I'm not going to go into the whole odious "Born Alive" controversy, which is well covered around the blogs with more gravitas on the subject than this place. I find that Senator Obama's personal and campaign responses to be... fantastical, and it's bemusing to watch how the media are giving it the Clinton treatment of marveling at how twisty-slippery he is, what a marvelous defensive dance he conducts! And in so doing ignore the basis of the *why* the Senator essentially called his own people liars.
I'm a squish on abortion, to many who frequent these pages. I'm not for an outright total ban. I'm not for making it cheap and easy, either - and I think that people should think long and hard about the decision. I don't have answers.
But I do like this answer, given by Archbishop David Chaput, of the Archdiocese of Denver, when asked could a faithfully practicing Catholic vote for a pro-choice candidate:
Heh. Leaving children who survived an abortion attempt to die, untouched, unloved, alone. How Spartan of them. And I'll not be much interested in listening to any discussions about the horrors of combat and evils of war from people supportive of the concept at issue.
But then, I also believe if you broke something, it's yours to fix, in a sense. I wouldn't have invaded Iraq. But we did, so I wouldn't walk away from them, and leave them to their own devices, either.
Just as I wouldn't walk away from a baby I failed to kill during an abortion - but, well, hell, I just can't get inside the mind of an abortionist anyway, I admit that. Just as I didn't walk away from a chick that was born deformed, who was rejected by her siblings, who was scared, and just wanted to be with someone who would make her warm and feed her. And there was no way she was going to survive the night - she was born with her insides, outside. She didn't know that. She just wanted to be warm, safe, and fed.
I didn't just leave her to die as entropy unraveled. I did what I had to do. I killed her, quickly, cleanly, humanely. And I put an onus on my overly sensitive soul by giving her some warmth and comfort, too, rather than just leaving her alone in her terror, as I decided how best to go about it. It was an awful time, holding that little waning life, sitting in my hand, as I pondered how to end it as mercifully as I could.
Just a chick, I know. Just a baby, existing outside the womb, self-sustaining inasmuch as any human baby is after birth.
Feh. It turns my stomach.
I'm a squish on abortion, to many who frequent these pages. I'm not for an outright total ban. I'm not for making it cheap and easy, either - and I think that people should think long and hard about the decision. I don't have answers.
But I do like this answer, given by Archbishop David Chaput, of the Archdiocese of Denver, when asked could a faithfully practicing Catholic vote for a pro-choice candidate:
Emphasis mine. Apparently, it's possibly a discussion the Democrats don't want to have in Denver (it's their convention, they have that right, just as we have the right to ask the question in this and other forums) - from the Washington Times today:I think there are legitimate reasons you could vote in favor of someone who wouldn’t be where the church is on abortion, but it would have to be a reason that you could confidently explain to Jesus and the victims of abortion when you meet them at the Judgment. That’s the only criterion.
Hey, maybe it *is* just an oversight. With the uneven way this campaign has been running, I can believe that. Regardless of deliberate or not - it's out there now, something else for them to chase their tails with.Democrats have invited more than two dozen religious leaders to pray or speak at their upcoming convention with a notable exception: Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, a policy wonk and the leader of Colorado's largest religious denomination.
Heh. Leaving children who survived an abortion attempt to die, untouched, unloved, alone. How Spartan of them. And I'll not be much interested in listening to any discussions about the horrors of combat and evils of war from people supportive of the concept at issue.
But then, I also believe if you broke something, it's yours to fix, in a sense. I wouldn't have invaded Iraq. But we did, so I wouldn't walk away from them, and leave them to their own devices, either.
Just as I wouldn't walk away from a baby I failed to kill during an abortion - but, well, hell, I just can't get inside the mind of an abortionist anyway, I admit that. Just as I didn't walk away from a chick that was born deformed, who was rejected by her siblings, who was scared, and just wanted to be with someone who would make her warm and feed her. And there was no way she was going to survive the night - she was born with her insides, outside. She didn't know that. She just wanted to be warm, safe, and fed.
I didn't just leave her to die as entropy unraveled. I did what I had to do. I killed her, quickly, cleanly, humanely. And I put an onus on my overly sensitive soul by giving her some warmth and comfort, too, rather than just leaving her alone in her terror, as I decided how best to go about it. It was an awful time, holding that little waning life, sitting in my hand, as I pondered how to end it as mercifully as I could.
Just a chick, I know. Just a baby, existing outside the womb, self-sustaining inasmuch as any human baby is after birth.
Feh. It turns my stomach.
What horrifies me more than trying to understand why ANY doctor would willingly perform what I consider to be murder, is realising that after the operation, they will then present a bill for their services. Murder for hire.
And theses same scum-sucking bottom dwellers called me and my friends "baby killers".
I'm going for a walk..... and maybe a drink.
I am not that far from your perspective, John - and I was utterly horrified at the concept of allowing a baby that survived abortion to simply die on a shelf. It made me almost physically ill, and still makes me mad enough to see red. Add the massive irony of our troops being called baby-killer, and it's too much to stomach.
People who can hold both thoughts simultaneously in their pea-brains are something less than human to me.
And they refuse to see the inconsistency.
Why don't their heads explode from holding these two opposing views? And to repeat myself - Why do they keep killing the wrong people???
Ok, so in my role as a girl who peeks, I follow all your links and I read this -
So the latest defense is that there were two similar bills?
LOL, well that's the answer! All Obama has to do is admit he was confused.
There you go Obamassiah, you don't really stand for going to appalling lengths in the name of protecting Ros vs. Wade.......you were just too lazy to read the proposed legislation thoroughly enough to distinquish between the two.
Or how about this? It was a hectic Monday morning. Maybe the morning after you and Bill Ayers had had a late night collaborating on how to *create* the America Michelle could be proud of. Maybe there was a nice pinot noir and over indulgence gave you a tinsy hangover.
Oh wait! You were rushed. You had to get across town for an important bible study session with the Rev. Wright because he was such a great spiritual advisor.
There you go! Don't ever say that Princess Crabby never reached across the aisle to help out the opposition.
Or at least, that is what they tell themselves.
The consistency is internally consistent to them. They will always favor somebody else doing the killing. Whether it's doctors or the 'state', but it was never they themselves who made choices and had to be accountable to them. Oh no.
Free will is frowned upon in some localities, you know.
"Interesting that most of the pro-lifers support the death penalty"
Most of the pro-Lifers I know believe life without possibility of parole *is* a more fitting punishment.
And to me, as discussed elsewhere here, absent a miscarriage of justice, a murderer strapped to a gurney made a series of decisions that put him there. He made choices, choices that got him or her marked as so dangerous to society that the representatives of society decided to remove him or her from the society permanently.
An unborn child hasn't made a decision more significant than whether or not to suck its thumb when the forceps or vacuum wand suddenly appears and what was a warm, nurturing environment becomes an abbatoir.
The unborn child was an inconvenience to someone - except in the extreme cases of threat to the health of the mother, it wasn't a threat.
It was an embarassment. But not one that would kill you to get your sneakers.
Might turn into one, sure - heh, Freakanomics makes that argument in favor of abortion - but even if so - that occured because of choices made and options taken.
Therein, to me, lies the difference. Yep, society might well end up executing someone that would have been aborted had a different decision been made.
But that is knowing an unknowable.
It should also be mentioned that even the perpetrator of the most heinous of crimes will receive the full protection of the legal system. He/she will be given the oresunption of innocence, housed and cared for humanely, provided with legal council at the state's expense if needs be, given the right to a hearing to see if charges are valid and warrented, told the nature of the charges against he/she, given the right to defend themselves before a judge and jury, given the right to face and examine the accuser(s), given the opportunity for appeals, etc. A long and technical process formed to ensure that equality under the law exists as well as we can make it so.
The child in it's mother's womb? Not so much. Apparently the mother gets to be prosecuter and judge, and there seems to be plenty of willing executioners. No right to council, no right to plead a defense, just a "sorry, but you are an inconvenient truth, and you're outta here". Heck, the denial runs so deep amongst the child-killers that they cannot even bring themselves to recognise, let alone admit, that they are destroying human life.
I understand that there are, indeed, times when it (abortion) is the only good choice in a bad situation. The Catholic church has always counseled that the life of a mother with other children always trumps that of the child she carries, if by carrying the child to term it would likely result in the death or permanent incapacitation of the mother. She has, after all, other children living who need her help to survive. But those cases are a tiny minority and with modern medicine and technology, the chance of death during, or as a result of, childbirth is growing smaller every year.
Lets not even get into how the whole sordid situation completely eliminates the rights of the father from any sort of consideration.