Please, won't you join us here for another in our occasional series of non sequitur posts? Pull up a chair. Make a scrutinizing face. Stare pensively.
Just a surmising here, but I'd like to promote the title of this post as a new bumper sticker platform.
Whenever I hear pro-life arguments, it's generally by those who go out of their way to support pro-death policies for anyone who is already born. Their concern about the yet-to-be born stands in contrast to their concern for the already-born. You know, things like war and bombs and not supporting health care for citizens and cutting funds for wounded soldiers (at the V.A., e.g.) and tampering with the education of children or their opportunity to live healthy lives (be it food issues, public school support, getting bogged down in debates about why someone would think learning aboud creationism would help a human live in this world), and standing in the way of the health of the mother, someone who pretty much needs help to remain healthy, seeing as she's carrying a child. That kind of stuff. Doesn't mean I think people shouldn't care about the yet-to-be-born, but that the pro-life banner should extend to people actually already born too.
Is this just me?
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You rock. That is so true, and the slogan is excellent! My husband and I have made this case often...often to blank looks of confusion. I don't know what is so complicated about this; after all, if you believe in the sacredness of human life, wouldn't that apply to all humans, including the post-partum ones?
Thanks!
And I want to know why oh why oh why
If you care about life, why don't you care about mine?
This is something my dad has talked to me about. Occasionally, he'll see the same people who once protested at an abortion clinic protesting against welfare the next day. Since hating the poor hurts minorities the most, my dad calls this mentality "save a baby, kill a nigger."
Well said! Let's have that bumper sticker.
Exactly my problem with the anti-abortion bunch. As part of the 2007 Blogswarm against theocracy, I wrote this post in which I made a similar (albeit less eloquent) argument.
What annoys me the most about many "pro-life" people is that they go nuts about saving the life of a fetus -- but most of them are totally oblivious to the cruel slaughter of billions of far more advanced life forms. Even a chicken has more on the ball than the average aborted fetus.
"Pro-life", my ass.
Occasionally, he'll see the same people who once protested at an abortion clinic protesting against welfare the next day.
I'm sorry, but when was the last time there was ever a protest "against welfare" anywhere, let alone the day after an anti-abortion protest? My impression is that all of you are holding forth on the obviously silly views of people you imagine must exist but have never actually met.
And creationism is "pro-death"?!?!?
That strikes me as pretty dim, CC. You've heard of Congress, right? They protest both abortion and welfare quite consistently. Time was, it was a majority of them Congress folk who did it.
I have always been moved by the consistency embodied in Pax Christi's "seamless garment" (John 19:23) life ethic. Pro-life, anti-death penalty, and anti-war.
I believe that was Bill Hicks' view as well, something I've long agreed with. As he put it the pro-lifers should stop picketing doctors' surgeries and start picketing graveyards instead.
The one that really gets me is the pro-lifers who support the death penalty. Not only sanctioning the murder of human beings but supporting the same penalty that supposedly robbed them of sky-daddy's little boy. Mmm, I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning...
That strikes me as pretty dim, CC. You've heard of Congress, right? They protest both abortion and welfare quite consistently.
So Aerik's father saw people protesting at an abortion clinic, turned on C-SPAN the next day and saw them in D.C. protesting (using a completely different definition of "protest") welfare?
I must be indeed be pretty dim -- never in a million years would I have thought that that was his point.
I have no cognitive dissonance since I realized that all fetuses are white males, often German or Anglo-Saxon, usually mainstream Protestant. It is only after birth that they become welfare cheats and other forms of 'the other,' to whom an even break (or better) would be Death For Our Kind.