Good one PEC!
Religious Fundamentalist Terrorist Strike Again?
by Justitia Themis 129 Replies latest social current
-
-
Brocephus
I don't know the answer to most of your questions, Sammieswife.
Seriously can you not read the question? I am not asking if the killing of this D octor was right or wrong, or why people are the way they are.
I am asking for the last time I promise:
Is Late Term Abortion murder? If not why?
Why can't you just answer the question Sammieswife? You keep talking about everything under the sun but the question. I seriously want to know. Your platitudes and sterotypes are not telling me anything about what you believe or think. I want to know how someone who sees this differently than me came to the conclusion. Or did you only come to your conclusion because you decided Pro-Lifers were bigger A--holes that Pro-choiers? We get it you think Pro-Lifers are jerks but what about your answer to the question? Please see PEC's post for an example of answering a direct question if you need an example. Unlike the Watchtower the answer is not the third sentence in this paragraph. You will have to synthesize and answer of your own. Good luck!
And trying to stay unemotional but you don't really think soldiers wake up and with the intention of killing children? If your answer is yes that may explain your difficulty grasping a simple question.
-
BurnTheShips
Murder is murder. To simply take the law into your own hands and kill someone is murder. No one has the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a society governed by laws like our own except in extreme cases of self-defense, and even then without the intent to kill, but to halt. This man may have felt justified in taking the life of the other murderer while in church, but he may have set things back a great deal by his actions. These sorts of actions create backlashes that end up counterproductive to the cause the shooter obviously cares about.
BTS
-
Brocephus
This is not a issue; because, Dr. Tiller practiced in Kansas and it is illegal to perform an elective abortion after the 21st week in Kansas.
PEC Just when I was bragging on you? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/27/george-tiller-kansas-doct_n_180280.html
Dr. Tiller was accused or circumventing the laws to preform the abortions past the limit of Kansas law. See above link.
Regardless of if he was or wasn't I still thought you would answer the question? How could it not be an issue?
No one seems to be able to really defend the position that late term abortion of a viable fetus is not murder. I won't push yall anymore but
all of you have failed to convince me my feelings are wrong. Better luck next time.
-
PEC
Trial and acquittal
Kansas law prohibits aborting viable fetuses, which is generally midway through the second trimester, unless two doctors certify that continuing the pregnancy would cause the woman "substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." [25] Tiller went on trial in March 2009, charged with nineteen misdemeanors for allegedly consulting a second physician in late-term abortion cases who was not truly "independent" as required by Kansas state law. [26] [27]
The case became a cause célèbre for both supporters and opponents of abortion rights. Columnist Jack Cashill compared the trial to the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, [28] while NYU Professor Jacob Appel described Tiller as "a genuine hero who ranks alongside Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. in the pantheon of defenders of human liberty." [29]
On March 27, 2009, Tiller was found not guilty of all 19 misdemeanor charges stemming from some abortions he performed at his Wichita clinic in 2003. Although acquitted of criminal charges, the state’s Board of Healing Arts continued to investigate ethical violations that mirrored the prosecutors' allegations. [30]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tiller
Philip
-
-
AllTimeJeff
Brocephus
I don't consider it my responsibility to change your mind, only to defend those who would disagree with you and their rights to the autonomy of their own body.
As for your feelings on the matter of late term abortion being akin to murder, I can see certain circumstances where that may be true. Much depends on the circumstances, which is why each case must be weighed on its own merits, and the option remaining open.
For my part, it would be great if we could guarantee that 100% of all abortions termed as "late term" were totally unnecessary. However, that isn't our decision is it? Isn't it really up to the women and her doctor?
I know that the most basic argument is that it is believed that a child can live on its own in the 3rd trimester and is thus technically alive at this point. Believe me when I say that I am very sympathetic to this reasoning. However, to hold to this view at all costs is too black and white and doesn't allow for issues relating to health of the mother, the fetus, etc.
I don't disagree that this is a matter that must continue to be discussed. But just because no one gave you personally a satisfactory answer doesn't mean that one wasn't offered. Frankly, an unborn fetus is just that, unborn. It is not an unborn life, but an unborn fetus.
Religious feelings aside, the whole idea of pregnancy is to perpetuate the species. Your personal/religious views of how to view pregnancies, life, fetuses, etc, should not be enforced. Your personal views are just that, and you are welcome to live in accord with them. Others who have very valid reasons to disagree should likewise be respected, even if their decisions differ from yours.
As an aside (I realize this isn't the point of the thread, but I think it relevant overall), I distinctly recall in Africa esp where large families of 8 or more children suffer through a difficult life of suffering. Women have little access to birth control, even less access to education. Abortion is hardly an issue over there for the most part, but trust me when I say, there are worse fates for millions of children then to be born in certain circumstances.
Viewing life as a "gift" is difficult for me to wrap my head around, considering what hundreds of millions have to endure. Hell, what I have had to endure makes it difficult for me to view my existence as a gift. I promise you, existence alone proves nothing, whether that be about god or other personally held views. Take hold of life, embrace it, but let not the irony and randomness of existence be lost on anyone.
I don't mean for that to be a downer. I enjoy my life. But it is fair to point out that not all lives are worth living.
-
sammielee24
Why the flying f$#$...fig...should I answer a DEMAND by you?
I was actually going to discuss this with you but now that you have so arrogantly demanded I answer, I think it would be a waste of my good and valuable time and I don't cater to bullies or morons if I can help it. You most seriously do not want to know what I think. Calculating us on debate points?? Puleeze.
By the way, I never said that pro- life people are jerks - NOT ONCE. I am repulsed by extremists who use God as a shadow for violence. I BELIEVE that if a person doesn't like the law to this extent, they either get the votes to change it, move to another country with like minded fanatics or else suck it up and find another cause to support.
By the way IN CASE you didn't get my reference to O'Reilly, I wasn't bashing him. I was merely pointing out that there may be some culpability for the media slant that continues on in this country around many social issues - some directly related to religous extremism. The political scene is just one. Here is just one guy who happens to agree - and he was in the middle of it all. sammieswife.
-----------------------------------
My late father and I share the blame (with many others) for the murder of Dr. George Tiller the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday. Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America.
In the late 1970s my evangelical pro-life leader father Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop (who soon become Surgeon General in the Reagan administration) went on the road with me taking the documentary antiabortion film series I produced and directed ( Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) to the evangelical public. The series and companion book eventually brought millions of heretofore non-political evangelical Americans into the antiabortion crusade. We personally also got people like Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan and countless Republican leaders involved in the "issue."
In the early 80s my father followed up with a book that sold over a million copies called A Christian Manifesto. In certain passages he advocated force if all other methods for rolling back the abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade failed. He compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler's Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion. I said the same thing in a book I wrote (A Time For Anger) that right wing evangelicals made into a best seller. For instance Dr. James Dobson (of the Focus On the Family radio show) gave away over 100,000 copies.
Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.
In fact that very thing has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Paul Hill, a former minister, was convicted of the killings and executed in 2003. Paul Hill was an avid follower of my father's.
Hyperbole from the pulpit from religious leaders, be it from my father or from President Obama's former pastor the Rev. Wright, is par for the course. But once in a while someone "does something" about it and then everyone says that they were only speaking metaphorically or "spiritually" when they called for violence or for the overthrow the state or when they said things like "God damn America!" or that "abortionists are murderers like Hitler!"
Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which -- when taken seriously -- lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.
When evangelicals on the right call President Obama a socialist, a racist, anti-American, an abortionist, not a real American, and, echoing the former Vice President, someone who is weakening America's defenses and making us less safe, the logical conclusion is violence. If you take these words literally you might pull the trigger to "make America safe" and/or free us from communism or to even protect us from -- what some "Christian" leaders claim -- Obama as the Antichrist.
Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the late term abortions that horrify most people. And for the sake of keeping abortion legal adjustments need to be made. Roe is far too all or nothing (as I explain in my book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back). As I say in my book today I believe that abortion should be legal but more regulated than Roe allows. I also think that we should do what President Obama calls for: use sex education and contraceptive distribution and programs to help women and children in a way that results in less abortions.
But the reason this issue will never go away is that the Roe ruling was an over broad court decision that makes abortion legal even in the last weeks of pregnancy. Take away the pictures of all those dead late term fetuses and everything changes emotionally. Democracy and civil debate is messy but if abortion had been argued state-by-state abortion would be legal in almost all our states today and probably the laws would be written more like those of Europe, where late-term abortions (of the kind Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) are illegal and/or highly discouraged.
The same hate machine I was part of is still attacking all abortionists as "murderers." And today once again the "pro-life" leaders are busy ducking their personal responsibility for people acting on their words. The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I'd like to say on this day after a man was murdered in cold blood for preforming abortions that I -- and the people I worked with in the religious right, the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.
I am very sorry.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism)
-
BurnTheShips
But it is fair to point out that not all lives are worth living.
Perhaps, but it is not your right or mine to determine whether someone else's life is worth living, or not. And a lot of medical conditions that are now incurable will not be so in a few years.
A note of warning to those that use viability outside the womb as the dividing criterion that divides between human life that deserves legal protection and human life that does not: As science advances, the age at which human life is sustainable outside the womb is getting earlier and earlier. I suspect the time will come that a human life will be sustainable by artificial means from the creation of the embryo all the way through the end of the normal gestational period. We've already had 22 week old preemies survive, and the age will continue to fall. A woman could conceivably expel an embryo, and it would be completely possible for it to be sustained outside her body. Science has been of great aid to pro-life. The unborn are no longer a cipher, they have faces visible with scanning equipment. The immediate humanity of these lives has been made more and more apparent and visceral to society as medicine has advanced. Science will render the death of the unborn a purely elective decision for the those that would rip untimely rip the child from the womb.
What definition will you use then?
BTS
-
AllTimeJeff
BTS
I agree with you, it isn't my responsibility to do this. But certainly, if there is a fetus in a women, her views and decisions, made in accord with her doctor should be paramount to outside influence.
The fact is, it is quite possible many birth defects WILL be cured at some point in the future. Unfortunately, that isn't the case now. And we all must make the best decisions we can with the knowledge and resources available.