Ohio Abortion Bill

[jackoh]

This is nothing more than a further attempt to write a religious belief in to the legal code, with the result that the law enforcement apparatus of the state will be used to impose a way of life peculiar to certain religious sects on all of the citizens of the state. Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that America is not much different than the Middle East.

[joev]

Abortion is not the best topic to use to determine whether someone is liberal, moderate or conservative.

[gramarye]

Agreed. In fact, the very fact that it tends to push people in opposite directions is one reason political admen love it, because it’s very easy to paint someone as an “extremist” due to their abortion position and invite the viewer to assume that the candidate in question is an “extremist” on other issues as well.

[Mercurius]

[DavidF]

joev wrote:

Abortion is not the best topic to use to determine whether someone is liberal, moderate or conservative.

Name a better one.

Not going to be consistent for everyone, but then what issue is?

[Snarf]

jackoh wrote:

This is nothing more than a further attempt to write a religious belief in to the legal code, with the result that the law enforcement apparatus of the state will be used to impose a way of life peculiar to certain religious sects on all of the citizens of the state. Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that America is not much different than the Middle East.

Bingo.

[gramarye]

Are laws against murder attempts to write the Sixth Commandment into American law?

Are you similarly dismissive of those who oppose the death penalty on religious grounds? Or do they get a pass because they happen to agree with you, even if they openly admit that they want to end the death penalty because they believe that it will help to make us a more Christian nation?

If you could find support in Scripture for Obamacare or open borders or gun control or whatever liberal pet policy you favor, would you suddenly switch to opposing it because that policy would then be “nothing more than a further attempt to write a religious belief in to the legal code?”

[melikecheese]

I wish our law makers spent time on other things…

[Twixlen]

Religion doesn’t belong inside law. Religion shouldn’t inform law. Religion has nothing to do with morals or justice or ethical behavior.

That said, the only people that should be involved in an abortion decision are a woman, any medical professionals that she consults, and depending on the circumstances, the dude involved in the situation. The law – with it’s ignorant, self-righteous, owned-by-corporate-interest lawmakers – should have no interference.

[jackoh]

gramarye wrote:

Are laws against murder attempts to write the Sixth Commandment into American law?

Are you similarly dismissive of those who oppose the death penalty on religious grounds? Or do they get a pass because they happen to agree with you, even if they openly admit that they want to end the death penalty because they believe that it will help to make us a more Christian nation?

If you could find support in Scripture for Obamacare or open borders or gun control or whatever liberal pet policy you favor, would you suddenly switch to opposing it because that policy would then be “nothing more than a further attempt to write a religious belief in to the legal code?”

I think that you may be, perhaps, confused. I was not making a value judgment, I was making an analytical statement.

[gramarye]

I think you may the confused one if you think anything you wrote was analytical instead of judgmental.

[Snarf]

gramarye wrote:

Are laws against murder attempts to write the Sixth Commandment into American law?

Are you similarly dismissive of those who oppose the death penalty on religious grounds? Or do they get a pass because they happen to agree with you, even if they openly admit that they want to end the death penalty because they believe that it will help to make us a more Christian nation?

If you could find support in Scripture for Obamacare or open borders or gun control or whatever liberal pet policy you favor, would you suddenly switch to opposing it because that policy would then be “nothing more than a further attempt to write a religious belief in to the legal code?”

Why do I feel like I should expect better arguments than these?

[El Diablo Einstein]

A few thoughts on the religious right and how this whole fetal heartbeat argument was seen years ago.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/when-right-wing-christians-stopped-thinking-women-people

[gramarye]

I just read the whole article and the headline looks like it was written by a different person than the author of the article. In fact, as a fairly strong pro-lifer, I still had very little to oppose in that article other than the headline until about four pages in (out of about 5.5). Even then, there was nothing in it about the thesis that Christians don’t think of women as “people,” which is a sensationalist falsehood that I would simply dismiss out of hand without comment. The article itself was actually more responsible and correspondingly more interesting, because it quite rightly noted the importance of the ultrasound and advances in fetal imaging as a major catalyst for the growth in pro-life values over the past 40 years. If anything, the author could have eliminated the Christian connection entirely with respect to that development: the more widespread availability and affordability of fetal imaging technology has not only solidified Christian support for abortion restrictions, but its effect on secular citizens has also been fairly pronounced. The article can give the misleading impression that somehow it was only Christians who responded powerfully to the images of the person in the womb, even though the article itself also notes elsewhere that vision is our most powerful sense and we are basically biologically hardwired to respond positively to images of other humans; that isn’t a religiously conditioned response.

It’s absolutely true that as children have become more visible even while they’re still in the womb, and also become rarer overall, protectiveness of them has increased across the board. And I’ll grant that the article is probably right (or at least, I have no reason to doubt it) that it has increased more among Christians than non-Christians, but the article never even really attempts to draw a connection between that and somehow denying the humanity of pregnant women. Maybe he simply assumed that because he was writing for Alternet, casual assumptions of the worst about believers would be widely shared among his audience and would need no explanation.

[jackoh]

gramarye wrote:

I think you may the confused one if you think anything you wrote was analytical instead of judgmental.

Perhaps someone here could explain to you the difference between a judgment of what “ought to be,” or what one prefers, vs a statement of what is, in fact, the case.

[Author]

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