Everyone knows the bill isn't passing leaving the post as the pure epitome of recreational outrage.You know, that's kind of bullshit. I don't think it's a good post, and I don't think there's any chance that it will generate a good discussion in the comments. But the bill was proposed for a reason. It's part of a political strategy. Talking about that political strategy is not "recreational outrage."
There is nothing to discuss about the political strategy beyond, "It can't pass and this is grandstanding theatre."Sure there is. For instance: would they have proposed this bill if it had any chance of being enacted? I think they probably wouldn't have: once you start actually discussing the abortions that this bill would de-fund, you get into the gray areas that make purportedly pro-life people have second thoughts about outlawing abortion. I don't think they want a substantive debate on this bill. But other people might believe differently.
...Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
Scenario 2: Woman doesn't want to abort, man does.I think that, generally speaking, what men want in this scenario is to be able to opt out of financial (and other) responsibility to the child who is eventually born. They don't want to force the woman to have an abortion. They just want to be able to free themselves from the obligations of parenthood, which they consider equivalent to the mother's right to be freed from the obligations of parenthood via abortion.
You won't hear a lot of people standing up for the man's right to have a say in this scenario, because we pretty much all believe that forced abortions are a fucked up thing. The fact that we are all pretty much in agreement about this suggests that we in fact do all believe that the woman's say is more important. (With the exception of the pro-lifers, who concluded "no abortion" in scenario 2 because they would always conclude "no abortion.")
Is it really that hard to realize he wasn't too happy about being painted with the same brush as the ignorant and controlling jackasses who were proposing the hideous redefining of rape?
Sheesh people.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:21 AM on January 29, 2011 [28 favorites]