From Newsweek via Instapundit:
Belief in god, like getting pregnant, is a private matter between consenting adults (or one consenting adult and one or more deities) and is no one else’s business. I am on record in this blog (and have not budged an inch) as not objecting to any candidate’s religious views.
But I object strongly when anyone (and especially anyone with political power) tries to take their theology out in public, to inflict those private religious (or sexual) views on other people. In both sex and religion (which combine in the debates about abortion), Sarah Palin’s views make me fear that the Republican party has finally lost its mind.
I am a pro-choice atheist but the utter massive hypocrisy of the leftists’ conceit that they do not impose their “private” values on others nauseates me. Leftist political doctrines, especially those involving sex, boil down to nothing but the imposition by state coercion of minority values on the majority.
Take the case of abortion: Roe v. Wade and related judgments represented the direct imposition of leftist values onto everyone else. All contemporary “abortion rights” laws rest on the wholly arbitrary judgment on the part of leftists that the unborn (zygote, embryo, fetus) is not a human being in any moral or legal sense. To reach this conclusion you must make a leap of faith and adopt the materialistic assumption that humans can observe and measure all phenomena, and that if we cannot observe a phenomenon, such as a soul, then it does not exist. Further, you must make the arbitrary assumption that the unborn do not at any particular stage of materialistic development cross over a line that requires that we protect them. In short, leftists have made an arbitrary decision that as long as the unborn remain inside a woman’s body that she may kill them at any time and in any manner of her choosing.
Worse yet, leftists inject these arbitrary values into the personal choices of families. Leftists have decided that, in the case of abortion, parents have no right to any oversight or even knowledge of someone else’s performing a medical procedure on their minor daughters. Schools cannot give children an aspirin without express written permission, but anyone can give a child of any age an abortion. Leftists have made the arbitrary decision that a child’s desire, real or provoked, to kill the unborn person inside of her trumps every value and concern that any parents might have. The Left runs roughshod over the values of people who do believe that they have the right and responsibility to see to their children’s welfare.
Worst of all, the Left used undemocratic judicial fiat to impose their values on others. In case after case, the Right has gone to the people and actually let them vote on matters while the left has subverted the will of the people.
Abortion and sex-ed represent merely the most dramatic acts of values domination by leftists. In the end, most leftist precepts rely on the idea of imposing the values of leftists onto others by using the violent force of the state. Leftists gleefully force their values onto others even while hypocritically casting the Right as the invaders.
The hypocrisy is blatant and pathetic.
In all fairness, the lines quoted above were written by Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty), the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, and not by the staff of Newsweek (corporate motto: “For those who think Time is too right wing”) nor of the Washington Post (corporate motto: “Please Barack, Save us from the Republicans”).
Unfortunately it does not make things better, because Ms. Doniger seems to have become completely unhinged. Consider the following line:
“Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”
Available scientific evidence is that being a woman is a biological fact, not a belief, about which one could be accused of hypocrisy.
I find it amusing that M. Doniger’s chair is named for Mircea Eliade, who was a prof at the UofC Divinity School (corporate motto: “God, the fascist bastard, is dead”) when I was an undergrad, back in a previous millennium. What they never told us back then, was, that before he fled his native Romania when the Communists took over, Eliade was an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of the Iron Guard, an overtly fascist and anti-Semetic party.
I once attended a lecture Eliade gave at Hillel (the campus Jewish organization), of all places. Between the thickness of his accent and the stark incomprehensibility of his ideas, I could not understand a word of it. I attended two lectures by Richard McKeon but I fell asleep both times.
BTW: has anybody noticed what is happening at Intrade?
Robert, I have noticed McCain’s rise of 10 or so points over the last week. I initially attributed it to the Palin bounce, but is it possible that someone is artificially driving up the price, albeit slowly? We saw it happen very rapidly just before the last presidential election. I’m not familiar with the availability of the information on the intrade stocks to know if someone is buying up a lot of shares in a short time frame to make it appear that the Palin bounce is bigger than it is. Is there any way to verify the authenticity?
Sorry for the OT comment.
I support gay marriage, but I have gotten into argument after argument with my left-leaning friends on why MA and CA imposing it by Judicial Fiat is going to backfire. Because they want it NOW NOW NOW, and aren’t willing to meet their opponents on the battlefield of ideas and convince them that it doesn’t represent the end of civilization as we know it, their opponents will simply resent the fact that they have no choice, no voice in the society in which they live. At least if there were a plebiscite, they could comfort themselves with the fact that, although they believe differently, more of their fellow countrymen disagree with them and a grudging acceptance would begin on those grounds. Instead, they are disregarded as irrelevant to their own society. This will backfire in rage and further division of America. Instead, the leftist insists that he is right and everyone else is evil and so he will override the idiot flyover yokel redneck’s ideas and impose the “correct” morality on him.
Not the America I want to live in … can we make a new one please?
The old one merely needs to assert itsself.
I believe it is a woman’s right to do as she wishes, with her sex life and with her body. She can have all the babies she wants, if she wants them. And let the state or community help her in life if she is unable ato take care of them on her own. Or use emergency rooms if need be to care for them. And also let the public schools simply take on more kids and feed them free lunches if they are called for and let the tax payers approve the school budget for the extra class size…we are all in this together, right?
Fred, here’s a novel idea for those women who have an unintended pregnancy, adoption! Why does the left have to portray that situation as an either or proposition? Why must you people think in such black and white terms?
Fred Lapidies,
A pro-life person would say that its not just her body a woman must take into account but also the life of the unborn. The leftist makes an arbitrary decisions that the life of the unborn is of no account.
Most pro-life people would gladly pay whatever it would take to care for children if the choice was between paying and killing them. The only difference would be that those on the right would see that the money actually accomplished providing care and did not instead focus on reelecting leftist. Most social welfare programs today have the opposite effect than they intend and they often actively hurt the individuals and communities they purport to help. Yet leftist cling to them with a death grip because they would rather hurt the poor and vulnerable than lose power or admit error.
A pro-life person generally assumes responsibility for the quality of life of those they bring into the world: plans for the good of that child in an active way, protects it from the sharp corners of our society. A pro-life person may or may not have doubts about the virtues of the safety nets Fred describes, but many see these as undervaluing the child’s life in encouraging passivity and dependence and in undervaluing the responsibility of those who brought the child to life.
I seem to remember “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” being pretty prominent in the Old Testament. Damn those religious nuts for imposing their ideas on us.
There is a difference between being pro-choice and pro-abortion. I was shocked by the Canadian gynecologist (?) saying that Palin having her Down’s Syndrom baby will affect Canadian women’s decisions. Does this mean that doctors were actually putting real pressure on women whose babies might have been disabled? Now they will look at Palin and have a strong argument against that pressure. However, if that is what doctors were doing it remains outrageous.
Given the theological and biological dimensions of the issue, it seems clear to me that some compromise is required. A single fertilized egg is a long way from a functional human being with any measure of free will or autonomy. Yet an abortion of a potentially viable fetus is close enough to inficide to make me uncomfortable.
The core problem is Roe v Wade. Reverse that and any implication that this power is federal, and states will come up with legislation that reflects the state’s population’s view of the matter. California and New York will be most free of restrictions while Alabama and Mississippi might be extremely stringent.
More broadly, leftists do impose their values on others as a matter of course. Consider conservation of energy. They wanted remote control thermostats in California, allowing the state to set the temperature of your family room. You will be forbidden to buy incandenscent lightbulbs shortly no matter your lighting preference or needs. The list goes on and on.
Shannon, the tone of your post was quite striking, “illiberal”?
Liberals might fall anywhere in the social-action marketplace along the spectrum of have-it, keep-it, give-it, pro-choice, pro-abortion (well-observed, Helen). And the view of a particular liberal might change with circumstances; each person’s story and experience is unique and valuable. Liberals want people to have a free hand in the social action marketplace, and typically are befuddled at the notion they are imposing their values on others for the simple reason that they aren’t forcing anyone, in this case, to do an abortion.
If a person were to force a woman, or some class of women to have an abortion, then they aren’t liberal at all-they are illiberal. Illiberals want to regulate the social-action marketplace, along the lines suggested by Whitehall in the energy conservation example. Liberals support freedom in the social-action marketplace in the same sort of way that conservatives oppose regulation in the economic marketplace.