They happen to align with my values. I was raised Christian, and I only became agnostic in college, so that probably plays into it.
For example, abortion, I think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don’t know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution, at the earliest point, at conception.
Im not anti-lgbtq.
I dont hold contempt for atheism, I dont like /r/atheism
Christian nationalism is weird one because no one seems to know what that actually means. And hell, freedom of religion is one of the most important rights, right next to free speech.
You can equate the two, but they’re not functionally the same in reality. There is statistical evidence that banning abortion does not work and in fact has the opposite effect, so swapping the words makes no sense. A better comparison would be Prohibition in the US in the 1920s - banning alcohol didn’t stop the production or use of it, it just made it exceedingly dangerous, lots of people got sick, went blind, and died from homemade liquor that contained too much methanol.
If you truly care about the life of the child at conception and after its birth, you’d choose the option where there is never an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. Most unwanted pregnancies result in children suffering abuse, entering the foster system, and eventually aging out without ever having a permanent or stable family. Many of these kids live a life where they’ve NEVER been loved.
There are nearly 400,000 children in the foster system in the US right now and the number grows every day. There’s no one to adopt these babies. Forcing women to have children does not work. No child should ever be unwanted, every child deserves loving parents. This is the world that abortion bans create.
Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes or wants women to have abortions, especially the women getting the procedure…it is NOT pleasant. Pro-choice supporters would be thrilled if there’s never another abortion again, as long there were no unwanted pregnancies.
The best,statistically provenmethod to prevent abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Full stop.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially “people still break laws, so why have laws?” That is a poor argument that isn’t going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the “murderers” in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I’m familiar with the thought process.
We have laws that regulate abortion, alcohol, etc already. I said nothing about “why have laws?” in any part of my argument. I said banning abortion will not reduce abortions, much less stop them. That statement is a proven fact.
You and others seem to be applying my belief that abortion should not be illegal to all other laws, which is not the case. That is my opinion on a singular issue. I never stated nor implied other laws shouldn’t exist.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say “making murder illegal doesn’t reduce the number of murders” anyone with any sort of a moral center will say “I don’t care, murder should still be illegal.” And that’s the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That’s how the argument gets reduced to “Why have laws?” To them, it’s basically saying “It doesn’t help enough, so why even draw that line at all?”
That said, let’s look at your proven fact for a moment. I don’t believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70’s, which didn’t begin to fall until the 90’s, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren’t statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
You’re missing the point. If you conflate abortion and murder, you’re either being willfully ignorant or exceedingly simple. Just because some people equate two things, doesn’t make them the same in reality. Whether you like it or not they are different, and applying the same standards to them makes no sense.
Your argument is like saying “Advil and heroin are both pain relieving drugs, so the law should apply equally.” They are not the same, and we should not treat them the same, even if some people mistakenly equate them.
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it’s justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that’s a different argument than what you began with.
More like banning any medical procedures during pregnancy will force people to get then somewhere else.
Also killing someone who is using our body without your consent is self defense.
I see you lack basic understanding in science and human development, and it’s unfortunately infected your opinions, feelings, and thoughts on the matter to the point you’re too far gone down the rabbit hole to ever come back to reality.
Aborting a non viable pregnancy isn’t and never will be murder. In fact, stopping women with non-viable pregnancies from getting an abortion often can be murder itself. Therefore abortion != murder
Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, it just shifts it to a black market where women are far more likely to die.
Perhaps, but it will likely at least severely reduce it. It’s certainly not appropriate to assume that every woman who would have had an abortion when it’s safe and legal would also do so when it’s dangerous and illegal. More likely, it would lead to a rise in babies given up for adoption.
No, I don’t see fetuses as babies, I feel no moral stress whatsoever in supporting abortion rights. But that is a different point. You were casually claiming adoption as a solution even though it requires thousands of times more effort from a society that currently refuses to provide that effort.
And this is an internet comment, not a research paper, google it. There is so much data on this shit, I’m not gunna spoon feed it to a stranger just because I point out something they said is BS.
You know what I changed my mind. I’ll do a little research paper for you, but only if you do it first, defending your claim that the most likely result of an abortion ban is (mostly) an increase in adoptions.
I prefer sources to be papers, but I’ll accept anything that cites it’s data well.
I honestly wouldn’t know where to start looking for data on that. But I didn’t make the claim that this was definitely going to happen, just that it was the likely outcome, based on the common sense assumption that if abortion access wasn’t easy, safe, and anonymous, and involved a significant risk of injury or death for the mother, more women would likely find it less risky to carry their pregnancy to term and give up the baby for adoption if they haven’t changed their mind on it by then.
Also, they may simply choose to use birth control more often, and/or insist on their partners wearing a condom.
From my point of view, I find the claim that making abortion illegal would not prevent even a single one from occurring far more incredulous and therefore requiring a higher level of proof.
Alright I’m gunna take this point by point because broadly I understand what you are trying to get at but you have a few details that bother me and I feel derail the whole thing.
But I didn’t make the claim that this was definitely going to happen, just that it was the likely outcome
Me neither, I was talking about historical precedent, not some hard and fast rule of the universe.
based on the common sense assumption that if abortion access wasn’t easy, safe, and anonymous, and involved a significant risk of injury or death for the mother, more women would likely find it less risky to carry their pregnancy to term and give up the baby for adoption
First of all, with the “death or injury” part of this, I don’t see why this is preferable. Seems like threatening their lives and happiness in the interest of forcing births. But also, this assumes there aren’t other ways this can shake out in the end, and child abuse, abandonment and childhood homelessness, and human trafficking are all part of this topic and all things that increase when abortion is illegal. Your common sense assumption is based on a situationally perfect example, and it doesn’t make sense when applied to real world experiences.
if they haven’t changed their mind on it by then.
This is just a piece of that bullshit take that argues women will learn to love their future babies if they are just forced to carry them long enough that abortions are more difficult and less legally accessable. Nah
From my point of view, I find the claim that making abortion illegal would not prevent even a single one from occurring far more incredulous and therefore requiring a higher level of proof.
Good thing I wasn’t claiming that then. I’m saying the amount prevented would be negligible, not magically impossibly zero. It would likely be a small amount, and utterly overshadowed by the negative effects of banning abortions.
I honestly wouldn’t know where to start looking for data on that.
Generally any search engine is a good start, although you can go to google scholar if you want more academic and dense results. Then, just look for what experts/doctors are saying. Try to stick to groups that verify each other and are verified by outside groups, individual experts are fallible on who knows what, so trust the experts that other experts seem to trust. Generally unless you want to be a researcher yourself, these are the most trustworthy and direct sources for data and such you can possibly get.
Me neither, I was talking about historical precedent, not some hard and fast rule of the universe.
Well that’s the thing, “historical precedent” means that this has actually demonstrably happened before, in which case there should be data on it. That’s why I asked for proof. Which I understand you’re most likely not going to be able to provide, since there obviously can’t be any reliable data on the amount of clandestine abortions that happened before it was legalized.
First of all, with the “death or injury” part of this, I don’t see why this is preferable. Seems like threatening their lives and happiness in the interest of forcing births.
I mean, I’m not a woman, but if I were, and I was given the choice between having an illegal procedure that had a good chance of injury or death (and no possible recourse), and carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, I think I would choose the latter, because it seems a lot safer, no matter how inconvenient.
This is just a piece of that bullshit take that argues women will learn to love their future babies if they are just forced to carry them long enough that abortions are more difficult and less legally accessable. Nah
Well, in the absence of any hard data, I find that idea more convincing than the opposite, but again, I’ll admit that I’m not a woman. But unless you are, you’re likely no more of an expert on this than I am. And even if you are AND have gone through all this, you’d just be a single data point of anecdotal evidence, which would not be enough to convince me.
Good thing I wasn’t claiming that then. I’m saying the amount prevented would be negligible, not magically impossibly zero. It would likely be a small amount, and utterly overshadowed by the negative effects of banning abortions.
You realize that for statistical purposes, “zero” and “negligible” are absolutely identical, right? It’s called a null hypothesis, look it up.
I would rather die than be pregnant. Nobody wants their body hijacked and raped for 9 months. That’s something you only do if you consent to it. Otherwise you might as well waterboard someone for 9 months they’d much prefer it.
Honest question. How do you reconcile your claim about not being anti-lgbt when the GOP is very vocally and openly pushing anti-lgbt messaging and legislation.
You know that someone can agree with most things in a platform and hate other things about it right?
The fact that they said they’re not anti-lgbt instead of saying they’re pro-lgbt implies that lgbt issues in general are lower on their list of priorities. They may not agree with the anti lgbt stuff but it isn’t important to them anyway.
I’m aware of that first part, but I’m not quite sure how it’s possible to make a moral argument that basic human rights shouldn’t be towards the very top of your list. The unfortunate reality of the matter is that even in the off chance your local R isn’t completely awful, the policies that will be implemented on a national level if they manage to take control of the presidency again are. Voting for an R is a tacit endorsement of those policies.
They’re a Republican. They don’t view LGBT issues as a human rights issue in the first place. It’s a political issue for them. Hence why they can reconcile that their opinion vs the party platform.
Again, that’s why they said they’re not anti-lgbt rather than saying they’re pro-lgbt.
They can disagree with the Republican Party on LGBT issues, because it’s a political issue for them and not a human rights issue.
Idk man. It just seems like you’re saying “political issue” but what you mean is “doesn’t affect them”.
And I think the whole they’re not “anti” these people they just don’t care enough about them to vote for them to have basic protections is a tough sell. At some point it’s a forced choice, and sitting out isn’t really an option.
I guess maybe it’s how they truly see it, but it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
It just seems like you’re saying “political issue” but what you mean is “doesn’t affect them”.
Yeah, that is exactly what I said and what I meant. It was my point. Thank you for getting the point?
At some point it’s a forced choice, and sitting out isn’t really an option.
Idk, the fact that the Log Cabin Republicans exist kinda proves that it is. Even LGBT people can reconcile Republican ideals and their own LGBT identity. It’s much easier for someone that isn’t LGBT to ignore LGBT issues. And the majority of people wont have someone close to them be LGBT, making it even easier to not care about them.
Yea it is easier for them to ignore. Choosing to ignore it is still a choice. And the effect of that choice is the continued suspension of human rights. There is no true option of sitting out.
The point is framing it as a “political issue” takes the responsibility off of them. Again, it’s true they see it that way, but all I hear is they only care about themselves.
This sounds an awful lot like a repudiation of “vote blue no matter who” but from the opposite angle. The fact of the matter is that different people place different priorities on different issues. Everyone these days seems to think that all people need to have the perfect opinion on every subject but I think that’s crazy. Take the wins you can get and leave the rest for later.
Personally I think that means that Democrats need to bide their time on several issues. If they would make a commitment to let guns, abortion (would have been easier 4 years ago), and LGBT issues lie for an entire election cycle, and make the general electorate believe that’s a real promise, they could get so much other shit done. I know people here are going to start in on how such a statement is unfair to trans people, women, victims of gun violence, etc, but there’s no denying the fact that those issues are sticking points for huge amounts of voters.
You don’t even have to concede any arguments to do what I’m suggesting either. All you need to do is acknowledge that we have other things we could work on before we cross those bridges. If you look at polling data most Americans agree with Democrats on solutions to problems like healthcare, the tax code, and labor laws. If we could implement even semi progressive laws around these issues we would improve the lives of everyone in America, including those most impacted by the issues above. Why would we not do that and then go back to our usual bickering along political lines?
When it comes down to it we’re not gaining anything by insisting on purity tests for these positions that only drive voter engagement for conservatives. Just table them for now and work on what can realistically be accomplished. The alternative is not more progress for more people, it’s more of this culture war bullshit, and that doesn’t help anyone at all. Isn’t that the worst option on the table?
Democrats need to bide their time on several issues… LGBT issues lie for an entire election cycle
The problem is a lot of damage can be done in one election cycle. Just this year so far? 590 anti-trans bills have been proposed and 85 anti-trans bills have passed in the US: https://translegislation.com
And how did those bills get passed? Republicans were able to pass them because some voters are so worried about their guns and drag queen story hour that they refused to vote for Democrats. You’re making my point for me. Anything is better than regression, including no progress at all.
I bet leaving guns alone would be enough by itself but Democrats just can’t stop themselves from poking that beehive even though they know damn well that no meaningful legislation will come from it. They’re not gaining any voters or changing any laws by making it a sticking point but they’re definitely losing voters because of it. If you know you can’t make anything happen then why bring up something that’s only going to hurt you? Fight that battle on the day you can win it and until then keep your mouth shut about it.
I never stated whether I was pro or con guns, so I don’t need the lecture. I was simply pointing out that you can’t just sit out an election cycle when it comes to human rights
Call it what you want, that way of doing things hasn’t seen much of any major progress since the civil rights movement. The moral high ground seems rather pointless to claim if all you’re doing is watching things deteriorate from an elevated position.
You know I voted for Hillary and Biden even though both trashed the idea of Medicare For All. That’s a huge issue for me, but you don’t really get to pick your politicians. You only pick the lesser of two evils. Republicans don’t like Dems. They might not love Trump or even Ted Cruz but for some people that’s their lesser of two evils. So I can’t speak for this other commenter but I can understand why you might vote for someone who doesn’t share your values
And for plenty of policy points that’s not an issue. When we’re on the topic of basic human rights, I’m not entirely sure how you* can handwave those abuses away because you want lower taxes.
Ok so if your choice was between a politician who made LGBT issues their priority but were against medicare for all/socialized medicine, and a politician that made medicare for all/socialized medicine their priority but were against LGBT rights, who would you choose?
Both are human rights issues. Which one is more important to you?
If there’s an answer that isn’t basically “well they’re not on my priority list so they can get fucked”, I’d love to hear it. We’re not talking about some relatively benign issue like zoning laws or whether or not we should introduce a new sales tax to fund the park system. Sitting by complacently is actively tacitly supporting the policies trying to further these abuses, and it’s not some trivial issue that doesn’t matter.
People can have different opinions to what is important and what is not. If someone try to censor every online forum in order to protect people from cyber crimes and financially support North Korean government even though time and time it has been proven that it doesn’t go well, fuck up all the housing crisis even more, but is the only candidate who (remotely) supports LGBTQ, I’m not voting them, which is exactly the case in my country.
There are other important aspects of people’s lives and you can’t just go around and say your priorities are wrong. You can however argue about the reasoning that led to said priorities and initial opinion, which is exactly what people are talking to you.
Neo-libs may not be, but there are plenty of us who are adamant that the workers shall not be disarmed.
Ignoring that…
The gop is unintionally better for lgbtq than the dnc
Only one is actively imposing legislation that oppresses the lgptq community. If you honestly believe that, I beg you to take an actual hard, honest look at the legislation the GOP has passed in the last 6 years. You’ll find that’s just simply not true. Lying to others is one thing, but don’t lie to yourself.
Are there individuals within the GOP who don’t support those things? Perhaps, but they’re clearly at least not opposed to them. Unfortunately the “old guard” have decided they’d rather let the complete and utter batshit insane corner of the party drive the platform. It’s time to realize that.
Yeah, I probably should’ve said gop and dnc, and adjusted the wording slightly.
I would argue that any right is meaningless without 2a to back it up. Thus, any rights given by the DNC aren’t real. They aren’t worth the paper it’s written on.
You must have a much higher tolerance for glacial paced change than I do.
As someone who is aggressively pro-2a (although almost certainly for different reasons than you), I might have been able to legitimately see your point 10 years ago when the GOP was less actively hostile to the very existence of gay people. Unfortunately we don’t live in 2013 anymore.
think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don’t know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution
Why stop there? You have no idea, right? So why do you masturbate or use condoms? You’re killing millions of potential babies!
If you don’t know, you should err on the side of caution for the rights of the people who you do know are real.
Or maybe you should just stay out of it, because as you say, you don’t know. Leave it to the scientists and doctors who DO know and who almost universally support abortion access.
Why stop there? You have no idea, right? So why do you masturbate or use condoms? You’re killing millions of potential babies!
Not the guy you’re responding to, but you have a point. Coincidentally, most religions are also against both, so at least you can’t accuse them of being inconsistent on the issue of reproduction.
I’m on team “glad you responded” but I still wanna respond to 2 things you said.
First, a lot of anti-abortion people want the abortion conversation to end at “this is murder”, but how do you address the bodily autonomy argument? Even if I accept any and all abortions as the full death of a complete person, why are women compelled to donate their bodies to save another person? I don’t support forced organ donations to save lives, and by that logic I also do not support forced pregnancies. Any opinion on that perspective?
Christian nationalism isn’t complicated in what it is, it is just the desire/push/beliefs from the people that want a nation with an explicitly christian government, a christian theocracy. If it completely took over everything, freedom of religion would be dead, everything would be christian. To try and rephrase it bluntly, Christian nationalism is the desire for and work towards a Christian nation. Some people take it seriously, some people don’t, some people outright support it, others deny it even is a real concept.
Edit to add: if you aren’t anti-lgbtq, will you call your representatives that you vote for and emphatically tell them so? The difference in opinions between conservatives and their politicians about lgbtq is something I hear from most conservatives I’ve talked to, but it makes me sad to see they don’t really care beyond saying “I’m not anti-lgbtq”. If you vote for an anti-lgbtq politician because of other policies they support, please at least tell them you don’t agree with their anti-lgbtq stance. It is literally the least amount of help I can think of to ask for.
I’m anti abortion once the fetus is viable. Prior to that point, a woman is refusing to let someone else use her body to survive, and while there are personal moral questions there, I think she should have the right to make that call. After that point, she’s attempting to kill someone else to avoid the suffering that a birth would entail.
I still support her right to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, I just don’t support abortion as the method.
I’m aware that late term abortions are so vanishingly rare that this is a pointless hair-splitting exercise, but I like to have a consistent moral system as much as I can, whether it’s currently relevant or not, and I thought someone might appreciate my .02.
In my mind, so long as lgbtq people have both free speech and the right to bear arms, the rest of their rights will come. See: The marches and protests that lead to gay marriage. Those two rights come before everything else, and support everything else.
Unfortunately, many Republican elected representatives are, to varying degrees, anti-LGBT and do support Christian encroachment into non-religious people’s lives.
Kudos for sharing. Feel free to ignore those who challenge your values. It takes a bunches of mental energy to argue and it isn’t necessarily worth it to argue.
With that said, I will still would like to ask you a question, if you are up for it.
How did you form your values?
I only ask because it is easy, when you are raised as Christian, to uncritically accept the teaching, values, and views of those around you as your own.
As kids we are conditioned through school, parents, and in general just information asymmetry to accept what adults say as fact and not question it. It is easy to carry that same tendency over into our values and viewpoints. Kids and adults have a hard time separating fact from opinion. We tend to treat widely held beliefs as fact instead of as the opinions they actually are.
Pro guns, all sorts of historical precedent, from the US in Iraq, to Roof Koreans, to the French Resistance, to Australia. (This is honestly my strongest belief, guns and free speech)
Free speech, how can you speak up if you can’t speak?
I understand your justification for your beliefs and even share some of your moral beliefs. It seems to me like you didn’t really answer in the way I meant to communicate it. I’ll try to rephrase my original question to what I mean clearer. What causes you to rank your own values in the way you do?
Why do you think access to guns is more important than your beliefs on abortion? Or why are they more important than not getting overcharged on everything from housing to education to healthcare?
TLDR: Without guns and speech, you have no rights, and I have historical evidence to back me up. But also they’re pre-crime laws.
Simply put, the right to bear arms protects every other right. But before you grab the ammo box, you supposed to actually say something. Protest, make yourself heard. Free speech and guns go hand in hand in my mind.
For guns specifically, guns protect rights I can point to any number of historical precedents. Even in America, gun control basically started as a way to disarm black people, and it’s still trying to keep poor people from arming themselves, and look how minorities are treated. In Nazi Germany, one of the first things they did was disarm the Jewish people. On a lighter note, Australia disarmed, and now they banned hentai. You can’t make this shit up
Guns are powerful tools, poverty stricken farmers in the middle east held off the most powerful military in the world for decades, whether or not you agree with them. The IRA successfully kept most of Ireland independent from the UK with guns. The French Resistance wouldn’t have been able to do anything without guns. Hell, the Roof Koreans wouldn’t have saved their stores without guns.
I can come up with more, but I think you get the point.
It’s a similar situation with free speech. Tons of historical precedents. Martin Luther King marching for example. (I came up with a ton of examples, but I realized just how long it was)
In any case, gun control and hate speech laws are pre-crime laws. What’s the actual issue? Murder, assault, robbery, that sort of thing. Simply owning and saying shit isn’t hurting anyone by itself. Murder should be against the law, not having a gun and not outing yourself as a bigot. It’s pre-crime, not actual crime.
Christian nationalism is just the merging of Christian and American identity. “America is a Christian nation”. You hear similar often from pandering and or deranged Republicans
Being a fetus doesn’t excuse a foreign body’s presence inside of mine. I do not intend to be pregnant and if my partner’s sperm invades my body when I do not want it I will take every step to eliminate it or the process that follows it. A fetus isn’t important. If anything forcing someone to exist is the utmost violation of bodily autonomy. As they say, just because something is natural doesn’t make it good.
They happen to align with my values. I was raised Christian, and I only became agnostic in college, so that probably plays into it.
For example, abortion, I think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don’t know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution, at the earliest point, at conception.
Im not anti-lgbtq.
I dont hold contempt for atheism, I dont like /r/atheism
Christian nationalism is weird one because no one seems to know what that actually means. And hell, freedom of religion is one of the most important rights, right next to free speech.
I hope that helps.
Banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion, it just shifts it to a black market where women are far more likely to die.
What does demonstrably reduce abortion to effectively insignificant levels is better sex education and easy access to contraceptives.
Prohibition has never worked. Education always has.
Let’s replace some words. I think that abortion is murder. So it becomes:
“Banning murder doesn’t stop murder”
Do you see the point I’m trying to make?
You can equate the two, but they’re not functionally the same in reality. There is statistical evidence that banning abortion does not work and in fact has the opposite effect, so swapping the words makes no sense. A better comparison would be Prohibition in the US in the 1920s - banning alcohol didn’t stop the production or use of it, it just made it exceedingly dangerous, lots of people got sick, went blind, and died from homemade liquor that contained too much methanol.
If you truly care about the life of the child at conception and after its birth, you’d choose the option where there is never an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. Most unwanted pregnancies result in children suffering abuse, entering the foster system, and eventually aging out without ever having a permanent or stable family. Many of these kids live a life where they’ve NEVER been loved.
There are nearly 400,000 children in the foster system in the US right now and the number grows every day. There’s no one to adopt these babies. Forcing women to have children does not work. No child should ever be unwanted, every child deserves loving parents. This is the world that abortion bans create.
Nobody is pro-abortion. Nobody likes or wants women to have abortions, especially the women getting the procedure…it is NOT pleasant. Pro-choice supporters would be thrilled if there’s never another abortion again, as long there were no unwanted pregnancies.
The best, statistically proven method to prevent abortions is education and easy access to contraception. Full stop.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially “people still break laws, so why have laws?” That is a poor argument that isn’t going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the “murderers” in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I’m familiar with the thought process.
We have laws that regulate abortion, alcohol, etc already. I said nothing about “why have laws?” in any part of my argument. I said banning abortion will not reduce abortions, much less stop them. That statement is a proven fact.
You and others seem to be applying my belief that abortion should not be illegal to all other laws, which is not the case. That is my opinion on a singular issue. I never stated nor implied other laws shouldn’t exist.
You’re still missing the point.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say “making murder illegal doesn’t reduce the number of murders” anyone with any sort of a moral center will say “I don’t care, murder should still be illegal.” And that’s the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That’s how the argument gets reduced to “Why have laws?” To them, it’s basically saying “It doesn’t help enough, so why even draw that line at all?”
That said, let’s look at your proven fact for a moment. I don’t believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70’s, which didn’t begin to fall until the 90’s, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren’t statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
You’re missing the point. If you conflate abortion and murder, you’re either being willfully ignorant or exceedingly simple. Just because some people equate two things, doesn’t make them the same in reality. Whether you like it or not they are different, and applying the same standards to them makes no sense.
Your argument is like saying “Advil and heroin are both pain relieving drugs, so the law should apply equally.” They are not the same, and we should not treat them the same, even if some people mistakenly equate them.
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it’s justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that’s a different argument than what you began with.
More like banning any medical procedures during pregnancy will force people to get then somewhere else. Also killing someone who is using our body without your consent is self defense.
I see you lack basic understanding in science and human development, and it’s unfortunately infected your opinions, feelings, and thoughts on the matter to the point you’re too far gone down the rabbit hole to ever come back to reality.
Good luck down there!
Aborting a non viable pregnancy isn’t and never will be murder. In fact, stopping women with non-viable pregnancies from getting an abortion often can be murder itself. Therefore abortion != murder
Perhaps, but it will likely at least severely reduce it. It’s certainly not appropriate to assume that every woman who would have had an abortion when it’s safe and legal would also do so when it’s dangerous and illegal. More likely, it would lead to a rise in babies given up for adoption.
There is historical precedent that your assumptions are not the case. Assumptions are deadly if you use them to ignore the world around you.
And it’s not like there are great systems in place to support babies given up for adoption, even if that was what happened.
So you’re saying it’s better to perfectly kill babies than to imperfectly give them up for adoption?
Yeah, I’m going to need a source on that.
No, I don’t see fetuses as babies, I feel no moral stress whatsoever in supporting abortion rights. But that is a different point. You were casually claiming adoption as a solution even though it requires thousands of times more effort from a society that currently refuses to provide that effort.
And this is an internet comment, not a research paper, google it. There is so much data on this shit, I’m not gunna spoon feed it to a stranger just because I point out something they said is BS.
You know what I changed my mind. I’ll do a little research paper for you, but only if you do it first, defending your claim that the most likely result of an abortion ban is (mostly) an increase in adoptions.
I prefer sources to be papers, but I’ll accept anything that cites it’s data well.
I honestly wouldn’t know where to start looking for data on that. But I didn’t make the claim that this was definitely going to happen, just that it was the likely outcome, based on the common sense assumption that if abortion access wasn’t easy, safe, and anonymous, and involved a significant risk of injury or death for the mother, more women would likely find it less risky to carry their pregnancy to term and give up the baby for adoption if they haven’t changed their mind on it by then.
Also, they may simply choose to use birth control more often, and/or insist on their partners wearing a condom.
From my point of view, I find the claim that making abortion illegal would not prevent even a single one from occurring far more incredulous and therefore requiring a higher level of proof.
Alright I’m gunna take this point by point because broadly I understand what you are trying to get at but you have a few details that bother me and I feel derail the whole thing.
Me neither, I was talking about historical precedent, not some hard and fast rule of the universe.
First of all, with the “death or injury” part of this, I don’t see why this is preferable. Seems like threatening their lives and happiness in the interest of forcing births. But also, this assumes there aren’t other ways this can shake out in the end, and child abuse, abandonment and childhood homelessness, and human trafficking are all part of this topic and all things that increase when abortion is illegal. Your common sense assumption is based on a situationally perfect example, and it doesn’t make sense when applied to real world experiences.
This is just a piece of that bullshit take that argues women will learn to love their future babies if they are just forced to carry them long enough that abortions are more difficult and less legally accessable. Nah
Good thing I wasn’t claiming that then. I’m saying the amount prevented would be negligible, not magically impossibly zero. It would likely be a small amount, and utterly overshadowed by the negative effects of banning abortions.
Generally any search engine is a good start, although you can go to google scholar if you want more academic and dense results. Then, just look for what experts/doctors are saying. Try to stick to groups that verify each other and are verified by outside groups, individual experts are fallible on who knows what, so trust the experts that other experts seem to trust. Generally unless you want to be a researcher yourself, these are the most trustworthy and direct sources for data and such you can possibly get.
Well that’s the thing, “historical precedent” means that this has actually demonstrably happened before, in which case there should be data on it. That’s why I asked for proof. Which I understand you’re most likely not going to be able to provide, since there obviously can’t be any reliable data on the amount of clandestine abortions that happened before it was legalized.
I mean, I’m not a woman, but if I were, and I was given the choice between having an illegal procedure that had a good chance of injury or death (and no possible recourse), and carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, I think I would choose the latter, because it seems a lot safer, no matter how inconvenient.
Well, in the absence of any hard data, I find that idea more convincing than the opposite, but again, I’ll admit that I’m not a woman. But unless you are, you’re likely no more of an expert on this than I am. And even if you are AND have gone through all this, you’d just be a single data point of anecdotal evidence, which would not be enough to convince me.
You realize that for statistical purposes, “zero” and “negligible” are absolutely identical, right? It’s called a null hypothesis, look it up.
I would rather die than be pregnant. Nobody wants their body hijacked and raped for 9 months. That’s something you only do if you consent to it. Otherwise you might as well waterboard someone for 9 months they’d much prefer it.
Honest question. How do you reconcile your claim about not being anti-lgbt when the GOP is very vocally and openly pushing anti-lgbt messaging and legislation.
You know that someone can agree with most things in a platform and hate other things about it right?
The fact that they said they’re not anti-lgbt instead of saying they’re pro-lgbt implies that lgbt issues in general are lower on their list of priorities. They may not agree with the anti lgbt stuff but it isn’t important to them anyway.
I’m aware of that first part, but I’m not quite sure how it’s possible to make a moral argument that basic human rights shouldn’t be towards the very top of your list. The unfortunate reality of the matter is that even in the off chance your local R isn’t completely awful, the policies that will be implemented on a national level if they manage to take control of the presidency again are. Voting for an R is a tacit endorsement of those policies.
They’re a Republican. They don’t view LGBT issues as a human rights issue in the first place. It’s a political issue for them. Hence why they can reconcile that their opinion vs the party platform.
Again, that’s why they said they’re not anti-lgbt rather than saying they’re pro-lgbt.
They can disagree with the Republican Party on LGBT issues, because it’s a political issue for them and not a human rights issue.
Idk man. It just seems like you’re saying “political issue” but what you mean is “doesn’t affect them”.
And I think the whole they’re not “anti” these people they just don’t care enough about them to vote for them to have basic protections is a tough sell. At some point it’s a forced choice, and sitting out isn’t really an option.
I guess maybe it’s how they truly see it, but it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Yeah, that is exactly what I said and what I meant. It was my point. Thank you for getting the point?
Idk, the fact that the Log Cabin Republicans exist kinda proves that it is. Even LGBT people can reconcile Republican ideals and their own LGBT identity. It’s much easier for someone that isn’t LGBT to ignore LGBT issues. And the majority of people wont have someone close to them be LGBT, making it even easier to not care about them.
Yea it is easier for them to ignore. Choosing to ignore it is still a choice. And the effect of that choice is the continued suspension of human rights. There is no true option of sitting out.
The point is framing it as a “political issue” takes the responsibility off of them. Again, it’s true they see it that way, but all I hear is they only care about themselves.
This sounds an awful lot like a repudiation of “vote blue no matter who” but from the opposite angle. The fact of the matter is that different people place different priorities on different issues. Everyone these days seems to think that all people need to have the perfect opinion on every subject but I think that’s crazy. Take the wins you can get and leave the rest for later.
Personally I think that means that Democrats need to bide their time on several issues. If they would make a commitment to let guns, abortion (would have been easier 4 years ago), and LGBT issues lie for an entire election cycle, and make the general electorate believe that’s a real promise, they could get so much other shit done. I know people here are going to start in on how such a statement is unfair to trans people, women, victims of gun violence, etc, but there’s no denying the fact that those issues are sticking points for huge amounts of voters.
You don’t even have to concede any arguments to do what I’m suggesting either. All you need to do is acknowledge that we have other things we could work on before we cross those bridges. If you look at polling data most Americans agree with Democrats on solutions to problems like healthcare, the tax code, and labor laws. If we could implement even semi progressive laws around these issues we would improve the lives of everyone in America, including those most impacted by the issues above. Why would we not do that and then go back to our usual bickering along political lines?
When it comes down to it we’re not gaining anything by insisting on purity tests for these positions that only drive voter engagement for conservatives. Just table them for now and work on what can realistically be accomplished. The alternative is not more progress for more people, it’s more of this culture war bullshit, and that doesn’t help anyone at all. Isn’t that the worst option on the table?
The problem is a lot of damage can be done in one election cycle. Just this year so far? 590 anti-trans bills have been proposed and 85 anti-trans bills have passed in the US: https://translegislation.com
And how did those bills get passed? Republicans were able to pass them because some voters are so worried about their guns and drag queen story hour that they refused to vote for Democrats. You’re making my point for me. Anything is better than regression, including no progress at all.
I bet leaving guns alone would be enough by itself but Democrats just can’t stop themselves from poking that beehive even though they know damn well that no meaningful legislation will come from it. They’re not gaining any voters or changing any laws by making it a sticking point but they’re definitely losing voters because of it. If you know you can’t make anything happen then why bring up something that’s only going to hurt you? Fight that battle on the day you can win it and until then keep your mouth shut about it.
I never stated whether I was pro or con guns, so I don’t need the lecture. I was simply pointing out that you can’t just sit out an election cycle when it comes to human rights
Call it what you want, that way of doing things hasn’t seen much of any major progress since the civil rights movement. The moral high ground seems rather pointless to claim if all you’re doing is watching things deteriorate from an elevated position.
You know I voted for Hillary and Biden even though both trashed the idea of Medicare For All. That’s a huge issue for me, but you don’t really get to pick your politicians. You only pick the lesser of two evils. Republicans don’t like Dems. They might not love Trump or even Ted Cruz but for some people that’s their lesser of two evils. So I can’t speak for this other commenter but I can understand why you might vote for someone who doesn’t share your values
And for plenty of policy points that’s not an issue. When we’re on the topic of basic human rights, I’m not entirely sure how you* can handwave those abuses away because you want lower taxes.
* generic you
Many many people believe that healthcare is a basic human right, right up there with LGBT issues.
Putting Medicare for all on the same footing or higher than LGBT issues, because healthcare affects literally everyone.
Well yeah, that’s because it is. Performing human sacrifices for the profit gods, which is what we are currently doing, is bad.
Ok so if your choice was between a politician who made LGBT issues their priority but were against medicare for all/socialized medicine, and a politician that made medicare for all/socialized medicine their priority but were against LGBT rights, who would you choose?
Both are human rights issues. Which one is more important to you?
When that situation happens I guess we’ll find out.
It won’t though, and is a fucking laughable attempt at a gotcha
Are you looking for conversation here or do you just want to be right?
If there’s an answer that isn’t basically “well they’re not on my priority list so they can get fucked”, I’d love to hear it. We’re not talking about some relatively benign issue like zoning laws or whether or not we should introduce a new sales tax to fund the park system. Sitting by complacently is actively tacitly supporting the policies trying to further these abuses, and it’s not some trivial issue that doesn’t matter.
People can have different opinions to what is important and what is not. If someone try to censor every online forum in order to protect people from cyber crimes and financially support North Korean government even though time and time it has been proven that it doesn’t go well, fuck up all the housing crisis even more, but is the only candidate who (remotely) supports LGBTQ, I’m not voting them, which is exactly the case in my country.
There are other important aspects of people’s lives and you can’t just go around and say your priorities are wrong. You can however argue about the reasoning that led to said priorities and initial opinion, which is exactly what people are talking to you.
The right is pro-2a. The left is not.
The lgbtq should arm themselves, before anything else.
The gop is unintionally better for lgbtq than the dnc.
Neo-libs may not be, but there are plenty of us who are adamant that the workers shall not be disarmed.
Ignoring that…
Only one is actively imposing legislation that oppresses the lgptq community. If you honestly believe that, I beg you to take an actual hard, honest look at the legislation the GOP has passed in the last 6 years. You’ll find that’s just simply not true. Lying to others is one thing, but don’t lie to yourself.
Are there individuals within the GOP who don’t support those things? Perhaps, but they’re clearly at least not opposed to them. Unfortunately the “old guard” have decided they’d rather let the complete and utter batshit insane corner of the party drive the platform. It’s time to realize that.
Yeah, I probably should’ve said gop and dnc, and adjusted the wording slightly.
I would argue that any right is meaningless without 2a to back it up. Thus, any rights given by the DNC aren’t real. They aren’t worth the paper it’s written on.
You’ve said some stupid shit but “The gop is unintentionally better for lgbtq than the dnc.” takes the cake.
The DNC is trying to disarm lgbtq. The GOP isn’t.
What else is there to say?
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I look at the actions. The GOP is (more than the DNC at least) pro-2a and pro-free speech. When you have those two, the rest follow naturally.
Yes, I believe the GOP is unintentionally better for lgbtq people and their rights than the DNC.
You must have a much higher tolerance for glacial paced change than I do.
As someone who is aggressively pro-2a (although almost certainly for different reasons than you), I might have been able to legitimately see your point 10 years ago when the GOP was less actively hostile to the very existence of gay people. Unfortunately we don’t live in 2013 anymore.
Why stop there? You have no idea, right? So why do you masturbate or use condoms? You’re killing millions of potential babies!
If you don’t know, you should err on the side of caution for the rights of the people who you do know are real.
Or maybe you should just stay out of it, because as you say, you don’t know. Leave it to the scientists and doctors who DO know and who almost universally support abortion access.
Not the guy you’re responding to, but you have a point. Coincidentally, most religions are also against both, so at least you can’t accuse them of being inconsistent on the issue of reproduction.
This person I’m responding to isn’t religious.
Okay? I never said that he was.
So they aren’t asking their religions convictions about what was right…isn’t that obvious?
Thank you for your response.
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Murder is wrong. There’s some argument to make for self-defense, but tbh I haven’t heard that argument made well.
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Unborn babies are human too.
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I’m on team “glad you responded” but I still wanna respond to 2 things you said.
First, a lot of anti-abortion people want the abortion conversation to end at “this is murder”, but how do you address the bodily autonomy argument? Even if I accept any and all abortions as the full death of a complete person, why are women compelled to donate their bodies to save another person? I don’t support forced organ donations to save lives, and by that logic I also do not support forced pregnancies. Any opinion on that perspective?
Christian nationalism isn’t complicated in what it is, it is just the desire/push/beliefs from the people that want a nation with an explicitly christian government, a christian theocracy. If it completely took over everything, freedom of religion would be dead, everything would be christian. To try and rephrase it bluntly, Christian nationalism is the desire for and work towards a Christian nation. Some people take it seriously, some people don’t, some people outright support it, others deny it even is a real concept.
Edit to add: if you aren’t anti-lgbtq, will you call your representatives that you vote for and emphatically tell them so? The difference in opinions between conservatives and their politicians about lgbtq is something I hear from most conservatives I’ve talked to, but it makes me sad to see they don’t really care beyond saying “I’m not anti-lgbtq”. If you vote for an anti-lgbtq politician because of other policies they support, please at least tell them you don’t agree with their anti-lgbtq stance. It is literally the least amount of help I can think of to ask for.
I’m anti abortion once the fetus is viable. Prior to that point, a woman is refusing to let someone else use her body to survive, and while there are personal moral questions there, I think she should have the right to make that call. After that point, she’s attempting to kill someone else to avoid the suffering that a birth would entail.
I still support her right to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, I just don’t support abortion as the method.
I’m aware that late term abortions are so vanishingly rare that this is a pointless hair-splitting exercise, but I like to have a consistent moral system as much as I can, whether it’s currently relevant or not, and I thought someone might appreciate my .02.
If you had been aborted once viable you wouldn’t have neither cared or known.
If someone shoots me in the head while I’m sleeping I wouldn’t care or know either.
In my mind, so long as lgbtq people have both free speech and the right to bear arms, the rest of their rights will come. See: The marches and protests that lead to gay marriage. Those two rights come before everything else, and support everything else.
Unfortunately, many Republican elected representatives are, to varying degrees, anti-LGBT and do support Christian encroachment into non-religious people’s lives.
Why do you consider conception as the earliest point? What about at arousal? 😜
https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk
Kudos for sharing. Feel free to ignore those who challenge your values. It takes a bunches of mental energy to argue and it isn’t necessarily worth it to argue.
With that said, I will still would like to ask you a question, if you are up for it.
How did you form your values?
I only ask because it is easy, when you are raised as Christian, to uncritically accept the teaching, values, and views of those around you as your own.
As kids we are conditioned through school, parents, and in general just information asymmetry to accept what adults say as fact and not question it. It is easy to carry that same tendency over into our values and viewpoints. Kids and adults have a hard time separating fact from opinion. We tend to treat widely held beliefs as fact instead of as the opinions they actually are.
Well, abortion is basically a modified pascal’s wager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal’s_wager
Pro guns, all sorts of historical precedent, from the US in Iraq, to Roof Koreans, to the French Resistance, to Australia. (This is honestly my strongest belief, guns and free speech)
Free speech, how can you speak up if you can’t speak?
I understand your justification for your beliefs and even share some of your moral beliefs. It seems to me like you didn’t really answer in the way I meant to communicate it. I’ll try to rephrase my original question to what I mean clearer. What causes you to rank your own values in the way you do?
Why do you think access to guns is more important than your beliefs on abortion? Or why are they more important than not getting overcharged on everything from housing to education to healthcare?
TLDR: Without guns and speech, you have no rights, and I have historical evidence to back me up. But also they’re pre-crime laws.
Simply put, the right to bear arms protects every other right. But before you grab the ammo box, you supposed to actually say something. Protest, make yourself heard. Free speech and guns go hand in hand in my mind.
For guns specifically, guns protect rights I can point to any number of historical precedents. Even in America, gun control basically started as a way to disarm black people, and it’s still trying to keep poor people from arming themselves, and look how minorities are treated. In Nazi Germany, one of the first things they did was disarm the Jewish people. On a lighter note, Australia disarmed, and now they banned hentai. You can’t make this shit up
Guns are powerful tools, poverty stricken farmers in the middle east held off the most powerful military in the world for decades, whether or not you agree with them. The IRA successfully kept most of Ireland independent from the UK with guns. The French Resistance wouldn’t have been able to do anything without guns. Hell, the Roof Koreans wouldn’t have saved their stores without guns.
I can come up with more, but I think you get the point.
It’s a similar situation with free speech. Tons of historical precedents. Martin Luther King marching for example. (I came up with a ton of examples, but I realized just how long it was)
In any case, gun control and hate speech laws are pre-crime laws. What’s the actual issue? Murder, assault, robbery, that sort of thing. Simply owning and saying shit isn’t hurting anyone by itself. Murder should be against the law, not having a gun and not outing yourself as a bigot. It’s pre-crime, not actual crime.
How the fuck did you go from “they banned guns” to “so what’s stopping them from banning child porn, when they take your guns away!”
Holy shit you’re a sick dude.
They didn’t ban child porn, that was already banned. What they banned was all hentai. It’s ridiculous.
Murder of a consciousness is abhorent, but that doesn’t really happen. So are you also against pulling the plug on the brain dead?
Christian nationalism is just the merging of Christian and American identity. “America is a Christian nation”. You hear similar often from pandering and or deranged Republicans
Right on. I don’t share your values but I’m glad to see you here participating and sharing.
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Being a fetus doesn’t excuse a foreign body’s presence inside of mine. I do not intend to be pregnant and if my partner’s sperm invades my body when I do not want it I will take every step to eliminate it or the process that follows it. A fetus isn’t important. If anything forcing someone to exist is the utmost violation of bodily autonomy. As they say, just because something is natural doesn’t make it good.