The thing I’ve yet to figure out about the abortion debate, and what likely gets me labeled as a right-wing bigot for even daring to ask, is where 'pro-choice' people draw the line. The 'pro-life' view is clear: life starts at conception. However, I don’t know where the left draws the line, and in my mind, refusing to do so seems to suggest it would be fine even a day before birth, which seems like an equally extreme position.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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IS it a contradiction? I don't agree with the death penalty or anti-abortion position, but I don't see some essential link between either position. You can hold two different beliefs about two different things is how come.
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In the end, it's because they're told that that's the way it is.
Abortion makes a an easy political point. Vote for the children.
Being hard on crime and executing people, That's another easy political point. Vote for the law abiding citizens.
They don't care that those two things are at odds They don't care about life or death. They care about their own exact situation, and don't really give a rat's ass about anyone else. They believe that the team they're backing gives them the best advantage, and that's absolutely all they care about. Beyond that, it's simply consuming and regurgitating the propaganda, self-perpetuating.
Because with reactionaries, the cruelty is the point.
These same people also solve seem to give af about the suffering of children outside of the border of the country.
I've yet to hear any evangelical cry about dead Palestinian children or the suffering of children on the other side of the American Mexican border.
The death penalty doesn't control women.
It's a pastime of liberal pundits to point out that the pro-life governor of some flyover state also supports the death penalty and so on and so forth. We get incredulous and infuriated at their blatant hypocrisy. We call them stupid, which really sets them off [...] They don't think of themselves as self-serving hypocrites or idiots who can't keep their facts straight long enough to form a cogent argument in continuity with the rest of their ideology. We try to describe this as “cognitive dissonance” or other give other armchair diagnosis that doesn't fully capture what's going on. I'd like to give them more credit than that. They clearly believe in something, and in that context their words and actions would make sense, but it's not what they're self-advertising when you ask what they believe in.
From still the best description of american conservative thought I've read: an essay by u/kin7es: https://wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans
Everyone has a spot on the big food pyramid of the socio-political hierarchy. Good, smart, and hardworking people of merit make their way to the top. Bad, dumb, and lazy people go to the bottom. For convenience sake, this hierarchy is color-coded. In a zero-sum world, everyone who gets to the top has to knock someone down a rung to make room.
I would argue this is how republican voters think. That they’re in the right because they are voting for the right of the individual. But on the other hand I think Republican policy makers give zero shits about a person’s self worth and actualization but rather they know that they need to feed the machine and we need the poor babies born to do so, and on the other hand they can demonstrate some form of moral high ground by deciding life and death.
There’s no death penalty for defrauding elections, molding the healthcare (or really any corporate) system to work for harm and profit, avoiding taxation through infinite shell companies and offshore bank accounts. Those things are celebrated as “beating the system”
Still to this day everyone that claims “Plandemic” is chasing some invisible elite power structure that somehow only includes democrats, without ever getting mad at the corporations that profited immensely off developing covid vaccines and charging market price for them as a portion of the world was dying.
Underlying their shallow morals is a undiagnosed mental condition. More often than not from my perspective its usually a cluster B personality disorder. NPD/BPD or one of the others variants. They simply lack the ability to see their hypocrisy. They lack the basic empathy necessary to realize it. Due to this they a mortally afraid of therapy and are not likely to ever get better. What we have to do is improve identifying them and preventing their illness from destroying those around them. Not likely to happen when so many of them are elected to office. If you haven't noticed mental health systems in this country are In a shambles. This is not a accident.
Most people aren't all that well informed and don't do a lot of crtical thinking about their political positions on things. Many people are only guided by their emotions.
If your Church says that life begins at conception, then abortion is killing babies. So you'd be angry about abortions happening.
If you hear a horrible crime, you're angry about that and might want the person that did that crime to be executed. If you never hear about or think about innocent people being execute, never consider the ethical problems with a government killing people, never consider the costs of it, and all the other arguments against the death penalty, then you can go through life thinking there's no problem with it.
And even if you hear the rational arguments, they get overpowered by emotion the next time someone says "abortion is murder" or you hear about a horrible crime happening that might qualify for the death penalty.
This. People are not that complicated
Kind of seems like a contradiction
They don't care. There's no point in calling conservatives out on hypocrisy. Only a very small number of them will give a shit, and those will be the ones who were already having doubts.
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They would argue that the "baby" is innocent.
So was the guy they executed the other day right? So innocence might not be it either
Because they don't care about "life".
They care about punishing people.
An unwanted unplanned baby is punishment for having sex outside of marriage.
Death penalty is punishment for being convicted of murder.
It's perfectly consistent when you look at it all about punishment.
The cruelty is indeed the point
They're obsessed with punishment. A lot of them see unwanted pregnancy as a just punishment for recreational sex.
Because they’re goddamned thoughtless morons.
contradiction
You’ve discovered conservative politics. Party of freedom that wants to restrict women’s access to healthcare, books in schools, reproductive rights, healthcare for children, etc.
Ain't Taliban follows the same method of eradicating women empowerment!
Punishment fetish.
Because they're not pro life, they're pro suffering.
And they want to control others (against their will if possible), so ending someone's life and forcing someone to gestate a baby or die in the process fall in exactly the same bag.
Because they are hypocrites, once that baby leaves the womb they give zero fucks.
Don't get an abortion, also we aren't paying for that kids lunch
The suffering is the point. It's got nothing to do with morals or human rights or the death penalty or abortion or "Christian values". It's all about making "those people" suffer.
Punishment. They aren't against abortion, they're pro punishment. They don't think any laws should be about mitigation or helping, only as a means of punishing.
It's in how they talk: "she should have kept her legs closed"; "that's what you get for being a slut"; "if you don't want to have a baby, don't have sex". The pregnancy is a punishment for anyone who wants to have sex, but doesn't want to have children. And jail or death is the punishment for avoiding that previous punishment.
When talking about gun control, too: "why should I - a law abiding citizen - be punished for the actions of a few criminals?"; "ShAlL noT bE INfrInGeD". They don't want laws to do anything but punish. Mitigation? Expansion of freedoms of "them"? No.
Look at voter ID laws: they're restrictive to our freedom, but proposed as punishment for "fraud".
And it often stems from an individualistic and Evangelical ideal. Everyone is "responsible" for their actions. There are no systemic issues in the mind of an evangelical. God is punishing the individual. The laws are punishing the individual. We don't need to change, because we includes I, and I don't need to change, because "I'm a good Christian warrior in the fight against evil".
And evangelicals definitely think there is a spiritual war going on, so punishment of the "wicked" is always an option. Because being wicked is an individual issue.
(Also why they think drug addiction is a moral failing of the individual, not a societal one, and therefore they should be punished).
Right now, evangelicalism and their Christofascist views are moving into political positions of power. They have tons of money coming in, and even if Fuckface 45 (their evangelical God-king warrior) doesn't get into office, they'll still continue to influence policy and grab seats of power.
We need to be aware of them, and stop them at every pass.
I'll just say that able minded people, usually adults, are usually responsible of their actions.
Ok, and?
It's a jeebus said so thing. Babies need to be baptized and sinners need to be sent to hell.
There's no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn't be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies
(I'm not picking a side in the "Are fetuses people?" debate here. They are from the point of view of the people against abortion.)