Abortion should soley be the choice of women. It is something that affects au far more then it will ever effect men.

Slavery should solely be the choice of the master. It is something that affects the cracker of nigras far more than it will ever affect some Yankee bleeding-heart.

More seriously, why isn't a humanist pro-life view ever treated as something that a serious person can believe? I know about straw-men, and the convenience of secular airheads conjuring caricatures of "bible-thumping rednecks" that only reach that view to listening to a clerical authority figure?

Note: the airhead view really is so laughably inept, I don't see how people aren't ashamed to hold such stupid views. For starters, it makes no political sense to bash religious beliefs when so many hold some form of religious doctrine. I'm shocked such anti-religious demagoguery doesn't experience more backlash. Then there's this business of "rednecks" obeying doctrines of "the church?" These smug cosmopolitan airheads are so ignorant of religious culture and America that they really don't know what a Protestant is, as opposed to a Catholic, which dominates which regions of the country, and which has a Pope with official clerical doctrine and junk.

It's no wonder they have to invent an "American Taliban" as their adversaries, for they really couldn't wit their way through a special ed class with any confidence.

Being (sometimes abrasively) nonreligious myself, I'm still pretty sympathetic to your complaints about cosmopolitan airheads not only not understanding, but not even trying to understand religious culture (to elaborate: I don't mind so much if they don't try to understand it, but expressing loud opinions on it while simultaneously not making the effort makes me want to ignore them). I think the closest the airhead culture has come to a serious understanding of religious culture, starting from their own framing of cultural breakdowns, is Altemeyer's stuff on right-wing authoritarianism. Even here though, we're seeing the work of a psychologist (ugh) trying to understand something quite out of a psychologist's depth, though some of his insights are interesting (for instance that Russian reactionaries pining for the good ol' days under Joe Stalin share interesting personality quirks with "right-wing" authoritarians in North America). The stuff about an American Taliban has some rooting in serious concerns -Dominionists really are creepy people and probably would be every bit as nasty as the Taliban if they ever had serious power- but the paranoid way any law or policy that rubs a good liberal the wrong way gets contorted into a plank in some grand Christianist Conspiracy is really annoying. People who think along these lines not only don't understand religious culture, they don't understand the essentially "centrist" and "pragmatic", multi-partisan way that governments usually get in gear to do really nasty things to their subjects. When fascism/whateverism comes to America, yeah, the religious right will have had a part in building it. So will have the good liberals and the pragmatic centrists. All of this is way off-topic, of course. But I guess this post is evidence that I don't mind.

And to make a note on the more on-topic comment, I've noticed that even really intelligent people I have a great deal of respect for - people who are easily capable of fairly characterizing all sorts of beliefs they have absolutely no sympathy at all for - always want to act as if all arguments against the morality and/or legality of abortion proceed from some sort of desire to see women enslaved. That's fine, I guess, if what you really mean to say is that outlawing abortion would have the effect of enslaving women (I think it might, given certain cultural corollaries), but then what you're doing is arguing from consequences (which might be fallacious or not, depending on the specific topic under discussion). Also to note: Any statement to the effect that abortion is a woman's business just begs the question if the topic is the morality of abortion, whether it should be legal, etc.. Morality is the business of everyone capable of reasoning, and so such statements presume that the question is settled; that abortion is, if not virtuous, then at the very least, morally permissible to the extent of "being nobody else's business". I note to one side that wife- and child-abuse were once considered to be part of this category.

I also want to note that Fictionpress fails even harder than I remember at line breaks. For **'s sake.

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