I’ll tell you…if I had a nickel for every angry, humorless ideologue I ran into on the internet, then I would be…well, I would have enough money to pay someone to come up with a suitably snarky image to put up in this post. Instead, I’m stuck with a merely serviceable yet poignant illustration of Obama’s… negligible degree of political sex appeal. 
Those of you that keep track of such things might remember the last time I stuck my foot into the hornet’s nest of the ideological blogosphere. Fun, yes, but inconceivably boring after the first 3 seconds of novelty wore off. Still and all, I stumbled upon this truly amazing bit of writing about how Obama is a truly pro-life candidate.
I’ll just let that…sink in for a moment before I explain it in more detail and then tear it down mercilessly.
Finished sinking? Let’s go then.
Effectively, the argument runs that McCain and the pro-life crowd are going about things the wrong way, and Obama should exploit that. The error of the social conservatives? Opposing contraception. Wide contraception use reduces the number of “unintended” pregnancies; and it is precisely these pregnancies that end in abortions. Since Obama supports government dissemination of and education regarding contraceptives and their use, he is the more desirably candidate for those who want to see a reduction in the number of abortions.
Got that?
Now, I’m not a logician, so I’m not going to evaluate the argument internally. I’m also generally a fair-minded person, and I’m more than willing to admit that there are pro-lifers out there who are ignorant enough about their beliefs that they actually think that it’s all about the body count. Those people are, to speak simply, idiots. Not the benign, mentally-retarded kind, either. We’re talking about the pox-on-society, bovine-level unreflective kind of idiot that is regrettably all too typical in contemporary society. Sure, it might look like a good if your universe is bounded by abortion, but what raisin-brained looney lives in that world? I certainly don’t, and I don’t know anyone who does.
This is the problem with arguing from a disingenuous or ignorant position, like the blogger who wrote the piece linked above. An ideological pro-choicer isn’t going to understand the authentic pro-life position without a lot of work, and it’s way easier to just chalk it up to ignorant, Bible-thumping Godmongers than to actually sit down and try to figure out why anyone who claims to be pro-life and votes for Obama is either a liar or a moron.
For those in the audience just joining in, let me explain why I am pro-life, and why this encompasses contraception – oh, and why it doesn’t present a real problem, either.
Being pro-life means a variety of things at once. It means respecting the intrinsic and God-given dignity to each and every person by virtue of being human. It means understanding that life begins at the very moment of conception, when the fusion of parental DNA sequences creates a distinct human entity. It means realizing that life ends at natural death and not at some point before when the fuzzy-wuzzy line demarcating a positive quality-of-life from a negative quality-of-life. (That is an entirely different matter. Again, remind me and I’ll write something about that at some point.) In a nutshell, being pro-life is not about just one part of the human life cycle – it’s about every part of it; and while a true pro-lifer will willingly take steps that save some unborn when he can’t immediately save all, he will never compromise one part of his position in favor of another.
The fulcrum of this whole shouting match is a fundamental difference in world-view, which is another reason why trying to tackle abortion as if it is a discreet issue ends up in Epic-Fail-ville. To a pro-lifer, human life has inherent dignity and explicit meaning that cannot be taken away. To a pro-choicer, no matter what they may say, human life of necessity has value only insofar as it is invested with it – otherwise their vocabulary falls into meaninglessness. Consider just the phrase “an unwanted pregnancy.” If the degree to which a child is desired makes that child more or less dispensable, then what does it say about that child’s dignity?
Some have gotten over themselves enough to take the premise forward to its logical extension, viz. that the parental prerogative for killing offspring ought not stop at the boundary of the uterine realm. All that must be asked is whether or not the parents’ interests and the child’s coincide – instantly setting up a hierarchy in which the child is objectified, much like his pre-natal analogue, but with a more lively stage presence.
So in conclusion, if you claim to be pro-life and you think that the bottom line is fewer abortions, then vote for Obama. If dismembering a living human fetus is reprehensible to you, but you’re cool with measures that would have denied that fetus even a fighting chance at life in the first place, then vote for Obama. Oh, and wake the heck up and stop calling yourselves pro-life while you’re at it. You’re as useful as if you were unabashedly pro-choice, because you exercise the same type of hypocrisy that they do: if it doesn’t look human, it can be ignored. To tell the cold, hard truth about the matter, you have as much of an idea of what being “for life” actually means as this picture communicates what the idea of Darth Vader is supposed to mean – that is to say, only in the most distorted and caricatured way I can imagine.
The difference? The “Hello Kitty” Vader motif is actually funny. You’re not.
Filed under: abortion, blogging, epic rant, politics, pro-life
