that did not shoot up the school.

The same gun lobby that did not shoot his grandmother.

The same gun lobby that did not pass or fail the gun store background check.

The same gun lobby that did not exhibit many warning signs that went uncaught by red flag laws and federal NICS checks that state regulations cannot circumvent.

Meanwhile, Joe makes a number of incorrect statements; I no longer give him the benefit of the doubt, even in his upset state, in assuming he made an honest mistake.

Despite Joe's insistent repetition of the word, the shooter did not have any assault weapons.  He had a semiautomatic rifle that looks scary and may have had a pistol.  

The shooter carried in a bag full of ammunition, that at this time has been tentatively determined to have been in 30-round magazines, yet Joe insists that magazine capacity limits are important to legalize.  But if he had a whole bag full--that would probably be hundreds of rounds--what difference would it make if the contents of that bag was parceled into, say, ten 30-round clips or fifteen 20-round clips or thirty 10-round clips?  I don't think we're in the territory anymore where we can pretend it's worth talking about how small differences in inconvenience to a mass shooter might meaningfully affect the outcome.

And of course Joe holds little to no discussion about what drives someone like Tuesday's shooter to do something like that.  Instead he just wants to ban it.

Funny:  when we talk about banning abortion, the closest they come to agreeing with us is with rhetoric like "we need to make abortion unthinkable before we can make it illegal."  How nice:  take away all the things that make abortion seem like a worthwhile option before making it an unviable option directly.

I'm all for fixing things that make abortion appealing, separate from the legal considerations.  But why doesn't Joe and the rest of the gun control lobby feel the same way about that?  Why do they seem to think not only will gun violence go away but all other violence won't rise as violent people resort to other means?

I don't think they really fear another Bath, Michigan disaster even though that's what would happen.  I think the gun violence crusaders have a tactical opposition to guns but virtually none against violence.

Pro-life centers attacked in wake of SCOTUS abortion decision leak

Meanwhile, abortion clinics are "preparing" for the same thing to happen to them if the Supreme Court does end up scuttling Roe.  Even though, if the laws change, such acts would no longer be necessary--so to speak--to stop abortion.   Even though it hasn't happened since the last century. 

Well, abortionists and choicers, there goes all your pretense at moral superiority based on an allegedly more consistent life ethic.  Were you surprised at this level of violence?  We weren't.

Recent discussion on local leftist radio: "Those pro-lifers aren't arguing in good faith. 'Hypocrite' is no longer a word sufficient to describe the evils of those sex-trafficking kiddy-porn users."

 Well, to the extent that's true, I respect their outrage.  But even if their contention that most in the pro-life movement were vile criminals who just liked taking questions of life and death into their own hands--projection much?--and not a gross misrepresentation designed to help them fool themselves into moral complacency...

...it's still not an argument against abortion.

It's not even an argument at all.  Just emotionally-charged deflection.  A distraction.

Meanwhile, they keep feigning outrage at being called groomers while all the big names in their own movement keep doing that Jeff Epstein schtick.

Why is that when pro-choicers point to programs intended to help break the cycle of poverty as part of their efforts that have the effect of reducing abortion...

...they don't allow pro-lifers to make the same argument?

Maybe someone volunteers at soup kitchens, helps minorities in juvenile detention learn reading and other life skills, but if he goes to pray one rosary across the street from an abortion clinic or goes online, he's accused of not taking a holistic approach to honoring the dignity of human life and therefore isn't sincere at all.  Meanwhile his accusers do nothing but show up to shout at him, vote D, and then say "we pay our taxes to support these things."

Yeah, and he pays the same taxes.  Then he donates time and money willingly where he thinks it will make the biggest difference.


"Studies have shown 100% of abortions are carried out on women who don't want to be pregnant, and 0% on conservative white Christian men, so butt out."

Nice rhetoric, but you can only get that 100% figure by including women who don't want an abortion but aren't allowed to be shown alternatives, and women who want to have their babies but are dragged to clinics by their boyfriends who may use phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid paternity hearings," and girls who are reluctant but undecided yet whose mothers drag them to the clinic on the grounds of "you live under my roof and I drive you around and feed you and I'm supposed to raise you, but since I failed to teach you to be 'responsible' then you must also have not learned what it takes to be a mom, so instead of showing you we're doing this," and girls who are reluctant or undecided yet whose boyfriends drag them to clinics while using phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid statutory rape charges."


As for the 0%...there are atheist pro-lifers, and liberal pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers, and none of them is negligible in number, so why don't you stand your ground and defend your position, and log off or stay home for a while when you get tired of being reminded that people exist who disagree with you?

An open "Dear John" to someone who has taken Trump to to be a justified target of rage instead of one for hope and mercy; against a laundry list of arguments trying to make peace between the Democrat Party and voting Catholics

A while ago I stopped reading a popular Catholic blog that, looking back, was already on the decline. The blogger is a well informed convert who, perhaps a bit like me, failed to resist using his soapbox to indulge his anger.  Honest readers got banned for asking critical questions that previously rarely came up because they were rarely prompted by his posts(I no longer recognize anyone who comments there, and once upon a time a typical post could draw hundreds of meaty comments from dozens of regulars several times a day), apologies for his overreacting in a medium where everyone is autistic went from being something I admired for their elegance and humility to something quite rare.

It started with me just spending less time there overall because there was less combox discussion going on for me to follow, and I eventually got tired of saying to myself "Well, when he foams at the mouth over the evils of some group he partially disagrees with, he doesn't really mean me because my motives are clearly not what he describes."  He did make this argument himself from time to time, which made me feel less like I was just rationalizing being judgmental, but after a while it only happened when someone in my shoes asked for confirmation, and eventually he just stopped talking about anything else.

Not literally--it's more like how I used to be on here a few years ago, is all I mean--but every time he posted on a hot button topic I had to make excuses for him in my mind.  Eventually I gave up--it had become a daily occurrence, so clearly he was done making room for people like me in his target audience, which was weird considering everything else he still wrote didn't seem to exclude me--and like I did when I gave up network television for the substantial minority of questionable content (probably not really a minority, but even then there were things I wouldn't watch), I afterwards realized how much I had been deceiving myself about the level of vice and acrimony I had been trying to desensitize myself to. 

Sometimes I would wonder if I was overreacting or if he was just going through a phase, and I would go back; the stuff he did that was good, was very good, and I honestly missed it.

Every time, though, I'd be proven right again.  He still churned out the same good and bad product, but he didn't seem to have his heart in the good anymore.

It's not all vitriol, but like before, when it's a hot button topic, the gloves and the muzzles come off.

I just had to dive in one more time, though, and I couldn't resist compiling some of the questionable reasons given in a post and its combox for why voting Democrat is necessarily the morally superior option these days.

Before I post any of that here, though--I don't need any excuses to go back yet again and get angry at people until I get banned too, even if that would only take five minutes--I want to clarify that I do believe it's possible to discern that voting for any of the parties is the best choice.  We don't all have the same priorities, we don't all predict the same crises or whims of history, we don't all have the same local candidates to consider or problems to contend with firsthand, we don't all have the same information, but we all have to make our best effort.  So when he says that he votes (D) with a clear conscience, I can accept that, even if I don't think everything he says adds up to much more than "I'm angry and this will show them!"

One of the first points brought up was that Trump increased funding by 8% in the past year to Planned Parenthood, and so the GOP doesn't really mean to do anything about abortion.  They put up disappointing SCOTUS justices, talk a good game, PP gets some milage out of the scary possibilities on the horizon, everyone goes home to the status quo but richer.  I think there's a little truth to this; it's kind of the same thing flipped with gun control.  But 8%?  PP's federal subsidies in 2008-2009 were $363 million, and in 2016-2017 were $544 million.  That's like making a point of criticizing Hitler for his mustache.  Meanwhile during that time period Obama cancelled the Mexico City policy and tried to get federal funding to PP an unremovable item of the federal budget.  Trump undid both those things.  Clutch your pearls over 8% if you want, but don't talk to me about purity of intent.

"But abortions go down with a Democrat in the office!"  And contraception goes up, right?  "Yes, more comprehensive sex ed!"

Oh, you mean the stuff where kindergartners are taught to masturbate and encouraged to experiment for themselves even though they're not mature enough to perform, let alone comprehend, the act? Or do you mean the stuff where kids who are of the age where they need some guidance are taught to be "heteroflexible" and that all sexuality is a human construct except for noncisbinaryism which is in-born, which doesn't seem to do much except send teenagers to get scrips for an SSRI and start bringing guns to school?  This blogger and some of his readers are Catholics, and like I said before they are well informed; they know that while contraception might not be quite as grave as abortion, they are intrinsically linked; the two practices come from the same mindset and they have the same social outcomes, and they pass through each other along the way.  So I struggle when people at that blog make an argument that sounds like it's going to be something like "I'm not positively choosing the lesser of two evils, I'm just trying to mitigate the moral damage to society," which would be fair because the voting booth doesn't have room for that kind of nuance, but ends up being "This single matter of abortion is the whole of the issue of reproductive morality, so if I can make the number of D&Es drop tomorrow, then I will accept anything that follows after."  Double effect doesn't excuse you when the secondary effects outweigh the primary ones, and it's not like our arguments are pie in the sky abstractions against things no one has seen happen in society everywhere contraception is liberalized.

Say the temporary and slight drop in abortion is worth it, but don't say that's the end of the story.  Even Democrats who want more abortion tell us that it would be nice to practice eugenics by more community-friendly means that are harder to implement.

"Well, millions got health care from Obama they didn't have before!"

Maybe so.  But what civil liberties were jeopardized by the casuistry that made this precedent?  How many people lost their health care?  That's a number I never see; that's a question I only am answered with silence.  How many didn't get to keep what they liked? How many besides the Little Sisters had a little choice before but got it taken away and replaced with something morally offensive?  "Well, they don't have a choice, so it's not like they're formally cooperating with evil; only materially!"  That is a discussion to be had within one's conscience, not a point to be used to justify subsidizing evil.  Now there's talk about Obamacare imploding, but it's all Chicken Little and Trump; practically none is "crap, this sure looks like it was designed to fail all along and they knew it well before 2016; how can we get out of the particular mess we're in without making it worse either way?"  And that's why I sometimes wax skeptical about this blogger's intellectual honesty these days; only so much can you overlook as the lack of perspective, especially in someone who talk about this for a living.

"You MAGA cultists are only making things worse by swallowing his propaganda.  After my analysis I believe God is commanding me to vote Democrat."

Maybe He is, but in my experience, usually when God does that, it's because of something specific going on in your life, and not because God is heavy handedly intervening in society--and if he thinks I'm another "MAGA cultist" after all because I'm honestly responding to something he said that struck me as off point or I'm new and missed the last time he said he weren't really criticizing the people who were thoughtful or pinched their noses when they voted for Trump, then maybe he does need to remind not just his readership but himself of whom he means when he uses epithets. Anyway, God can do as He sees fit, including raising up angry prophets, but usually He's more subtle.  I don't make this point to put God in a box, but  a year ago he was saying "I can vote (D) with a clean conscience," but now it's all "directive from God?"  Really?  Follow God to the best of your ability, by all means, but does he hear himself?  Whom is he trying to convince?

There's a saying about dogs and fleas.  You don't have to feed one or take one into your home to pick up fleas, you just have to lie down with them.   You see it’s already working?  They’ve got him supporting—for he certainly is silent on these points, which does little but scandalize non-evil Trump voters who might be open to changing their minds—things that are just as morally and socially destructive (which should concern all educated Catholics; these people clearly are willing to cook the golden goose if they get too much resistance to pull a Scandinavia, and then how much help will the little darlings be getting?  This is not some pie in the sky abstraction that can’t hold a candle to the reality of suffering people you know personally, this is something we see happening in the world right now), and all for only the low low price of:

• promoting a culture of abortion and contraception, even if raw numbers for the former are dropping when Dems are in power (would you consider the possibility that this is deliberate—that they skew their marketing to change what appears to be trendy, so they can claim that it's their policies and a friendly administration that help pregnant girls more effectively than Welfare helps the homeless?), and like I said before from the Catholic perspective abortion and contraception go hand in hand, but have you looked to see if or how much contraception has gone up compared to the drop in abortion?  I'm not sure it's fitting or even possible to make a numbers argument, but it might be worthwhile to consider the proportionality of things to see if there are any trends that will need to be addressed in the next generation.
• encouraging not simply libertine and hospitable immigration policies but a whole movement of flouting rule of law. However bad those cages are, they were there long before 2016 and the bureaucrats really are not just moving anonymized kids around the country to be jerks and kids cartoon villains—at least, not any more than before. 
• supporting a movement that is long on symbolic gestures—you’re familiar with these on the other side, as you always point out—that are fraught with mixed results (high costs, lopsided success stories, habit of following unsuccessful historical patterns)
• supporting a movement that has done little to prove they haven’t outgrown their uncivilized roots or just ported their rhetoric into more egalitarian pursuit of power, except for their frequent and contradicted say-so.
• supporting a party that likes to put obstinately and openly heretical Catholics front and center with the express purpose of propagating scandal
• supporting a party that promotes gender confusion and uses double-talk to assault the Church. And I don't want to hear some hoo-rah about Republicans being hypocrites for talking a good moral game but failing to meet the marginalized in the street, so to speak; a standard that is low enough to follow successfully is no standard at all, and I raise this point under this bullet and after the one preceding particularly because gay marriage and naked pride parades and so on are scandals that flow into and through and out of the abortion movement, and a Catholic with a scintilla of history education will know that these things cannot stay separated.  Or is hypocrisy only a problem when a politician espouses old fashioned values but doesn't practice old fashioned charity, and it's okay when a politician turns old fashioned charity into government programs but rejects the truth?

If you're a single issue voter, that's fine.  Some things really can be so important that nothing else is worth considering.  But few things that are that important are also so simple that you can take a snapshot of a single outcome and declare victory--it's the epitome of cherry picking.  

I'm not saying a pro lifer can't honestly vote Democrat because of their record on abortion, despite my skepticism; Republicans habitually fall short, probably in no small part because it is more useful for them to have that fight to fight than it is good to have won it.

But if all you're doing is looking at one number under when the White House has (D) versus when it has (R), talking about how one of those parties never succeeds without even thinking about how the other party vacillates on a daily basis between seeing abortion as an evil that should be prevented but not opposed and something to be celebrated (seriously: this blogger used to talk a lot about how Moloch corrupts, without resorting to the genetic fallacy or invoking the halo effect, so he knows better)...then maybe you need to reconsider how honest you're being with yourself.

"Alabama, get your act together. No state that bans abortions but is in last place for education and has had four mass shootings alone in 2019 really cares about kids."

Yet another argument based on moving goalposts and insufficient purity of intent or zeal, which will get its own treatment.

What about next to last place?  40th instead of 50th?  Second place? First? At what point will you allow us to say, O arbiter and czar of decency and liberty, “our children might not score as high as some states’, but stop shaming us for this perfectly respectable ranking, because it is not the only metric?” Education is important, even for people who may not be college material, but in a day and age where there’s a lot of training to blame capitalism (or “the heads of capitalism,” who I take to be not George Soros or Bill Gates and formerly not the Donald) for every human failure in history and conditioning to divorce personal responsibility from lifestyle outcomes, I’d be chary of making comprehensive moral judgments on the basis of a testing statistic.

I mean, really:it’s not fair to prioritize one issue, even life, and refuse to acknowledge the value of others, but you’re literally saying “the children we don’t kill do better on standardized tests than yours.”  Wow, way to set the bar, there.  It’s not like any true Scotsman would criticize the rope he was getting hanged with for being new, after all.

As for the mass shootings thing...the New York Times as of May 9 reports eight school shootings in the US, one being in Alabama.  These have resulted in four deaths and seventeen injuries. Wikipedia has some more interesting statistics:  124 events total nationwide as of May 16, with 129 fatalities and 468 injured. Three of these were at a school at one was at a church.  For comparison, it shows three mass shootings in Alabama with a total of five dead; New York only had one with one fatality, California had twelve with eleven fatalities, Texas had twelve with 21 fatalities, but the city of Chicago alone had four deaths across five mass shootings.  All these include bar fights and domestic incidents with multiple casualties, not just schools.  I'm not going to quote low-fatality statistics at you, but this should be enough for you to practice on when someone says you're not comparing apples to demographic apples.

A metaphor for abortion

“After my folks died," one apologist for abortion once said, "they left me their house, but I liked living in my townhome downtown; it was close to work and the grocery store so I didn’t need to drive much, and it was cozy.  I knew I would never want to live there—at least, not at that point in my life.  But I still had to go through the neighborhood a lot where the house was, and I didn’t want to be reminded every time I saw it that my parents were dead.  So I burned the house down.”

Okay, she didn't exactly say this, but this argument was identical in shape and logic to the argument she used.

Setting most other considerations to the side for a moment--such as the problem itself--does this not sound at least like one of the less responsible solutions, not more responsible, to her problem?

So, in looking for other things, I found an image similar to the one below with a caption that read something like "Can we stop telling women what to do with their bodies?"

The irony puzzled me.  This wasn't the first piece of evidence I've found that the originator wasn't intellectually all that like most post-theistic "life is a tool and we are its master" types think they are, but it didn't seem like the most insightful juxtaposition.

So, a word to the wise:


This might be a picture of a girl, but it is not a woman's body.

Bodily autonomy is not the answer that cinches it for abortion.  It is the question.

You and we might be talking about issues that are related, but they are not one and the same issue.  Both sides need to be reminded of this from time to time.  And then we can actually have a discussion.

Deceptive juxtaposition

I wonder if it's just where I work.

A few years ago I moved from a red state to a blue state.  The area I live in is in many ways like where I used to be, so it's easy for me to use the mental shorthand of thinking I'm in one of those place where it's actually a mostly red state that is overcompensated by some large, ultraviolet population centers, but then someone says something that I'm shocked to hear when I'm not on the Internet.

I may have mentioned a certain coworker before; nice young lady, smart, talks about how she grew up in a conservative redneck family--and they have their issues, I won't knock her that--and then how she got to college and her eyes were opened.  I appreciate her somewhat hipster taste in restaurants and breweries in the area, but I couldn't help teasing her once about professors saying "Didn't you know everything your parents taught you was a lie?" with a straight face.

Totally lost on her.  But also only tangent to my point.

She's a minority amongst the abortion supporters I cross pass with these days.  She likes to talk about how going to third world countries to "teach them about" contraception and abortion would be a great way to help bring education to women and bring their country to modernity.

The majority?  In the abstract, I hear talk about the real hardship cases, how it's a necessary last resort for lonely and helpless women in a real bind.

In the concrete, however, "real hardship" is a little nebulous.  One suggested a few weeks ago mandatory abortion for pregnant women who contract zika.  Another said to me that if she found out her teenaged daughter was pregnant, they'd immediately take a trip to Planned Parenthood; no discussion, no negotiation, no consideration for alternatives.  "So much for being a choice," I said.  "No!  She's not old enough to know what comes with motherhood!"  That argument would have gone in a different direction if her teenaged daughter weren't just hypothetical, but I did notice a pattern.

There's a lot of talk about the hardship cases.  But mostly there's a lot of people who want to preserve some right to a certain lifestyle, and they're willing to destroy real civil rights to get there.

Why is it that people who criticize the Church for admonishing people to help starving and destitute families while preaching against contraception and abortion, themselves never spare a second thought  for helping starving and destitute families who already have children?  Whom are they really trying to help?

The next time someone asks you if or why you don't support a woman's right to choose, don't answer the question.  Try saying something like this:

"I can't help thinking that when people ask me that, they're not being honest, but rather are trying to set some kind of rhetorical trap so they can use any answer I give them to prop up either the assertion that they have support for abortion amongst the hypocrites who claim to be pro-life but really don't want to see abortion go away, or the assertion that we're really the villains in some Marxist morality play who want to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and away from the polls.  But keep in mind that abortion to us is a legal issue above and beyond any legal considerations for which women are the sole subject.  You might as well be a plantation owner in 1860 asking an abolitionist whether or not he supports the owner's right to choose to employ the labor of slaves or free men."  

Sure, they could make the argument that the plantation owner shouldn't have to bend to the whims of Washington, but whatever evidence currently supports that argument takes a back seat to the grave injustice that was chattel slavery, and they know it.

News penetrability of the pro-choice side of things

I was driving to the East Coast this week for business when I caught part (alas, not all; I would have loved to hear the whole thing) of a show where Abby Johnson, pro-life activist and former Planned Parenthood employee, was a guest on an upstate New York NPR radio station.

The show's host, whose name I didn't catch, reminded would-be callers to keep things respectful, and so the one call I heard was from a guy who was quite civil but seemed very concerned that Abby Johnson might be willing to relegate poorer women seeking abortions in an era after Roe v. Wade were overturned (since richer women could more easily travel to other abortion-friendly countries) to resorting to the much defamed back alley abortions.

Johnson pointed out that the statistics on back alley abortions before 1973 were grossly inflated, as had been admitted by the former abortionist (who also had had a change of heart) who inflated the statistics.  She then gave the example of a woman--her name was given, but I don't remember it and the Google results are sketchy, so if you know please post it in the comments--who went in for an abortion to a clinic, and afterwards continued to hemorrhage for four hours while the clinic didn't call for an ambulance, and the woman died from blood loss waiting at the clinic.  Following that up with the example of Kermit Gosnell, Johnson pointed out that illegal back-alley clinics don't get much worse than what he was doing.

The show's host then said that she thought she might have to go into the other room to help her sound engineer pick his jaw up off the floor.

It made me wonder:  why?  Did he not know this kind of thing went on?  Did he just not follow the abortion issue very closely, or did he only pay attention to information sources that believe that women dying of complications from abortion distracts from the "true and consistent compassion" message?

I pray it's the latter.  But either way, there's a lot of ignorance to be overcome.

Abortion, the battle from on the ground

You sometimes see me post an example of something ludicrous and alarming and say "this is what we're up against."  These posts, while highlighting specific examples of whatever the issue at hand is, tend to have an abstract angle to them; a pro-choice politician may be saying what he personally believes, but being a politician his actions will tend to affect people more conceptually than personally.

I mentioned my un-PC coworker a few days ago.  In the conversation he was having with some of his other coworkers who are pretty liberal (I'm currently residing in a very blue state, so we're all soaking in it), the talk somehow turned to abortion.  My coworker said that, while he is perfectly happy with prevention, he won't countenance abortion especially when used solely as birth control.

I think he used the word "pro-abortion" at this point, because one of the others denied being pro-abortion, but rather was pro-choice...and that if she had a twelve year old daughter who was molested by some guy and ended up pregnant, the first thing she would do would be to drive her to an abortion clinic.

"So she doesn't get a choice."
"No!  At that age she's not mature enough to understand the consequences."
"What if she doesn't want the abortion?  Would you at least discuss it with her?"
"No.  She's not capable yet of making an informed decision."

Okay, she's a minor and the parent gets the last word on medical decisions; even the law agrees with this, except when the situation is reversed.  But the hypothetical daughter is 12, not an idiot; she's going to have an opinion, despite having been raised by an "I'll choose who has abortions in this household" mother, it might not be the same, and she's at least going to want to feel like her feelings and preferences are being considered before they're overruled.

This; this is really what we're up against.  People who have listened to the rhetoric and already made up their minds, who don't believe in Choice as a virtue and civic right to be protected so much as they believe abortion is just a means to some other end, who are going to vote for politicians and laws that will let them pursue those other ends without inconvenience.

This is the battle we have to fight:  not just beating with rhetoric the sin-darkened intellects of talking heads who themselves may only be using the abortion issue to achieve some other end, but breathing on the embers of conscience in the people who both who are on the fence or see abortion as a necessary evil, and those who have inclined themselves to using the last resort of abortion so cavalierly that it is the first resort.

We have to win hearts.  You can get a little traction by winning arguments, at least trying to plant seeds, but it's such a charged topic, like evangelization itself, that if you come after them with logical guns a-blazing, they'll retreat into emotional counterarguments that you can't touch.  The woman who said she would choose abortion for her underage daughter no matter what walked out of the room before I could add anything to the suggestion that her daughter's feelings should be considered whether or not her own choice would be.  The topic might come up again and I might have another chance to play the "kindler, gentler conservative" next to my other coworker, but it might not.

But I'm still curious:  if someone says "I'm not pro-abortion, I'm pro-choice," what does he think someone admitting to being pro-abortion would say differently?  That he just wanted to kill babies for the sake of killing?

So, Gosnell's guilty...

...and what little I’ve heard from the pro-choice side is in the vein of “Well, of course we need to make sure women have access to safe abortions.”

This really makes me think someone hasn’t been paying attention.  They used to say “safe, legal, and rare,” but really all that was being pushed was “legal.”  Gosnell might be an epitome but he’s not the only one.  I’ve known pro-life people who voted straight ticket pro-choice because they believed that all the other social policies advocated by pro-choice political candidates would lead to lower demand for abortion in the long run; meanwhile, pro-choice politicians end up compromising with other politicians who may have different goals and who may actually have a lot of the same values but want to follow a different path to the same goal.  The only thing clung to and promoted, the only thing there isn’t room for compromise on—come on, nobody really wants to perpetuate poverty, but there is a plethora of opinions on how to alleviate it—is access to the procedure.  So the wagons are circled around abortion clinics and the media are mute on the topic of badly run clinics, for fear of handing ammunition to the pro-life movement.

Well, folks, you shot yourself in the foot with that very ammunition, and no amount of “Pro-lifers made us resort to this” whining is going to change that.  You talk safety and then refuse to take steps that might even bring you a few allies from the pro-life movement in at least helping to ensure that expectant mothers were treated well, lest the disconnect between respect for women and the abortion culture become undeniably overt—maybe it doesn’t have to be the case that bosses fire pregnant employees for deciding to go to term, or that domineering boyfriends and husbands will insist on not becoming fathers but stay in relationships with women who are willing to become mothers; but all to often, it is the case.  More abortion isn't the answer.  If it's a symptom of greater societal ills, then we need to cure the greater ills; we need to put a bandage on whatever abortion purports to cure in the meantime, but in taking a stand at abortion, you gather the rhetorical points of choosing lesser goods over greater ones, and you win poster children like Kermit Gosnell.

Might as well put a briefcase nuke in the hands of every person on the planet, on the grounds that MAD worked for the US and the USSR, so it's got to work for individuals as well.  A few people set 'em off anyway?  Get more into the field, so we can really make our point that more violence means less violence; all this carnage is just a blip.  Still more?  It's not you, it's them; it should work, and we're not going to stop until they stop.  We just need to clap for Tinkerbell harder.

I wonder maybe if Moloch is really in the service of Mammon these days.  Help build up a controversy, recruit desperate people, offer them an escape to the nightmare of motherhood, and then...start cutting costs.  High school dropouts are a lot cheaper than certified anesthetists, and frightened and unsure expectant mothers have low sales resistance, even to snake oil.  

“I don’t think a college student in Colorado Springs should have to choose between textbooks or the preventive care she needs.”

This from our president, to which and to whom I respond:

If this college student were spending so much on "preventive care" that she can't afford her books, she's having way too much sex to have time to study, let alone make it to class or do homework and take exams.  She'd be expelled for academic failure and have no further need of her books by spring break.

“We worked with Catholic hospitals and universities to find a solution that protects both religious liberty and a woman’s health,” he went on, but apparently this work did not come to fruition: “We’ve made sure churches and other houses of worship don’t have to provide or pay for it.”

Too bad for Americans with traditional religious values and beliefs that you couldn't find a solution that protects religious institutions other than churches, such as the aforementioned Catholic hospitals and universities.  

Need proof that the MSM has a liberal bias?

I submit that the following evidence is representative, if perhaps a bit inflammatory; abortion is the example I give, and I recognize that the lines between Life and Choice are not drawn perfectly down the middle aisle.

The Bad Catholic has two posts with videos from the March for Life.

Mark Shea has more posts than I could hope to write, but in his defense, it's kind of his job.

Shameless Popery...well, you get the idea.


If you don't care to follow the links, each shows how the March for Life, attended by hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade was anything but news, but the relatively scant counter-protesters got disproportionate coverage, with interviews focusing on asking Planned Parenthood executives questions that suggest the underrealized utopia that consequence-free sex was supposed to usher in was mainly due to logistical difficulties.

And yes, I realize that I'm just rolling a few Catholic blogs.  But hey, the hard work's already been done, and sometimes being fair and balanced, so to speak, means presenting something with bias opposite to the usual so a lucid mind can consider the merits of both sides; and like I said, I consider this to be a representative, if dramatic, example.

You know, just to mix it up a bit, I'm going to link a couple gems from the Zombietime blog (which may not be suitable for those with delicate sensibilities):

• Taxonomy of a Fraud
• The Red Cross Ambulance Incident

There are some other articles there that go into more detail.  For those not in the know, Zombie is a photographer in the San Francisco area who, despite not being particularly conservative, finds much blog fodder in the incoherence of the fringe Left and the intellectual bankruptcy of its alleged elites.

It's not too late to stand up to the White House! (edited)

Please, go there and sign the petition, if you haven't signed one already.  It's morally bad for disregarding conscientious objection, it's legally bad for presuming that "to regulate commerce...among the several States" means "to mandate commerce between as well as wholly within each of the States," and it's ethically bad for perpetuating the myth that "Christian values" are best served by appointing Caesar the power to care for the poor and feed the lambs on our behalf.

I received a response from the White House on Friday, which I will be quoting liberally here.

Thank you for using We the People to make your voice heard about the Obama Administration's decision to ensure that women have access to free preventive care with no co-pays

"Free" and "no co-pays" are two different things.  This distinction is not consistently preserved, either throughout the rest of this form letter or in the debate at large.

[T]he Affordable Care Act requires insurance companies to  cover preventive services, including preventive care for women, without charging a co-pay, starting on August 1, 2012

This part was interesting.  Until now, legal entities that objected were given a one year grace period in which to discover some sophistry for accepting what was still going to be inevitable.  Now that's off the table.

This part is important.  Jimmy Akin goes into a little more detail on this point.  In some ways it appears we lost ground by the USCCB using accommodating diplomatic language, but I don't think so.  Evil will do this when it is threatened in order to intimidate and distract you from casting it out.

As the President said: "Nearly 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives"

I'm highly skeptical.  Until last week, I used to hear numbers that were much lower, and the claims were merely that Catholics contracepted at the same rates (over half, but no supermajority) as other Americans.  Suddenly it's all but a handful?  It's not impossible, but I'd be looking askance at such reports even if they weren't sourced by the Gutmacher Institute.

Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health

And every free citizen should be in control of the decisions that affect his or her own soul.  Let's not conflate "some people struggle to afford medical care" with "you must agree that fertility is a disease," let alone the other moral problems with arguments framed in terms of self-determination.

And I saw that local churches often did more good for a community than a government program ever could

I appreciate your...appreciation...but so what?  A screwdriver is great for driving screws, but you can't port that over to driving nails just because there's a compelling need for hammers.  There are reasons it just doesn't work like that.

If a woman's employer is a religious non-profit organization, such as a charity hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, her insurance company -- not the hospital or charity -- will be required to reach out and provide her contraceptive care free of charge if she chooses to use it.

Here's where we're supposed to remember that "free of charge" is, well, impossible in this world.  Who's paying the insurance company?  You and I. Why do people even think that the government can impose fines or fees on some corporate entity without said entity passing it straight along to the customer?  They don't even pretend to pass "you may not raise your prices to cover these costs" legislation to make any punitive damages more painful than the administrative hassle it would be to maintain profit levels.

There are tremendous health benefits for women that come from using contraception. Contraception is a safe and effective way of ....

No, it's not.  It can reduce the risk of some types of cancers, which is good, but prescription and OTC hormones range from "too weak to work on more fecund women" to "you'll literally bleed for the rest of your life."  I'm being dramatic, granted, but when the mere side effects are as bad as hemorrhaging and stroke, is prescribing it for something as prosaic as acne really the best way to go?  They prescribe the pill to alleviate irregular periods because it's easier than recommending an endocrinologist to actually cure irregular periods; does the side effect of good skin rise to the level of a "tremendous health benefit" that is proportional to the disregard of our consciences that make clear that certain things, while convenient, are still evil?  Because they still haven't established the point that pregnancy is itself is a disease which should be prevented (which is odd, since they're so happy about treating other "reproductive complications" and unrelated conditions with the pill).

I think I need to make that point clearer.  We hear things like "pregnancy would kill me," but it's a possibility of death for the mother versus, when it comes to the point of abortion, certain death for the child.  I don't want to get sidetracked, but the choice between "possible tragedy" and "definite evil" should not be a hard one.

Importantly, we also usually hear that pregnancy can cause things like peripartum cardiomyopathy, but the way it's usually billed is that pregnancy is the disease and PC is a symptom.  I sympathize that many of these complications are difficult to predict and only get discovered during pregnancy when only symptoms can be treated, but the problem with PC isn't the pregnancy, the problem is the heart.

I'm all for prevention, but let's not fall into "we wouldn't have these problems if we didn't know about them" thinking.

This is an issue where people of good will on both sides of the debate have been grappling to find a solution that works for everyone, and the policy announced today has done that.

The first half is right, unless it means "the policy announced today will further our ends, and will give you an opportunity to embrace white martyrdom," in which case I agree.

The right to religious liberty will be fully protected

If it were, there wouldn't be such an uproar.  I'm glad you're not my lawyer or neighborhood cop.

Here are a few statements from groups involved in the issue

Never mind.  Quotes from Catholics United, Catholic Health Association, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL.  They all make the reasonable point that this is supposed to help them help people who really need it, but PP and NARAL don't even throw a bone to folks who don't think that working evil is a safe and reliable way to achieve good.  Thanks, but no thanks for that dose of alleged perspective.

Would feminism oppose sex-selective abortion to prevent the decline of the female population?

Apparently not in this day and age.  At least they're being consistent, right?  Choose the legal capacity to make choices over the ontological ability to have choices to make.

If I haven't said it before, I've intended to say it a thousand times:  evil is ultimately self-consuming, suicidal.  It is only parasitic on the good and when it has done all the damage it can do to the particular good off of which it feeds, it turns to other goods and extinguishes them, eventually cutting off the branch on which it sits; or as Tolly put it in the Silmarillion:

...in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.

Thus do all evils eventually collapse or expend themselves.  The great 20th century dictatorships made great efforts to cull millions of their own people; Germany was saved only by attracting the righteous fury of the Allies trying to rescue Europe from fascism, the Soviet Union was spared perhaps as much by the demise of Old Joe Stalin but was felled by a gross overestimation of the propensity of humans to work for others before themselves, and China perhaps was a wiser student of history but is these days merely taking new bait for the same trap.

So we see it in the Roe effect.  Evil is sterile and cannot propagate itself, not without corrupting another fecund good.  I would speculate that this is why when Jesus touched the unclean, they became clean rather than He unclean.  The beast may raise its head again but here is one more reason why abortion will end:  there will be no one left to support it.

From Ms. Magazine, ten questions they think will stump pro-lifers:

1. How many years do you consider to be a fair prison term for a woman who has an abortion?
2. How many years for a doctor who performs one?
3. Will the punishments be greater the second time around? 
4. Where will the state get the money necessary to prosecute one-third of all American women for this crime?
5. Forty-two percent of women who have an abortion have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s $10,830 for a single woman with no children, if you’re counting). When women are forced to have children they cannot afford to raise, will those children become wards of the state or simply new Medicaid recipients? Where will the state find the money necessary to support them?
6. Will you be willing to watch your wife die in front of you when her life is threatened by an unsafe pregnancy that no one is allowed to do anything about? Your daughter?
7. Will rapists have to pay child support to women who are forced to have their children?
8. Will the child of incest be in the custody of its rapist father or the father’s teenaged daughter, his mother? In fact, 18 percent of women who have an abortion in America are teenagers. Will they be required to drop out of high school to raise their children or will the state provide free childcare?
9. Will upper-class white women be prosecuted as vigorously as other women who have abortions?
10. You are aware that upper-class white women have abortions, aren’t you?

From me:

1. I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide?  If she did it out of desperation, then I might say it's analogous to murder three.  It would be, after all, a felony.  We're not going to get to the point as a society where abortion is off the table until having a child--even just having one and giving her up for adoption--is not viewed as a greater problem than killing a child; where trying to make the problem go away instead of facing up to it is not viewed as preferable to taking a hit in the lifestyle.  Until then, just putting people in jail isn't going to be any better a solution than putting basement tokers in jail under "zero tolerance" laws has solved the drug problem.
2. I don't know, what's the usual penalty for infanticide?  Since he's just doing it as a matter of course, then I might say it's analogous to murder one.  It would be, after all, a felony.  I'd make the same analogy as I did with the war on drugs, but abortion clinics are notorious for not meeting the professional or hygiene standards of real medical facilities, and that kind of problem is of a more dire order than an agglomeration of college dropouts living smokey lives of quiet dissipation.
3. Aren't they usually?  Why wouldn't they be?  Couldn't think of more than nine good questions?
4. From the money it doesn't give to Planned Parenthood (by some estimations, nearly a million dollars a day--one figure I saw was $363 million a year), if your assumption is correct that the vast increase in number of abortions after Roe would not be reversed by its overturn--and is that one third of all American women, or one third of all American pregnancies?  We should be clear on this point; I'm actually uncertain, and haven't seen numbers on the propensity of women to have abortions repeatedly, recently enough to remember any figures.  Or maybe we could do things differently:  Instead of making it illegal to procure an abortion, just make it illegal to perform one.  After all, we already have laws that distinguish between possessing, buying, and selling controlled substances; if we want to be sensitive to desperate and scared mothers, we could focus on the doctors who actually do the dirty work.  Similarly, going after drug dealers would probably be more effective than going after people who would just prefer to toke up on Friday nights with a few friends instead of gathering around a box of King Edwards and a bottle of Crown Royal Reserve.  But still:  if we wanted another zero-tolerance law to enforce, do you think a million a day would cover it?
5. So fewer than half of women who have abortions live in poverty?  Why does it seem natural to kill children who would be born into poverty before finding your own answers to questions like "who would take care of them?" and "who can afford to have children?"  And why are you assuming that the state needs to shoulder the direct responsibility to care for children?  There is such a thing as finding would-be parents who would handle these details and save lawmakers and voters much grief.  Sure, kids are expensive to raise, but decrepit senior citizens are also expensive to keep in nursing homes, and I'd like to give them the chance to do better than hold a pillow over my face when they tire of watching me linger.  But if they do neither because they were never born alive, who's stuck with the job?  The state--that is, you taxpayers.  Does that trouble you now?  Sure, you get to start making claims about how your money gets spent, but now your money's getting diluted more and you'll be fighting with more people who are anteing up and also want a say on how their money's spent.  You're worried about money?  If we ban abortion, start giving money to Distributed Parenthood so adoption fees and whatever medical expenses accrued during delivery are covered for poor mothers, since it looks like Obamacare is going to be driving Catholic Charities out of the business and taking over most everything anyway.
6. You're asking me if I would be willing to kill my son or daughter to save my wife's life, not just from an "unsafe" pregnancy where the complications surpass current medical arts, but where for some reason doctors are barred from acting (a facile equivocation; in the real world abortion isn't the only possible solution to pregnancy complications).  First, two words:  double effect.  That's an argument too big to pack in here.  Second, maybe you should ask my wife if she was willing to kill her son or daughter to save herself.  Making this about male oppression makes you the sexist.  As for my daughter, well, I would never kill my grandchildren, and I would hope she wouldn't either; I guess you could say we're "barred" from murdering our offspring by the same logic.  You want to talk about unsafe pregnancies?  Try to frame a hypothetical situation in terms that don't require me to commit or authorize physical violence to resolve a "sometimes life's just a bitch" problem.  I wouldn't even kill you to save someone's life, unless you yourself were the immediate threat, and even then my desire and intent would not be your demise but the removal of your immediate ability to propagate harm.  Half of all abortions are elective, anyway, which means there isn't a vast majority of genuinely troubled and at-risk mothers desperate enough to risk a D&E in some marginally sanitary office.
7. I think that's the least they should do.  Forcing them to marry their victims like in the old days was never a good thing, but it did reflect at least a dim understanding of accountability for one's actions.  Why would you even ask this?  Trying to make it easier on rapists by insinuating that they shouldn't, that rape victims should be protected from any possible "reminders" of their attackers?  Have you really ever gotten to know mothers whose children were the product of rape?  Or is this just another shocker of a non sequitir to keep pro-lifers off balance and pretend you actually scored some rhetorical points?
8. Again with making every solution a power of the state.  Thanks for the patronizing lesson in abortion statistics.  Why would a rapist of any stripe now get custody of the child, and why would that change?  Does it relate in any way to laws on the books before Roe?  The father's a rapist, he should be in jail.  Do you realize you're assuming we would stop prosecuting rape in the case of incest?  Where the hell do you get that idea?  Just throwing out outrageous suggestions to get a rise out of us, so you can either pretend we're the unreasonable people for taking rightful offense at offensive claims and acting like the the only scandalized adult in the room?  As for teenage mothers, if it really gets to be a problem, maybe we should start having day care at high schools; in the meantime, we have day care elsewhere, and maybe the feds could offer a tax break or subsidy for child care if we're going to go that route instead of leaving it to today's grandmothers to raise a second generation of kids, hopefully better than the first (don't get hung up on rape--the vast majority of accidental pregnancies are from consensual sex).
9. Why shouldn't they?  Are their children not just as human as the poor brown children you insist we hold to a different standard?  Or are you referring to the fact that rich people, perhaps disproportionately, already are not prosecuted with the rigor as other demographics, when suspected or accused of the same crimes?  That's a fair cop, since it's something that already happens with all kinds of crimes, and probably has been happening in the West for the last five hundred years, and longer before that and in all other places if you replace "brown" and "rich and white" with any other two disparate demographic groups historically and geographically proximal to each other (whether or not it's just, the double standard between alien or minority and native or majority is almost universal), so I don't know why it's only a scandal when trying to trick people into thinking their desire for mercy for desperate and scared and pressured pregnant women is really a belief in choosing abortion.  I can only imagine this is supposed to be a parallel with the death penalty, but to really be a proper analogy, we'd be debating whether to legalize or ban murder on the grounds that fewer white people get the chair for murder:  there may be a problem, but this is a different one.
10. Oh, I see.  You're the one who holds poor brown people and, apparently, rich white men to different standards.  So you're racist as well as sexist.  No wonder I was only incredulous, and not stumped, at your really insightful and penetrating, um, caricatures.  You think we don't think about who has abortions?  You think it only occurs to us that abortions don't only happen to "not me and nobody I know" but "not me, nobody I know, and nobody of my race or economic class?"  Do you realize how artificial a way of thinking that is?  In spite of this, do you think it hasn't occurred to us that while perhaps a third of pregnancies end in abortion, half of all pregnancies of black women end in abortion?  Do you think we haven't noticed that, while half of abortions are not for reasons of medical or financial desperation (I'm reluctant to say "necessity"), the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in poor neighborhoods?  Do you think those rich white folks you so disparage are just going to happily come to those run-down and dangerous parts of town you want to pretend we think don't exist?  Do you think we haven't noticed that these differences are, as they say, statistically significant?  I'll tell you this much:  it's not because we're promoting abortion among minorities.  What do you think is going to happen to minorities if they maintain the highest abortion rates in the country?  But please, by all means:  tell me more about how abortion hits close to home.  Please, by all means:  when you've run out of reasonable arguments to make, make some more graphic or inflammatory comments to try to gin up some squeamishness or frustration to feed your schadenfreude.  That's how they roll on the internet, after all.

These things remind me of people I knew in high school and college, and even a few in grad school, who are pretty smart, but maybe not as smart as they think they are, and are hung up on getting by with native talent and not bothering to do any real homework.  Sure, someone looked up that 42% figure somewhere, but coming up with this list of questions, it's like they couldn't get past the misconception that pro-lifers are really just about controlling women and hiding that agenda under a veneer of sentimentality.  But what's sentimental is talking like we need to save PP because it's such a great provider of women's health services, like it's one of those "too big to fail" corporations loaded up with the nostalgia of an older friend who will hold your hair back when you're puking in the toilet and give you a lift to the mall when you need to Take Care Of Something.  No thanks; I like a friend who helps me when I'm sick but I don't want one who would support me in doing something wrong, and I hope I wouldn't be a friend who would, either.

The inclination to moral bankruptcy of the pro-abortion movement

I had a weird experience over the weekend, albeit one that wasn't too surprising, upon reflection.

Was web surfing and found an interesting food blog--barbecue I think was the main theme, and for what it's worth I'm a sucker for meat that's been cooked low and slow.

The blogger had posted on a pig roast, and some anonymous vegetarian left a comment to the effect of "your unborn child should suffer the same fate as that hog."

The blogger was understandably on the far side of annoyed, and after a brief and righteous condemnation of a coward flaming from behind the shield of anonymity, the blogger...proceeded to instruct the commenter that "unborn child" is a contradiction ("child" being defined by some assumed authority not to include the medical category "fetus"), and then spent the bulk of the message defending the legitimacy of meat consumption.

You can eat meat or not if you wish, but I was a little off-put by how this blogger just blew past the rhetorical threat to her son or daughter.

I shouldn't be shocked but it still goads me to see people hiding behind technical terminology in casual communication.  Especially here, when the retort was hardly a rebuttal.

Whether or not "unborn child" would be acceptable parlance in medical or legal literature, it's specific enough that no one fails to understand the reference.  It would be like me interjecting into a conversation on building materials with "You should know steel isn't a metal;" in a sense it'd be true, because steel is an alloy of elemental iron (a metal) and small amounts of carbon (usually forming a stoichiometric compound in the so-called alpha matrix), along with sometimes some other elements; but I would generally only be confusing the non-pedantic people who are concerned with matters to which my hair-splitting is irrelevant; and beyond that I still wouldn't be entirely correct because the steel would remain predominantly metallic in the sense that the iron's conduction and valence electron bands still overlap.

See what I did there?  Completely derailed the discussion by insisting on an inappropriate use of strict terminology.  Maybe intimidated a few people with my posturing.  Certainly confused and annoyed some people who understood perfectly what was going on until I jumped in and pretended to clarify things with impenetrable jargon--in essence, hid an entire forest behind a bunch of trees.

John Wright has written more thoroughly, and superiorly, on the abuse of language and how it is propagated through political correctness, and it's perfectly reflected by what this blogger did and what I just demonstrated:  Control of the discussion was claimed by one party, who overtly or subtly tried to dismiss the concerns of another party and redefined the terms from words that were well understood to malapropos words that are so specific they cloud the real issue, divert attention to other matters more easily argued than the matters that were relevant.

But still, why that detour?  The vegetarian rhetorically wants your kid roasted on a spit as payback for doing the same thing to a pig, and aside from this horrific overreaction to reading about a person eating meat, before going on a long diatribe about how eating meat isn't so bad, you have to stop to point out that--wait for it--it's not really a child the vegetarian wants to see cooked?

That kind of knocks the wind out of any rebuttal.  It would have been more clear how silly it is if the argument had been laid out differently.  "Your child should die in a fire as payback for you roasting that innocent pig whole."  "Hey, don't be so scandalized; almost everyone in the world eats meat.  But it's not really a child, anyway."  Huh?  So, maybe it would be okay, but if not, at least it's not like they'd be making her give up barbecue?  What?

I can only surmise it is part of the perpetual campaign to darken people's vision of what should be perspicuous, that innocent humans born or unborn are entitled to freedom from deliberate harm.  Without the high-falutin' rhetoric to counter rational thoughts to the contrary and this disjointed murmuring to keep people off guard and stop them from having quiet enough moments to think, people would be likely to realize the self-evident for themselves, start making well-informed and thoughtful decisions for themselves.

I wonder how the child would feel, looking back at the blog archives ten or fifteen years from now, and seeing his mother imply that while he might have been spared the embryotome, it was not because he deserved or had any right to be.