Saturday, May 07, 2022

A Little Hardball

 Abortion is the wine and wafer of the feminist movement. (A despised cultural figure of the 1990s.)
I thought that was extreme and unfair at the time. I have come to believe they were right. If you remember who that was, you may mention it.

A) What part of "If Roe is overturned it goes back to the states" is opaque?

B) What part of "Not everyone agrees with your assessment that the right to abort is just, like, obvious, which is why we have legislatures, attempts at persuasion, and try to have significant allowances for differences of opinion" is opaque?

C) Given A), and B), I submit that the "passion" as Jen Psaki called it (a sentiment she did not allow to those who assembled peacefully to protest the 2020 election) is about feelings of cultural victory rather than attention to practical considerations?

One of the foundational topics of this blog has been issues that people feel are intellectual, but upon applying pressure turn out to be only social and emotional. I may not have been successful at enforcing that upon myself and my friends here, but I have at least recognised the possibility and tried. I may be only deceiving myself in one of those reverse-gainer Screwtapian ways, yet I can claim that even that is an advantage over those I oppose, who seem oblivious to the possibility that such considerations apply to them as well as every other human being in history. 

But because we are in the territory of my own passions at this point, it is best that I not accuse further.


6 comments:

james said...

I remember plowing through a book of feminist essays from the early 70's/late 60's. One of them wrote "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It's the sort of thing that's easy to say.

james said...

Yes, but the fact that it was said tells you how central the author felt it to be, and invokes the "wine and wafer" comparison well before the 80's usage.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Sorry if I was unclear. I meant that it was easy for her to say that, not that it was easy for you.

Mike Guenther said...

A close family member lost their mother to an illegal abortion back in the late 50's, was abandoned to abusive relatives by her father and yet she is staunchly pro-life.

And as I explained in a Facebook reply to one of my daughters, why all the hysteria for something that might not even be decided yet.

And I explained how even the liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was a badly reasoned law and that it should have gone through the legislative process before even going to the Court.

Yeah, she's still talking to me.

RonF said...

Those in favor of abortion "rights" could not get them through the democratic processes of our form of governance, so they sought it through the least democratic one so as to impose it against the will of the people. Since then they have had half a century to get a democratic confirmation of what they sought. But they were so convinced that they knew the true progress of culture and history - and of their control over such - that they could not even conceive that it would be necessary. But what has been clear to many was that what the Court can do the Court can undo - apparently they didn't pay attention in school when Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education were discussed. Now what they thought was over and done threatens to be reopened. The loss of what they thought they had has them furious. The apparently loss of control over the culture has them panicked (which is why Elon Musk taking over Twitter is so controversial).