Questions from other bloggers I'd like answers to...
A variety of good questions from other bloggers to which I would also like the answer.
1) Why is it that President Bush is "against destroying life to save life" when it comes to stem cells, but defends the loss of human military and Iraqi civilian life in part by talking about all the lives which are being ultimately saved?
2) With even the administration now admitting that there were no WMDs in Iraq, why is there not an investigation on whether that fact was truly a "massive intelligence failure" or (as the Downing Street Memo seems to attest to) a deliberate attempt to defraud the citizens and the Congress into supporting a war the administration had already determined to wage?
The answer to the first is politics, of course. The same Religious Right that so loves fetuses that they can't bear the thought of even one not coming to term has no problems if, after coming to term and living 18 years, they are sent off to die in the name of God and country.
And come to think of it, the answer to the second is probably that the answer is pre-determined and would not look good on the administration. More and more, it's looking like the President and his staff picked and chose the intelligence they wanted to believe (from the "yellow cake" Uranium to the Aluminum Tubes), even when that intelligence came from very shaky of unverifiable sources and flew in the face of more reliable sources which disagreed.
And people wonder how I think it's possible to think this President is the worst in my lifetime without being a partisan Democrat.
UPDATE: Janet has a different take on #1, her feeling is that the difference is in the choice of the armed forces. In order for the question to make sense presupposes that you feel this is an unjust war (or at least, a war which we are in at the moment for unjust and invalid reasons). I see this as very different from the Afghanistan war. Soldiers sign up for the armed forces in order to protect our country and its interests. Under the current circumstances, I believe we're accomplishing neither, and so I see no moral difference between sending soldiers to die on a battlefield and sending fetuses to die at the hands of a scalpel. And besides, it also misses the point that while the American soldiers lives may have been volunteered, the same can not be said for the thousands of innocent Iraqis (non-insurgents) who have died.
Copyright (c) June 5, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net
posted by Liam at 6/05/2005 11:48:00 PM
9 Comments:
Liam, it's a slippery slope if we as a nation agree to diminish any human life as less than human and therefore suitable for extermination for the benefit of society. Thus, 100% of the human embryos created from this process are condemed as "less than human". Whether you like the war or not (and you have stated you are against it) this action of our country in no way condemns all soldiers to death nor does it denigrate their humanity to less than human as does the embryonic stem cell research. To even compare the two is to grasp at a thought process in order to shed a bad light on President Bush. God knows he has enough of his own bad light showing through honest evaluation.
Monday, June 06, 2005 6:15:00 PM
I understand that they're different situations. To me, they're still similar.
On the one hand vehement pro-life arguments even to the extent of refusing to gain any benefit at all from stem cells which will be discarded anyway as part of the "in vitro" fertilization process infertile couples go through. On the other hand, sending people off to die in a war. Executing murderers and terrorists. It seems to me that if one is going to use the "All life is precious" rhetoric, then it's difficult to reasonably back off from that in the case of capital punishment, or in the case of putting people in a place where some of them will die.
Maybe a better question, though, is why some hard-line right wingers are absolutely pro-life when it comes to a child which is not yet born, but then turn their back on the woman and her child once it is born. I saw a political cartoon about this many years ago, and it has stuck with me.
In the first panel, a single woman gets the news that she's pregnant, and she's got two or three people around her with "Abortion is Murder" and "Save Your Child" signs.
In the second panel, she's beginning to show, and she has a batch more people with similar signs, helping to hold her up and support her, etc.
In the third panel, she's obviously just about to give birth, and she's absolutely surrounded by these people, there are so many they fill the panel, and it's obvious that there are more that we can't see.
In the final panel, she's standing alone, holding her child in one arm and a sheaf of bills in the other, looking around at an empty landscape with a few discarded broken signs around and not one person there to help.
That really does seem to me to be the attitude of *SOME* among the right wing. Don't let the mother abort the child, that would be wrong. But once the child is born, no handouts, no help, leave the family to flounder if they don't have enough. In the extreme, this child grows up disadvantaged, ends up getting involved in drugs and crime and ultimately kills someone, ends up on death row and society kills him.
Is this an extreme example? To be sure, and I'd never suggest they all happen that way. But I think we need to put some more serious thought into it than just "do we allow abortion or do we not".
If we're not going to, then we should also regulate childcare so that we don't, by disallowing abortion, just create a whole new generation of underpriviledged children that we refuse as a society to care for.
By the way, I really am anti-abortion in cases which don't involve the mother's health. I'm not arguing in favor of the pro-choice agenda.
I'm just saying that that belief has consequences, and if we're really concerned with the child and it's life, we should put more thought into it than merely ensuring that that life CONTINUES, we should make sure policies are in place to help ensure it has a fair shot at a good life, not simply a life.
Liam.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005 11:50:00 AM
Oh, and since I kind of got off track, the point to me at which my original point has merit is NOT the point of being against abortion.
The point I was trying to make in the original piece is that the rhetoric should match the belief. The absolute statement "All life is precious" or that one is "against destroying life to save other life" is too simple and too pat, and doesn't apply. We've all seen television shows and movies where the main character agonizes over the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, and under what circumstances is it fair to choose to let one person die to save 10, etc.
But when you make the absolute statement "all life is precious", then perhaps you should also be against anti-biotics. After all, by their nature you're killing bacteria by the millions so that your one life can be spared.
Even if you make it "all human life is precious", how do you justify any killing, ever? How can you be for the death penalty if all life is precious? How can ANY goal be worth asking others to go into a situation where some of them WILL die?
The point is still valid, because the statement Bush made was that he was against destroying life to save life, and yet that's EXACTLY the argument that he's making now about the war, the cost in lives (American soldiers, innocent Iraqis, etc) was worth paying because we saved the lives and freedoms of millions. Destroying a few lives to save other lives.
What this all boils down to is the further dumbing down of political discourse in America. Everything is sound bites, and as a result few Americans take the time to even really think through or understand the situation, to try to understand the nuances and that it isn't all just black and white.
We need to get away from absolute black/white statements and get back to informed debate. I'm against abortion because {X}. I'm for the war because {Y}.
{X} and {Y} need to be more complete than a stupid one-line soundbited absolute.
Liam.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005 12:02:00 PM
Liam, all life is precious and I want to make that statement again! In the case of a convicted rapist, murderer or torturer, it takes years and the attention of many judges, juries, lawyers and ordinary citizens to have the death sentence carried out. This process is necessary because you do NOT want to put to death an innocent person (even thought in the past we have),but in abortion....
I read with interest your comments concerning the "pro-life" people who care so much about the life of a child before he is born, but not a twit about the life of the child after he is born. I am really indignant at the message you sent. I am very heavily involved in the pro-life movement, and have read ad-naseum those same lines that I know to be untrue. I can name, off the top of my head, people who are involved in the "pro-life" movement who care VERY much for the child and the women after the birth of that child. I belong, on the national level, to the "pro-life" movement. I cannot tell you the number of people who attend what we call a "baby shower". This is a shower given by a town or a group of churchs where the "shower" is for no particular child, but for all. The things that are collected are then distributed to the known neediest, and the balance given to the distribution agency for the needy of the community. I have been privy to a lot of people who give to "Covenant House", a group that helps young people get off of the streets while they are run-aways from their destructive homes. I belong to a group that collects money to give to single moms to help them pay for their utility bills or their rent when they cannot. I personally know of groups like this in 12 other towns in our state. What you are repeating is the untruths put out by the "pro-abortion" crowd to make it seem like we are not logical nor sympathetic to people who have to live in this world in VERY tough circumstances. What would be better, that they abort this child?
Thursday, June 09, 2005 9:50:00 PM
First off, my apologies if I offended you. It was honestly not my intent to say that NO pro-life people continue to support disadvantaged mothers/families after talking her out of an abortion. There are good people out there, I know there are. But...
It is also dishonest to claim that there aren't large numbers of people on the pro-life side who behave exactly as I described it. I know some of them. They don't REALIZE what they're doing, because they never connect the dots, but one day you'll have a discussion with them, and they'll espouse a serious pro-life opinion. On another day you'll be talking about welfare, food stamps, AFDC and some of the other programs which help (among others) those disadvantaged families and (especially) single mothers, and they start railing against the welfare state and how those people should "get a job" and "stop taking money out of my pocket".
I know there are good people out there, and I'm very happy to know that you are one of them. I try not to demonize entire classes of people by the actions of some (and try to call others on it when they do it, it does seem to be a tactic of particular appeal to both the far left and far right).
But absolutely I know, first hand, of people who EXACTLY epitomize the comic strip I discussed above, and they really anger me. Not that I think aborting the child is the better solution, but it sure seems disingenuous when I run into those attitudes.
Liam.
Thursday, June 09, 2005 10:46:00 PM
Fetuses (Feti ?) are innocent and have no purpose except to become fully functional human beings. There is no excuse for harvesting their cells. You are likely thinking very seriously about such beings just now.
Friday, June 10, 2005 6:20:00 PM
But Ralph, would you (and maybe you would, this is an honest question) make the technology illegal that is used to allow couples with conception problems to conceive a child?
Because that "in vitro" process creates a number of fetuses, most of which will never become human beings.
If they're already going to be destroyed, couldn't that destruction at least have some benefit to humanity, if by studying those cells we could find ways to end certain diseases?
I know, it's a slippery slope, because once you say "OK", then it's that much easier to say "Well, you said it was OK, how about we fertilize a few extras while we're at it, so as to have even MORE to work with"...
But still, if we can save lives using bio-mass that's already never going to be given the chance to form into a human being, it seems to make sense to do so. (To me)
Liam.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 8:13:00 AM
You are right that such things as fertility technology complicate these decisions and no I would not want to make such treatment illegal but it troubles me that these excess fetuses become raw material for medical treatment. I would hope that they could be availabel for adoption - so to speak. I would prefer that they die rather than be harvested.
Many do not develop into babies from natural causes and I can accept that not all will be selected for implantation (life) and therefore die.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005 11:04:00 AM
Fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion, and in fact under other circumstances, I agree with similar sentiments, so I can even understand it.
I'm not really sure where I fall on this one. My original point, though, is still that I don't like the rhetoric on this one claiming that "all life is sacred" when it comes to abortion and stem cell research, but somehow not feeling that life is quite as sacred when it comes time to punish criminals, or when it comes time to invade another country.
The black and white nature of the statement offends me, like I'm being preached to, like I'm being told that I'm a moron if I can't see that all life is sacred, when in fact there are plenty of examples of life which is not treated as sacred by the speaker.
What the speaker is actually saying is that "all human life which hasn't otherwise given up it's rights is sacred except in the case of really good causes". But that ambiguity doesn't play well in Peoria, as well as leaving open the question of whether curing diseases is a "really good cause" vs going to war.
Liam.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:54:00 PM
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