I could begin this column with a quote from a post on the presidential election I saw on Craigslist this week, but it is so vicious — and violent — that I shall spare you. Mercifully, however, despite the savage activism by which the post was inspired, and which it joins, there is some difference this presidential-primary season. And I saw it on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.
In a packed barn in Hollis, a Democrat asked Rick Santorum a question about abortion. She was a transplant from Santorum’s own Keystone State, and her pediatrician when she was growing up was Santorum’s future father-in-law. This gave her an immediate connection with the candidate: “We’re a lot alike, and I love that.” But “we’re also very different,” she told the candidate. She had a question about abortion.
Advertisement
“You want me and maybe others to change our beliefs, our values, our thoughts, and vote for you and the Republican party,” she suggested. “And I respect that. That’s what you should do. I’m not quite sure how to do it. I’m just dramatically involved in being pro-choice, which, to me, means pro-life. And you’re not pro-choice and you are pro-life, so we are both pro-life, but . . . we wouldn’t see it the same way. We don’t define it the same way. But how do you convince me to change?”
Not for the first time, Santorum admitted that at age 30, “when I decided to run for the Congress, I was sort of an agnostic on the abortion issue.” He “hadn’t really thought about abortion as an issue that much. . . . It wasn’t an issue that I really cared much about. But when I thought about running for office I knew . . . this is an issue people are going to care about.”
Santorum is well known for not being the sort of candidate who answers questions with sound bites — instead, he has been likened to a professor or social-studies teacher by journalists who started paying attention to him after his strong Iowa-caucus showing — and this was no exception.The former senator patiently described sitting down with the woman’s pediatrician, his future father-in-law, before he ran for Congress. Dr. Garver, he said, “walked me through . . . the process,” from “the standpoint of a scientist,” of “how human life begins, and at the moment of conception there is a unique individual, someone with a unique DNA who is alive.”
“From a scientific point of view, there really isn’t an argument as to whether that’s a human life,” Santorum continued, without challenge. “It is. The question is whether that human life is a life that should be protected under the Constitution. That’s the debate. At what point in time does that human being attain rights that protect its life, that protect it from having its life taken. That’s really the issue here.”
The doctors daughter is pro choice, which to her,as she sees it, is pro life. This is the twisted logic of the left. She wants both sides of the argument, and the Senator just wants one side. So he must be wrong.
Rick Santorum, Ms. Lopez, will never be President of the United States...period.
Any politician who said that contraception (not even abortion) was "dangerous"...has no shot. Even if you try to say he "only meant personally" or as a "topic of discussion, not policy" or one of Gingrich's hypothetical academic exercises.
That is way outside the mainstream of America, so much so that many Republicans wouldn't feel comfortable with him, if at the least for how he would paint their Party as extremist as a Presidential or even Vice-Presidential candidate.
The percentage that wishes to bear witness to the Truth about human sexuality and the beauty of the human person made in God's image. I won't be judged on whether my neighbor follows this Truth, just whether I do, and whether I acknowledge it to be true.
Invincible Ignorance is the hope of salvation for those who are unable to grasp what it is, because they are.
IHistory Buffdoesn't sound to me like a person who takes his/her positions based on a reading of the Bible, but let me point this out:
And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
1. The concept of Sola Scriptura isn't found in the Bible.
2. Santorum's position on contraception is beyond irrelevant to his ability to be president. William F. Buckley, whom everyone here idolizes, likely had the same belief. Is his resurrection of conservatism somehow less valuable.
3. Your putdown at the end doesn't begin to make sense.
Other note: I hate when people use the words "pro-life" land "pro-choice" as nouns. "I'm involved in pro-choice" "we talked about pro-life".
The Holy Spirit is the GIVER of life. How biblical is it to deny Him his gift of life?
How do we know what the "mainstream" thinking is on abortion? We have never been questioned, and the only way to know what "mainstreamers" do believe is to have a national election on the issue of abortion. Polls ask questions which presuppose the answers.
Let us have the discussion in public in a reasoned and civil fashion. Then let the states vote on the issue. I think we might all be amazed at the results.
You don't need a line from Scripture. You use your common sense instead: why stop a perfectly useful function, procreation, with articial means? It's like eating and then throwing up. Society insists that the pleasure should be had, the appetite fulfilled, but the outcome suppressed or destroyed.
My favorite idiocy is the sight of "all-natural" women sniffing haughtily about high fructose corn syrup and BPA's in plastic and sobbing over declining salamander populations, at the same time stifling the normal cycle of their bodies with potent articial hormones. Boo hoo until they can't do what they want!
History Buff, I fail to see why Santorum's out of the mainstream views disqualify him, but Barack Obama's do not. Obama voted to withhold medical care from babies that were already born. He's a supporter of partial birth abortion. Yet he also won the presidency in a country that abhors both positions. If the media finds Santorum's views unacceptable then we declare him unacceptable, but if America minus the media finds Obama's (or any democrat's) views acceptable then they are unremarkable?
Why don't we just let the democrats pick the republican nominee?
Yes, let's have the discussion in the public square. Let's have the "pro-choice" people explain why it is perfectly acceptable to pull the legs and torso of a baby out of the womb and then plunge an instrument into the baby's skull and suck out the brain.
Late term abortion is not acceptable and extreme pro-choicers are nuts. But the extreme pro-lifers who think that a fertilized egg is a person are equally crazy.
Life does not begin at conception, but it also doesn't begin at birth. There is a rational middle ground on abortion, but the extremists on both sides just muddle it up.
Most of my science-oriented friends support higher brain function as the dividing line. I admit I have not done enough research to know whether I agree them, but it has an intuitive appeal to me. If lack of higher brain function constitutes legal death, then why not have it define the beginning of a life with legal rights? That could surely serve as both a political and scientific distinction.
Just a note to clarify - higher brain function, not simply any brain wave, not the ability to feel pain, etc.,
Lack of higher brain function constitutes legal death? Since when? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that "...no jurisdiction has adopted the higher-brain standard..." commenting that it is only the opinion of certain scholars who hold to this "progressive alternative."
Given that the "higher-brain standard" is controversial as a determinate for death in born humans, it hardly seems adequate in this discussion. Moreso, as fetuses develop at different rates, there is an arbitrary quality to such a standard (just as there is in the original Roe trimester argument). Are we really to accord rights based on how quickly unborn children acquire brain functions that the vast majority of them would all acquire given enough time.
This is a regimen of excuses, looking for reasons to dehumanize what is scientifically human. It is not a scientifically-oriented discussion, per say. Rather, it attempts to apply science as the justification for what is actually a philosophical assertion.
Follow
