Politics-What's on your mind?

[dark_crystal]

One discussion that has emerged this week, as we watch women's rights be dismantled in Georgia and Alabama, is the hypocrisy pro-lifers sometimes have about fertility clinics (i say "sometimes" because there has been some protest of the destruction of leftover IVF embryos, and the pro-lifers fought hard against stem cells, plus there was the whole George W. Bush snowflake-baby photo op.)

Despite these caveats, it remains the case that you are more likely to see protesters outside planned parenthood than at the IVF place.

When we were tweeting about this over the weekend, my reply was "Because there’s no sex involved. No “sluts” to punish. Doctors created those embryos and lots of the doctors are men doing capitalism"

THEN, last night, I saw this, from a reporter who is covering the legislature's debate in Georgia:

@lyman_brian, reporter for Montgomery Advertiser, on Twitter
Chambliss, responding to the IVF argument from Smitherman, cites a part of the bill that says it applies to a pregnant woman. "The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant."

(I wish there was more than a tweet from a reporter, like an actual news article, but "Bryan Lyman" is identified by the paper as covering the legislature, and the Montgomery Advertiser is a venerable paper with a 190-year history)

So, yeah. Someone said the quiet part loud. Life does not begin at conception unless that conception happens through sex. It is not about life, it is about sex.

It is about punishing women for having sex, which is STILL fucked up because they ALSO punish women for saying "no" to sex.

Like, men never stop trying to get you to have sex, and are total psychos when you resist, then they also want to go psycho on the women who do give in and give them what they want?

It just does not make sense. Like, the logical answer is that they are not penalizing women for having sex, they are penalizing women for having sex without giving up their independence. Like, what they are mad at is that women have sex with them but do not become their property by doing so?

That is the only thing that makes sense, BUT, they do not want all of that property. A man is going to seek sex from exponentially more women than he can afford to support. They seek sex from women they would never consider supporting, and they are especially not going to support all of those kids.

Men want LOTS of partners, but they are only going to take responsibility for one, then they want to limit the options of the non-primary partners who have to take responsibility for the results of their insistence on having lots of partners.

It's money, isn't it? Men want a variety of partners, but they would be broke if they had to support them. Best way to avoid that is to put women who could make claims on them in jail.

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

Men want LOTS of partners, but they are only going to take responsibility for one, then they want to limit the options of the non-primary partners who have to take responsibility for the results of their insistence on having lots of partners.

It's money, isn't it? Men want a variety of partners, but they would be broke if they had to support them. Best way to avoid that is to put women who could make claims on them in jail.

We now live within a Christianity that places the fight against various kinds of sex above any other fight, although Jesus himself seems to have prized humility above all virtues and deplored hypocrisy among all sins.

One thing he did not spend much time on was any kind of sex. Christians need to leave sex alone. Even if fornication and homsexuality were wrong, their concern with these issues should not extend any further than His did. He mentioned sex twice. He mentioned hypocrisy in 159 verses, and humility in 254--more than any other topic. What would really be the consequences of laying the "biblical" sexual rhetoric on the ground and just backing away? What if they fought hypocrisy and promoted humility instead of fighting promiscuity and promoting heterosexual monogamy?

They do not do this because promoting humility and fighting hypocrisy threatens wealth, while fighting promiscuity and promoting marriage preserves wealth. The Red Letters contain 122 verses against materialism, but humans cannot resist it, so they find a scriptural justification for its continual pursuit. If our culture says that supporting one’s family is a Christian man’s highest calling, this provides an excuse to build wealth.

Pro-life ethics are actually pro-wealth ethics. Family planning gets women out of the home and puts them in competition with men, meaning the wealth pie gets cut into smaller slices. If the women are kept home and the man is encouraged to prove his virtue through how well she is kept, that is a license to ignore everything Jesus said about camels and the eyes of needles.

The thing that prevented me from seeing this for awhile is the fact that men are not capable of monogamy. Like, don’t they see that outlawing abortion means they are all about to get a lot more kids? And that's expensive? I now think 25% of your income is less expensive than economically competing with women. Child support is a loss leader for men.

Further, if supporting one family is virtuous, supporting multiple families can also, eventually, become virtuous. From there it’s a short step to polygamy, which takes even more women out of economic competition AND eliminates the need to pay child support to the state-- if all your co-parents are your legal wives and live in your home, you can dole out money as you see fit.

I saw this tweet last night (@willwilkinson):

The claim that abortion is murder implies that the conditions for women's social, political & economic equality come at an intolerable moral cost. It's no accident this view got traction with conservative Protestants as institutionalized gender hierarchy started to break down.

[homoe]

Susan Collins has faith Kavanaugh won't uphold Alabama abortion law



I'm thinking Susan Collins must be living in a fool's paradise if she really believes this..........

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

Susan Collins has faith Kavanaugh won't uphold Alabama abortion law



I'm thinking Susan Collins must be living in a fool's paradise if she really believes this..........

I suggest all the females who voted in favor of Kavanaugh pay attention as well, after all, you's are all up for re-election at some point...