Any argument based on a faulty
premise is doomed to a foolish stalemate.
The stalemate occurs when the faulty premise is exposed. “When does life
begin?” is such a debate. Sperms are
alive. Eggs are alive. All the sub-microscopic shit that goes into their
make-up is alive. If we were to find a
sperm or an egg on Mars we’d go batshit crazy saying there is life on Mars,
which there would be. So, the answer to
when does life begin? It’s already
begun. Faulty premise.
The second faulty premise in the
life/choice debate concerns the “sanctity” of life, which, if we’re talking
from the political/religious right, means human
life. There is no sanctity of
life. Dictionary.com defines sanctity as “a sacred thing; sacred or
hallowed in character. “Sacred” means
“entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things;
holy.” Life isn’t that; certainly human
life isn’t. And the people who make that
argument don’t treat life as if it is.
You can’t call life sacred and then be willing to let whatever happens,
happen, the moment that life becomes “viable”.
You can’t call life sacred and be willing to end it by institutional
force when a faulty court system deems the owner of that life to have done
something particularly heinous. You
can’t consider life sacred, then go drop bombs on it.
The universe doesn’t treat
life as
if it’s sacred. And if the universe is
run by a deity, then that deity doesn’t treat life that way. Life, even
human life, comes and goes at the
whim of random chance. Disease, things
bumping into things with great force, faulty arteries, poisoned brains,
gravity, sneak up behind us and extinguish our lives on a daily basis.
Thousands of times. No entity stops it and no entity cares. The
universe is loving enough to allow the
rules of science and random chance to do their thing.
A righteous group, political or
religious, that claims to believe in sanctity of life, but behaves as if they do not believe in the sanctity of lives, particular lives; lives already
being lived, is spiritually empty. This
god-awful war on women, and it is nothing short of that, is being waged by
people who recognize no sanctity to the lives of women making the overwhelming
choice of whether or not to bring a child into the world for whatever reason. If you really believe in democracy, then you
value choice. The choice is about whether or not to stop the baby from happening, it
is not about killing an innocent life, just as it is a choice to shoot a live sperm
into a sock (sorry, flashback) instead of into home base for some egg. If the people who are so quick to find a way
to force women to carry every sperm-egg union that occurs, implanted by
whatever source, would be just as quick to help take care of that baby once it
found it’s way to the light of day, we could at least see a thread of humanity in their argument. But that ain’t how they vote. They vote to extinguish choice, then to
extinguish funding for every possible service that might give that child a
chance for an empowered life.
When James Brady was President
Reagan’s press secretary, he was, by all counts, in lockstep with Reagan’s
pro-gun, pro-NRA stance. Then James
Brady got shot in the head, and guess what?. All of a sudden James Brady wants to make it
more difficult to get guns, and particularly certain kinds of guns. Different story when it hits home.
If you’re a lawmaker and you don’t
have the imagination, or the decency, to put yourself into the situation that
the law you’re making addresses, you shouldn’t be a lawmaker. Imagine if Paul Ryan’s daughter Liza were to
be brutally raped at say, the age of twelve by a violent schizophrenic or
mentally ill psychopath. Should her twelve-year-old body not “have ways
to shut that thing down” as his policy-lock-stepped friend Todd Akin believes it
would, Paul and his wife would be in a pickle if the bill he sponsored becomes
law. They would be required not only to force his twelve year old
daughter to pile the trauma of carrying that child to term atop the original
horrific trauma of the act, but then live in fear of the very real possibility that
the donor’s DNA might run down the generational pike into the Ryan gene pool. If that didn’t
change his perception – and his vote - I’d have less respect for him than I
have now, which seems mathematically impossible.
If your philosophy trumps your
humanity, you are not fit to be making laws for humanity.
