Friday, April 21, 2017

Tolerance for Diversity: Can We Find Common Ground?

What appeared to be a purely local mayoral race has garnered attention from  Bernie Sanders: http://www.omaha.com/news/politics/bernie-sanders-stumps-for-heath-mello-in-omaha-stirs-national/article_284457a1-a7d1-5d79-ae2e-9c8bc68ea31e.html.   No one who doesn't live there is going to be affected by who is elected mayor of Omaha.  However this race points to a larger issue of how we define a progressive.

"U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders told a cheering crowd in Omaha on Thursday that he thinks mayoral candidate Heath Mello is part of the Democratic Party of the future. But some Democrats don’t agree, and Sanders’ appearance at a rally for Mello at Baxter Arena sparked a national debate about whether the party needs to focus on progressive policies and reject Democratic politicians like Mello who are opposed to abortion."
“The way we defeat money and power is by putting together a strong grass-roots coalition,” Sanders said. “The country is now looking at Omaha, Nebraska, as the first step.”

Sanders' endorsement of Mello drew some hostile commentary from Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/omaha-mayoral-candidate-under-fire-says-he-would-never-do-anything-to-restrict-access-to-reproductive-health-care_us_58f8e868e4b018a9ce590a84?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

The Republican party put together a coalition of about three different conservative or right-wing factions, and won the White House and both houses of Congress (of course now fighting among those factions impairs their ability to govern).  Are the progressives and social democrats so intent on ideological purity that they can't make common cause with people who basically agree with everything they stand for, such as Heath Mello, and others who are pro-life?  If so, they will set themselves up for defeat, IMHO.

46 comments:

  1. I apologize for the clumsy links, for some reason the formatting didn't work.

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    1. Read this story with great interest in the NYTimes this morning. I am not a fan of Bernie, but I think he was onto a major problem of the Democratic Party: the are hardliners on abortion, but squishy on economic matters that affect their long-lost former base in Catholic working and middle class.

      The quote in the story from NARAL and Perez kowtowing to Cecil Richards of Planned Parenthood show that anything about abortion is non-negotiable for the Democrats. I think that non-negotiable is one reason for Clinton's loss (not the major, but enuf to siphon off people who are leery of talk of the "absolute right to abortion."

      Here's the link again: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-nebraska.html?ref=politics&_r=0

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  2. It's not about ideological purity. The Democratic party can't have a pro-life stance because that's in direct conflict with a stance for women's rights. The civil rights of women, like those of racial/ethnic minorities and LGBT people, is one of the most important planks of the Democratic party's platform. You can't have it both ways, although it does seem like the few conservative religious Democrats keep trying to argue for this.

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  3. We elect persons, not parties, or policies, or planks. Those persons will have to face many complex situations, some foreseen but many not.

    Party platforms are simply the views and wishes of some party leaders; they are helpful guidance for voters, party candidates and officer holders. I think we should have them, just like I think we should have any planning document. But they don't take the place of good people exercising good judgment in changing circumstances.

    We are a representative not a parliamentary democracy. We elect people not parties, or policies. I have always though the Bishops should not issue any advice on voting, because we are always making a personnel not a policy decision.

    If all candidates were honest about their positions, I think candidates who disagree with some of their party platform would probably be the better candidate if for no other reasons than those of independent thinking and integrity.

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    1. Jack, I agree with you that platforms "..don't take the place of good people exercising good judgement in changing circumstances."

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  4. I think most Democrats (and Republicans) do vote for a party platform. It's Independents who vote for people ;) Imagine a Republican, one who mainly is a Republican because he is pro-life and his party's stance is officially pro-life .... do you think he would be "intolerant" if he didn't want to vote for a pro-choice Republican candidate?

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    1. If the only reason one was Republican was the party's supposed pro-life stance, and they ran a candidate who was not pro-life, then the reason for any party loyalty just went away. Trump is not pro-life in any meaningful sense of the word. The party left me a long time ago.

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  5. I've always been a Democrat. It's not that I'm loyal, it is that the Democratic party more than nay other option represents my own values. I think it is the party that stands up for the poor, the powerless, the marginalized, for fairness and equality, and for reason, for science, for the environment, for animals, etc. Sometimes individuals or the party fall short, but I think that's the ideal that makes people want to be Democrats.

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  6. crystal:

    Can we be absolutely certain that the Catholic Church (and so many others) is wrong that an abortion is the unjust taking of an innocent human life? It seems to me it is an extremely difficult moral question, to which I am unsure of the answer. But if abortion is indeed—or only just maybe—the unjust taking of an innocent human life, should every Democrat be expected to support it in the name of "women's rights"? It seems that the old meme that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" has been abandoned by Democrats and replaced with "abortion is a right, and there must be no restrictions on women who want to exercise that right." We Democrats must all love abortion. If only the whole issue would just go away!

    I sometimes feel that (we) Democrats are just as eager to impose our own "liberal" solutions as the worst of Republicans are to impose their "conservative" ones. As one example, I strongly support transgender individuals, especially young people, but I really wonder if decrees from on high about who may use what bathrooms are probably regrettable coming from either side. It sometimes seems like liberals like to rub conservative's noses in these kinds of things.

    Should anyone be offended by these remarks, I will deny I made them!

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    1. That should have been "aren't probably regrettable."

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    2. The belief the Catholic church has - "abortion is the unjust taking of an innocent human life" - is just that, a belief and it's fraught with assumptions.

      Why does it matter, for instance, if the life is "innocent"? Does that mean abortion is worse than the death penalty for criminals? And "unjust" ... what would make it justified ... the mother's health at risk? And "human life". What does science say about that? Does it make a difference whether that human life counts as a "person"? Is an embryo a human being with the same rights as a woman or little girl?

      And why should anyone but a Catholic care about those beliefs? And even most Catholics don't believe that stuff - a majority of Catholics want abortion to remain legal, according to polls.

      Abortion *is* a right, according to the Supreme Court. That doesn't mean there are no restrictions - there are many, different ones for different states, plus the viability restriction from Roe v Wade.

      We don't have to love abortion and I think none of us do love it. What we have to love is choice. Nobody is forced to get an abortion, they get to make their own choice. Republicans and pro-life people want to take away a person's right to make that decision and force them into one option.

      In the case of bathrooms, I think liberals are trying to protect vulnerable groups who will suffer if there's not a law enforcing their rights - like school desegregation. That was forced on people, yes, but don't we all think it was the right thing to do?

      I do see the flip side ... what about protecting the vulnerable group of fetuses with a law that enforces their rights, instead of letting women choose whether to do that or not? The difference is that fetuses are not people with the same rights as people.

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  7. From the New York Magazine Article:

    Many Democrats at the time reembraced the Clintonian formulation of “safe, legal, and rare” — a phrase long rumored to have been the invention of Hillary Clinton — which cast abortion not as a legal right necessary to women’s autonomy and economic equality, but as a necessary evil. Clinton herself, then a senator from New York, was part of the stampede away from reproductive rights, telling a group of family-planning advocates in early 2005 that abortion is “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.”

    I don't see what is wrong with regarding abortion as a "necessary evil."

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    1. I think maybe the idea that abortion is a tragedy was not really honest. Recent studies have shown that almost all women who get abortions don't have any remorse about it but are instead relieved, that they aren't haunted by a tragedy but just see it as another medical procedure. Maybe what this is about is the choice movement putting aside the "women are the second victims of abortion" trope.

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    2. According to the statistics cited in this article, 3 quarters of people who believe that abortion is wrong believe that contraception is morally acceptable. Access to contraception is a compromise many if not most pro-lifers would be willing to make.

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  8. When we have a HUGE economic problem, namely that the wealth of the nation is disappearing into the black hole of the billionaires, and a HUGE political problem, the we are replacing democracy with rule by oligarchy, does it make sense to worry about a politician's view on abortion?

    Both Republicans and Democrats are transforming politics into religion, i.e. a war about personal values, rather than a debate about changeable public policies such as taxation, campaign spending, etc.

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    1. Yes, that is it exactly, Jack.

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    2. Except .... a woman's right to control how many children she has and when she has then has a huge impact on her economic life and on her country's economic life. It is no coincidence that some of the poorest countries are also the ones where birth control and abortion are difficult to access ... think the Philippines.

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  9. There must be room in the Democratic Party for those who believe that abortion is a sin. Period. The abortion-on-demand faction has driven too many people away, and I am glad to see Bernie trying to close that wound.

    That doesn't mean the party platform has to be anti-abortion.

    I would be happy if the platform upheld the opinion of most Americans, that abortion is a vexed moral question, that states have the right to place some restrictions on abortions in the second and third trimesters, but that there are situations where a woman, in consultation with a physician, may choose abortion to maintain her health, well-being, and the well-being of her family.

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    1. Jean, yes, I could live with that platform. And I favor a strong social safety net so that no woman would feel forced to choose abortion because of economic reason (also because a strong social safety net is part of a just society).

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    2. Yes the current political solution which he have to the differences in values is to allow abortion under certain circumstances to those who believe it is a moral choice, but we also do not allow public funding for abortion to satisfy those who believe it is not a moral choice. That seems to me to be a reasonable political compromise.

      But the "fake religionists" on both sides constantly want to impose their values on the other side.

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    3. I am also impressed that Bernie is trying to "close the wound", as Jean put it.

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  10. We have a lot of problems, from oligarchy in Washington to lunacy in Pyongyang to thawing tundra that Congress has to deal with. Then there is abortion, and the only way Congress can deal with that -- absent agreement among five justices to reverse Roe v Wade -- is to hyperpoliticize the Supreme Court through litmus test appointments, leaving the third branch of our republican form of government broken, unbelievable and useless. Which would not be a good thing to do even if the USCC is willing to risk it.

    Since elected politicians can do nothing USEFUL about abortion, it should not be a fighting issue between the parties. But since they can laugh about it, shout about it and never have to choose, that's what our fourth-rate political class does.

    Crystal asks: "Why does it matter, for instance, if the life is "innocent"? Does that mean abortion is worse than the death penalty for criminals?" If you ask them why they say it, that's their answer -- fetuses haven't been convicted (on tainted evidence?) and sentenced. But when they say it, it's just a meaningless add-on, like godless communism and Fabian socialism. Makes it sound worse that way.

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    1. Tom, yes, the whole issue has hyperpoliticized the Supreme Court with detrimental effects. And you are right that elected politicians can do little or nothing useful about it. Which is why it is surprising that the subject even came up in a mayoral race in Omaha,it's nothing to do with a mayor's job description. Which by the way in Omaha is theoretically non-partisan,
      Speaking of the death penalty, I am against that also.

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  11. Not everyone here will agree with this article. But it makes a good case that "...Without these pro-lifers, Democrats will continue to be the minority party, unable to advance the kind of legislation most progressives have on their agenda."

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  12. Without these pro-lifers, Democrats will continue to be the minority party, unable to advance the kind of legislation most progressives have on their agenda.

    This is completely untrue. Polls continue to show that most people want abortion to remain legal ... As of 2016, public support for legal abortion is as high as it has been in two decades of polling. Currently, 57% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

    This is why pro-choice Obama won two terms and why pro-choice Hillary won the popular vote over Trump.

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  13. "This is why pro-choice Obama won two terms and why pro-choice Hillary won the popular vote over Trump." There were a lot of other reasons why Obama won, and Clinton could have used the boost of some additional votes to get her over the hump.
    The article wasn't actually about making abortion illegal, it cited statistics saying that "... more than half of U.S. adults take a non-absolutist position, saying that in most – but not all – cases abortion should be legal (34%) or illegal (24%). Fewer take the position that in all cases abortion should be either legal (23%) or illegal (15%)." It was about a more nuanced position being an advantage.

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  14. The situation we now have is nuanced - there are a number of restrictions on abortion already. But pro-life people don't have a nuanced position - they want to make all abortion illegal.

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  15. Bernie is not really a Democrat and this is partly why he was unable to win the nomination. I think his 'revolution' will fail to take over the Dem party as he continues to put his own limited agenda before the priorities of those who do mostly make up the party ... women, racial minorities, LGBT people, the poor.

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  16. Tom Blackburn said: If you ask them why they say it, that's their answer -- fetuses haven't been convicted (on tainted evidence?) and sentenced. But when they say it, it's just a meaningless add-on, like godless communism and Fabian socialism.

    It is certainly true that some pro-lifers sentimentalize the unborn (or at least the unborn at risk of being aborted). There have even been those who compare aborted babies to the "Holy Innocents" (killed by Herod) and urged the Vatican to declare aborted babies martyrs.

    However, it is very common (including in the Catechism of the Catholic Church) to define abortion and murder as the unjust killing of the innocent. This is not a matter of sentimentality, but rather of necessary definition. For example, the old online Catholic Encyclopedia, in the article Homicide says: The direct killing of an innocent person is, of course, to be reckoned among the most grievous of sins. . . . For the scope contemplated here, a person is regarded as innocent so long as he has not by any responsible act brought any hurt to the community or to an individual comparable with the loss of life." To say that the unborn are innocent is not to say they are especially virtuous or saintly, or to say that they have a greater right to life than the "post-born." It is simply to say that they have not done anything to justify killing them.

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    1. Well, if St. Augustine is right about original sin, the unborn are the only people who deserve to be called innocent. Since World War II, the majority of people killed in wars have been non-combatants. Civilians have usually been considered innocent, although that is arguable if they have been cheering and whooping for their national war-mongers. And, as the Innocence Project has shown, it is not unheard of for people to be executed for crimes they did not commit, although it's doubtful that any of them are as pure as fresh snow. All of which makes "innocent," as defined, highly unlikely for the born.

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    2. I am not sure I get your point. In the definition of homicide—the unjust killing of an innocent person—an "innocent person" is basically someone who has not committed a capital offense. "Innocent" doesn't mean "virtuous." Civilians who root for their side in a war are still innocent. Anyone executed for a crime he or she didn't commit would, as I understand it, be "innocent" no matter how many other crimes he or she had committed. The unborn are not termed innocent because they are little angels. They are innocent because they haven't committed capital offenses. It's not something to their credit. Although some pro-lifers want to cast them as martyrs, the Church has said they are not.

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  17. Thanks David; I think that is a clarification of terms that is needed.

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  18. But in actual real life situation, like when a nine year old girl in Brazil was raped and pregnant with twins and docs told her she needed an abortion to save her life, the Catholic church tried to stop the abortion and justified it with this...

    "Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored."

    From TIME magazine

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  19. I don't want to debate abortion. I think the Democrats need to recognize that there are many folks who believe in a safety net BECAUSE they are pro-life, and the party needs to make peace with them. To what extent has the Democratic party radicalized pro-lifers and driven them away?

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    1. "...the Democrats need to recognize that there are many folks who believe in a safety net BECAUSE they are pro-life.." Jean, exactly.

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  20. Being anti-abortion is seen as being in conflict with women's rights. Democrats supporting women's rights is very basic to the party. If they change that and make women's reproductive care an optional issue, I think the party will die ... I really doubt the anti-abortion people can make up for in numbers the loss of pro-choice women voters.

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    1. But, Crystal, doesn't your answer suggest that people on both sides if the issue can't live in the same party? You say pro-lifers won't make up for pro-choicers, as if everyone were single-issue voters, and the issue is abortion. We're the Democratic Party, not the Women'Reproductive Rights Party. I think we can and must begin to give a nod to what we have in common with pro-life factions. Accepting differences of opinion and some restrictions to abortion on demand does not mean making women's reproductive rights optional. Abortion is a subset of women's repro rights.

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    2. Don't want to beat this issue to death and it seems I'm the only one here who feels this way, but I'll try one more example to show what I mean.

      The Democratic party is also the party that supports the rights of LGBT people and the rights of racial minorities. Despite differing personal opinions among Democrats, the Democratic party would not officially support a candidate who wanted to overturn the Supreme Court's decision on marriage equality or who wanted to turn back the clock on voting rights for racial minorities.

      The Democratic party supports the civil rights of everyone, women included, and even though there may be individual Democrats who are pro-life, the party itself can't officially support a candidate who wants to poop on women's rights, any of those rights, especially ones granted by the Supreme Court, especially ones that have to do with health and life, and still remain the Democratic party.

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    3. Crystal, if I read you right you want the Democratic Party to be the pro-abortion party, meaning what? Abortion for any reason at any time?

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    4. I want the Democratic party to be true to its own platform statement ...

      "We believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion—regardless of where she lives, how much money she makes, or how she is insured. We believe that reproductive health is core to women’s, men’s, and young people’s health and wellbeing.

      We will continue to stand up to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers, which provide critical health services to millions of people. We will continue to oppose—and seek to overturn—federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment ..."

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  21. crystal said: . . . the Catholic church tried to stop the abortion and justified it with this... "Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored."

    The "Catholic Church" did not utter the quote given above. It was Archbishop José Sobrinho (as the linked article notes) in a telephone interview with Time magazine. Archbishop José Sobrinho is not the Catholic Church. There were many reactions to Sobrinho's handling of the incident. Wikipedia notes: "The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil repudiated Sobrinho's initiative. . . ." It also notes: "The Holy See's semi-official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published a front-page article on 15 March by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, that was highly critical of Sobrinho's action. . . " and "Bishop Jean-Michel di Falco of Gap, France, criticized what he saw as the un-Christlike nature of Sobrinho's statement."

    If you are hostile to Catholicism, then of course it suits your purposes to identify Archbishop José Sobrinho as "the Catholic Church" and ignore the National Conference of the Bishops of Brazil and the President of the Pontifical Academy for Life altogether. They don't fit the narrative. It's necessary to pick out the very worst outrages you can find and attempt to use them to define "the Catholic Church."

    Troubled as I am by abortion, I would still say that when the life or health of a 9-year-old is in danger because she has been raped by her step-father and is pregnant with twins, the decision in favor of abortion is a no-brainer. But I think it is unfair to condemn the Catholic Church because an archbishop said something asinine or even because the Church holds to an ideal that most would find it impossible to conform to in extreme situations.

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  22. I didn't ignore the other guys - I didn't know about them. And I didn't search out the worst quote - it was in an article I read about the even in TIME magazine! :) But it's not just the archbishop - I recall that the CDF refused to undo the excommunicating of the little girl's mother and doctors and they backed Sobrinho's actions/words.

    And it gets worse ... the same thing happened in Paraguay with a then 10 year old girl and in that case the church *did* have the political power to stop her from getting an abortion. They put her life at risk, even though the United Nations asked that she be allowed to terminate the pregnancy ... http://www.refinery29.com/2015/05/87269/paraguay-10-year-old-rape-survivor-denied-abortion

    So I'm anti-Catholic for calling the church on its treatment of little girls? So be it.

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  23. crystal said: But it's not just the archbishop - I recall that the CDF refused to undo the excommunicating of the little girl's mother and doctors and they backed Sobrinho's actions/words.

    Your recollections are faulty, as were some of the press reports. Archbishop José Sobrinho did not excommunicate anyone. He declared, as if it were a fact, that the mother who sought the abortion and the doctor (or doctors) who performed it were excommunicated automatically—that is, he claimed that they had been excommunicated latae sententiae. To somewhat oversimplify, what Sobrinho did was express an opinion. (I never thought I would be linking to EWTN, but to see some of the technicalities involved, see this. The point is that the CDF could in no way "undo the excommunication."

    crystal said: the same thing happened in Paraguay with a then 10 year old girl and in that case the church *did* have the political power to stop her from getting an abortion.

    What happened in Paraguay was a bit different, in that it involved only the government, not the Church. Although undoubtedly Paraguay has very strict abortion laws because the population is almost 90% Catholic, abortion is still allowed if there is a threat to the life of the mother. According to governmental authorities, the pregnant girl would have been more at risk from an abortion than from a continued pregnancy. Had an abortion been performed, it would have been late term, since the girl was already 22 weeks pregnant when her mother took her to the doctor to find out why she was having symptoms.

    What you are trying to do, it seems to me, is to discredit the Church by selecting a handful of horror stories, in much the same way that pro-lifers focus on late-term abortion, "partial birth abortion," and reprehensible abortionists like Kermit Gosnell. Both pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates try to focus on the 1% of abortions that are extremely atypical when 99% of abortions are more or less routine. In the name of "women's rights," you will no doubt defend abortion on demand, which permits women who have unwanted girl children to abort them and try again for boys.

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  24. David,

    The auto-anathema. What a conveniently invented doctrine because then no one is responsible for dooming the recipients except themselves. I must have missed that NT memo.

    If you want to see me as anti-Catholic, I don't mind. I don't think I am. There's stuff I really like about Catholicism, like Ignatian spirituality. But there's a lot I don't like too.

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