Apart from an enourmous quantity of swearwords, that is. See, I’m pro-choice. I find it very hard to sympathise with the pro-life view. I mean, the pro-choice lobby isn’t forcing anyone to have abortions, and I think it’s hugely immoral, not to say just plain rude to try and prevent someone from having one.
But at least when an individual person is pro-life, well, it’s just one person, I don’t agree with them, but I know many decent and extremely clever people with whom I disagree on a wide range of issues, including this one. But when a state is pro-life I get incandescent. This is scummy, disgusting behaviour of the first water. It’s fucking religious is what it is. And I disapprove of churches being allowed to set any sort of political agenda, because it’s patently obvious to even a half-bright three year old that they’re not fit to work out a fucking moral agenda, never mind a political one.
Attention Americans: Until you depose your president by armed revolution, and chase him through streets in a mob baying for his blood and the blood of his administration and all their friends and family, finishing by scourging them all to death with rusty barbed wire, the rest of the world will refuse to take you seriously as a sentient people.
…
I too am speechless at that. I can’t think of anything to say! Are people in the western world still posessing that attitude in the 21st century???
That is thoroughly depressing.
I suppose it won’t help if I say that I didn’t vote for them. (Actually, I was a Florida Absentee Voter in the 2000 election. Made me special).
There is a portion of american society for whom this is the only issue. And unfortunately, they vote. Early, often, and all the time. The fact that these segments of society have abortion rates that match that of the rest of the country of course, isn’t at all the issue. Oh, no.
Unfortunately, I hate to say an armed revolution isn’t going to work very well. My office is 3 blocks from the White House, and between the armed guards, the armed plainsclothes guards, and the Secret Services’ Not so Secret new Headquarters, nobody is getting anywhere near there.
I think we just have to wait them out.
*wonders when Margaret Atwood will start feeling really perturbed at life imitating art*
Fucking scary biscuits.
The irony, also is that abortion is high in the US. For instance, had I chosen to have sex while over there, my options were the costly clinic about 30 miles away with no bus service. Or condoms from the local pharmacy – if you were allowed to buy them.
I went in with a safe sex t-shirt to school once. You’d think I’d have turned up naked. Carpeted before principal, the works. And at least 10% of the girls over 14 in the school were either pregnant or had been pregnant. And they were the ones who stayed in school.
Fucktards. Have they never *heard* of hormones?
*suppresses religious rant before it goes any further*
Honestly, that’s not the bit that really annoyed me. OK, yes, it really, really annoyed me. But the other bit’s especially special.
Y’know, the bit where they’re trying to stop teenagers having any access to contraception.
Well, because providing contraception will encourage them to have sex. And we aren’t supposed to do that until we are married.
This is the reason that sodomy is still illegal in a number of states. You can actually be arrested for having oral sex with the person you are married to. In your own house. It’s not frequently enforced.
But still, the fact it’s on the books at all…
And people wonder why I prefer living in England…
The religious right have slowly been getting themselves elected to political posts and changing laws from the small ones upwards to suit their agendas. From banning books, to banning Darwinism to hounding abortion doctors…and they think god blesses America.
*shakes head with disgust*
It’s all quite sad, really. I feel as though the clock is turning back to the 80s when Ronnie was in charge and the great conservative xtian movement was sinking their claws into people. Our “elected” leader has lost a large majority of the female vote for 2004 if he decides to run again.
Large swathes of the the American people are finding growing up very hard. They want certainty. They want to be on the side of God. They believe in inalienable rights, they want the myth of thier founding fathers fight for freedom of conscience to be unperturbed by the simple historical fact of a continenet wide genocide. They want to believe themselves founded on ideals, not blood. They declare freedom of conscience, yet they voted thier first Catholic President only 40 years ago, they might just about tolerate a Jew in the next 50 years – but an Atheist? I think not. So it’s freedom to believe in thier God, to believe in thier myths, to embrace absolutes that allow of no shades of grey.
Absolutes are so comforting. If there is an absolute right, you can’t be held responsible for the pain it’s maintenance may create. You can burn people to save thier souls. The status quo will be maintained because you must be living in the best of all possible worlds – you have this codex (in this instance the Bible, but it could as easily be an edition of Marx) wherein all anwers to all questions may be found.
You don’t have to think.
It’s not your fault – it’s GOds law.
So, the scientific fact of our species’ increasingly early maturation is of no consequence. The fact that poeple make mistakes is irrelevent.
Your right to hold whatever belief you choose is important. To justify it you pay lip service to the idea of freedom of belief, but the fact is your belief is the right one, and so clearly ought to be the basis of the law for everyone else. Cos your right.
How blinkered do you have to be not to see the gaps in such thinking – before you even get to the moral discussion?
There is nothing good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
There are no ‘human rights’ but for those we choose to adopt.
The universe could throw a rock at us tomorrow and whining that it has no right is unlikely to help.
But this isn’t true of Americans alone. In this country we have a creationist shcool and a bible bashing PM who refused to take a stand against them.
I’ve often thought – in this day and age, is there anything I’d be prepared to go to war for? And I think there is. If anyone turned the UK into a theocracy I’d have to fight. I’d be prepared to die for that, cos living under such a regime would be intolerable. I’m civilised, you see, and will not allow myself to be subject to barbarians.
But it’s unlikely to come to that for me.
However, American chums – it may come to that for you.