the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

Mother of Four writes:

The Rape Fallacy

#1. Few raped women conceive. Not only is there the matter of timing -- women being fertile for only a few days during the month -- but trauma and stress greatly reduce the chances of conception. So we're dealing with a very rare situation to
begin with and basing all law on rare exceptions is pure silliness.

#2. As every responsible mother teaches her young children, two wrongs don't make a right. If a thief steals my car I
don't get the right to steal someone else's car. A raped woman's ordeal doesn't earn her the right to kill an innocent person.

#3. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime committed by another person. There is no moral difference of any kind between executing a rapist's adult child as punishment for his/her father's crime and executing the rapist's unborn child for his/her father's crime.

#4. Once the crime has occurred the woman can't be un-raped. She's a crime victim, not a lottery winner. Crime has ill-effects on a person and when the crime is rape one of those effects may be an unwanted pregnancy. Just as a victim of robbery, assault, or vandalism has to deal with the consequences of being victimized, the rare rape victim who becomes pregnant has to deal with the fact that she is now carrying a human life within her and that, just as an assault victim
must pay his medical bills and a property crime victim must pay to repair or replace his stuff, she has a duty to her child.Life
isn't fair. Pretending that making her un-pregnant will make a woman un-raped is a delusion. It will only make things worse for the victim if she bloodies her hands by murdering her baby.

it is very frustrating reading this kind of thing, not just for all of its logical leaps (pretending that making her un-pregnant will make a woman un-raped is a delusion) & fairly open callousness (It will only make things worse for the victim if she bloodies her hands by murdering her baby), but because it displays so many of the bad places you're lead into by believing purely and intently on a foetal 'right' to life & basing all decisions on the pre-eminence of that fact. like if you see santorum speechifying, so fixed on an immutable truth that any pragmatic concern is irrelevant, can be handwaved. it just doesn't connect with real life at all, & prioritising it above all else makes you a cheerleader for just the worst options, the least charitable behaviours, moves you into opposition to the possibly slightly useful options people facing the worst circumstances might have. Mother of Four is obviously an obnoxious demagogue, & that's a big part of what's offensive, her involvement, her insistence, her ignorance, but the root of it is just so sad i think.

Eric Caplan 10 hours ago

As absurd as Akin's comments is, what's even more absurd is how few fellow Republicans have risen to condemn it. What boggles the mind is the failure of the presumptive nominee and his erstwhile running mate to seize this "Sister Souljah" moment and run with it.

nothing these people say is that weird if you keep in mind that they believe the moment of conception inaugurates a full individual person vested with all the same rights as any other flesh-and-blood child. like schlump says, everything flows from that. liberals constantly forget this, or pretend to forget it. i mean of COURSE you can't terminate if that's what you believe. it's OK to "kill" "someone" just because they were brought into the world under terrible circumstances? what, are you insane?

what's that you say, it's about the right of women to make their own decisions about their bodies? well, not if that decision involves MURDER!

Well even with that belief their moral thinking is spectacularly non-nuanced, ignoring possible room for manoeuvre such as Judith Jarvis Thomson's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violinist_(thought_experiment).

i wonder about that. jarvis' thought experiment doesn't necessarily encourage one conclusion over another, so i'd expect people to resolve it differently. i expect many (most?) contemporary american conservatives would argue that no one has an inherent right to demand that someone else provide life support services, but once such services have been engaged, it becomes murder to remove them. squares opposition to the ACA with both their position on abortion and the terry schiavo freakout.

i agree it's not cut and dried, i'm not sure what e.g. a libertarian position would be, nor do i care much to find out. but my point was that in these extreme cases you can't just say it all flows from one flawed belief, flawed reasoning is a major factor too.

Rep. W Todd AkinVerified
‏@RepToddAkin
I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract
Explain the change, the difference between
What you want and what you need, there's the key.

lol

legit taken aback by this controversy bcz it really seems like some use-dr.-pepper-as-plan-b type middle school folktale, but i guess it's alarmingly common:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/a-canard-that-will-not-die-legitimate-rape-doesnt-cause-pregnancy/261303/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/the-6-craziest-things-people-have-said-about-pregn

(fwiw the buzzfeed style applied to politics is p grody to me but w/e)

what e.g. a libertarian position would be... exactly the same as the GOP position except your smoking weed in your parents basement.

I don't see anything in libertarian belief that dictates that life starts at fertilization, so pro choice libertarians should be out there, right?

romney camp initially said they disagree w/akin, now theyre saying his commentes were insulting, wonder how far this will go

some republicans have called for akin to drop out, scott brown being the most prominent to date

democrats of course think that might be kinda over doing it

The Corner has pretty much said that McCaskill winning now would be a legitimate rape of Akin.

uh where?

i def. missed that

no longer giving The Corner the benefit of linking to them.

must have been a columnist, or a commenter because i don't see it. or maybe you made it up?

http://swampland.time.com/2009/06/12/moving-day

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

campaign season with no questions:

Mitt Romney has long been enveloped in “the Mittness Protection Program” and it has been difficult for reporters following him to even ask a question (both in the United States and at “Polish holy sites”) However, Barack Obama hasn’t been much better.

The President hasn’t taken questions from the White House press corps in nearly two months. Instead, he has done local interviews where he has gotten softball questions, complied here by Buzzfeed, including “If you had a superpower, what would it be.”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_08/a_scrutiny_free_campaign039308.php

tbf a not insignificant portion of the electorate is comprised of which superpower single issue voters

I don't see anything in libertarian belief that dictates that life starts at fertilization, so pro choice libertarians should be out there, right?

― hipsters in black metal drag- next, on burzum buddies (Hunt3r), Monday, August 20, 2012 9:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for sure. my dad is a hardline libertarian (and a physician) and is very much pro-choice

idk what the numbers would be on this but i feel like the old-right libertarians are kind of running the show at the moment. (tho i would say that...)

i think the hip idea in libertarianism these days is that social conservatism shouldn't be enforced, but it's just natural. ie w/o an overweening state with its tentacles everywhere, you couldn't have lazy teen moms, gays enforcing their normality, liberal arts grads, sad 30ish professional women sans child, various loser groups with specious 'rights' claims etc. everyone would have to be an industrious sober nuclear family or die. let a thousand petty authoritarianisms bloom...

can't even disguise my glee at this akin situation now tbph

president scott brown wants him to step aside, claire mccaskill wants him to stick around! this is once in a lifetime stuff. clemenza, back me up here

I googled it, and all I could come up with was Michael Sarne during the making of Myra Breckinridge--the entire cast wanted him fired, all the competing studio heads wanted him to stay on.

delrayser ‏@delrayser
From NBC's 1st Read: "Even if Akin was ready to get out, his wife would never let him quit. 'She makes him seem like the reasonable one.'"

uh oh

?! i must know more of this woman then

he won't drop the Senate bid

Once the crime has occurred the woman can't be un-raped. She's a crime victim, not a lottery winner.

Here it is, right HERE, where you get an unobstructed view of the mindset that's so alien to me -- to this writer, it makes sense to imagine a woman responding to being raped with a joyous "whee, I hit the jackpot and now I can get the abortion I've always wanted"

nothing these people say is that weird if you keep in mind that they believe the moment of conception inaugurates a full individual person vested with all the same rights as any other flesh-and-blood child. like schlump says, everything flows from that. liberals constantly forget this, or pretend to forget it.

But I think it's a pretty small proportion of anti-abortion voters who really believe this (who, e.g, think that abortion should be prosecuted as murder, who bury miscarriages in the cemetery, etc.) There are some who do but I think it's clear that the vast majority hold some kind of intermediate "Fetuses are things other than people but are enough like people that you should be prohibited from killing them" view, whether or not they articulate it this way

like schlump says, everything flows from that.

actually everything flows from the idea that non-procreative sex is wrong. close tho.

xp How is it clear?

i'm not sure about that. i think a lot of ppl believe personhood starts at moment of conception xxp

opposition to abortion tends to warp other ideas around it. it has already softened theological differences between christianities that would make our grandparents do a spit-take. honestly i think it's that simple: if abortion is evil and rape is evil then a rape-necessitating-abortion has to be impossible. if a ludicrous idea boxes that in and explains it away, you'll find people believing it.

note also that these folks have a melodramatic villain-in-the-bushes image of rape, too. just as pernicious imo.

this is a theological breakdown in seriously addressing 'bad things happen to good ppl' paradox. a lack of intellectual sophistication tbh.

TPM Editor’s Blog
Ready to Rumble
Josh Marshall August 20, 2012, 1:51 PM 38

Shorter Cornyn: Carefully consider your future, Todd, and then decide to resign.

Family Research Council: We “enthusiastically” back Todd Akin.

lack of intellectual sophistication

said like it's a bad thing!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/obama-todd-akin-rape_n_1812140.html?

in for the kill

gop needs to find a new candidate who can run an impromptu campaign but also has acceptable positions on rape to satisfy the base

good luck usa

Theology really has nothing to do with this, and if you are blaming it on Christianity you are pretty much in the same boat as people using Christianity to defend it.

^^^

? nobody itt did that

i blame xtian theology

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/mitt-romney-would-pay-082-percent-in-taxes-under-paul-ryans-plan/261027/#.UDKnDVtU5QM.facebook

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