I’m going to put this whole thing under the fold. For those of you who don’t want to talk politics, the Carolina Chocolate Drops kick ass.
Abortion.
Very briefly, here is where I stand on abortion and on these labels we use to describe our positions on the issue. First of all, I prefer using the prefix “pro” over “anti”. I am personally pro-life and believe that a fetus is a person or at least a person in the making. Other than miscarriage or abortion, the only other potential thing a fetus will become is a baby. I also realize what enormous strides women have made toward equality thanks to safe and legal abortion and birth control. That women have made these strides is an undeniably good thing. Making abortion illegal would not only reverse a great deal of this progress, it would create a devastating abortion black market and would force many women to perform do-it-yourself abortions. Not good.
It’s also important to me that our culture moves toward fewer abortions by choice rather than through the blunt arm of the law. This will be more sustainable in the long-term. Likewise, I believe that more private and public efforts need to be made to help women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term, including more funds for public daycare, public health, and so forth. This is one reason I support some form of universal healthcare, and why I support the use of birth control.
I use the term ‘pro-life’ not because, as Anne suggests, I prefer to hobnob around with people who disagree with me on this issue, but because it sums up my beliefs on many issues beyond the abortion debate such as war, torture, and the death penalty. (Perhaps that’s too imprecise. I’ll have to think about it.) Many of the people on the right-winger list I was on support all sorts of things I find abhorrent (though I’m a big fan of much of Reihan Salam’s work).
Well I didn’t put myself on that list. Nor do I have any desire to lead the conservative movement or any other movement. I’m against political movements in general. I really don’t belong on the list, and probably every other member of the list would agree. The people I generally collaborate with at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen have a mix of views and stances on abortion, but they all agree that the wars we’re immersed in are absurd and that torture is abhorrent and evil. There are lines that need to be drawn in whatever political sand we walk in, but abortion strikes me as a much more complex and emotional issue, much less black and white. II believe there is sincerity on both sides of this issue, whereas on many other culture war issues, that same sincerity simply doesn’t exist. You may disagree, and I’m sure you have good reasons to do so.
High Broderism.
You can call anything that seems to walk the middle of an issue ‘High Broderism’ if you like, but I think that’s a cop-out (it may apply at times, but using it reflexively is just silly). I may say the Republicans and Democrats will both be losers in this mosque controversy, but clearly the Republicans are on the wrong side of the issue whereas the Democrats are merely bound to screw things up for themselves. (Except for Harry Reid, who is on the wrong side of the issue.) Pointing this out is hardly an instance of false equivalency.
Some issues are divided into sides that many of us would rather not be on. Artificial opposites are manufactured and if we don’t hop on one bus or the other we must be squishy moderates, trying to please everyone. We have all sorts of false dualisms in our society. We have to be Republican or Democrat; we have to be liberal or conservative; we have to be pro-choice or anti-abortion. Well even my three year old understands what a false choice is: “do you want peas or carrots” almost inevitably turns into “neither, I want goldfish crackers.”
When some of us decide that these labels are stupid or decide to eschew orthodoxy in favor of some sort of fusionism, or point out that both these oppositional binary forces are wrong or right to a point, we’re immediately castigated as lazy centrists. Well I’m not trying to please anybody. More than anything, a lot of the positions I hold mean that I piss everyone off. I’m not trying to do that either.
I don’t pussyfoot around issues about which I care passionately. Immigration, torture, war, gay rights, the drug war – some things simply don’t have gray areas as far as I’m concerned. Torture is immoral and will always backfire; war should be avoided at all costs and preemptive war is a crime; we should end the war on drugs entirely; gays should have the right to marry and be treated equally under the law; and our borders should be as open as possible. On other issues I think there is more nuance. How do we find that balance between free markets and a fair, egalitarian society? How do we balance productivity with social stability? How can we best preserve the good elements of our civilization while still allowing progress and change to flourish? How do we balance organic growth and change with the need for regulation and safety nets?
These aren’t simple questions with simple answers, and quite frankly a lot of partisans on both sides don’t care to answer them, they just care to win, to grind their opponents down and set up clear divisions. Take healthcare reform. I don’t buy the Cato line that markets will solve everything in health reform. I also don’t think single-payer is the best we can do or that the public option was some magic bullet. I look across the pond at countries like the Netherlands that use private markets, backed by sensible government support, to create an effective and relatively inexpensive healthcare system. Or Singapore, which uses health savings accounts backed by a single-payer system to drastically reduce health costs.
I really liked Ron Wyden and Bob Bennett’s healthcare bill also. Not because it was some moderate, meet in the middle solution but because it was actually pretty radical – at once fiscally sound and egalitarian that fixed a lot of the problems and inequities with the status quo. It was a better bill than the one we got, but I think the one we got has the potential to be better than the system we have now. Time will tell.
Good ideas may come from either side. False compromise and squishy centrism is a bad way to meet in the middle, but not all trade-offs need to be false compromises either. And I don’t want to make the trade-off between good ideas and partisanship that a lot of people seem to think is somehow more noble.
Really, except for the fact that he is more hawkish than I am and puts a little bit too much faith in government while I put more emphasis on competitive federalism and the dictum that ‘all politics are local’, I’m not all that far from Matt Yglesias politically. Though I imagine we disagree on many of the particulars, this passage is something I largely agree with:
So that’s the agenda I have to offer. For rich countries—productivity growth, social insurance, and efforts to improve public health all aiming at allowing people to live more and more of their time outside the bonds of commercial work. For poor countries—capitalism, to get the process of prosperity and social betterment rolling. At the interface between the two—a generous and humane approach to migration issues so that people can have the freedom to escape bad situations, and a trade regime that aims at facilitating the exchange of goods rather than coercing poor countries into adopting the preferred policies of rich world companies. And for all of us, an overhaul of energy systems so the world doesn’t boil and we all get to keep enjoying our prosperity.
That sounds like liberal-tarianism to me – or perhaps ‘liberalism in the European sense’. And that’s my kind of liberalism, or whatever you want to call it.
P.S. I really dislike the term ‘centrist’. It is a definition that relies on something else to exist and implies that views held rest nicely between two wings. I’m not a centrist. I’m downright radical on some issues. Finding common ground and common discourse is as much an exercise in denying the false dichotomy of left and right as it is finding a happy medium. Or something.
Michael D.
Anyone want some ice cream?
scarshapedstar
Well, this is where the divide is perhaps deepest: when I read “fewer abortions by choice”, I think “Easier availability of contraceptives! Great idea!”
Wingnuts, on the other hand, take it to mean “Pregnant women should be chained to a bed in a church for 9 months so that they make the right choice.”
Sentient Puddle
None of this strikes me as being the least bit controversial.
Granted, I also glaze over the long strings of comments whenever matoko or whoever inevitably brings up abortion on one of your posts for no apparent reason.
carlos the dwarf
*applause*
arguingwithsignposts
That Yglesias passage is sparkle pony bullshit.
As to your point about high broderism, having checked the definition in the Lexicon, I would agree that you didn’t engage in false equivalency, but the “pox on both their houses” sentence structure leads to that kind of reflexive reaction.
Sarcastro
Stop with the bluegrass / folk wankery. Ugh.
roshan
@Michael D.:
Which flavor?
arguingwithsignposts
Can we stop using this term? There is NO SUCH THING as a free market between nation-states.
flotsam
I thought that was very well written and persuasive. Thanks for talking like a grown-up. But one point I quibble with, if you weren’t such a neoconfasicistcommiesquishieterroristlover your daughter would eat her peas and carrots instead of goldfish – even though goldfish are so full of win.
Violet
Re: your stance on abortion, it sounds you fall solidly in the pro-choice camp. You’re personally against it, but you aren’t going to tell someone else what to do. You’re a radical hippie commie leftist by those standards.
As for supporting assistance for women who get pregnant and help after they have the baby…why don’t you go curl up with your copy of of “Das Kapital,” you Marxist soshulist who hates America.
Okay, I’m exaggerating slightly, but your personal beliefs, while important to you, are irrelevant to the greater community. It’s where you want to impose your beliefs on others that matters. And in that regard you’re a commie, leftist, soshulist. Welcome to the club.
Warren Terra
Other than abstinence, contraception, onanism, losing out in competition with its peers, and the things you list, every sperm will be a baby, too – is it sacred?
For that matter, a teratoma or an ectopic pregnancy has the capability to become a person, though its circumstances aren’t suited for it.
Look, I like that you’re not trying to legislate your theology, but that’s just what it is – your theology. A majority of fertilized oocytes will never become people, and arguing that a blastocyst, a mass of cells that is clearly incapable not merely of independent life but also of any neuronal activity whatsoever, let alone cognition, is a person because your magic man told you so is not distinguishable from saying a teratoma is a person. If you wanted to go that route, there are really quite difficult ethical questions about how to perceive even a rather early fetus – but saying that human life begins at fertilization just marks you as a zealot, however moderate your resulting policy prescriptions.
Neutron Flux
I was listening to “Dona Got A Ramblin’ Mind” just this morning. I like.
wes g
i heard the Carolina Chocolate Drops on NPR, they are indeed f’in awesome.
beltane
Abortion should be looked at solely in practical terms. Philosophizing and moralizing about the issue may be entertaining abstractions, but I am only interested in the practical effects of policies. While the “pro-life” may see the world in pastel colors of smiling babies and happy adoptive couples, the reality is that outlawing abortion will lead to dead women, widespread infanticide, abandonment, sexual and physical abuse, baby-selling, and child trafficking. Sorry to be crude, but that is the reality of the situation. There are worse crimes against babies than abortion.
The pregnancy rate at my high school was extremely low because we were provided with a comprehensive and graphic sex education, and because most of my classmates were the offspring of godless liberals who taught their kids to respect their own bodies and to respect the institution of parenthood.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Congratulations, you’re a liberal on this issue.
Seriously, I’m not sure how someone could be more “liberal” about it than you (other than what you call it, “pro-life”).
Unless, of course, you’re leaving out opinions just to keep the zerg swarm at bay. (abortion is akin to slavery?)
Nobody likes abortion, but libs tend to think that a woman who has been here for 20-40 years has rights as well.
Well, re-reading your post, why are you opposed to “some” birth control methods? If we’re so worried about humanity, isn’t it better to allow for all types of birth control (as long as you don’t rediculously define abortion as birth control).
Cermet
OK-you are a real liberal (no matter your belief) and not Mr. Ed – Once more I am wrong and your views are very progressive and that makes you, overall, a fair minded and reasonable person but no matter what you call yourself, you’re no conserative on the issues that define that stupid mind set. Welcome to BJ, you really belong here and your counterpoints should be accepted as a post by a fair (if sometimes wrong) writer of intellect.
Midnight Marauder
I think in some ways this is a false construction that overlooks the main criticism writers such as your self face in a forum like this. It doesn’t really matter what title you want to slap on yourself, but it does matter that you acknowledge that there is, in fact, a gross disparity in terms of what the Democratic and Republican Parties have prioritized for the citizens of this country over the last few decades. Any analysis that denies this history cannot be fully honest or effective in dealing with the tangible, real world results of that legacy.
There are no “artificial opposites” between the Republican and Democratic Party; they are very stark contrasts that have very real consequences depending on who wrest control from one cycle to the next. As you say, issues may be divided into sides you do not wish to join, but that is the reality you are confronted with, and it is to your own disadvantage to ignore it.
You aren’t called a lazy centrist because you reject labels. You get that title when you fail to appreciate the complex, nuanced, empirically documented history that produced whatever situation you are bemoaning.
Michael D.
E.D. @ Top:
With the exception of a very few commenters here (and there are a few), this is exactly what the commentariat is like on this blog.
Not to say I haven’t learned a few things from serious people here. I have. It’s just a general observation.
Enjoy posting. If you don’t take a position that is exactly on the left, you will never hear the end of it. The closer you get to the center, the more apt you are to be called names here. John knows it. Doug knows it. The only “debate” that usually happens between commenters here is exactly how more “correct” their side is over people on the right. It’s never that their side might be wrong on occasion.
You don’t even need to read the comments, really. You already know what everyone is going to say. Mostly .There are serious people here that are open to a good debate.
Again though, enjoy. Just know that you will never, ever be accepted here by most commenters. Most of them already have their response to your next post written. They just have to fill in the blanks on whatever the issue is.
beltane
@scarshapedstar: I am in favor of all young women of child bearing age being provided with free contraceptives, preferably the pill or patch. If some parents don’t want to raise their children the right way, the community should step in. Living among the rural Real Americans has been a shocking eye-opener in irresponsible parenting.
morzer
I think this post is mostly admirable, and I respect EDK for laying out his views so honestly. I am troubled by this though:
It seems to me that a classic “pro-life” move is to treat potential and actual as if they were the same thing, and thus legitimize a good deal of talk about “murder” and “infanticide” etc etc, when,in actuality, we are talking about the removal of a group of cells without any claim to person-hood. It is, or should be clear, that there is no philosophical or real life warrant for this move. After all, we don’t grab people off the street and try them as “potential” murderers. If we are going to go down this route, of confusing potential and actual, we end up with embarrassing consequences, whereby e.g. masturbation is, in some sense, the destruction of a potential, i.e. actual, human being. This is an area where I think pro-lifers, of whatever stripe, should be pushed to think through their claims, and actually argue them out, rather than simply being allowed to make them the basis of their case by default, because they rest on an extremely questionable emotional assertion, rather than facts or logic.
Susan of Texas
This isn’t about you and your feelings. You want this, you want that, you want the best of all possible worlds. We don’t have that. Abortion is about who decides whether a woman can abort her baby–the state or the individual. Whether or not anyone likes abortion or wants less abortion or thinks it’s murder is irrelevant. The only person who gets to make the decision is the person carrying the baby. Just like the only person who decides if he or she can have gay sex is the gay man or woman. Nobody else.
Either we get to make decisions for ourselves or we don’t. We vote on these issues and then they are the laws of the land, which must be obeyed if they are constitutional. I decide if I want to take contraceptives or have an abortion, nobody else, because the Constitution says we are entitled to make private decisions privately, without anyone else butting in. The only thing anyone can do about that is to patiently wait until the Supreme Court is right-wing, which might not be much longer. Then the Court can decide that we don’t have a right to privacy–any of it, for any of us. That will be a very, very bad outcome.
And that article about the up-n-coming conservatives–well, you were paired with K-Lo. Enough said.
Elia
I really don’t understand why people were all over E.D.K’s behind previously.
Like he said, he’s very Yglesian, he just doesn’t really identify with the word “liberal” as much as he does the word “conservative” – who cares?
I’ve yet to come across something of his that I thought was tendentious, pernicious or egregiously intellectually flimsy.
Truly, I pray every night to Aqua Buddha that one day the Right in America will be primarily composed of people like him – you know, like the good old days when Broder was a young whippersnapper and Lyndon Johnson and Eisenhower had tickle-fights after the SOTU address.
burnspbesq
This is, at best, tangentially related to the subject of the post … But it’s too funny not to share.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ann-coulter-deemed-too-gay-friendly-worldnetdaily-conference
j low
In general nicely done. As long as you are opposed to laws that restrict the legal right to abortion then who the fuck am I to judge your personally held views on when life starts.
schrodinger's cat
I used to believe this, till we bumbled in to Iraq under false pretenses. Do you still believe that after 8 years of Bush and the hate fest of the last 2 years? Also could you give me one example of one good idea any elected representative of GOP at the national level (Congressman or senator) has had since Obama was elected.
NonyNony
This makes you PRO-CHOICE. Period. This is the bog-standard, run of the mill, mainstream pro-choice boilerplate position. If you believe that women have a choice in the matter you are implicitly on the pro-choice side of the debate – even if you also believe that things should be put into place to make it easier for women to choose to carry a pregnancy to term.
If you call your position pro-life, what the fuck do you think the “pro-choice” position is?
wmsheppa
@Warren Terra: I hardly think that being personally uncomfortable with the idea of abortion marks ED as a zealot, no more than being personally uncomfortable with eating meat but not feeling like vegetarianism should be legislated makes someone a zealot. Would you say the vegetarian is a zealot as well?
Zifnab25
Welcome to the DFH club. I honestly don’t see anything to disagree with.
superking
Didn’t Reihan Salam write a moronic book with Ross Douthat?
wmsheppa
@NonyNony: I think it’s very possible to be both pro-life and pro-choice at the same time, the positions aren’t inconsistent. You can believe that abortion is something that you as an individual are uncomfortable with, but recognize there is enough of a grey area around the entire issue of when life begins that people need to make up their own minds.
Surly Duff
TL;DR
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The thing that drives me nuts about folks who are anti-torture, pro-gay rights, anti-drug war, etc is that all that is secondary to securing tax cuts for Paris Hilton.
j low
@Susan of Texas: Did you read the same post that I read? I heard him say there should be no legal restrictions on abortion.
pragmatism
with wingnuts of all persuasions, if you keep explaining your position cogently and consistently, they’ll twist themselves in knots trying to demonize you and lose the little credibility they have. keep up the good work E.D. having you here is a great object lesson.
chopper
i’ll agree, seems like you’re pretty pro-choice. i think a lot of people don’t like that label (like the term ‘liberal’) because the right has made it poison.
LGRooney
The only ism by which I abide.
Cliff
E.D. Kain:
this is a most excellent place to post a link to this fantastic show:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
jacy
E.D. Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the post on your own blog, especially this:
Boy, do I know that feeling, every day.
That said, I think why you keep getting hammered here on the abortion is tangentially related to that thought. In short, to many of the people here, you choose to be self-described at “pro-life” not because you disagree with the pro-choice stance, but because you find it distasteful to be identified with those who call themselves pro-choice.
I personally don’t use “pro-life” as a descriptor, because it has ceased to be anything but a shortcut to describe crazy right-wingers, who are actually not pro-life, but just anti-choice, anti-sex, anti-woman. Sorry, those are the breaks. We don’t get to personally define terms, regardless of their lack of nuance.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I just find you saying you’re “pro-life” to not necessarily be dishonest, but to be a kind of a diss to those of us who fight for the same things you’re espousing (better pre-natal care, better early child-care, better healthcare for children) and yet have the temerity to consider ourselves “pro-choice.” If you don’t want to legally compel women to take a pregnancy to term, you are by definition pro-choice.
Probably the best thing you could do would be to lose the label and just say “I’m neither pro-life or pro-choice, because those are meaningless terms co-opted by certain groups to bludgeon other groups over the head, but this is where I stand on individual issues…”
Otherwise, your use of “pro-life” is just going to rankle and appear that you want to have your cake and eat it to.
beltane
@wmsheppa: I have five children and am pro-life for myself (did not even have amniocentesis for my last child), but am also fiercely pro-choice because I see no place in a civilized society for forced childbirth. I put abortion into the category of “Bad shit sometimes happens in this world. Deal with it.”
Brachiator
Non-issue. A woman’s choice is not the business or “society” or “culture.”
A woman has an absolute liberty interest over her body. Otherwise, you would have to do random pregnancy checks and immediately sequester any woman found to be pregnant lest she do something that might cause harm to the fetus.
People need to stop wondering what might be going on between a woman’s legs. It ain’t your business.
To be blunt, I am not concerned about definitions of when life begins, etc. Until we reach the point where a woman can flush all her eggs before puberty and put them in an external tank, and fight over what happens to them, the woman is the only person who can make a decision about pregnancy.
In a related aside, it gets a little trickier as to what to do with frozen embryos. Except that as far as I can see, “society” has no right to tell a woman or a couple what they can or cannot do with the frozen embryos. This means that as far as I am concerned, they can throw them in the trash if they choose not to implant them.
Also, too, there shouldn’t be any orphanages in America. Anti-abortion conservatives should adopt every child that has not already been placed.
Or STFU.
Mike in NC
@superking:
‘Grand New Party’
neill
I find it’s nap time when uterusless dicks carve uterusless abstract “pro” or “anti” life theoretical turd balls out of the “issue of abortion.”
Tonybrown74
You know what really annoys me about the Abortion “debate”? It’s the way that some people say the word “abortion”. You can hear the distaste dripping from their mouths when the say it. It’s as if there is this picture in their minds of Shaniqua or Bobby-Sue walking down the street, chain smoking and drinking a 40 oz, 8 months and 28 days pregnant and just decided to walk up to the neighborhood clinic announcing that they, “don’t want the baby no more!”
It’s this silly caricature of what’s in their minds I see every time a Chris Matthews talks about it. And that shit needs to stop. Pregnancy is a health issue. and when America starts treating it as a health issue, we will be able to reduce the number of abortions in this country (with proper sex ed, health care access, counseling, and yes, even abortion services).
Violet
@Michael D.:
What do you mean by this? All sorts of left bashing goes on here, from branding Firedoglake posters “Firebaggers” to eyerolling at Daily Kos posters. Both of those places are much further left than are a lot of people who comment here, imho.
What do you mean by “exactly on the left”?
General Stuck
I put up a link to the Chocolate Drops a few months ago and nary a comment on them. I have nothing to say on abortion, other than I am certain to never have one. One of the few things I’m certain of in this crazy ass country.
JGabriel
E.D. Kain:
Erik, you do realize you’ve just articulated the squishy middle as your defense against assertions that you argue from the squishy middle?
Points for being meta, if intended, but but saying that good or bad ideas can come from the middle or either side, you know, depending, isn’t exactly the most compelling of defenses.
This is the kind of writing J.K. Rowling parodied in the character of Professor Umbridge:
.
NonyNony
@wmsheppa:
Again, you are saying there is a choice. The choice exists. People have to make their own decisions. The government should not be making those decisions for them.
This is a bog standard pro-choice position. There’s no “pro-life” in here when it comes to the political question. Even if you couple it with a desire to see reduced abortions. Even if you couple it with a plan for government outreach to help pay for women to carry births to term and increase funding for adoption as an option. If you say there’s a choice and adults need to make it for themselves you are on the pro-choice side of the argument because the pro-life side of the political argument says that there isn’t a choice to be made because we’re talking about human life and that the government needs to intervene and mandate that there is no choice.
That’s exactly how the abortion argument breaks down in this country – if everyone were “pro-life” like ED Kain was there wouldn’t be an argument because everyone would be in agreement that the government needs to stay out of people’s personal business.
KG
@Midnight Marauder: one disagreement with this line:
I don’t think it is the failure to appreciate the history that got us where we are. I think it is an orchestrated attempt by the two major parties to squeeze out any “third way.” The Republicans and the Democrats have a vested interest in making sure that the false dichotomy of the two party system remains intact. That is why they capped the number of representatives in the House at 435 in the early part of the 20th century. If they would have stuck to the formula laid out in the constitution, we’d have something like 8,000 members of the House. It’d be far more representative (districts would be much, much smaller) and there would be all sorts of minor parties floating around, likely requiring something more akin to coalition governments like we see in most European systems. But the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to limit the size of the House (I need to find and reread the case for the exact reasoning), so we get presented with a false choice between Republicans and Democrats.
The squishy moderate/centrist thing is simply a continuation of that. And, this is one of the few things you do see where “both sides do it” actually applies. The partisans on both sides do not like squishy moderates/centrists because it transforms the game into something other than zero sum. And the fact that so many consider it a game is another point to bemoan another time.
morzer
@Violet:
“Exactly on the left” is a fictional location created by those who enjoy sanctimoniously bleating at others for actually, like, discussing, like, issues and ideas. Ancient geographers put it somewhere between Complacency and La-La Land.
beltane
@Brachiator: Anti-abortion kooks warehousing abandoned infants is not the answer. But it does reinforce my point about the unintended consequences of outlawing abortion.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I agree with this.
Understood. It is a difficult dilemma which any person who thinks seriously about questions of social policy must face.
Mmmm, no. Sorry, but you’ve lost the plot here.\
We do have all sorts of false dualisms, but when it comes to politics, Rep or Dem? isn’t a false dualism, it is a real one.
Like it or not, we live in a small-r republic with a representative small-d democratic system of governance. And one that is for both structural and long standing cultural reasons dualistic. Like it or not, Red and Blue are the ying and yang of US politics. Combine those factors together and the result is that you have to make a choice. Refusing to do so is also a choice, but one that like all the other choices comes with certain consequences, both for yourself and the rest of us. Policy advocacy is one thing, but at the end of the day you’ve still got to make a choice.
In other words, goldfish aren’t on the menu at this dive. And trying to pretend that they are too on the menu, just in special ink that most people can’t see, in the end amounts to choosing peas or carrots, depending on what mood the kitchen is in.
p.a.
I’m going to mirror the NRA’s stance on gun rights for abortion rights: any effort to lessen the right to own/carry/abort is just an incremental step to enact a ban on ownership/reproductive rights. The NRA is full of shit on this point, but the forced childbirth zealots have been clear that, barring a Constitutional Right-to-Life Amendment (which the Republican hypocrites will never give them) they are willing to use incrementalism, with Bill Clinton’s ‘safe, legal, but rare’ being a first step, a wedge that begins to define abortion rights as something society deigns to grant at its discretion.
Omnes Omnibus
It seems like some people – I am not going to point fingers at individuals – have built a straw-kain that they are continuing to attack over this issue. He has stated his position: 1. He finds abortions icky, 2. He would like to reduce their numbers, and 3. He has no interest in limiting access to them. Most people here would agree with points 2 and 3. As far as point 1 goes, who cares?
Midnight Marauder
@wmsheppa:
This seems like a case of being too cute by half, since there are some very clear cut defining positions that separate the two sides. In the instance of being pro-choice, you are espousing a viewpoint that fundamentally encompasses many of the tenets of the “pro-life” position, such as wanting to reduce the overall number of abortions via better sex education and reproductive planning organizations and access to birth control. But fundamentally, the pro-choice position recognizes that people are free to make decisions as the circumstances in their life dictate, or as someone else noted upthread, “Bad shit sometimes happens in this world. Deal with it.”
But while the “pro-life” position can be maintained within the confines of a pro-choice perspective, the same cannot be said for the inverse. The basic “pro-life” position indicates that the fetus, the unborn child, has rights that supersede an actual, real life human being. It would seek, in a multitude of forms, to deny access to the tools and knowledge that have been empirically proven to reduce the number of abortions in a population once implemented. The “pro-life” position would say that when bad shit happens, you are actually without recourse to deal with it, and instead, have only one real outcome to confront: give birth to the child, even if it comes at the expense of your life.
It’s a dangerous game of semantics saying that the “pro-life” and pro-choice positions aren’t inconsistent. As NonyNony said:
beltane
OK people, who put everything in bold? Not as annoying as italics but close. Never mind, it’s gone.
Comrade Dread
@morzer:
Of course, the contrary is likewise true.
There is little that distinguishes a fetus with a functional set of lungs, neural activity and a heartbeat from a newborn infant. Both are completely dependent creatures incapable at that moment of abstract reasoning and self-awareness who will be ‘parasites’ on their parents.
So, conversely, if we take some of the pro-choice arguments to their absurd ends, you might end up giving parents the legal option to abort through age 29 or later.
I’m in agreement with you.
Despite what the GOP likes to tell social conservatives, there really is no political will or likelihood of overturning Roe v. Wade, so abortion is with us for the long term, whether I like the current law or not.
So I think the path you outline is the most likely way to reduce abortion to those where it is a medical and psychological necessity.
Likewise, I’m in agreement with you that the term pro-life should include more than abortion and should be defined by one’s attitude toward war, torture, the death penalty, and how we treat the sick, the poor, and the struggling among us.
Omnes Omnibus
@JGabriel: It doesn’t mean he is wrong.
General Stuck
I think I disagree with this in the meta sense. There is a war of ideology for control of this country, and I am four square against the true believers on the right and will fight them to my last breath, in any fashion that takes hold. But I hope to never have my mind close to those with open ones whatever their pol persuasion. That way lies soul death imo, regardless of being right on issues.
So you keep on there Kain, I will agree with you when I can and disagree when that is the case. So long as you keep up your end of the thinking man’s bargain. Though I am about turned off enough on politics to turn away from them at any moment these days.
flukebucket
Hell. The man once said that he had never, ever voted for a Republican. I wish to God I could say that.
wmsheppa
@NonyNony: Fair enough. In general political terms, I am indeed 100% pro-choice.
I take issue that the anti-choice right has made pro-life mean anti-choice. I just think that the whole debate is a hell of a lot more nuanced than the way it’s treated in the political domain by either ‘side’, and so i prefer to use more nuanced terms to spell out where I stand on abortion.
Wow, that paragraph sounds like a lot of philisophical wankery, but that’s life.
@Beltane couldn’t agree more.
morzer
@Comrade Dread:
But that’s really the point – you’ve defined a fetus in terms of certain attributes that it must possess to be like a baby. This is quite a bit different from simply stating that a fetus, any fetus at any stage is potentially a human being and must therefore be treated as a human being. My objection is that by confusing two things, and being vague about the fetus, pro-lifers license a good deal of moral blackmail that isn’t based on much but emotionalism.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: And then he tagged on a bunch of nuanced musings about personhood and the meaning of this and that. I don’t have a uterus. What anyone with a uterus does with her uterus ain’t my business, nor the State’s, nor ED’s. Don’t give a fuck about her motivations for doing what she does with it; it neither harms me nor picks my pocket. Her body, her business. We’re free to think whatever we wish about it–and Erik’s position is both pretty comprehensive and on-the-whole respectable for someone who identifies as pro-life–but it’s just fucking wanking. Opining on the nature of personhood et cetera is primarily an internal debate and ought to have no bearing on whether or not women have the right to control their own fucking bodies. (All possible shades of interpretation intended) :)
j low
Most people who call themselves pro-life are not. They are anti-choice, pro death penalty, war mongering zealots. Shouldn’t we (from a semantic perspective at least) be thrilled that a self described conservative is calling himself pro-life and actually means it? I just don’t see how that could be a bad thing.
JGabriel
Omnes Omnibus:
The positions in the paragraph I quoted are so finely balanced as to cancel each other out. It’s hard to be wrong when you’ve effectively said nothing at all. That’s why I criticized the writing rather that than the positions.
.
matoko_chan
lie.
your side is completely bereft of good ideas.
your sides ideas embroiled us in two meaningless unwinnable wars that are bleeding us white.
your side built the Econopalypse That Ate Americas Jobs.
your side won by gaming the system the founders built..by demagoguing your low information racist base.
Ryans roadmap is a joke.
this is the reason you all fought HCR like tasmanian devils on crack.
this is your leadership.
and now you can see a bit into the future and you want to change the rules before the demographic timer runs out.
well fuck you.
Conservatism DIAF.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: I suggest you go back and re read the part about not passing laws to restrict a woman’s right to get an abortion.
Paris
Bemoan false dualisms and then create this list:
Shorter posts that don’t say anything please.
Midnight Marauder
@KG:
Well, in all honesty, I wasn’t really talking about the infrastructure of electoral politics with that comment, although I understand your point. I was rather focusing on pundits, political analysts and bloviators, who take positions against issues and argue them as though they occurred in some kind of historical void. For example, take this statement by Kain in his post above:
This doesn’t even fucking mean anything. “Good ideas may come from either side.” Awesome. Please name the good ideas articulated by the Republican Party in the last 18 months, and also too, the last 8 years. Because I am sure many people here are dying to know what those “good ideas” are. Quadrupling down on the ol’ Southern Strategy? Taking a position of rank Do Nothingism in the face of a superpower teetering on the brink of being incapacitated? By all means, share the good ideas the modern Republican Party is offering. I’m pretty sure the biggest and strongest criticism of theirs the past two years almost now is that they are a bunch of know-nothing, obstructionist assholes who are completely unserious about governing.
This is what I am talking about. Either you are delusional or you are being intellectually dishonest and vacuous in your abstract hypothesizing. But you can’t ignore the fact that in the real world, good ideas have not been coming from both sides, and to pretend otherwise is to perpetrate a false compromise that absolves them of the rightful stigma they should feel for being so politically unserious.
Roger Moore
@morzer:
It seems to me that the issue is trickier than you’re making it out to be. If an early stage embryo is not a person but a baby is, then there must have been a transition to personhood somewhere during pregnancy. If you want to make permissibility of abortion contingent on personhood, you still need to figure out when the fetus becomes a person. That’s obviously not easy, since it’s probably a gradual transition rather than a bright line. So people one one side or the other try to create an arbitrary bright line at the point they’d prefer, either conception or birth.
soonergrunt
When are you going to pick up the welcome gift I bought you?
wmsheppa
@Midnight Marauder: You’re right, it is a dangerous game of semantics. If I had to fill out a survey or take a poll asking me what I am, I would respond pro-choice. I just don’t like the you’re with us or you’re against us game that abortion has turned into in this country, any more than I like the way that the war on terror turned into the same thing. I think that’s a reasonable position to take.
Crashman
E.D., I have almost the exact same view of abortion that you do, but I consider myself pro-choice. Like other commenters have said earlier, because of the way the abortion debate has been framed over the last few decade or so, you pretty much have to support making abortion illegal in order to be considered pro-life; this idea has become a central support pillar of the pro-life position. It’s like Sullivan’s ridiculous insistence that he’s still “conservative.” Sorry, Sully. Whatever you think you are, it ain’t what “conservative” means anymore. Same with pro-life; perhaps it could have accommodated our viewpoint ten years ago, but not anymore. The living definition of the term has changed, and people with our conception of what it means are too few to lay any claim on the term anymore. We are pro-choice by default.
duck-billed placelot
@Susan of Texas: Nicely articulated.
The problem with E.D. Kain’s “Pro-Life” position is pretty much the same as his “Conservative” position. These words do not mean what you think they mean.
Look, guy is a very good writer. He makes plausible arguments in a pleasing manner. But applying self-labels that espouse positions in almost direct opposition to what you believe is dirty and counterproductive and f-ing maddening. Being a reasonable and friendly conservative helps the people working for the opposite of what you say you believe in. Claiming to support the legality of abortion and citizen’s rights while terming yourself pro-life helps those who would strip women of control of their own bodies. It is a form of misinformation, of propaganda, and in a time in which we are losing rights (and make no mistake, the Nelson “compromise” on HCR restricted citizen’s rights), helping those who are doing everything in their power to return women to back alleys, coat hangers, and constant fear, helping those people is incredibly immoral.
Kain is setting himself up as the pundit, conservative form of the New Republic. “Even pro-life conservative E.D. Kain agrees women should have rights!” some disingenuous conservative ass will say, neatly sweeping under the rug all the pro-life activists who foment violence, lie to women, and want to end birth control as much as abortion. Except in this case, the disingenuous part should probably apply to Kain.
Common Sense
OT but can’t.. stop.. laughing. This has to be satire, right? It sounds like Trey Parker wrote the lyrics.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
That transition is called “birth,” the time when the fetus exits the womb and lives on its own without being physically tethered to its mother for nutrition and oxygen.
It’s really not that difficult: when the fetus is no longer attached to the uterus via the umbilical cord, it is a separate person. While it is still attached, it is not a separate person.
morzer
@Roger Moore:
Actually, you’ve just repeated my point. It is more tricky and complex than Kain makes out with his sleight of hand about “potential” human beings. I want to see a more open discussion from him – why should we treat potential human beings as actual human beings? At what stage does the fetus merit this? What’s the basis for his argument here? I want to see the full debate.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: Yeah, it’s in there. All I’m saying is that that’s the only relevant or interesting part of what he has to say on the issue. All the rest is wankery. Personal feelings don’t count. I disagree with him that health services ought to be geared towards encouraging women to bring all pregnancies to term, but that’s quibbling. (Health agencies ought to be geared towards supporting womens’ choices, either way, IMO.) Wanking about what women should do or ought to do is insulting to women and confuses the debate, which is (I’m gonna guess) what frustrated Susan in the first place.
Comrade Dread
@morzer: Well, of course I have, and that really is the central disagreement between people who are pro-life and people who are pro-choice: when does a zygote/fetus/baby attain personhood and equally valid human rights?
Most pro-life people define this at conception. Most pro-choice people define this after birth or whenever the child could survive on its own without being a ‘parasite’ on its mother.
My point in the previous post was purposefully hyperbolic in the same fashion that yours was to demonstrate that both lines which are conventionally drawn are usually arbitrary.
morzer
@duck-billed placelot:
Except that Kain isn’t doing this. Nowhere in this piece does he defend violence against women, and nor does he want abortion to be illegal. He’s explicitly against that.
.
Surely that was clear enough on the point!
suzanne
E.D., though I was all up over your ass last night (and I stand by that), I actually have very little problem with what you’ve written here. It sounds like you have a fairly nuanced position on abortion, which I can appreciate.
The two issues I do take are:
1) If one doesn’t seek to use the law to interfere with a woman’s right to an abortion, I wish those people would describe themselves, at least when discussing the political issue, as pro-choice, full stop, without qualification or equivocation. I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t appreciate that abortion can be a complex personal moral issue. But personal morality isn’t what’s being discussed. I am pro-drug legalization, even though I have made the personal choice to no longer use drugs, and don’t especially want my kids using them, either. But my political position is clear on the issue, so I describe myself as being pro-legalization, and what I do personally is immaterial to the discussion. In my view, it undermines the expressly private nature of these decisions to conflate one’s political views with the personal nature of the choice at hand, and it’s also a lazy way of looking to make common cause with those who hold directly oppositional political views, when in reality, the political issue is clear: either you’re willing to use the law to take away the right to abortion, or you’re not. And if you are willing to use the law to that end, you’re an oppressor, and that *should* be considered socially unacceptable. Full stop.
2) The other reason I object to describing oneself as “pro-choice politically, but pro-life personally” is because the term “pro-choice” already encompasses every single possible choice one can make for oneself. The anti-choice crowd has done a bang-up job conflating “pro-choice” with “pro-baby-killing”, and that sort of stereotyping has been very harmful to the feminist movement and to women in general. It’s to the point now where the vast majority of women are embarrassed about their abortions and don’t talk about them, EVER, because public judgment is so fierce and cruel. It’s to the point where women walking into a Planned Parenthood to pick up a prescription for birth control pills have dead-fetus dolls thrown at them. It’s to the point where it’s considered okay for the pharmacist to refuse to fill your birth control pills that you take to shrink your painful ovarian cysts because he thinks you’re a whore. We need people, especially opinion-makers (including prominent bloggers) to say that they’re pro-choice. We need that term to be reclaimed and clarified if we want women to make the sensible decisions free of coersion that would actually make abortion rarer. The baby-killing rhetoric is intellectually dishonest, but is also actively harmful to women, and I think that the more people that clearly reject it, the closer we come to achieving the goal of “safe, legal, and rare”.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
I’m not sure how “no longer enclosed in its mother’s body” is arbitrary. Either the fetus is inside the uterus or it’s out. You don’t have too many women walking around with a fetus poking halfway out.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: What’s the disagreement then? What are blogs for if not for wankery?
morzer
@Comrade Dread:
Right, which was just why I wanted to call attention to that line of “argument” by Kain. I think he grants himself too many of his pet assumptions, and it leaves a large area in his argument looking questionable at best.
General Stuck
Maybe Kain is the right wing Neo sent to destroy libtard Zion and restore the matrix pods to the corporate machines. Or, maybe, this is sometimes a lesser notion.
never get out of the boat
I ain’t goin’ I ain’t goin
matoko_chan
Give up one single ‘good’ conservative idea, Kain.
stand and deliver.
KG
@Midnight Marauder: I won’t disagree with you that the GOP has been worthless for most of the last decade. They offer nothing but retreaded ideas from a generation ago that are ill suited to the contemporary world. It is sad and pathetic, and the reason that I no longer consider myself a member of the party or movement.
Midnight Marauder
@wmsheppa:
I would agree that it’s a reasonable position to take, and I would imagine very few people enjoy the culture war battleground that abortion has become over the years. But much like you said, that “you’re either with us or against us” dynamic was created by a dedicated group of zealots who have no qualms with murdering and assassinating their foes in cold blood, especially if it means advancing their political agenda.
They may have raised the stakes to this level, but it damn sure doesn’t mean you have to let them own the issue anymore.
Shinobi
Shorter E.D. on Abortion:
“I’m pro-choice, but I don’t like to call myself pro-choice because that makes me sound like a liberal, and calling myself pro-life makes me sound morally superior.”
morzer
@matoko_chan:
You do realize that if ED Kain reads your attempted stick-up, he’s probably going to fall off his chair laughing at you? God knows, I did.
You and whose army, kid?
duck-billed placelot
@morzer: Read what I wrote, please.
By using labels that describe political positions he does not actually hold, Kain helps people who do work for restricting the rights of women, foment violence against health care providers, etc. He helps them by being a reasonable, unobjectionable face for oppressive/intellectually bankrupt/morally repugnant positions. All while claiming to, personally, believe totally reasonable (opposite) things.
morzer
@duck-billed placelot:
Except that none of this is in Kain’s piece. It’s your fantasy of what you think the Machiavellian Scary Conservative Masquerading As A Reasonable Human Being ED Kain really thinks. There is an important difference.
matoko_chan
@suzanne: i’d add this.
4. if you really think abortion is murder, Kain, seek to prosecute the murderers.
that means the women that seek abortions or use abortifact birth control like the 5day pill.
otherwise stfu, because it isnt your body and it isn’t your bidness, and it seems like you want to treat women like retarded children that need to be protected from making their own decisions.
abortion is legal in this country.
its the law.
why don’t conservatives seek to criminalize abortion seekers instead of legal abortion providers?
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne:
I will clarify:
1 minute before birth, the fetus had a functional set of lungs, a heartbeat, neural activity, movement, the potential to become a human adult, but was not capable of abstract thought, self-awareness, or surviving on its own without substantial sacrifice and succor provided by its mother.
1 minute after birth, all of the same applies.
So, it seems like a pretty arbitrary line to me to say that now the child gets human rights when it still possesses the exact same attributes it did two minutes beforehand and only the location has changed.
Sentient Puddle
Man, some of you put way too much weight in labels.
General Stuck
I always thought fealty to symbolism was the weapon of the right. Guess not.
matoko_chan
@morzer: wallah….you have no understanding of niccolo at all.
j low
@duck-billed placelot: That’s a classic Fox news move. “It doesn’t matter what he actually said or what he actually believes, because really he’s a merkin hating, commie, islamofascist, terrorist, blonde baby raper.
morzer
@matoko_chan:
What would I know? I only read the Italian version….
Shinobi
@morzer: The point is not that ED THINKS that he’s misrepresenting the opinions of Pro Life individuals. He’s not some evil monster. What he is is a guy misrepresenting his opinions by applying a label that does not actually apply. And his misrepresentation of his own opinions has consequences.
While I understand ED’s attraction to the label Pro-Life, words have meaning, movements have real solid positions, and you can’t just appropriate their label because it makes your position sound nicer.
duck-billed placelot
@morzer: Jesus Christ, you’re being thick. No, I am not saying that Kain is pretending to have all the reasonable opinions he has.* I am objecting to his using obfuscating and false labels for his opinions, because those labels will allow OTHERS to point to his reasonable opinions as cover for their own awfulness.
*Although some of his opinions are not reasonable, his pro-choice abortion stance is very reasonable.
JGabriel
Sentient Puddle:
Possibly, but given that we’re all communicating here via text, an emphasis on words and what they mean seems germane.
.
General Stuck
@Shinobi:
Can’t tell you the joy when my movements have solid positions.
Brad Hanon
I can’t fault E.D.’s position on abortion–my late mother felt exactly the same way. She thought abortion was wrong, but also thought that she didn’t have the right to impose that belief on other people.
She felt rather vindicated by studies showing that banning abortion doesn’t reduce the number of abortions one jot or tittle, that education and contraception are the only things that do. And she was appalled when I told her that no pro-life organization in the U.S., not even Democrats For Life, would express support for contraception. It’s that latter point that really tells you where political pro-lifers (as opposed to personal pro-lifers like E.D. and my mom) are coming from.
morzer
@Shinobi:
Except that he isn’t mis-labelling himself at all. He’s explained why he prefers the term, and the sense in which he uses it. He has every right to do so, and he’s done it openly and honestly. You can’t just tie a term to one definition or understanding. Think of how Fox News presents liberals – and how liberals see themselves. Same label – different definition.
Midnight Marauder
@Sentient Puddle:
Methinks the legacies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would disagree with you.
morzer
@General Stuck:
General, your response made me laugh out loud. Nicely done, sir!
Shinobi
@Sentient Puddle: Labels have meaning.
If I put the wrong label on the spices in my spice rack I end up using cinnamon when I wanted nutmeg. Sure they are both brown, but they are NOT THE SAME THING.
And if all the nutmeg went around claiming to be cinnamon we’d randomly get blindsided by cinnamon in dishes that should have Nutmeg.
If someone posting on a popular blog about politics, or a politician labels themselves that label should reflect reality, not their own personal definition of what that label means because they think that label sounds better.
duck-billed placelot
@Shinobi: Or, read what Shinobi said for a nicer version of what I’m saying.
I do think that it’s disingenuous for Kain to use these labels, as it allows him to pass, as it were, in all company. To a conservative audience, he can simply say he’s pro-choice. To an audience that cares about citizen’s rights, he can say that no, really he supports citizen’s rights. He just prefers this term that means the opposite.
Note: I am not saying he doesn’t hold the opinions he articulates. His labels, however, are bullshit.
morzer
@duck-billed placelot:
No, I am just not very impressed by your fabrication of an ED Kain out of your imagination, rather than reading and responding to what the man actually wrote. If you can’t debate him honestly, I assume you don’t have much faith in your own positions.
Susan of Texas
@TheNickronomicon:
Kain is the epitome of High Broderism, finding that extremely lucrative middle ground that supports the elite while pretending to sympathize with the masses. If he is pro-choice, he is pro-choice. That is liberal, not conservative. But he won’t say that, because that’s not centrist, and centrist is where the money is.
Julian Sanchez said it well, when he was making excuses for being a dreadful journalist:
The Savvy Tribe publishes in conservative forums, links with approval to right-wing conservatives, and runs in horror from being labelled liberal, yet claims to be neutral. Kain’s Savvy Tribe posture pleases nobody and fools nobody.
KDP
Y’know what. I think that all of you who are nitpicking about EDK’s referencing himself as ‘pro-life’ and then articulating a stance that:
a) supports the right of a woman to choose
b) supports social supports and resources for the family
c) disavows support for torture, death penalty and war
are allowing those who define pro-life as solely about an opposition to abortion to define the terms of the discussion.
Why are you doing that?
Why can we not strive to take back the term pro-life to be defined as personal and social positions that promote the health and well-being of the individual, based on their individual needs. This may mean that an abortion is the right choice for some; it may mean that carrying to term is the right choice for others. To be truly pro-life requires respecting life at all stages, and I think it includes being pro-choice with respect to providing a woman with the opportunities and resources to make a clear decision about her options with respect to a pregnancy, whether intended or not.
I do not like it that those who seek to impose their own standards regarding pregnancy and contraception are defining the terms by which we can have a discussion. I’d like to think of pro-life as addressing a broader realm of human concerns than just the interval between conception and childbirth. This seems to be how Mr. Kain is using the term. I cite:
Thank you, Mr. Kain, for a reasonable response to yesterday’s thread.
Three-nineteen
@Comrade Dread:
You are comparing without contrasting. The differences between before birth and after birth are 1) breathing on its own, 2) not physically attached to the mother. Those are the points Mnemosyne used, and you ignored them.
Comrade Dread
@Shinobi: Except that politicians have been doing the same thing for years: calling themselves personally Pro-Life, but legally supporting the pro-Choice position. Either as a way to acknowledge reality (abortion isn’t going anywhere even though they find it repugnant), or as a way to weasel out of the issue and try and appease both sides.
Sentient Puddle
@JGabriel:
Maybe, but it strikes me that the more germane thing to be parsing is the words that are part of the substance. Focusing on just the label is weaksauce.
Bob
@arguingwithsignposts:I’ve tried to point this out to E.D. often. Don’t give up. He may come around.
E.D., a post on how you define free trade would be nice.
The Moar You Know
@matoko_chan: Don’t you ever get tired of yelling at people?
It should be painfully obvious to you by now, as it is to everyone else here, that Mr. Kain is not a run-of-the-mill conservatard.
If you feel like excoriating everyone who’s voted for a Republican once in their lives, you can start with Mr. Cole and then bitch out almost everyone that posts here.
Better yet, you could set up shop over at Daily Kos. It’s a good place for that sort of thing. They specialize in reflexive, mindless groupthink bashing over there. It feels good but gets old real fast. Kind of like your posts every time Mr. Kain posts a piece.
Save the list (a good one by the way) for when the real wingnuts show up. They will, soon enough.
Shinobi
@morzer:
I just don’t understand why someone gets to call themselves whatever they want, because they think one word sounds better. I mean I think African-American sounds way cooler than Caucasian, and I am sure if tried could come up with some vague rationalization for calling myself an African American. But at the end of the day I’m still white, and all that BS about preferring a different label just makes me sound like an asshole.
morzer
@duck-billed placelot:
Both you and Shinobi are being enormously dishonest by trying to force your pre-determined labels onto Kain. He explained why he uses the term he does, and how he understands that term. If you can’t deal with what he actually says in his arguments, admit it. Don’t fake up some idiotic controversy because you have the paranoid idea that ED Kain is really trying to cover for others. He’s laying out his view – after being badgered about it on these threads for about four days now. You asked for his views, now do him the honor of discussing them and taking him seriously, without trying to write some idiotic Dan Brown novel about it all. This ain’t a prequel for The Lost Label FFS.
Chuck Butcher
EDK, I’ve taken the liberty of slapping you on multiple occasions, this time I’m going to make a bit more nuanced complaint and it regards the term “free market.” There is laissez faire capitalism and there is managed capitalism as concepts. The concept of laissez faire capitalism has never been utilized – not ever – not even Adam Smith regarded it as desirable. No market is free in this world, every market is managed in one form or another.
Market management or managed capitalism happens in the range from the point of a gun to tax policy to tariffs to subsidies and exchange rate manipulation. There is nothing new in this country about managed capitalism – the fight between Jefferson and Hamilton in Washington’s administration was about whose benefit capitalism in this country would be managed for. This has never stopped.
The term “free market” is a plutocratic wet dream of a meaningless concept. It does not, has not, and will not ever exist. It is a goddam talking point and using it as though it has meaning plays into the meaningless rhetoric of a group whose agenda you don’t seem to support in the least.
Using their terms in definition of an issue plays into their propaganda rather than advancing policy ideas. You cannot have a meaningful exchange of ideas when one of the pieces is an out and out lie. You bury your idea underneath the meaningless rhetoric of a side that you don’t even agree with and you will get castigated for it.
I will give you another example, I personally dislike what abortion is but I will not support an effort to control a woman’s body. It is not as meaningless as flushing a toilet and it is a morally complex issue with all kinds of bad outcomes competing on all sides – IMHO. I will not use the rhetorical device of the right, pro-choice, even though I prefer life to the alternatives because I don’t mean what they do with that term. The term pro-life may more accurately describe your view than theirs, with the inclusion of war and capital punishment in their movement, but it does not accurately describe your political stance in light of their politics.
I’m sorry, if you use the rhetorical devices of a group you will be held to their definition of those terms rather than your own. The reason is simple – language is communication and your readers are not to be expected to redefine words for your exception, the reader is supposed to understand you to mean what words are understood to mean. The Right uses words for a reason that is divorced from logic; it is about the emotional response to the word not the logic of it. Free market and pro-life are such words, their logical definition has nothing to do with what is meant or the end, which is an emotional response divorced from the actual outcomes of such a policy. In what rational world would pro-life include pro-capital punishment? In what rational world would anyone in the bottom 80% of the economic scale support laissez faire capitalism re-badged as “free market”? Yet you use the terms? Please, write what you mean and give a miss to getting whacked for what you don’t even believe…
I give you props for your straight ahead addressing of criticisms in this instance. And yes, good ideas do come from surprising places including the right – lately extremely vanishingly rarely, but … a closed mind is not progressive.
Comrade Dread
@Three-nineteen: Because they are irrelevant.
Plenty of human beings require the use of oxygen or other breathing aids and I seriously doubt we would start questioning whether they were persons.
And attachment also falls under ‘location’. The child is just as dependent upon its mother for food, warmth, and survival and, is, in fact, even more demanding outside of the womb.
Shinobi
@Comrade Dread: Yah, and it drives Pro choice and pro life people CRAZY when they do it.
morzer
@Shinobi:
So why did you call yourself Shinobi then? Since when were you a Japanese scout for a feudal army? Hmm? What Kain is doing is absolutely normal – he lays out his position, explains how he defines it and the term he prefers to use. You can’t ask him to be more open than that.
Midnight Marauder
@morzer:
Except that it isn’t just about grossly slandering someone with positions they don’t actually hold. There are real tenets of belief that come with the “pro-life” position and a great deal of them directly contradict the notions E.D. Kain endorses in this post. The “pro-life” position in this country, politically speaking. believes abortion is outright murder of a human being and that it should be illegal in almost all cases, with only the rarest of exemptions. This is completely antithetical to the pro-choice perspective.; it is fundamentally about giving you the right to choose the path the best suits your needs and interests.
You can’t just call yourself “pro-life” as though the term exists in some kind of nebulous vacuum without a real political meaning and history. It is indication not of your actual beliefs, but rather, your apprehension of associating yourself with people, organizations, and concepts you find unseemly or unenlightened.
Susan of Texas
@Susan of Texas:
The second to the last paragraph is part of the blockquote–my editing didn’t work.
Shinobi
@morzer: I’m not being dishonest, it really REALLY bothers me when people walk around saying white is black because they like the word white better. I don’t actually care if they have good reasons to use the wrong term, it is still wrong, and I refudiate their use of incorrect terminology. ED can rationalize using a term that means something completely different from what he is intending it to mean all he wants, that doesn’t make him less wrong.
MTiffany
It’s also important to me that our culture moves toward fewer abortions by choice rather than through the blunt arm of the law.And failing magical thinking, is the blunt arm of the law an acceptable fall-back? You know what’s important to me? Getting our culture to move toward telling people to keep their noses the fuck out of other people’s private lives.
slag
I’m pro-choice and I approve this message. And what suzanne said.
I, for one, have gotten over the idea that abortion is a debatable topic. It’s not. Women are more important than fetuses. End of story. It’s long past time we stop debating this point.
Shinobi
@morzer: really?
Look, I don’t believe in god, but my whole family wishes I were still catholic. I could walk around talking about how I am catholic because i was raised catholic and baptized even though i don’t share any of their actual beliefs. But that wouldn’t change that I’m an atheist, and it would probably piss off catholics, and atheists alike. That’s what ED is doing. And it’s not like I can stop him, but i can observe that he sounds like an asshole.
morzer
@Midnight Marauder:
The pro-life position may only mean one thing to you. There’s no reason to think that this is true for those who hold pro-life positions. Consider the label Democrat, for an instructive comparison. You really think Heath Shuler and Howard Dean are one and the same thing? How about Teddy Kennedy and Ben Nelson? Kain has defined what he means, and why he uses the term. If you want to argue with his case pro and con on the merits, make the argument – but for the love of God come up with something a bit more interesting and challenging than:
Mr Kain, your labels are a disgrace, because I said so. And everyone knows all the pro-life people are exactly the same anyway”.
j low
@Shinobi:
O Lordy Jeebus, where does one start?
TheNickronomicon
@MTiffany: This. A thousand times, this. Personal feelings about abortion are great! Think and discuss amongst yourselves. But they ought to have no bearing on the fundamental question of what women are allowed to do with their bodies and lives.
Edited to add: And they should be allowed to do the same thing as dudes–whatever the fuck they want.
morzer
@Shinobi:
No, he sounds like someone building an honest argument and showing you why he says what he says. Can you make a case against on the merits, or is it all just a matter of pouting because he thinks for himself about labels and terms?
arguingwithsignposts
@Bob:
The frustrating thing is that Kain put the huge elephant of the abortion discussion in the SAME FUCKING POST as the lesser mouse of his alleged high broderism, so nobody’s discussing the absurdity of Yglesias’ magic pony formula of liberaltarianism or EDK’s “good ideas can come from both sides” equivalency because they’re all hung up on the human reproductive process.
sigh.
ETA: some of what Chuck Butcher said, also, too.
matoko_chan
@KDP:
huh? Kain is supporting his bases goal of taking our control over our own bodies away KDP. Douthat, ED and McMegan are exactly the same. they give the conservative base cover to try to impose their bad, wrong, evil, views on the rest of us.
his fellow travelers want to outlaw abortion. if ED disagrees, he should call them out, or change sides. he doesn’t do either.
he comes here and talks out of both sides of his mouth.
heres my take.
works for SSM too.
its not my bidness how ED feels about abortion. i don’t give a shit.
It IS, however, my bidness that he is giving cover to his fellow travelers’ misogynistic chattel-slaver christofascist attempts to try to take away my personal autonomous rights over my own body.
Shinobi
@morzer: Pretty much just pouting.
Look, if he wants to use some in between independent label like pro-women’srighttochooseandbabieslivesandwarmfuzzyfeelings I am ALL ABOUT THAT. I think Pro-choice, Pro abortion anti choice pro life, all these labels are old and crappy.
But pro-life already has a pretty well defined meaning. I’m not saying he shouldn’t use labels that express his positions better. He absolutely should, but he should probably not use labels that actually mean the exact opposite of what he thinks.
duck-billed placelot
@morzer: Neither Shinobi nor I were the pre-determiners for these labels. Words have meanings, yay! Dishonesty is pretending something is that isn’t…like Kain pretending he’s pro-life which, in our country, today, means anti-choice. When he clearly isn’t and wrote very clearly about how he isn’t anti-choice. Politicians have, as Comrade Dread pointed out, been pulling this game for a while, which is one of the major reasons, I think, that we’re losing on the issue. “Everyone can agree that abortions are horrible” is both false and terrible p.r.
It’s not dishonest to point this out. Or to object to it. If challenging him on his self-described labels not matching up with his self-articulated positions isn’t engaging honestly with his writing, then .. then .. then I guess you’re not actually interested in what Shinobi and I are writing but instead want everybody to be nice to Kain?
Shinobi: I’m not trying to speak for you, but since he addressed us both I tossed your name in as well.
Turbulence
Regarding the words have meaning debate:
Let’s say EDK tried to run for the leadership of one of the big pro-life organizations in the US. Does anyone think he would have a shot at winning? Of course not. Because the minute EDK explained his pro-life beliefs, he’d be escorted out of the building by people saying “that’s not what pro-life means”. So pro-choice folks think EDK is using the wrong word. Pro-life folks think EDK is using the wrong word. How often do these groups agree on anything?
I’m delighted that EDK shares my policy preferences in this area. That is, by far, more important than names. But we live in a country where many many people are extremely ignorant about policy. Lots of people with liberal beliefs call themselves conservatives. We don’t need to confuse these people anymore than they already are. Just use the right word to describe your beliefs. If you don’t want to do that, please explain why you get to call yourself a pro-lifer when 99% of all pro-lifers reject your policy preferences.
j low
@MTiffany: It might help to read the post.
Sentient Puddle
OK see here’s my main issue with this instance of taking issue with the specific label in question (“pro-life”). It just doesn’t matter. Erik has elaborated his own personal view that more or less falls in line with the left (details aside to be sure, but honestly, I don’t care enough about these). Pro-life, pro-choice, that label wouldn’t matter if he were a member of congress voting on some abortion bill because his vote would be much more favorable to us than any on the right who could be reasonably described as vehemently anti-abortion. So, as far as the politics go, as elaborated by @Shinobi:
So a politician labels himself pro-life inaccurately and…co-ops who? Voters on the right who will be falsely lulled into this idea that said politician is their friend when in reality he’s our friend? Why do we have a problem with this? This seems to me to be something the anti-abortion crowd should be bitching about instead of us.
Note I say this particular label. There are plenty of labels that I’m much more critical of (“Ground Zero Mosque” anyone?). But as far as bitching about someone here who claims he’s pro-life but isn’t sufficiently pro-life, that has got to be one of the most inane and pointless arguments I have seen around here.
geg6
So…
You’re pro-choice when it comes to abortion.
You’re against the death penalty and unnecessary wars.
You’re a social liberal. Classic social liberal. Not a leftist, but a liberal.
You’re biggest problem is that you can call yourself anything you want, but you seem to call yourself things which you are not, at least not according to the usual, accepted definitions of those words. My advice is, when discussing these issues, to use the terminology the vast majority of us understand without days and days and posts and posts explaining and re-explaining why you aren’t what we assume you to be when you use well-known terms in unusual ways that we don’t understand without the incessant and interminable explanations.
Midnight Marauder
@morzer:
First of all, the case has been made at length without resorting to the bullshit non sequitur arguments you keep throwing out, like the quoted one above and this little gem earlier:
Clearly, you lack a basic notion of what we are discussing.
I am not just making up some kind of random definition for “pro-life.” The term comes with decades upon decades of history in this country, complete with political propagandists, actual political fights over real world situations, and intimidation and eventual murder of political opponents. You do not get to pretend that these things are not inherently associated and linked to this term because it doesn’t suit your proclivities. You cannot divorce a term from it’s real world legacy because you can’t deign to associate yourself with the movement that actually reflects the principles you are advocating. And you most certainly do not get to whitewash the fact that the “pro-life” position, as it is referred to, has consistently advocated and condoned murdering “political opponents,” aka – regular Americans who are also fighting for what they believe in, just via the legal recourses our society provides to us.
What you keep arguing is that “pro-life” has some kind of flexible, nebulous meaning, when all facts to the contrary demonstrate that is has an unflinchingly rigid core ideology that stands diametrically opposed to many of the policy goals E.D. Kain would like to see implanted some day.
HumboldtBlue
You’re not pro-life, you’re anti-abortion, just face up to it all fucking-ready. You’re not a woman, it’s not your fucking body and it’s none of your fucking business what a woman chooses to do with hers. So save the fucking “please, I am a reasonable douchebag who does not believe women are capable of being moral agents on their own.”
duck-billed placelot
Note to self: Cannot start comment, refill coffee mug, and finish comment on BJ and still expect to keep up with the conversation.
morzer
@Shinobi:
Except that he’s laid out why he thinks what he thinks. Honestly, I don’t think it matters whether he calls himself “pro-life” or “Chairman of the Elect Emperor Xenu committee”. It’s the content of his argument which matters. I don’t like the ambiguity of the way he conflates actual and potential human beings, and I think he ought to make a more open and honest case about this – but the label he applies really isn’t a big issue either way. Overall, he’s said some good things in this post, and I wish people would respond to the post, rather than just going off into conspiracy theories about the “real” ED Kain or debates about labels.
Three-nineteen
@Comrade Dread:
I like that the points contradicting your argument are irrelevant. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, I’m just saying that you totally failed to engage the points that Mnemosyne made.
To your argument – the one thing that makes this so difficult is “dependent on the mother”. People who are on oxygen do not get physically reattached to their mothers to help them breathe. As long as the mother is the only person who can fulfill a fetus’s needs, the question of whether or not she can be legally forced to is going to be tricky.
j low
Pro life does have a pretty well defined meaning.
Main Entry: 1pro
Pronunciation: \ˈprō\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural pros
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin, preposition, for — more at for
Date: 15th century
1 : an argument or evidence in affirmation
2 : the affirmative side or one holding it
Main Entry: 1life
Pronunciation: \ˈlīf\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural lives \ˈlīvz\
Etymology: Middle English lif, from Old English līf; akin to Old English libban to live — more at live
Date: before 12th century
1 a : the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b : a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c : an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction
Cain
@Sentient Puddle:
They do. Putting the conservative label got people all foamy and stuff. I find that these labels are really trite and that we are a lot more complex than these silly labels. There are parts of me that people would consider very conservative, and other parts of me that is total DFH.
In the end, we’re just a product of our environment and that defines us.
cain
Shinobi
@Sentient Puddle: Pro-life politicians can also label themselves Pro-choice to get the pro-choice vote. I don’t care who it co-ops, accurate self representation is important to me. If a politician or writer feels their position is more nuanced than is reflected in a label then outlining that position in detail is great! Proceeding to apply a label to it based on which one sounds better is not so great.
Allan
Congratulations, you’re a liberal.
morzer
@Midnight Marauder:
You really don’t understand this business of logical argument and evidence, do you? Think for a moment, engage the brain, and consider whether you really want to start claiming that all pro-life people think exactly the same way. If you do, you’ve just ignored history, reality, and the facts about how human beings are. The pro-life position includes extremists who murder doctors, it includes people who recognize the legality of abortion, while trying to arrange for adoptions instead, it includes people who are pro-life for personal reasons, but consider that legal abortions are much safer, if they must happen.. in short, it is not one, simple viewpoint as manifested by the fanatics on either side. ED Kain fits within this spectrum, although from another perspective he could just as easily be considered pro-choice with pro-life tendencies.
Now, if you don’t mind, I think I shall go and spend some time in the real world which you are so eager to ignore.
matoko_chan
@j low: so fucking what?
Kain can call out his base where he thinks they are wrong, or switch sides.
ca m’ete egal
there’s a saying Out Here in the West…..can’t sit on two horses with one ass at the same time.
Kain is just another fucktard porn fluffer for conservative failmemes.
rumpole
I gotta say, I don’t give a flying f what label you apply to your views. Ten years ago, I was a conservative. now, those same beliefs make me a terrorist-loving, socialism-promoting, madrassa-attending communist-except-for-supporting-Obama-who-is-just-like-Hitler. (Oh–don’t forget gays and guns. One of them is bad, and both of them together are bad. Or something.)
There’s one point that’s not clear, and this (for me) defines the difference between pro life and pro choice: can vs. should. The first is a legal question (can the state regulate this); the second a policy question (even if it can, should that power be exercised). The first you don’t address at all. The second is addressed, but obliquely.
Could you clarify?
duck-billed placelot
@morzer: We are responding to his goddamned post.
No one, as far as I can tell, is claiming to know the deepest heart of the inscrutable E.D. Kain. We’re responding to words. On screens. That he put there.
It has also been explained multiple times why the labels matter. But once more, with feeling:
If Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse started serving Big Macs but called them Kobe beef t-bones, people would be understandably upset. If McDonald’s then started claiming that their sandwiches were haute cuisine (“Even the reasonable Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse…”), people who care about fine dining would…well, they would laugh. But when it’s about, oh, bodily autonomy and citizen’s rights, the issue becomes less funny. Particularly if a huge portion of the restaurant going public started to believe McDonald’s. So to speak.
artem1s
sorry but IMHO this puts you clearly with the anti-choice crowd. It is high time the pro-choice crowd acknowledge that contraception choice includes many abortifacts up to and including third trimester termination. When we try to apologize for using abortifacts (the pill, IUDs, morning after, or any method that does not prevent conception) as contraception we are losing the CHOICE part of the battle. Some women use abortifacts every single day by choice. The use of these abortifacts have made it possible for women to improve their economic status and kept them safe from being considered property of her male relatives.
When we try to rationalize that OUR method of contraception isn’t part of the debate we victimize those who have chosen a ‘less acceptable’ form of contraceptive. By saying we want fewer abortions aren’t we really saying that we want to indoctrinate everyone into what we believe is our ‘acceptable’ definition of contraception? Ending a pregnancy is an abortion whether it happens chemically (the pill) because the uterus isn’t receptive to implantation or physically (IUD) because the fertilized egg passes through.
Please don’t give power to zealots like Schafly by arguing that there is some big black line that divides contraception and abortion. That line doesn’t exist. For a woman facing a surgical procedure it doesn’t exist. For a women who is facing forced pregnancy in an abusive relationship it doesn’t exist. For a college student trying to get through school without getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant it doesn’t exist. It may be true that not all contraceptive methods constitute abortion, but the end result of ALL abortions is contraception. We will never end the abortion debate until we quit trying to paint certain contraceptive measures as ending life and others as ending pregnancy. they all do the same thing in the end and one is no more noble than an another.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
Except, of course, that 1 minute after birth the fetus is no longer physically tethered to its mother by the umbilical cord.
I see you keep gliding over the difference between breathing oxygen on your own using your lungs and having it provided to you by another person through the umbilical cord. That is what the essential difference is: being a separate person whose organs operate on their own and having all of your bodily functions be provided by another person’s body.
A fetus inside the womb isn’t breathing oxygen. It’s having oxygen pumped into its bloodstream by its mother’s body. It’s not eating and digesting food. It’s having nutrition pumped into its bloodstream by its mother’s body.
I’m assuming you’re not actually too stupid to understand the difference between “dependent on another person for help” and “dependent upon another person’s physical functions for survival,” so I have to assume you’re just being a pedant by insisting that breastfeeding a child that is outside of your body and having it take nutrition from your bloodstream while it’s enclosed inside your body is, like, totally the same thing.
Midnight Marauder
@morzer:
No one is going off into conspiracy theories. The content of his argument directly contradicts the position with which he identifies.
j low
@matoko_chan: What sort of medication are you not taking?
Comrade Dread
@Three-nineteen: Well, I did briefly attempt to explain why they were irrelevant.
Well, you said ‘breathing on its own’, which I took to mean without assistance from anyone at all. Not just the mother.
Which, to reiterate, is the root of contention: at which point does a fetus/child attain full human rights which may conflict with those of its mother, and the seemingly arbitrary lines we draw to answer that question.
The conservative pro-life answer is at conception and the fetus’ right to life trumps the mother’s right of self-determination until she can find an alternative caretaker.
The most liberal pro-life answer is at birth, thereby removing the dilemma of a conflict of two persons’ rights altogether.
And I’ve seen a gamut of other opinions from when the fetus has a heartbeat, to brain activity, to functioning lungs, to a rather hardcore libertarian who said when the child developed self-awareness regardless of its position in or out of the womb.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: It might be helpful to read MTiffany’s post. The first italicized line is EDK’s line.
It’s perfectly valid to take what he’s saying and follow it to a logical conclusion, as MTiffany has done. Kain asserts that abortion has had positive effects, then he turns around and says the state has an interest in discouraging abortion. Once Kain says (rightly!) that the choice is a woman’s, the discussion and the state’s interest pretty much end. All the rest is ugly window-dressing and attempts to control women’s bodies.
Turbulence
@morzer: The pro-life position includes extremists who murder doctors, it includes people who recognize the legality of abortion, while trying to arrange for adoptions instead, it includes people who are pro-life for personal reasons, but consider that legal abortions are much safer, if they must happen..
Can you name one national pro-life organization that advocates for legalizing abortion, distributing contraception, and providing maternal healthcare and day care as EDK does? I mean, if he really is a pro-life guy, there should be some other pro-life people who agree with him and have got together in a group to advocate for their policy preferences, right?
Three-nineteen
@morzer:
No. This is not what pro-life means politically. If someone says they want a pro-life Supreme Court Justice, they are not saying they want a justice who “recognizes the legality of abortion, while trying to arrange for adoptions instead”. They want a justice who will overturn Roe v Wade.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@Michael D.: Can we get that with pie. People hereabouts like pie.
General Stuck
Some people practice their politics as part of a group with steady, defined and mostly fixed positions on issues. Others of us, practice our politics largely one issue at a time as to where we stand on them. And The Department of Labels is just fine with use of personal definitions, provided the user explains what they mean when asked.
Ideologues are quite tasty when roasted on an open flame. I have heard.
matoko_chan
@j low:
dementia senilia?
im on youth.
:)
duck-billed placelot
On a side-note, this is something that I’m always interested in when personally-opposed-to-abortion-ers start explaining stuff:
E.D. Kain – what if your daughter fell pregnant? If she chose to have an abortion as an adult, would you support her decision? What if she were 17? What about 16? Would you give parental consent for her to get an abortion if she wanted one?
This is where all the oh-I-personally-believe stuff gets fuzzy and dangerous, because his personal beliefs might affect a real-live woman (or girl). Anyway, I’m truly interested to know what he thinks about this, as I don’t think this article answers that question.
Adam Lang
@General Stuck:
And now we’re back to discussing clapping between movements again.
Poopyman
I suppose I should read the post & comments, but I just spent the last hour sucking up the CCD videos on YouTube, so thanks for the tip, E.D.!
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, and a newborn is not dependent upon its caretaker for help. It is quite dependent upon its caretaker for its survival. It requires you to provide its food, a healthy and safe environment, locomotion, defense and protection, waste removal, etc. It will die if you are not present or capable of providing those things.
The only difference between the two functions is (in most cases) active consent (and in some cases, the force of law.)
Jane2
Let’s see…you support legal abortions *and* you like the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Me too…are you sure you’re not a Canadian communist?
matoko_chan
@Comrade Dread: ensoulment when the fertilization membrane lifts off?
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
So an adult woman is the moral equivalent of an artificial respirator?
Nice. I guess we all know what your opinion of women is now.
celticdragonchick
@Sarcastro:
Jesus. Go listen to something else, then.
Midnight Marauder
@morzer:
Of course, if you recognize the legality of abortion, most people who knew anything about the history of the issue in his country would not classify you as “pro-life.” Considering that the most basic of pro-life positions is that abortion should be ILLEGAL. You know, except for very special circumstances, but even then, they still stand firm that the basic procedure should not be available.
But that you think anyone who is “pro-life” would ever sign off on making abortion legal is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read on this site.
j low
@TheNickronomicon:
What he actually says is
I’d like to highlight a few words in the quote that actually comes from the post. They are; important to me, our culture, by choice.
With the first set “important to me”, he is articulating a personally held belief. By “our culture” he certainly does not mean ‘the state’ unless his malapropriation of “pro-life” means that all of his words have secret meanings all meant to undermine the ivory tower of intellect that is a Balloon Juice comment thread, and finally that last word is… wait for it…!!!!! Choice!
j low
@General Stuck: Like.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
An infant can be cared for by anyone. It’s not going to die because its biological mother is not available to personally feed it and breathe air into its lungs. Any human over the age of about 7 can successfully care for that infant.
Conversely, if that same infant is still inside its mother’s body, there is absolutely no one else who can provide the food and oxygen it needs. Even if the mother is in a coma and on life support herself, it’s still her body that provides oxygen and nutrition.
So: many people other than the mother physically able to provide care versus only the mother’s physical body being able to provide care. And you still say those are the exact same thing?
Of course, you already said think women are essentially just caregiving machines anyway, so I don’t know why I’m surprised.
celticdragonchick
@wes g:
Absolutely. I saw Rhiannon Giddens of the CDD (Carolina Chocolate Drops) with a Celtic folk group she plays lead fiddle and vocals with at the Bethabara Highland Games. She is amazing! Her vocals on “Hey Johnny Lad” set the bar as far as I am concerned, and her singing in Scots Gaelic is not to be missed.
In the link, you also see Nora Garver who leads our local Triad Scottish Fiddle Society. Nora is a sweetheart. I have only met Rhiannon once, but she was gracious and a delight to talk to.
matoko_chan
@j low: again, so what? i don’t give a shit about EDs personal belief set.
he can believe what he likes.
i care A LOT about his support for a party that wants to outlaw abortion.
it doesn’t matter what he says.
it matters what he does.
j low
@matoko_chan: What party is it again that he said he was a member of?
matoko_chan
@j low: he said he is a conservative. do you know what that is?
a republican trying to scrape the bush/cheney off their shoes while no one is looking.
wallah, you are an especially dumb cudlip aren’t you?
‘conservatives’ and teabaggers are stealthy republicans.
roshan
Could this be the last time you put up such a lengthy post? Yeah, this is a blog and all, and the space for all the prose you can stuff on abortion is limitless, but should you abuse it like this?
This is how you write about abortion and contraceptives and preventing abortions.
Please keep the touchy feely stuff limited to your private diary.
geg6
@Turbulence:
Heh. Don’t hold your breath waiting for evidence of any such group. Because it doesn’t exist. I consider anyone who calls themselves pro-life a zealot who is my mortal enemy. If they believe in legal abortion, but won’t have one themselves, they are NOT pro-life. They are pro-choice. My devout Catholic sister would never, ever have an abortion herself, but believes she has no right to dictate what others do or believe and neither should the law in this matter. She calls herself pro-choice because that’s what she fucking is.
THAT’S WHAT FUCKING CHOICE IS ALL ABOUT. YOU FUCKING CHOOSE WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU. NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS.
Omnes Omnibus
@matoko_chan: Please show where ED Kain has supported a party that wants to outlaw abortion. With links. Thank you.
Comrade Dread
After birth, the mother is tethered to the child by law under the arbitrary guideline that because there is physical distance between the two now, this ‘parasite’ now has a claim on her basic rights and choices.
So, with consistency in mind, why is the mother held legally responsible for finding another caregiver? Why is she held responsible if she refuses the demands of this thing to suckle? Why doesn’t she have the choice to destroy the child or abandon it to its own devices as she sees fit? To invoke her own right to refuse the demands this creature puts upon her?
Because someone has set a moment in time legally when we recognize that we are dealing with a human being with human rights.
TheNickronomicon
@j low:
You left out “rather than.” That’s not language that forbids ever using the law, so I’m not sure why MTiffany shouldn’t be upset by the prospect of the law getting involved.
How is he planning to move Our Culture? With what lever?
And speaking of relevant quotations…
He also says that. Maybe I’m wrong but “public efforts” usually mean “state efforts.” So he’s for choice, with the caveats that pressure be put upon women (“help women choose”) to choose the option he prefers. I’m glad he’d vote to support the notion that a woman has the right to control her own body, I really am. But I find this aspect of his position pretty fucking repellent. I really don’t care how much he pays lip service to the idea of choice–this undercuts the other things he says. I don’t see a good reason for this position, he doesn’t articulate a persuasive reason this would be a good idea, and I fail to see any reason his vision would result a good abortion policy for women.
j low
@matoko_chan: Oh the brashness of youth. Matoko_chan you are in danger of becoming the living definition of the word sophomore.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: Yours is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation of that sentence.
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne:
The point being in this example that arbitrarily deciding that being able to breathe without assistance is hardly a valid qualifier of being a person or possessing human rights or any less arbitrary than most of the other qualifiers we’ve discussed.
Yes, yes, I know I’m an evil misogynist who wants polygamy, Sharia law, barefoot and pregnant women, etc., etc., etc. Ad nauseum.
Three-nineteen
@Comrade Dread:
I envision a word… a word that means a mother can have a baby, leave the hospital, and never see the child again. This word would protect her from any criminal charges leveled against her for abandonment.
That word is “father”.
Edited to make it understandable to English speakers.
matoko_chan
@Omnes Omnibus: dude, hes a self declared ‘conservative.’
that means….Votes-Republican is his indian name.
conservatives vote republican.
“pro-life” is a plank of the republican platform.
and that is how ED described himself.
pro-life doesnt mean “thinks abortion should be legal and rare”.
it means work to overturn Roe.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: OK, I’m convinced.
This is clearly the most well-thought-out essay on abortion ever, there’s no room to question anything he says, and criticizing his position is totally ridiculous. Gosh, it was just so silly of me to think that this line of thinking might not be the best possible option for women. Thanks for setting me straight! :-D
PS–Interpretation of which sentence? There were a couple in that post.
Midnight Marauder
@j low:
Why is E.D. Kain even concerned if the child is brought to term in the first place? Why does he need public and private efforts to “help women who would otherwise have an abortion” (by making the choice to do so. Those woman would be exercising their right to choose. That’s an important thing to remember here.) instead decide to “choose to bring the child to term” at all?
geg6
@Comrade Dread:
She isn’t. She can walk out of the hospital and leave that baby and no one will ever give a shit. And she will suffer no legal consequences for that abandonment. It happens every day to the just-born and the born-years-ago.
Are you trying to tell me women get prosecuted for giving their children up for adoption? And that they have to find the adoptive parents or even an adoption agency on their own?
You live in a dream world, if that is what you think.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: What good would it do to block quote the post yet again when the point of this thread is to insist that ED means something that he didn’t say?
TheNickronomicon
@Midnight Marauder: Right. Once the right to choose is there, why do we need wanky efforts to encourage one choice or the other? Private efforts–fine! Let the various churches make their cases for why you should *choose* according to their preference. But I see no reason for public campaigns. Let women choose, privately and in peace, free from undue social pressure.
snarkypsice
@Warren Terra:
But he didn’t argue that – he just said his own belief, which he is entitled to and which he doesn’t have to defend.
ED, I really think some people approach your posts just looking for a fight because it’s damn near impossible to find anything objectionable in what you wrote.
How do we get more of you and fewer Sarah Palins?
matoko_chan
/yawn
look…..ED is just punking you guys.
he throws up a highverbal word salad here designed to make you believe that there are sane reasonable ‘conservatives’.
he want us to understand his base.
thass wat all the emo-touchy-feely bullshytt is.
we understand your base, ED. they are ‘low-information’ (read low-IQ) ignorant racist fucktards that would love to timewarp us back to the Glorious Confederacy.
we dont CARE about your feefees.
we care that you are giving cover to the troglodytes that have nearly destroyed this country, and are still doing their best to burn it down.
snarkypsice
@matoko_chan:
Interesting that you think your definition of what he means trumps his definition of what he means.
He told you he’s not working to overturn Roe v Wade because he doesn’t think that will help.
My god, reading the comments on an ED Kain post is so irritating. I feel bad for Cole.
mnpundit
You’re a Pro-Choice Republican then, Kain.
Or just a liar.
Pick one.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: You’re saying he doesn’t want to encourage more women to carry their pregnancies to term rather than choose to abort them? I’m in no way saying he’s not supporting a right to choose. I AM saying he’s advocating for some bullshit pressure to be put on women to make the choice he wants them to make. What fucking business is it of his or anyone else’s when a woman makes this choice? That’s my point. Once he supports a right to choose, all his musing about WHICH choice someone makes is just odious wanking.
j low
@Midnight Marauder: What child? Is it wrong to think that a better world would have fewer abortions? I think a better world would have fewer dumbshits, but that doesn’t mean i’m in favor of euthanizing stupid people.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: And who are you to say what he should think? You both agree on what the law should be. Are you going to be the thought police of the left?
asiangrrlMN
@slag: I agree with you and suzanne about the distinction in terms, and I especially agree with you about debating abortion. It’s like TNC says with race–there are certain things that I am no longer willing to debate. For me, abortion belongs in that camp. A woman has the right to choose, period. I, for one, am not going to sign on to the, “we must work for less abortions” meme, either. It’s a woman’s body–she has the right to choose. Period. Or, no period, as the case may be. Like the mosque, I don’t see why this issue involves anyone but the pregnant woman, maybe her partner, and her doctor. On this issue, I am unabashedly far-left. And, this is not toward E.D., but toward anyone who wants to criminalize abortion–the same day that happens, there better be a law passed that a woman can get her tubes tied at any age without question. And that she can make the father raise the baby for eighteen years instead of doing it herself. I think if that latter clause was tacked on to any anti-abortion bill, it would have no chance in hell.
And, I object to the pro-lifers using that phrase because for the political movement that is the pro-lifers, they are pro-birth at best. As to E.D.’s actual stance, though, we’re good as long as he doesn’t want to make abortions illegal.
That said, E.D., if you are ever in MN, I will gladly buy you dinner so we can have a lovely, engaging discussion to which we can sell tickets and make much monies for homeless animals around the BJ nation.
Karmakin
Labels really are important. They’re tropes basically. And promoting one trope over another really does give power..social cultural economic and political…to that idea..that concept.
How you label yourself might be more important than what you actually think.
The second side of it, is as a writer with such a large audience, you really do need to make it crystal clear. And if you self-identify with such labels, you have to realize that you are asking for all the baggage.
And for what it’s worth, ED if you’re reading, you’re a typical free market progressive, who are right on some things but don’t realize that you’re going to get blindsided by reality eventually. Namely, the only way that you’re going to get what you want..that is to maintain our middle class as well as an international free market..is to soak the rich in order to pay for massively expanded social programs, as well as much more direct intervention with our labor market conditions as well. (Manipulating a maximum work-week with a living wage up and down in order to maintain a balanced employment/wage structure)
General Stuck
I think Kain did just that. He chose to call himself personally pro life, and politically pro choice. next question.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: Once he starts saying there’s a public interest is encouraging women to make one choice and not the other, it becomes a policy choice and not a private one. I’ve said all along he’s free to think what he wants and make any argument he wants about why women should make the choice he wants them to make. I do strenuously object to the notion that it’s the state’s fucking business which way women choose.
So no, I don’t care what EDK thinks about how a woman chooses. I do care that he wants to the government to take an interest in persuading women not to have abortions. That, my friend, is some capital-B Bullshit.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
Yes, no one ever abandons their newborn baby or gives it up for adoption. You sure got me there — The Majesty Of The Law prevents any woman from walking away once the child is physically out of her womb.
You do notice that you have suddenly moved the goalposts from physical reality — fetus inside womb vs. infant outside womb — and started talking about legalities instead?
Yes, and that moment in time is BIRTH, aka the moment the child leaves the mother’s womb. That’s when it becomes a separate entity both legally and physically.
Sorry, which one of us is arguing that there’s no difference between a human woman and an artificial respirator so therefore a child inside a woman’s uterus is exactly like someone who’s on life support provided by a machine? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me.
Midnight Marauder
@j low:
Are you serious? The one referenced in the sentence that you came out defending so vigorously.
The sentence:
You:
So we’ve established that you probably aren’t even paying attention to your own comments, let alone the issues you’re commenting on.
No, it is not wrong, however there are legitimate ways to go about achieving this goal and ways that are wholly and utterly counterproductive to ensuring a better quality of life for women and children. Evidence has shown repeatedly that just outlawing abortion and declaring it evil and illegal only produces a more unsafe environment for women and their offspring. Outlawing abortion actually INCREASES the frequency of abortion; that’s why people find the idea inherently moronic.
Conversely, expanding access to birth control and contraceptives, teaching basic, non-abstinence based sex education, and improving access to family planning services all have been empirically shown to lower the amount of abortions overall, while also improving the quality of life in a given population.
Only one side in this discussion actually has an ideology, philosophy, and executable plan that would lead to a reduction of abortions in the real world. And here’s a hint: It’s not the assholes trying to outlaw the procedure.
Congratulations. You’ve just revealed you have no idea what you’re talking about.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: Stop making shit up.
Catsy
Others have made this point already, but to reiterate:
The line dividing the two irreconcilable sides of the abortion debate revolves around one thing and one thing only: who gets to choose whether or not a woman has a legal abortion. This is a simplification, of course: within those two groups, there are vast amounts of territory concerning the exceptions and circumstances under which an abortion is legal. But it is accurate.
If you believe that a woman should have the choice whether or not to have an abortion–even if you carve out exceptions for viability or draw a line past which it should only be for medical reasons–then you are pro-choice by definition.
This doesn’t mean you have to like abortion. The line in the sand has nothing to do with whether or not you, personally, approve of abortion; plenty of pro-choicers are deeply uncomfortable with it and would prefer to focus their energy on reducing the number of abortions that need to be performed. The line is drawn between people who want to take this choice away from women, and people who do not.
Period.
My suspicion is that you perceive a stigma attached to the label “pro-choice”, and are more comfortable with the term “pro-life”. This perception may be accurate: identifying or being seen as pro-choice is a pretty fundamental heresy in the modern conservative movement, and for many conservatives the term conjures up notions of abortion-on-demand and a callous disregard for life. And it is–politically, not semantically–the opposite of “pro-life”, a term with which you’re likely much more comfortable, since it dovetails with your other literally “pro-life” views.
The problem with the term “pro-life” is that it’s a misnomer with an implied insult to the opposition. Broadly speaking, pro-lifers aren’t “pro-life”, they are “pro-birth”. Like the majority of conservatives, they overwhelmingly supported the Iraq War, torture, and the death penalty–they don’t have a problem with deaths that they can justify, they simply insist that fetuses must be carried to term. And the semantic opposite of “pro-life” is either “anti-life” or “pro-death”–terms which only apply to the pro-choice opposition if you already accept the premise that life begins at conception. In this way the term dishonestly and inaccurately describes the fundamental disagreement between the two sides, which is why many supporters of abortion rights correctly reject the term and prefer the terms “pro-birth” or better yet, “anti-choice”.
Contrast this with the term “pro-choice”. As I said above, the fundamental disagreement between the two sides isn’t whether or not they approve of life or death, but whether or not they believe abortion should be a choice that a woman can legally make. You yourself are an example of this divide: you do not like abortion, but you do not think it should be outlawed–you believe it should remain a choice. And the opposite of “pro-choice” is “anti-choice”–a term which, unlike the opposites of “pro-life”, is actually accurate, regardless of how the people it’s describing feel about it.
I can sympathize with the reasons you might reject the term pro-choice for yourself. But these words have meanings, and whether you fall into one camp or another isn’t based on how you feel about abortion or the terminology of the two camps, it’s based on what your desired policy prescription is.
If you think abortion should be a woman’s choice, you are pro-choice.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: Which shit would that be?
“Likewise, I believe that more private and public efforts need to be made to help women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term”
Three-nineteen
@General Stuck: Next question: How many more times will we have this exact same fucking thread?
Three-nineteen
@Mnemosyne:
Actually, isn’t it legally third trimester?
Comrade Dread
@geg6: Leaving the child at the hospital, giving it up for adoption, dropping it off at the police or fire station IS finding another caregiver for it. Not a permanent caregiver, but a caregiver that will reliever her of the legal consequences of abandoning a child.
But my question was, why even put that nominal responsibility on her? Why should she even go out of her way that much to ensure this thing’s survival? Why is it not equally acceptable to just leave it on the road side or in a dumpster or out in the woods for which she does face legal consequences?
And the answer is again, that we have opted to declare birth (or the third trimester) the point in time in which this thing becomes nominally a human being with rights, and it’s mother is legally obligated to at the very least, put herself out and find someone who will ensure that her offspring temporarily survives.
j low
@Midnight Marauder: Did you read the blog post by the guy (EDK in case you missed it) who thinks that legal and safe abortion is a good thing?
General Stuck
@Catsy: You ever hear of changing the narrative? We hear all the time yammering from the left to change the narrative. Well, in order to do that, you have to identify terms that have been coopted by the opposition and narrowed into a specific issue, like the right has done with Pro life, that on it’s face should be a word that is universal and with the broad context it describes. It is the only way you CAN change the narrative, by talking different, and explaining what you mean. such as redefining what pro life means, and describing it as Kain did. And keep doing that. You can fall back into the reactionary position, that is fine, but that does not change the narrative, nor move the progressive cause forward imo. This is how wingnuts have codlocked liberals and steadily turned the narrative to a proactive conservative one, beginning with the redefining of the term liberal to be something bad. And how did liberals react to that, and continue to react to that attack, by simply relabeling themselves something else instead of fighting for the label that best describes them. IOW’s they wimped out and accepted the wingers defining them.
People want to move the Overton Window left. Well, that begins by going on the offense, not defense. And more often than not, that offense is simply an expression of common sense when it comes to words and labels and the like. Which is how Kain describing his position is, imo, common sense.
General Stuck
@Three-nineteen: Ten , maybe a thousand, who the fuck knows.
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne:
Because this entire discussion sprung from the arbitrariness of the laws in question which set a point when a fetus/child has rights, and why it is legal for a mother to have a fetus destroyed, but not smother a newborn or deny it food and shelter, and how where you personally argue to set the moment of ascribing human rights to a fetus/infant will affect your outlook and how we can draw logical absurdities from that basis that range from ‘Every sperm is sacred’ to legal infanticide.
Yes, we’ve already established that as the current point in time when the law has decided that suddenly this helpless, dependent creature that has been putting demands on you from day one suddenly has a legal right to do so and you are now obligated to fulfill them at your own personal cost. I have been arguing that this point in time is itself arbitrary and has no real basis other than location.
Really, if you’re suffering from reading comprehension issues, that’s on you.
bloodstar
@roshan:
Has the thought occurred to you that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination?
…or are you one of those people who flips to the last page of the book first?
Personally I like seeing the journey, the interior workings of how he thinks, it’s really no different than watching the Tunch mind control of John. And I mean, he did warn you and put it all below the fold. It’s not like you had to click it open and read it. Right?
Lysana
I figured I owed you a good, long read since I bitchslapped you over same-sex marriage phraseology (and yes, I still dislike being told that asking whether my rights should be up for popular vote is reasonable when nobody voted on YOUR rights).
Having done so on this post, I’m now confused as to why you’re the conservative blogger. I’m finding you socially liberal and economically under-explained. As you further explicate your positions on “free markets” and government’s role in providing for the general welfare, perhaps the differences will be made clearer.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: Yeah- things like pre-natal care, childcare, and parenting classes really suck. You got me there.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
Actually, it’s not. It’s on her and the father. That’s because, as all rational people recognize, there’s a difference between a fetus that’s inside the woman’s uterus and a baby that’s outside her body so both of the people responsible for creating that child are equally responsible for its care once it’s outside of the woman’s body.
As to why an infant is suddenly considered to be a separate person with its own rights once it’s no longer physically contained within the woman’s body, I’ll let you try to puzzle that one out on your own.
suzanne
I will just point out, once again, that when Harry Reid made his bullshit statement about “They have the RIGHT to build the mosque, but I don’t think they SHOULD,” most commenters here concurred that he was capitulating, stupidly trying to appease both sides, even though the people on one side of the debate are actively seeking to oppress the other. Bloomberg, who unequivocally stated that the right to religious freedom was absolutely paramount, is seen by most here as brave and honest.
When someone in a policy discussion about abortion pulls a similar rhetorical stunt, the effect is the same: it has the effect of saying that both viewpoints are reasonable. But using the law to oppress women, or Muslims, IS NOT REASONABLE. And should not be tolerated in polite society. So, even if it was not the intent to give that side’s argument equal credence, one has just done so.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
Apparently the fact that the location is inside another human being’s body means nothing to you. Which, again, I can only ascribe to you thinking that a woman is merely a semi-human procreation machine and not a fully functioning human being like, say, a man is.
So explain for us how a woman and an artificial respirator differ, in your opinion. So far, your claim has been that a fetus kept alive inside a woman’s body and a person being kept alive on an artificial respirator are the same thing. By your logic, then, an artificial respirator and a woman are the same thing since, in your view, the primary job of both of them is to keep a person alive who cannot eat and/or breathe on their own.
So how, in your construction, do they differ? You’ve already decided that one being a person and the other being a machine is a difference you can hand-wave away as insignificant. What gives a woman rights that an artificial respiration machine doesn’t have?
j low
@suzanne: Perhaps I misunderstood the point of his post. I though it was to explain his personal position after having been called out for saying he was pro-life. Did he not do that?
TheNickronomicon
@j low: Those are wonderful things that make perfect sense on their own merits. There’s no need at all to tie them in to abortion as EDK does. Packaging those good things with a terrible fucking idea (“encouraging” women to Choose Life) is pretty much fucking coercion. I’m absolutely opposed to bartering away women’s rights in order to get some good programs. That’s kind of a…..what’s it called….false dualism.
Catsy
@General Stuck:
Yes I have, but I appreciate the generous offer of condescension.
The main issue I have with your diatribe is that while your general points about changing the narrative and setting the agenda through language are true to a point, you seem mired in the idea that there is only one way to do this. Your prescription is that we reclaim the term “pro-life” and change its meaning to be inclusive of people who may not like abortion but believe it should be a choice. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that it concedes the validity of the “pro-life” misnomer by adopting it–and by applying it to people who don’t actually oppose abortion rights, it reinforces the validity and positive associations of the term. The second is that it muddies the waters, making it harder to determine just what someone’s actual position on abortion is. The other side won’t stop using the term “pro-life”, because it reinforces the dichotomy that they want to construct: that the divide is between those on the side of life, and those who aren’t. If we start using it to describe people who are actually pro-choice, it accomplishes the double whammy of making it harder to distinguish between the diametrically opposite views of two people using the same label, and inflating the perceived size of the pro-life demographic.
No. You are conflating two completely different kinds of linguistic changes: one is a change in the positive or negative emotional associations that people have with a term, the other is a change in the actual definition of the term. There are similar methods of socio-linguistic engineering involved in both, and there is some overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Conservatives have spent decades turning “liberal” into a slur. They have done so by using it as one: sneering it, using it as an epithet, and associating it with exaggerated caricatures of the extreme fringes of the left. Working in the opposite direction, homosexuals have spent the last few decades reclaiming “queer” and similar words, turning what were formerly epithets into badges of pride, thereby neutralizing their potency as weapons. The actual subjects referenced by the terms haven’t changed–what have changed are the positive or negative associations of those terms.
What you are suggesting is entirely different: you suggest that we attempt to entirely redefine “pro-life” to be inclusive of positions that support a woman’s right to choose while being personally opposed to abortion.
I don’t disagree with these broad platitudes in general, but they have no relationship to what you’re trying to suggest we do with the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice”.
It’s not common sense, it’s simply confusing the issue.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: You are making assumptions about EDK’s intent and belief in order to reinforce your previously held opinion. You may be right. EDK may be a trojan horse involved in a top secret campaign to infiltrate liberal blogs with right wing ideology. Interesting that he was invited here by Jon Cole the former Republican, no? Or, he might just be a thoughtful person who thinks that pregnant women should have all the support possible from society that they might have healthy and well cared for babies, should they choose to have them.
Midnight Marauder
@j low:
I did not. I am quite aware of that fact. It’s why my qualm has nothing to do with that.
Did you read the part of said blog post where E.D. Kain maintained his belief that “more private and public efforts need to be made to help women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term.”
Saying that you believe women have the right to choose what to do with their pregnancy is diametrically opposed to saying your personal belief is that more effort (of any kind, really) should be spent on convincing women to NOT choose an abortion as one of their choices. Once you involve public efforts in enforcing that “choice,” the final decision no longer resides in the mother’s hands.
Apparently, you are incapable of nuance.
@j low:
No one is arguing that in this thread.
matoko_chan
@snarkypsice: but it doesnt matter.
as long as he says hes a conservative he is ON THAT SIDE.
i don’t give a shit about his personal opinions.
publically he is weasel wording to give his base cover.
what don’t you get about the conservative pro-LIFE! position?
it means outlawing abortion.
is ED a conservative? i thot he said he was.
the personal is political.
ED is part of the machine. the socons have ruled this country for 200 years. we claw some civil rights out of their grasp via the courts, and they STILL FUCKING WONT GIVE UP.
you got nothing Kain. step on you fucking poseur.
enough already.
j low
@Midnight Marauder: So you too are certain that
is code for forced pregnancy and not support for pre-natal care programs, child care (I believe that was specifically mentioned in the post), parenting classes, support groups, and any other public and private efforts to support pregnant women?
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne: Oh, sweet fricking Buddha.
Sorry, no. If you can’t follow the conversation I was having with Three-nineteen and other more reasonable debaters, I’m not going to indulge you further.
Catsy
@Midnight Marauder:
This is where your argument breaks down. EDK’s policy prescription for reducing abortions involves non-coercive persuasion: providing information, alternatives and support. I don’t agree that public money should be spent trying to persuade women not to have abortions, but there is a huge–and unsupported–leap from that to the state “enforcing” that position.
Go back and re-read EDK’s description of the policies to which you’re objecting:
Funds for childcare, universal health care, counseling for alternative options, support for birth control, reducing abortions by choice rather than by outlawing them… wow! Those are some insidious policies for “enforcing” EDK’s preferences. For a contrary view, let’s head over to NARAL to see what they have to say about these kinds of policies:
Oh crap! NARAL secretly wants to enforce EDK’s policy preferences!
Turbulence
@Midnight Marauder: Saying that you believe women have the right to choose what to do with their pregnancy is diametrically opposed to saying your personal belief is that more effort (of any kind, really) should be spent on convincing women to NOT choose an abortion as one of their choices.
Um, what? I’m pro-choice. But I would really prefer that women use contraception rather than get abortions. Which is why I think the government should be handing out free contraception everywhere to everyone. The reason is simple. Most abortions are surgical procedures. Any time a surgeon gets near you, there’s a chance that you die. Or get severely injured. Or catch VRE or MRSA. Now abortions are safer than most (maybe all?) surgeries and also safer than bringing a pregnancy to term, but they’re still more dangerous than using contraception and not getting pregnant at all. Now, I don’t think we should do anything to deter women from getting abortions; but we should be doing a heck of a lot more to help women who want to avoid the need for abortions in the first place.
By the same token, I really prefer that women who get abortions should get them as early as possible. Which is why I think we should eliminate the crazy abortion restrictions (you have to skip work for three days, drive 400 miles, do a little dance, and bring us the heart of a mountain lion), make the government pay for abortions for anyone who can’t afford them and make the government contract out to ensure that there are abortion providers in every state. The reason is that early abortions are less dangerous than later abortions. They’re quicker to heal from, less likely to permanently damage the uterus, etc.
My reasoning here is straightforward public health. I think the state should do cheap easy safe things that reduce the need for surgeries of all kinds. That includes abortions as well as bypass surgery.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: I didn’t realize what a handsome straw man I made.
I know people have their issues with EDK. I’m not one of them. I’ve been reading him over at True/Slant for a while beause I didn’t always agree with him and he makes me think, which I appreciate. In this case, I agree with some of what he says, and strenuously object to some of his other points. I’m with asiangrrrl on this one–women’s bodies, women’s choices, no interference, full stop. According to what he posted above, EDK does not agree with that position.
I’m drawing conclusions from what he says. Maybe he doesn’t mean what I think he means. But he IS making a controversial statement when he says the state should encourage women to carry their pregnancies to term. (If one is making a controversial statement, one needs to take care that it says exactly what one intends it to say.) Perhaps he didn’t realize that’s what he was saying. I don’t think he’s that sloppy a writer, so I think it’s unlikely he’s not talking about the actual factual US government taking an interest in which way women choose.
EDK thinks (according to his post, above) that women should have the right to choose. He also thinks (according to his post, above) that “pre-natal care programs, child care (I believe that was specifically mentioned in the post), parenting classes, support groups” should be paid for by the government (great idea!) as part of a “public effort” to “help women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term” (shitty idea!). I once again reiterate: this….is….bullshit.
Genine
Okay.
Can E.D. Kain be a Republican if he has never voted for one? People keep saying he votes for Republicans. But he has said, at least twice, that he has never voted for a Republican.
As for the rest of what some commenters are saying- I am not touching it with a ten-foot pole.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Dread:
So I object to you claiming that an artificial respirator and a human woman perform a function so similar that they can’t be distinguished between and I’m the one who’s unreasonable?
I guess you couldn’t remember how to spell “hysterical.” Isn’t that the shorthand word used to explain why men are have to be allowed to make all of these decisions for us poor, irrational woman who just don’t understand why a fetus’ life is more important than ours is?
j low
@TheNickronomicon: Alright then. Let’s say we agree that he say’s abortion should be safe and legal. Then let’s get all of those other things like access to contraception, gobs of money for public health and child care. Then we can watch carefully to make sure that no woman is unduly pressured by the government or any one else to have a baby that she does not want, and I’ll call it a pretty good place to be
matoko_chan
@Genine: he said he was a conservative. a conservative is a republican that is trying to scrape the bushcheney off his shoe when no one is looking.
conservatives want to overturn Roe and make abortion illegal.
it doesn’t matter what ED believes personally. if he doesnt want to overturn Roe, then he isn’t a conservative.
hey, Kain, lets hear your position on Roe?
states rights?
or the Douthat/McMegan position that liberals need to help conservatives overturn Roe so conservatives can stop being so batshit ratfucking crazy about other peoples reproductive parts.
im with asiangrrlMN….it aint your bidness, creeper.
wallah….if Aisangrrl rejects ED then that means my thesis holds!!!!
:)
rejection of ED in juicers is sex-linked.
:)
General Stuck
@Catsy:
No, what i am suggesting is that to take away the power of the wingnuts coopting a term that should mean something else entirely and applying it’s broader meaning. They are not pro life, they are pro fetus as it has been stated here. By allowing them to comfortably keep using, or misusing the term, then you lose half the propaganda battle by ceding ground the wingers are not entitled to.
Same with the term liberal, by surrendering the term liberal.
We are speaking of politics and the fine art of linguistics are more like blunt force instruments. It is close enough to the same thing, which is a neverending battle of defining your opponent, rather than letting him define himself. It is true in individual campaigns with candidates, right on up to defining large groups of people with similar pol ideology.
You never retreat, when common sense is involved with using pol terms and labels. You never hand over a perfectly benign self description that you are comfortable with such as liberal. The term pro life and liberal are the same things, in the context of terms opponents have chosen for themselves. It is true that pro life involves changing it;’s meaning by wingnuts. But that should also make it easier to attack and take away.
Your comment seems to me to entirely fall on the side of reactionary, not on offense, or taking an initiative. I am not surprised by this however.
In any sense, I doubt Kain was being some kind of word warrior, but more just trying to describe his position in a way that makes the most common sense to him. He is not part of your movement, but he doesn’t have to be, to be honest.
TheNickronomicon
@j low: I would too. Of course that’s not what he’s advocating, but I like your idea better than his. :-)
Midnight Marauder
@Turbulence:
@Catsy:
The leap comes from the comparison to private vs. public efforts. That, combined with the phrasing “help women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term” is somewhat off-putting to me. Why, exactly, is there a need to interfere in altering a mother’s decision once it has been made? What does it matter to you whether she brings it to term or not?
Again, I’m not trying to argue that Kain is all about intrusive police states where religious zealots dictate what a woman can do with her body. What I am saying is that there are some major incongruencies in his position with regards to what he’s advocating and how he chooses to identify himself.
Yes, he clearly is in support of counseling and access to birth control and other empirically proven methods for reducing the abortion rate. But at the end of the day, despite his advocacy for those tools, he would still prefer a situation where “women who would otherwise have an abortion choose to bring the child to term,” and are actively steered in that direction via private and public resources. Whatever that may mean.
Belvoir
In the larger scope of life, the universe, and everything, I really don’t care much what E.D. Kain thinks about anything, and these sorts of “declarations of where I stand” essays are such an exercise in narcissism.
In his defense, he seemed quite called on the carpet to explain himself on the abortion issue. Like a political candidate whose views simply must be known, explained. Why? It’s not germane really to any current events, it’s an ongoing debate that will probably never be resolved satisfactorily for everyone. He’s a blogger, not a politician or even a celebrity . Why do people ascribe such power to him that his views matter in the least? It’s just a blog. A good blog, but I don’t see the point in arguing with how someone defines himself about a famously tricky issue.
You won’t change his mind, and vice versa, this is 240 comments about how he verbally describes his position. Just- a lot of typing, a lot of concern about how a particular blogger describes his position, and it’s really boring.
General Stuck
@Belvoir: You see, I don’t agree. I mean I do with Kain just being a blogger with no great consequence. But these threads have opened the door for me, on seeing how other liberals think and interact with someone who doesn’t quite speak their native tongue. And it is double interesting, the fact that his actual beliefs are in most cases quite similar/ Like taking the dogma for a walk in the sunshine.
j low
@TheNickronomicon: I guess to me it doesn’t matter if his motive is different than mine so long as all of the things he wants to do to make abortion more infrequent are good things. If he had thrown in Fundamentalist Church Camp Support Group I would certainly have fought him on that, but the only specific policy prescriptions I saw in the post were things I support.
ksmiami
@matoko_chan:
I love you… FTW.
Practically, I feel that some dude who will never ever have to worry about having to go through the medical procedure called abortion has no right to claim it as evil or something to try and “limit.” In a perfect world, accidents would not happen, but we do not live in a perfect world. You would think that so called conservatives would get that, but they don’t, they just get mad.All.the.time. So ED please call yourself pro-choice. In America right now there are two camps. Pro Choice or Forced Birth. And the other side is friggin nutso. For godsake, the Economist called the so-called pro-life side, “Extreme and uncaring” in their demands. No – birth control, no education – no abortion – and no funding for the babies who are born into their utopian breeder community. I dare ED to read the Hand Maiden’s Tale, or the Cider House rules and then come back and say he is pro-life.
loaded terms man, loaded terms.
Cliff
does this or does it not represent almost entirely the argument against nearly every republican position ever?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I agree with this. In fact, I super-agree, in that I would phrase it this way: Your personal beliefs are none of my business, and unless we are having a conversation about personal beliefs, I’d like to keep it that way.
In a political context, the only thing that matters is the part that says “it’s where you want to impose ….” Not your beliefs, but your right to impose any of your beliefs onto other people when your own life is not affected by what they do. For me, that line right there is where it’s at. That’s why I always say, I don’t care about your beliefs, and I want you to keep them out of my government. I don’t intend to be governed by your beliefs on abortion. Period.
So if somebody is okay with that, and will leave me and other people alone to figure out the thing for ourselves, then I am fine with that. And if I want to know more about your beliefs on the matter, which is not very likely, then I will ask. If I don’t ask, keep your beliefs to yourself. They aren’t my business and I don’t want them to be my business. And my beliefs on this are none of your business.
If everybody is happy with that, then let’s drink. First round is on me.
matoko_chan
@ksmiami: ty.
asiangrrlMN said the same thing, so did Anne Laurie and Suzanne….most if not all of teh XX.
anglosaxon tightass prurient protestants have ruled america for two centuries. the side of the angels has finally managed to claw some basic civil rights for women and blacks out of their grip and now we have fucktards like ED and Douthat wanting to put them back in teh saddle.
i don’t give a shit about ED’s personal position on abortion.
i just care about what his side wants to impose on the rest of us…and hes trying to help them.
and btw, the Carolina Chocolate Drops suck ass.
Muse kicks ass.
Peter
That seems like an awful lot of words that actually say very little.
E.D. Kain
@JGabriel: Nonsense. Saying that there are such thing as false compromises but that not all compromise is ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ does not cancel itself out.
Lihtox
I would quibble with your use of “pro-life” as a signifier for your position on abortion: the difference between you and someone who is pro-abortion is not that one of you is in favor of life and the other is not, but that you disagree on the definition of a human being and/or the value of a “potential human being”. Perhaps we should call the two sides “fetus-as-person” and “fetus-as-thing” (with the “pro-choice” being the agnostic middle: “I-don’t-know-which-a-fetus-is-figure-it-out-for-yourself”). Or, of course, we could just go with “pro-abortion”, “anti-abortion”, and “pro-choice” (or choose some other term if choice is overly broad for your tastes) for the middle ground.
That criticism aside, I am very glad you are blogging here; I always have the fear, when reading political blogs I agree with, that I will get sucked into the same sort of bubble that many Republicans have gotten sucked into over the last decade. It is therefore good to have rational iconoclasts about.
roshan
@bloodstar:
Personal journeys matter, but from men who are not affected by their positions on abortion, I don’t expect to get a word salad and a morality attached with the said position. I strongly believe that a woman should have the right to make the decision about giving birth and shouldn’t have to bother about how I react to it based on some morality that I attach with it. Similarly, I can have a personal journey with respect to same-sex marriage, but those individuals shouldn’t have to bother about how I reached that decision. What they need from me is to just state it clearly that I support it and would like to encourage the gov’t to do the same. For folks who are really affected by my positions, I don’t need to put the extra burden of finding out how I reached there, by posting a 500 words reading assignment.
All the word salading around an issue which is important to one half of the human population just delays consensus and attaches unnecessary importance to the journey of the other half of population when it’s not going to affect them.
I would like men to seek approval for viagra from the female populace thru such word salading from their side. Then a lot of them would understand what is important and what is not.
E.D. Kain
@suzanne: I’m fine with calling myself pro life or pro choice. I call myself both. I don’t mean this as an affront to the pro-choice crowd by any means, or to be ‘morally superior’ as some people have labeled me.
E.D. Kain
@Lihtox: Thanks. I certainly understand the quibble. I’m honestly happy calling myself either/or.
E.D. Kain
@Violet: Thanks Violet. I won’t argue with you. Except my hippie days are behind me.
E.D. Kain
@Cermet: Tell that to everyone who heard I was a conservative and therefore have decided to blanket judge anything and everything I write as evil.
E.D. Kain
@Michael D.: I think that’s true of a lot of the commenters here, and it’s a little troubling and a little funny. But a lot of the commenters are also sharp and challenging and gracious. So. We’ll see. What kind of ice cream are you having by the way?
E.D. Kain
@pragmatism: Thanks!
E.D. Kain
@General Stuck: Sounds good to me, General.
E.D. Kain
@duck-billed placelot: Meh. I’m not really sure what to call myself. I spend way too much time thinking about it. I’m just as comfortable with the ‘free market progressive’ label as the conservative label. Maybe I just harbor a secret hatred of silly political labels and I’m working through that.
E.D. Kain
@j low: Good question.
E.D. Kain
@Susan of Texas: You didn’t read my post did you?
E.D. Kain
@KDP: Hey – you win the thread! (So far)
This:
…is exactly what I’m trying to do. Labels are important, and it is my belief that at least half of politics is the war over who can appropriate which label. I intend to appropriate a few for good causes.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: Thanks. I do see where people are coming from though. These labels do matter. I just think they’re somewhat tired and even reflexive at this point.
E.D. Kain
@duck-billed placelot: I would support her decision whatever it was.
E.D. Kain
@Jane2: I did live in Canada for a while, so maybe…?
E.D. Kain
@roshan: Guess what – you actually aren’t compelled to read anything I write. I could give a shit whether you do or don’t. It’s really, actually that simple. Even better – once you’ve wasted all that time reading (or not reading, which is more likely) you don’t even have to comment. You can just move on.
E.D. Kain
@Lysana: Thanks. I’m not really bound to the label ‘conservative’ much anymore. I’m really much more interested in finding and thinking about good ideas.
matoko_chan
jesus mary and joseph .
then what the fuck are you?
shorter Kain: blah blah blah
so you are saying we are all the same?
we are not the same.
or you would have switched sides like Cole and CJ and I did.
You told me you are just ‘trying to understand the base’.
fuck that. its not hard. your base are old white conservative christian racists that think they get to dictate their fucked up religious doctrine to the rest of us because their ancestors were here first…. over the last 200 years with the help of the judiciary the side of the light has clawed basic civil rights for blacks, women and the poor out of your side’s death grip…well we are keeping them, assclown.
you told me that you couldn’t help reform your base unless they thought you were on their side.
fuck that. we aren’t all the same anymore.
who said this?
pandering and pretending they are not fuckwitted prurient assclowns bent on imposing their views on the rest of us is a ‘better approach’?
is that what you are doing here? bullshytt.
you are talking smack about your base to sound reasonable and pretending there are any good ideas left in conservatism.
conservatism has nearly destroyed this country.
its ovah.
and now that your side is going to lose forevah and evah, you and Douthat and McMegan want to change the rules. the conservative base has been selected for ‘low information’ christian racists that despise science, integrity, intellectuals, and higher education for a half a century.
your side can’t compete in a meritocracy anymore.
you might win one last time, but its over.
lead, follow, or get out of the way.
but don’t pretend you are ‘just looking for good ideas on both sides’.
your side is bankrupt of ideas.
You and Douthat and McMegan are a thousand times more toxic that Rush and Beck. because you pretend your side is reasonable.
they aren’t. you can’t switch the racism off…..you can’t turn off the anti-intellectualism. those are embedded traits, and they were fine as long as your side was winning.
but the demographic timer goes tick…tick….tick….
we aren’t going to help you reform your base. that is your job.
Conservatism DIAF.
Comrade Dread
@Mnemosyne: No, I simply don’t find any value continuing this discussion with you, in particular when you have misconstrued a discussion I was having with another poster, and there are far more men and women here I can talk to and receive a worthwhile response from.
DPirate
What I want to know regarding abortion is why the standard pro-abortion stance insists the man has no rights? The reality is that even so he will certainly have duties if the child is born, forced on him by the state at the woman’s discretion, basically (she doesn’t sue for support, he doesn’t get garnished). Isn’t this unethical?
Susan of Texas
@E.D. Kain:
Ah, the “you misunderstood me” defense, so beloved of glib Professional Pundits. I read what you said (several times) and I read your response, which utterly ignored my own.
You give a multitude of reasons why you are pro-choice but you don’t understand the issue of choice.
The last thing a woman needs in this traumatic time is state-sponsored coercion. You are a Nice Guy, and Nice Guys want everyone to find reasonable solutions that occupy some happy middle ground of morality and fairness. But abortion is messy and unfair, and there is no nice middle ground. So it must be a matter of choice, not compromise and niceness. You want to be able to coerce a woman to do what you want–carry a baby to term–but don’t want to take away her choice. Your Nice Words mean nothing. Either it is her choice to make freely, without coercion, or it isn’t.
Like a McArdlesque libertarian, you ignore the issue of inequality of power. You discuss free markets as if they actually exist in the real world. Power lies in the hands of the corporation, not the worker. Markets do not maintain equilibrium. You don’t like single payer, which shifts the power in the health care debate from corporations to individuals or government. You don’t like abortion, which puts the power in the hands of the woman. You like Bennett’s health care bill, which is skewered towards insurance companies.
You want to be all things to all people and end up saying nothing. If you are for individual rights, you are liberal. If you are for traditional power structure, you are conservative. If you don’t like either parties, fight for what you do believe in and ignore the labels. But you have no point of view, no passion, and no goal. That kind of meaningless support for authority, cloaked in pleasing, accommodative terms, made some people very rich, but you don’t want to be one of those people, do you?
Susan of Texas
Reading your responses to other people, I see your Nice Guy facade is as phony as your Savvy Tribe facade.
xian
Kain really brings out the twit in some of the commenters here. You can disagree with someone deeply without resorting immediately to verbal abuse and projection.
I understand there is some sort of bozofilter for this site?
Susan of Texas
We could ignore the reflexive conventional thinking, muddled reasoning, and rambling nothings, but that’s how we ended up with Ross Douthat, David Brooks and Megan McArdle.
The first thing that happens on the internet is that we find out that there’s always someone out there who knows more than us, writes better, and thinks better. We can learn from them, becoming more clear, more disciplined, and a better writer, or we can insist that we have already reached perfection and need no more improvement. (The McArdle approach.) Like most people, I had my work taken to pieces and I learned to leave out anything that was irrelevant and distracted from the main point, always always check my facts, and look at both sides of the issues for flaws in my reasoning. My work improved tremendously, and while it certainly was not fun, I learned more about writing and persuasion from people on the internet than I was ever taught in school.
I could have just made snide remarks about how everyone was mean to me and misunderstood me, but I actually care about writing so I swallowed my pride and tried to do better. It depends on what Kain wants–an easy sinecure saying nothing, or a real career shaping opinions and bettering the world.