I'm glum enough right now that my memory is not good, but I think I read somewhere that a prominent anti-abortion Catholic who writes some some kind of guide to voting issues basically said that Trump's callous disregard of the lives if a Americans during the pandemic made voting for a pro choice candidate morally permissible if not preferable.
So I wonder, how much, if any, of the hard core *Catholic* anti abortion vote is lost to Trump. I also don't know how many of those people are out there. I was look8ngbat old footage of Markey during the primary. In the late 70's and into the early 80's he was opposed to abortion, mostly. I think Ted Kennedy was the same, so the grip on Catholics of their church's teaching on this issue has been loosening for a long time.
Also, the ACA, damn. During a fuckin* pandemic.
There are of course lots of people who are opposed to birth control and want the teens pregnant (after being married to the future senatorial candidate who followed them to the mall). But probably not enough to win an election.
If I have a good faith conversation with someone who is anti-abortion
This is, in my experience, all but impossible, because they're not actually people with the capacity for good faith.
The handful of counter-examples I've had tended to founder on the grounds of them refusing to accept well-researched facts on, e.g. the incidence of third-trimester abortions. One very candidly told me that she could hear and accept all the facts and intellectually appreciate a harm reduction approach, but couldn't accept the morality of sanctioning the murders of millions of babies.
Once you've accepted that daft framing, you've essentially become unreachable, and there are very, very powerful and pervasive forces working to maintain that frame.
The only good-faith conversations with anti-abortion people end up being those Democrats who quietly admit that they secretly are deeply uncomfortable with abortion and wish we lived in a world where we supported all these other policies that would drastically reduce the number of abortions. We've had regulars here before who fit that bill. Very few of them need converting to anything at this point.
Trying to talk people out of their religion really doesn't work very well no matter how much you research the arguments. I have no idea why so many people have come to define Christianity as consisting of little except being opposed to abortion and homosexuality, but that's where we are.
Because their own sexuality is repressed and they're angry about other people who are allowed to have sex without consequences. Both abortion and gay rights are about forbidden sex without consequences.
And to be clear, they love the forbidden part. That's half of the appeal. They don't want frumpy Unitarian sex where everything can be discussed openly. They just want the punishment-part to stay intact.
5: Because abstractly opposing something through the ballot box is the easy part. Actually living up to the tenets of the faith requires effort and sacrifice. Like, say, Matthew 19:21, which never gets advocated at all.
You know that old bugaboo, hairy frumpy Unitarian sex with pendulous breasts and grey pubes on testicles.
I understand somewhat the Catholic viewpoint, provided that they also vehemently opposed the Iraq war and take seriously arguments like the one in 1. What I don't get is how a bunch of Sola Scriptura fundamentalist protestants have made the be-all and end-all of Christianity something that is manifestly not in the Bible.
In this way abortion is quite different from homosexuality, the bible is reasonably clearly homophobic and although it's certainly possible to be an affirming Christian, it's not really possible if you're a fundamentalist. By contrast, abortion was known in ancient times and is forbidden or limited in some other contemporary law codes (it's a crime against the father's family to abort a pregnancy after the father has died), but God in his infinite wisdom thought that it was much much more important to ban tattoos and eating shrimp than to say a single word about abortion. It's completely ridiculous to think that biblical fundamentalism is compatible with treating abortion as a political red line.
Concurring the OP, I emailed the Drum post to a friend and said that the polling was interesting, but that I would offer a different explanation, "I'd argue that the other answer is that Trump has discredited a variety of reasons to support the Republican party so it's possible that people are describing themselves as single-issue as a way to excuse/explain the fact that they continue to vote Republican despite having few reasons to do so."
That's somewhat unfair. I think there are many sincere anti-abortion voters, but I also think there are plenty who want to argue about abortion because they feel like it is political ground which isn't subject to counter argument. It allows them to just say, "I am voting my conscience " and not be required to offer more justification.
Also, God isn't particularly absolutist on the whole "wombfruit is sacrosanct" thing in his own endeavors.
"The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open." - Hosea 13:16
What's also wild about is that while there are people who've convinced themselves that widespread abortion is our civilization's greatest sin, Donald Trump is certainly not among them.
14: I think that one's easier to square. Of course *God* is allowed to kill babies, that doesn't mean it's ok for us to do it.
It's pretty complex figuring out what other countries allow.
The Guttmacher institute has a detailed table (pdf) of abortion laws for every country in the world. Their "category 6," countries that have abortion "on request," is at least 50% countries that allow gestational restrictions: apparently "on request" means "during at least some part of the pregnancy," which can be as low as 8 weeks and still be counted. Only a few (the US is one) allow abortion up until "viability," though some have no explicit gestational upper limit, so what happens in practice is hard to tell. "Category 5" is countries that allow abortion "To save life of woman, preserve physical/mental health, socioeconomic grounds." "Category 1" is "prohibited altogether," which is fewer than 30 countries, mostly poor.
I was surprised that fewer than 40 countries permit abortion in the second trimester. These are mostly first-world or semi-first-world countries, but there are a fair number of former USSR republics as well. The US at least notionally has very few restrictions on abortion, but in practice it's another matter, obviously. Some states (I think MA is one) have repealed moribund anti-abortion laws and even passed new laws legalizing it, in case Roe v. Wade is overturned.
The more intelligent and aware of the anti-abortion zealots know Trump doesn't care. They just think they're using him and it's okay because millions of dead babies.
I think 13 is very much correct for many right-wingers. It's not about a sincere conviction, it's about having an excuse.
Abortion is the beard to Republican cruelty. It wasn't all that long ago that some Republicans were willing to say it was an issue for the states, but what they've discovered is that they can be as horrible as they want, as long as they can say "murdering babies." Drum's reading of that poll is extremely credulous. "Single issue abortion voters" are just diehard Republicans who aren't out and proud about supporting racism and cruelty.
In my old age, I've become slow. 13 gets it exactly right!
13 et al is what I was getting at with this:
For them to vote for Trump based on abortion is just the laziest, thinnest of pretexts. The half that believe themselves when they say it are no better than the half that knows it's bullshit.
17 last If Roe is overturned, the next step is a nationwide ban. Virtually no pro-lifer believes in leaving this to states, and 99% of those who pretend they do are acting in bad faith.
To the OP, I actually think the politics on this might finally go the other way, at least in the presidential race. All the single issue pro-lifers were already for Trump, and already going to vote. The pro-choice majority can now see that talk of who gets to make Supreme Court appointments is not some sort of dishonest misdirection employed to trick people into voting for neoliberal shills, or just plain blackmail, but an actual thing.
Abortion is the beard to Republican cruelty.
This is a nice turn-of-phrase.
I worry about PA, because we really need a few tens of thousands to switch or stay home. Not gaining support isn't going to be enough.
I find it hard to think any Trump voter is arguing in good faith. I am aware I come across as abrasive, at least.
13 and 19 are correct. Back when I counted as religious, I'd point out that "what about abortion?" was going to lead them over a cliff following any jerk who promised the impossible and now they fullthroatedly support a miserable excuse for a human being just on the hopes that they will get someone who will overturn Roe, and what they're going to get is a gutted ACA and probably a different Casey-like restriction around 20 weeks* and a collapsed empire but Democrats kill babies (unlike their orange savior who is the most Christian president ever) and for some this way they get to own the libs.
There's also a subset that genuinely cares about ending abortion, but they've been hearing for forty years that they can be good Catholics only if they're also good Republicans because whaddyaboutabortion.
25: Some are arguing in good faith. They're just mostly unable to string together any sort of coherent argument. (I don't just come across as abrasive; I am largely constructed from rock salt and Brillo pads.)
It'll depend on what case comes to them, of course, but I'm not seeing Kavanaugh and Gorsuch playing the Souter/O'Connor roles in a new Casey.
That article describes wealthy, white suburban Trump voters who use abortion to justify their vote.
I think it is underappreciated how much these assholes justify by citing abortion -- not just votes. If your political opponents are mass murderers, then what measures are too extreme to defeat them?
Even most of those that (think they) genuinely believe abortion is murder would reject prosecuting it with murder sentences, so.
11: Right. Feticide, when it is a crime, is a property crime.
29 before reading the thread, and particularly 13.1, 18.1 and 19. Oops.
In my relatively recent experience, essentially nobody who is strongly anti-choice is arguing in good faith,* because they won't support any of the other policies that are clearly, demonstrably, redstateishly proven to reduce abortions. There used to be a good chart floating around that compared "If opposition to abortion is based on reducing abortion" to "If opposition to abortion is based on controlling and punishing women" and it was very illustrative of the positions on various issues (i.e., publicly funded insurance covering birth control).
*Exceptions for a couple of Catholic "seamless garment" folks I know well and trust; they are entirely consistent in their genuine concern for life in every respect, including the death penalty.
30: Via the Wayback Machine, the old Alas (a blog) gives us the definitive account of the relationship between opposing abortion and the pursuit of particular policies.
AIMHMHB, my dad used to be a consistent ethic-of-life Catholic who opposed abortion in all circumstances, and wouldn't join the ACLU because of it, but saved all his activism for anti-war, anti-death penalty stuff, and never voted for a Republican in his life. He's now a pro-choice Bernie Bro (though he will vote for Biden). I'm not sure what changed there, but I don't want to ask him because I'm still pissed about arguments we had concerning abortion 25 years ago.
My sister is a kinda conservative sometimes progressive evangelical who opposes abortion and has complicated feelings about homosexuality, but is very pro-immigrant, anti-racist, etc. We tend to only talk about the stuff we have some level of agreement on, but I know she's voted third party in the last few presidential elections b/c of abortion on the one side, and not wanting to vote for terrible people on the other.
When Nebraska had the referendum on the death penalty, the priests and bishop were extremely direct in telling people to vote against the death penalty. I assume they would be as direct if abortion were ever on the ballot, but that doesn't happen. I have no idea how people actually voted, but given the margins by which the death penalty won, I think many didn't follow directions.
34 is exactly the chart I was thinking of! Thank you.
I'm surprised at everyone saying that anti-choicism is usually in bad faith. I am pro-choice myself, but only 1 bit of information away from being pro-life: if I believed that let's call them -0.33-year-olds could feel pain, feel pleasure, feel terror at the prospect of being killed, etc. and were "basically people", I would be very anti-abortion and wouldn't be swayed much by arguments about a woman's right to choose. For me it all comes down to what the neuroscientists say about when various aspects of the brain develop, and the literature doesn't seem super-ultra-conclusive to me there, so I get people whose priors point them the other way.
Further, I think fervent anti-choiceism is more logically consistent than milquetoast anti-choiceism. If you really believe that millions of babies are getting murdered every year, seems like the definition of an issue worth voting singly on.
That said, I know very few people who are actively anti-choice and I'm usually scared to engage with them lest they think me a monster, so maybe red-staters in the commentariat have more perspective than me on what motivates them. *ascii shrug*
I guess the best argument for bad faith is Witt's 33 about the lack of support for policies that reduce the need for abortions. But the chart in 34 seems pretty off to me. E.g. they say that opposing a vaccine for HPV doesn't support or contradict the belief that abortion is murder, but it totally does support that belief -- increased cost of sex -> less sex -> less abortions. Opposing contraception = same kind of thing: if it makes any given sex act less likely to lead to an abortion, but decreases the cost of sex and leads to more sex, not obvious which effect will predominate.
Half the chart (protecting mothers from legal consequences, rape/incest exceptions, condemning extremists who bomb clinics) amounts to "these people don't have the courage of their convictions", which I kind of do agree with, as I said in 39.2, but I really DK about concluding from their milquestoastiness that they want to punish women.
39
I'm surprised at everyone saying that anti-choicism is usually in bad faith. I am pro-choice myself, but only 1 bit of information away from being pro-life: if I believed that let's call them -0.33-year-olds could feel pain, feel pleasure, feel terror at the prospect of being killed, etc. and were "basically people", I would be very anti-abortion and wouldn't be swayed much by arguments about a woman's right to choose.
Sure, but the vast majority of anti-choice people are only pro-life in this one way (e.g. death penalty, war, universal health care), and even on this one topic support policies that make abortion more likely (e.g. defunding women's health care and contraception). That's the bad-faith or completely-logically-incoherent part. A hypothetical Catholic "seamless garment" person who opposes abortion, the death penalty, and almost any war, and supports universal health care, and votes Democrat or third party in general or doesn't vote, I could respectfully disagree with about abortion. (In this election, my disagreement with voting third party or not at all wouldn't be respectful. But in hypothetical normal times, maybe.) Such people are very rare.
39: That is at least 4 bits. You don't get hide three commas behind a single bit.
41: I think my dad is the only one I've met, and he was never anti-contraception.
The Gallup polling is interesting because it divides opinions on various exceptions by trimester.
% calling themselves pro-life: high 40's, pretty stable over time
% favoring abortion ban when mother's life is endangered: first trimester 15%, third trimester 22% (2018, identical in 2003)
% favoring ban when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest: first trimester 21%, third trimester 42% (2018, very close in 2003)
If I had to try to assemble some kind of revealed philosophy from this, I would say (a) people believe in the quickening as a morally significant point (not surprising), but (b) it's not clear people believe in full personhood even post-quickening.
At any rate, it's definitely not a binary is/is not a person.
A hypothetical Catholic "seamless garment" person who opposes abortion, the death penalty, and almost any war, and supports universal health care, and votes Democrat or third party in general or doesn't vote, I could respectfully disagree with about abortion.
You meet people in the Catholic Worker movement like this all the time.
I definitely think that some of the anti-abortion sentiment is completely sincere and in good faith. I can empathize with somebody who feels like it is a destruction of life. I am slightly skeptical of how many people fit that description, and I am _very_ skeptical that the people who have changed their position in the last four years* fall into that category.
* From the Kevin Drum post, people who did not describe themselves as single-issue anti-abortion voters in 2016 but do now.
48: Maybe I was wrong about "vast majority" and "very rare". I knew someone like that in college. I have the impression he's become more conservative over the years, but that's a very vague impression; he's not too active on social media AFAICT and I've only spoken to him once since 2006, I think. I'm fairly confident that people like that are the minority of the anti-abortion movement, based on correlation between abortion and other political positions, but I don't have data to support "tiny minority" or whatever.
40:
Jesus wept, how much more data do we need on the proposition that increasing the risk of a fun thing, no, damn it, a primal human evolutionary mandate, does not in fact make it less prevalent?
The fact that 39 focuses on third-trimester issues, which admittedly have some complexity but constitute a minuscule fraction of abortions suggests to me that this argument is, if not exactly in bad faith, is at least not well established.
51.1 What data are you talking about? I feel pretty confident that making X more risky leads to less X for all X so I'ma need a lot of data.
51.2 -0.33 could be counted as 2nd or 3rd trimester. But feel free to substitute with -0.5 or -0.66, all the same to me 39's-argument-wise. BTW I agree with Peter Singer that there's nothing special about 0.0.
I never even saw the violinist until it was too late.
It is special as the moment before which there's an incontestably rights-bearing human being involved. That is, you can't just get to "I think a fetus might have some kind of rights, maybe" and decide abortion should be banned on that basis. You have to believe that the fetus's rights are greater than the rights of a woman to physical self-defense.
If you really believe that millions of babies are getting murdered every year, seems like the definition of an issue worth voting singly on.
Only if you also think that "babies getting murdered" is a binary issue and there is no reason to vote for, e.g., the (D) party whose policies might results in 1.2 million BGM and not the (R) party whose policies might result in 1.8 million BGM.
This is the thing that I just don't understand at all. From the standpoint of sheer pragmatism, I never understand why people don't support (what might be called) harm reduction instead of feel-good moralizing in cases when moralizing demonstrably results in more harm.
If you have a deeply held moral conviction, and someone presents you with compelling data about an action that you are taking that is causing that conviction to be violated MORE often, why wouldn't you stop? Unless that deeply held moral conviction about protecting babies is not as deeply held as, say, hating women.
(To be clear, I'm talking about supposed single-issue voters, here -- obviously in many cases people are weighing multiple variables when trying to decide about harm reduction versus absolutism.)
I have similar questions about drugs.
56/57: In years past I also did not understand this. It was a major basis of my previous decades of pro-life but always politically pro-choice political philosophy, and was the bulwark of most of my co-religionists' Dem voting; I have definitely coaxed a few new voters to register Dem and vote Dem with that argument in the past.
Now, however, people just don't believe me. Bureacratic data, instead of being illuminating, is simply false.
52: I present to you the abstinence movement (leads to riskier sex at younger ages), and the entirety of the goddamned war on drugs. Making these things more risky doesn't lead to less of them, it just makes them more dangerous.
I think the drug issue is really interesting, actually. I find the harm reduction arguments in favor of Narcan really compelling. I'm not sure how sold I am on the harm reduction elements of supervised injection sites.
But those seem like areas where I am truly weighing multiple variables -- it's definitely not a single-issue consideration (for me, at least).
I just want to try edibles without having to risk being in the paper.
I could not cosign 56 more strongly. In my more naive phases, I occasionally thought that was a bridge one could reach across to the anti-abortion folk. "Even if you make it illegal, you won't stop it, so let's cooperate on reducing the incidence."
Nope, they're not actually interested in anything other than grandstanding and sex-shaming.
63: Dude, we're like five minutes away from that being possible in PA. Seriously, there is unbelievable support for it across populations. I can't imagine it won't happen soon.
(I personally would weigh "legal access to edibles" as a heavy positive in contrast to "illegal access to joints" on the sole basis of NOT HAVING TO SMELL IT when I walk around downtown.)
I smell so much of it when I walk around the neighborhood at night. Ever since the pandemic.
(Yes, I'm poking fun at myself. Yes, I understand that my personal distaste for having to smell other people's drug use should not be the deciding factor.)
By so much, I mean like twice a week or so. But mostly where I walk is it past single family houses that are back from the street a bit.
61: I think I'm pro supervised injection as long as there are people who can help connect folks to treatment.
I think I answer to #4. I'm still not ra ra abortion, but I try to be supportive and helpful and non judgemental to friends considering getting one, and have been told I was helpful by friends who thought of getting one or did get one, after the fact. I try to be noisier about my pro-choice politics. I certainly give more money to planned parenthood. That was all after the Unfogged thread that made things clearer to me.
I don't think threads like that scale, and I don't think #34 -- intellectually insightful as it is --- is a persuasive tool. Diagnosing the fact that people are irrational and inconsistent is not usually persuasive. The issue, electorally, is not them but their loved ones. ~ {Liberal Catholic-ish women} who reliably vote Dem *and* have been *key to getting out the vote in the rust belt.* Using a table like #34 to highlight irrationality and inconsistency, and then rhetorically turning that diagnosis into a conceptual proxy for the emotional tenor of pro-life Catholic hearts -- how much they really are upset by the concept of killing a fetus vs. How much they just have vicious feelings about women having sex --- is not helpful to making liberal Catholic women feel energized as part of the big tent. There's a subculture reality in 9/33*/48 that's hard to access if you're just not connected to it, but denying it's existence can feel like gaslighting to the people who are connected to it. In 2016 I knew three liberal Catholic-familied women who were specifically frustrated and de-energized with campaign work because the campaign offices often featured this "pro-life is only powered by misogyny" discourse. They persisted, but they were exhausted and they felt peers gave up. Is that fair or rational? No. But I do believe it had an impact in PA, Wisconsin, and maybe Michigan. Because of RBG's death, I think it could return as a factor.
I get the extreme frustration that there is never a good time to transition from "safe, legal, rare" to destigmatizing. I don't know how you move the needle. Unfogged threads don't scale. Bureacratic impact data has been neutralized. 34-style logical dissections are not persuasive. We have to try something new. I am not sure the next four months are the time to try it.
I've long been in favor of legal access to all drugs except antibiotics. Dr. Carl Hart has some pretty persuasive things to say on the subject.
Drugs and what we term abusive use of drugs are a symptom, and the carceral state approach has, flatly, made everything orders of magnitude worse.
54: [assuming you meant "before which there's NOT an incontestably rights-bearing human being involved"] that's exactly what I'm contesting!
Agree with 56 that good-faith anti-abortion activists should be all about indirect means of preventing abortions like good welfare and benefits for single moms. & also that phrasing it as binary murder vs. not murder is oversimplifying.
Re the war on drugs, I've always assumed that it did in fact lower the rate of drug use, just at the cost of locking a ton of people up for no good reason. I've read studies that say that legalizing MJ has led to a lot more MJ consumption.
Re abstinence education, a random adult telling kids they should abstain is almost the opposite of raising the costs of sex. Back when there were real Scarlet Letter style social sanctions, teen sex rates were way lower.
I'm still not ra ra abortion
I'm ra ra abortion.
Diagnosing the fact that people are irrational and inconsistent is not usually persuasive. ... Using a table like #34 to highlight irrationality and inconsistency
Part of the point of the table is to show the underlying consistency of the dominant strain of anti-abortion thought.
34-style logical dissections are not persuasive.
The point isn't to persuade. It's to describe. We are often admonished that we ought not say a true thing because some folks won't like it -- and that is sound advice for many purposes. But surely here, among the Unfogged cogoscenti, we can talk about the world as it is.
74:
The whole point of the left hand column is that the views are not consistent with the idea it's murder?
I was not admonishing anyone. It's a useful, insightful table. Like I said, I don't think it captures or describes everything going on in people's mind's, but it certainly captures a lot. I was saying that *for the purpose of making a big tent to get out the vote* , especially in the rust belt right now, it may not be the most helpful centerpiece of discourse; for the purposes of moving the needle in the culture at large, it also hasn't seemed to work.
72.1: Wow. No. That's not what I meant. Try rereading my whole comment and thinking about it for a moment.
I think we're getting really close to solving this abortion thing.
"It [the moment of birth] is special as the moment before which there's an incontestably rights-bearing human being involved"
I thought you meant, before birth, it's contestable whether the fetus is a rights-bearing human; after birth, it's not contestable. I think 76 is implying that the rights-bearing human being you're referring to is the mom. She incontestably bears rights both before and after birth though. That's what confused me about your phrasing. I guess you mean before birth, she's involved; after birth, she's not necessarily involved. Isn't she though? She still has to care for the baby or at least dispose of it in some way. Arguably not as onerous a task as having to carry the darn thing around for months and push it out. Arguably more onerous.
Ile you're being more generous than you have to be, it's a bad table.
The whole "physical self-defense" sentence didn't convey any meaning to you?
I Googled the phrase, in quotes, "abortion is great" and the first thing to pop up was a Slate story.
Nonetheless, I still think abortion is great. (Sometimes Slate's reflexive contrarianism isn't mindless contrarianism. It's actually a quite good piece.)
LB, I know you're just getting started, but there cannot possibly be any hope.
Torque, you've made a lot of claims in this thread. What sources are you working from? Do you have specific texts or stats in mind? If so, it might be helpful for the discussion if you shared some of them.
I wrote a long rambly sort of thing about how it feels from the perspective of somebody who has had to do a lot of painful work to undo this kind of harmful thinking, in the original Catholic variant, but I don't see any reason to muddy the waters from the clarity of Witt's 56, or at least not until I can present something convincingly empathy building. Which I can't right now.
63: Dude, we're like five minutes away from that being possible in PA. Seriously, there is unbelievable support for it across populations. I can't imagine it won't happen soon.
Yeah, you're getting it before the 2022 election, certainly. Fetterman's hard push over the last year, culminating with calm-and-boring Wolf standing in front of a pot leaf flag, means the game's up. Can't imagine even the conservatives in the sticks are particularly against it now. I picked a bad time to move. At least I can buy beer from post offices.
This is deeply ironic, what with being unfogged's appointed technocratic dessicated calculating machine, but:
Only if you also think that "babies getting murdered" is a binary issue and there is no reason to vote for, e.g., the (D) party whose policies might results in 1.2 million BGM and not the (R) party whose policies might result in 1.8 million BGM.
There's your answer. If you think it's about babies getting murdered, if you buy into that, even arguing in terms of rat orgasm cost-benefit analysis is a monstrous act. On the other side, if you're willing to take "fewer", you're already convinced. They're not interested in one BGM more or less, they're rejecting the calculation, the principle that more or less is interesting, and the idea that the whole exercise has an instrumental aim. This should not be totally unfamiliar. The rhetorical move is the same one as declaring this or that "priceless", or such and such "mere", or that instrumental rationality destroys true ideals. Essentially, it's one of the things the far right shares with the far left, inherited from late 19th century hating on democracy.
If you're not particularly interested in more or less, but rather, what you stand for, well, this also gives you an out for almost any amount of hypocrisy and that almost goes without saying here.
84: That seems very smart to me. Witt is making a consequentialist argument without acknowledging that it comes in response to a deontological* argument.**
*I mean, sure, it's a silly deontological argument, but that's the form it takes.
**This philosophy stuff over my head. I hope I got my terminology right.
Ile, I think your points are really interesting. They are tangential to what I'm arguing, in that (I think) the kind of women you're describing are by definition not single-issue voters, or they wouldn't be struggling with how much abortion rah-rah they can tolerate. (The answer would be zero, and they wouldn't be remotely gettable for the Democrats.) I know people like this; they are pretty common in the exurbs of PA. I hope many of them will vote for Biden for the same reason that many of them voted for Sen. Casey.
(I've actually heard Casey speak quite movingly about his values in supporting pregnant women -- it's slightly paternalistic, but mostly really lovely, in the sense of emphasizing that he wants to create a world where women never feel urgency about terminating a pregnancy because they lack economic means or social support for parenting. We know that IS a factor for some women getting abortions, though of course not all.)
I'm not making any argument one way or another for convincing voters, to be clear -- there are really useful conversations to be had on that front, and I do think some of them get into the nuance of how frustrating it is that we can't easily say "Abortion makes me flinch" and also say "but I think it should generally be legal, with some restrictions as it gets later into the trimesters" -- but I'm not talking about convincing people.
The issue I'm struggling with that for people who SAY they are single-issue anti-abortion-rights voters, and SAY that they are concerned about killing babies, why is it that their purity around the binary belief overrides any instinct toward the reducing harm belief?
I don't know what deontological means but if google is accurate, I'm still left wondering why these voters are willing to vote for Trump (almost certainly a baby-murderer based on their definition) because the consquences of voting for him are that they get an anti-Roe Supreme Court justice. How is that not a consequentialist belief?
Because shut up, that's why, is about the best you'll get. It's not an ethical position, it's a cultural position.
86.last: I got nuthin'.
I have a brilliant strategy for influencing undecided voters: I refuse to interact with them, thus ensuring that they won't be put off by being called clueless fucks.
I think its not just deontology; I think one thing that exists in pro-life people's mind and rhetoric is that "life" (meaning soul) is important. What is less important is not experiencing fear, suffering, joy, etc. Which seems like it helps explain why one would care more about a 1-st term fetus than than pigs that live their entire lives in tiny, shit-filled cages, or immigrant kids in cages, etc.
86: I'll have to look up Senator Casey.
Are we saying that Trump is a baby murderer because of consequentialism or because someone actually came forward stating he paid for an abortion? (I'm just wondering if that was ever actually validated and somehow I missed it. I find it impossible to bet that he hasn't paid for an abortion or two or ten. It's of no consequence either, since he could do anything and his supporters wouldn't care.)
I just want to clarify. . .I'm definitely not talking about the people you're talking about, because I'm not talking about people whose *vote* is decided on abortion. Except for very young voters, I don't think anyone whose *vote* on Trump vs. Biden is decided on abortion is worth worrying about. I'm talking about *campaigning* energy. In 2016 the issue was largely the "let's destigmatize abortion by stigmatizing Catholic sensibilities" froth spilling forth from the professional political operatives who were particularly worked up because Clinton picked Kaine. And I only think it could possibly have been an impactful dynamic in Rust belt states. That's where I heard about it anyway.
|| Just got asked in a job application "Which pronouns do you use to describe yourself?"
Well... "Me"?
I am now cracking up at the idea of adding "Me/Myself/I" to the bottom of one's email signature.
"MY/MINE" for the inner toddler in my body.
USN EKRANOPLANS! (Theoretical, etc.)
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/september/modern-sea-monsters
Not that you doubted it, but joking about the pronouns question officially makes you The Olds.
190: it was in the last year that I noticed everyone dat work doing it. The lefty-ish Episcopal priest did it a couple of years ago.
A friend in her late 60's is really active on disabilities stuff and generally progressive but has been struggling to get the pronoun thing right, specifically remembering when she is supposed to say zie, zim, and zir.
My workplace has gradually transitioned to most people having them in their email sigs over the last year or two. I finally updated mine to add my new job title about a month ago, and added pronouns as well.
98 well of course the US navy should be spending money on ekranoplans. In fact I think it's a real question whether it should be spending money on anything else. Submarines and aircraft, I suppose. Marching bands.
In my behavior, I'm younger than you.
Except that I plan my meals around ensuring sufficient fiber.
officially makes you The Olds
I am sitting in a waiting room to see a urologist. I'm old.
I think that "if you were really interested in preserving the life of babies, you'd support policies and administrations that reduce abortions, improve outcomes, etc." is an argument that reaches many pro-life inclined voters. The trouble is a) those who can be reached have already been reached and are already voting for Biden/Democrats -- this is a lot of my college Catholic cohort -- and b) not enough of them live in Pennsylvania.
110 is right. But more of them, proportionally, live in Pennsylvania than Nebraska.
Is it possible to be excessively cynical about the Catholics? I think it is! Among religious folks in general, and Christians in particular, the Catholics come out looking okay in presidential voting.
113: Yes -- see this example!
https://twitter.com/NeilJYoung17/status/1307478290471374850/photo/1
That was not the Neil Young I was expecting.
The current phenomenon of Republicans denouncing the anti-Catholicism of people who don't like Amy Coney Barrett, who isn't Catholic, is pretty amazing. I guess that was the next step from people like Meghan McCain accusing Jews of being anti-Semitic.
116: What are you saying, Ned? I've confirmed that Amy Coney Barrett is Catholic. Am I misunderstanding?
Did you call the parish office to be sure?
Topically, I just got an email from the bishop stating that he is very much not going to make an endorsement and that any asshole with a printer can claim to be expressing a "Catholic" position in a political ad.
118: Sure, but then I confirmed it with the Vatican.
It's too feudal for that much centralization.
Sorry, what I read was about how she is part of a weird evangelical religious society that sounded very unlike any Catholic lay organization I'd ever heard of. But apparently it is.
122: The New York Times reported in September 2017 that Barrett is said to be a member of People of Praise, a group that emerged out of the Charismatic Catholic movement whose members allegedly swear a lifelong oath of loyalty to one another and are reportedly held accountable by an adviser -- a "head" for men and a "handmaid" for women. The Times reported that mentions of Barrett had recently been removed from the group's website.
Oh god, that weird amalgam like Pence?
NMM Gale Sayers.
Do kids today still watch Brian's Song?
People of Praise accepts Catholics and non. So it isn't like Opus Dei, which has official recognition as a Catholic lay organization. PoP seems to be walking close to the schismatic line.
I think their altar boys are in my email because it mentions a POP server.
Hmm, Opus Dei is a prelature, not an Association of the Faithful. World Marriage Encounter is such an association. But PoP doesn't seem to be even that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_the_Christian_faithful
127. As long as your server isn't in your altar boys.
123 is out of date, I guess - they no longer call woman advisers "handmaids" -- presumably because of the tv adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel.
The highest office a woman can hold in the community is "woman leader" (formerly "handmaid").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_Praise
I think Barrett is interesting because she was clearly anti-deathpenalty in 1998, when she co-wrote an article suggesting that Catholic judges should recuse themselves from such cases, since it was immoral. She might be a genuine "seamless robe" Catholic, though her apparently dreadful record on immigration cases -- I've not looked at it -- suggests not.
But then I am much less freaked out by charismatic Catholics than most people. I have a very traumatic time with some of them in Bosnia about 25 years ago, but the memories have faded since then.
PoP is also strange because it was founded in 1971, almost as part of the Jesus Freak wave by two Catholics who had been zapped with the Holy Spirit by some Episcopalians. That's a long time for a group like that to endure.
Lots of things started in 1971 are still going.
Not that many intentional communities, though.
Not that many intentional communities, though.
Not that many intentional communities, though.
This content obviously trying fir longevity itself. I blame the cat.
almost as part of the Jesus Freak wave by two Catholics who had been zapped with the Holy Spirit by some Episcopalians
This made me laugh out loud.
My dad had a friend who was a little bit kooky, who got into the Charismatic movement; and said friend convinced my father to accompany him on a weekend retreat (it was the '70s, but still: the thought of my father on any sort of "retreat" is still a bit unbelievable to me...). My dad's verdict upon this weekend retreat? "Zealots," he said. "Jesus Christ, but these people are zealots."
The moral of that story is not just "don't type on the phone" but "especially don't type on the phone while in bed accompanied by a cat who hasn't seen you for two days" though even that moral might advantageously be rephrased.
But people worried about Barrett should look at this piece of well-informed criticism.
It is now said that the covenant is public and online.
Dumber than the Republicans who cry "baby murder!" to justify every awful thing the GOP does are the liberals who think "well, can't we just get rid of Roe v. Wade and then we can stop talking about this divisive issue?" Ending Roe v. Wade won't end abortion politics. Outlawing abortion in every state wouldn't end it, either. The people guiding this fight on the right want to *put women in their place*, and that's a struggle that won't end.
bz, can you point to an example of a liberal who thinks that getting rid of Roe ends talk of this divisive issue? I can't say I've ever met anyone like that.
I did not realize Episcopalians did much Holy Spirit zapping.