The true motives of the anti-abortion movement.

So, at work today, I was discussing with some friends the unenforceability and general ridiculousness of the recently-passed legislation surrounding online gambling. I made pretty much the same argument that I made in the last blog - quoted here:

I saw. It's a big joke to most of the community. I love how the house's official position is "gambling online is bad, unless it's horse racing or the lottery." Gee, I wonder if they've got an incentive to provide those exemptions. Good ol' politician logic (and - sorry Brian, but it's the frickin' truth - it's much more a problem on the right than the left, particularly the Religious Wrong). "Vices are bad, except the ones that we can get kickbacks from."

Now, my friend Brian, who the quick aside was addressed to, and who is a feverent, if somewhat reasonable and moderate Republican, responded in fairly roundabout language to what I'd said. The relevant portion of the email is quoted here:

I don’t understand why you felt the need to apologize for your statement. You’ve spent too much time in Paris man, there are still conservatives out there beyond the bible belt. Your assumption that I support the religious right is actually inaccurate. Although I do hold many conservative political and moral positions, I do not agree with anyone who solely uses religion to justify a belief. Even if it’s one I share. Let me give two examples. I’ll proudly state that in almost every case (excepting rape, incest, and life of the mother) I do not support abortion. It’s nothing more than hygienic, state-sanctioned murder, plain and simple. The standard reply to that is ‘it can’t survive on its own.” Neither can an infant, is it ok to kill those? I don’t derive this from the Bible. I came to this conclusion based on my own personal beliefs of right and wrong and my knowledge of genetics and biology. Flip to another issue. I have absolutely zero issue with a gay person. I don’t think they are ‘sinners’ or going to go to hell. I don’t think they need to be ‘cured’. If two gay people want to commit to each other, I have no issue. If they want the same tax breaks as married people, I have no issue. On the other hand, I think the word marriage has been defined in western culture (with a few limited exceptions) over the last two-thousand years to mean the union of a man and a woman. Marriage should not include man + man, woman + woman, multiple partners, or any other combination.

Not a particularly interesting response; fairly predictable from Brian, to disassociate himself with the religious poison of fanatic Republicanism while still adopting the stances that they generate. My reply centered around the abortion movement, and does an adequate job, I feel, of summarizing how the anti-abortion crowd cynically asserts the moral high ground and then uses that position to their political advantage. The reply in full follows:

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Right, right, right. One of the "civil union" crowd. While we're at it, why not just give black people their own bathrooms? That sort of thinking is particularly segregationist; give them their own separate but equal institution. News flash: separate has never been equal.

As for abortion, you rely on the straw man argument of "can't survive on its own." I have rarely if never heard any pro-choicer actually use that particular argument - I've only heard anti-abortion people prop it up so they can slay it with the easy counter-argument that you present. The issue at question is "when does life begin?" There's no strict biological answer to that question in my mind. The anti-abortion crowd accepts a priori that life begins at conception. To me, the notion that a specific human life begins at birth makes a lot more sense. Here's a quick litmus test. How old are you? Now, when you calculated that number, did you go from when you were born or when you were conceived?

Does a morning-after pill that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the uterus count as "state-sanctioned murder" as well? For that matter, if a woman with a defective uterus has intercourse with her husband knowing that it isn't unlikely for an egg to be fertilized as a result of that act, but that the egg has zero chance of surviving to birth, does that count as state-sanctioned murder as well? To me those are logically indefensible arguments, but they logically must follow from the stance that you've supported. My stance doesn't allow for those ridiculous exceptions: from the time an egg is fertilized until the child is separated from the mother, that child is part of the mother's body, and the mother may do with her body what she pleases. Pretty simple.

I don't mean to start an abortion email war, but to point out that while you may not identify with the Religious Wrong, you've bought into their propaganda hook, line, and sinker, and your implicit support is every bit as necessary to their power-play as the explicit support of crazy fundamentalists. To the point, why do you think it is that the Religious Wrong is so ferverently anti-abortion? Why do they accept the "life begins at conception" postulate without any questioning whatsoever? Here's a hint: it has absolutely nothing to do with life and absolutely everything to do with sex. Unwanted pregnancy is a negative consequence of sexual behavior, and those negative consequences are a big part of how Big Religion remains in power (they're in the guilt business; they invent a disease and set themselves up as the cure; for that "disease" - sin - to carry any weight, the activities that are involved in its production must have negative consequences). They want any sex that they don't approve of to be as fraught with negative consequences as possible. They always have. That's why they oppose the distribution of condoms in schools (they're not promoting abstinence, and they know as well as anyone that opposing condom distribution has does not affect how many teens are "doing it" - they just want teen sex to be as hazardous as possible). That's why they have a tendency to oppose birth control in general. That's why some churches (and not just small, fringe ones), amazingly, have came out *against* a vaccine for HPV, the overwhelmingly leading cause of cervical cancer. And you heard it here first - if Merck were to come out with a pill that cured AIDS, there are big, politically powerful mainstream churches that would oppose its sale and distribution, for the same reason.

The reason I feel comfortable saying that you believe the way you do because you've bought into propaganda, by the way, is because you include the standard caveats in your opposition to abortion: cases of rape and incest (in addition to the life of the mother, which is a separate facet). Uhm, WTF? If your anti-abortion stance is because you believe you're saving innocent lives, how the bloody hell does that follow? Is a potential child of rape or incest any less innocent than a child conceived by two 16-year-olds fooling around? Why does the one "child" deserve to "die" and the other deserve to "live"? I'd love to hear that logic.

What that exception proves is that an anti-abortion stance that includes those caveats has absolutely nothing to do with saving innocent lives and absolutely everything to do with punishing people - women - who engage in activity that they don't approve of. Since victims of rape had no choice in the matter, there's no need to punish them, and the "life of the child" (existence of the fetus) suddenly takes a backseat that's utterly incomprehensible unless you wrap your brain around their true motives. That's why the term "Pro-Life" is such a blatant misnomer; if they were really pro-life, they'd oppose all abortion. That's why I make it a personal policy never to call it "Pro-Life" and instead use the much more accurate label, "Anti-Abortion." "Anti-sex" works well as well, but only if you take "sex" to mean "sex not approved of by the Religious establishment."

This is important to note because it ties back into the original discussion, since gambling is a vice used in much the same way as sex by the religious community. The biggest difference is that there's not much profit to be had in keeping it hazardous, so they just squash it. The exceptions in the bill (lotteries and horse racing) are political rather than religious in nature, though it does effectively display the hypocrisy inherent in the Republican / Conservative assumption of the moral high ground.

I know you're not a religious fanatic, but the point of all of this is that you don't have to be in order to turned into one of their supporters (you might not consider yourself as such, but you did vote twice for a president who said publicly that God talked to him and told him to invade Iraq). Their propaganda is insidious and can be effective if you don't look at it closely, as I've done here. I think you're probably intelligent enough to see through it. I sincerely hope that the more you see that, the more you will exercise your intelligence and question it; like you, I once considered myself a Republican, but came to realize that the issues on which I disagreed with the Democrats (largely regarding socialism / big government) were trivial in comparison to the enormous cultural conflict in play, and that the Republicans were inching further and further towards Big Government philosophy anyway (precisely because of the Religious Right, who are against everything that libertarians once admired about the Republican party; Bush's federal government is bigger than that of any Democrat in recent memory.)

So, while I agree that corruption does spoil both sides, particularly due to problems inherent in campaign finance laws, I only see one side that is systematically laced with poisonous influence from anti-science, anti-sex, anti-personal-liberty fanatics whose purpose is not to govern but instead to exercise dominion. It is a very overt attempt to push our government further and further towards a Theocracy; people who thought that the First Amendment was an enormous mistake that needs to be corrected. They hide it well, but if you doubt that that's the goal, all you have to do is look at the policies, and consider what the motivation for those policies could possibly be.

That's what I meant when I directed my apology. So you know.

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Thought it was worth sharing.