Tell the Captain
Capracus said:
It’s not that human rights are necessarily alien to their outlook, it’s that maternity sets up a potential for conflicting rights of the two entities involved in the process.
Just so we're clear:
You do recognize how hilariously stupid that sounds coming from you?
After all, we recently had a sixteen-month demonstration, over the course of
two↗ threads↗, in which the equal protection conflict invoked by Fertilization-Assigned Personhood so confused, defied, or frightened anti-abortion advocates in our community that they refused that issue.
I'm quite certain you
recall that discussion↗.
Still, though, you make my point for me:
The rights of individuals in a given society are not immutable, societies have and will grant them as they see fit.
Those rights are supposedly inalienable, but consider the reason we have Amendment XIX, granting woman suffrage. After the Civil War, Congress passed three constitutional amendments that were then ratified by the states; these are Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV. Amendment XIV contains the Equal Protection clause, which requires states to treat all persons within their jurisdiction equally under law. On this basis, multiple states moved forward giving women the vote; the federal government objected, and successfully argued that the Equal Protection Clause of Amendment XIV, forbidding states to
"deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" was not intended to apply to women.
And you make an excellent example of the result; the proposition of a woman's human rights so confounds anti-abortion activists that they cannot acknowledge those human rights explicitly, and only acknowledge the idea of a woman's human rights, as you have, when telling us why women shouldn't have them.
To the one, it's kind of grotesque, anyway.
To the other, it's especially grotesque given the historical record of this community; you could probably behave more like a cheap stereotype if you tried, but that would be
especially grotesque.
The rights of individuals in a given society are not immutable, societies have and will grant them as they see fit.
And a woman's rights as a human being are supposed to be inalienable; the best way around that is to effectively deny the existence of such human rights, which is generally how anti-abortion does it.
You spend ten sentences discussing why a woman's human rights aren't in effect, and never acknowledge that women actually have them. This kind of misogyny might be stock and standard, but that does not make it acceptable, and that does not mean it is not hateful. Blind misogyny nonetheless remains misogyny.
Acknowledge that women are people, too, with no ifs or buts. Acknowledge that women have human rights, with no ifs or buts. It's a lot harder to fashion your anti-abortion argument when you do that, isn't it?
Conflicts involving the protected rights of two individuals can generally be settled under standing case precedent; what makes the FAP argument different in this context is that it is attempting to install a new standard for resolving those conflicts. The legislation of ontology in order to justify further legislation is one of those ultimately cynical maneuvers that, in any other context, would only feed the fire of anti-government tinfoils fretting about intrusion and expanding state power; but this is a cynical maneuver to expand the state's intrusive power that those potsherds can get behind. In the larger political landscape, this dissonance has long been apparent, and in truth it complicates people's response to tinfoil libertarianism about other things. Like when the Pauline Evangelism would try to win votes from people like me:
Ron Paul supports your rights, dude. Wants pot to be legal! Uh-huh. And I have a daughter, whose human rights Ron Paul despises; what do they think I'm going to do? Ron Paul wants to be the arbiter of whether a woman has suffered an "honest rape"? These days the libertarian appeal includes the right to aid and abet sexual abuse of female minors, asserted as religious conscience freedom in a Texas bill currently waiting for its day in the state Senate. One would expect genuine libertarians to get sick of this bullshit, but the conflict between libertarianism and the conservative, intrusive claim to its mantle will continue to foil libertarianism in other issues, too.
To the other, I've got virtually nothing to say about killing a five year-old in self-defense, other than to marvel at the desperation of the argument. You probably wouldn't have to humiliate yourself like that if you would just acknowledge the human rights of women. Then again, if you do that and continue to advocate for the elimination of those human rights, there's nothing anyone else can do about such self-denigration.
Go and tell the Captain, waves are growing high, and anyone washed overboard, leave them here to die. Go, now, tell his mistress, who lies in sheets of wine, the candles and the invocations will not bring down the tide. He's abandoned any hope of life now; the endless storms that rage upon us grow from ripples in his mind. He has chosen darkness over light now; mistress and crew have lied and left him to be cold.
