Politics and Pro Life

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/13/my-take-rethinking-the-pro-life-label/

I’ve already blogged on this a bit, mostly in relation to a blog post of a college acquaintance who runs , a political blog of good quality, where he noted the relation of ‘pro-life” beliefs to libertarian values of freedom. In that post, “Abortion Terms Revisited”, I actually suggested a solution to this problem I’ll visit later in this post, albeit not necessarily solving what to do about the pro-life position itself.
Again, I rail on politics and its complexity, though both Democrats and Republicans could be inconsistent on the issue that divides even families sometimes. There’s always some variation on the general anti-abortion field, so as to distinguish this from the pro life issue for the moment. Some permit abortions in extreme cases, others forbid it in all situations and others are somewhat in the middle, resonating with pro choice and pro life in that they would like people to choose life, but they also respect people’s choices, as long as they don’t become abortions on demand for any situation. Of course, the pro choice thing is equally as polarizing. A side comment would enable me to transition more smoothly into what pro life would be more consistently across policies. Pro choice is not something Republicans are necessarily against. They value privatization, free market economy, freedom to choose a number of things out of various alternatives (like guns?). Their exclusion of abortion, but acceptance of the death penalty is just one of the inconsistencies many politically minded people observe about the Republican Party these days on their so called “pro life” platform.

To be truly pro life, many have begun to argue, you cannot suggest the budget for allaying the economic troubles we remain in. To cut benefits and aid to the poor is against many people’s deeply held religious beliefs. And even without religious beliefs based in the supernatural, one can argue there is still a strong compulsion for those who have plenty to give to those who have little or none. The basics of charity, generosity, and helping people live a fulfilling and satisfactory life can be said to be just as integral to a pro-life position as the commonly affirmed position of what I would call counter or anti-abortion. Pro-life is not the same as anti or counter abortion for the same reason that a counter/anti-abortion advocate can also be pro-death penalty/capital punishment or say the use of torture to advance the cause of peace is justified, among other more explicitly ‘anti-life’ positions. Of course, even the use of aggressive and excessive military strength that ignores the roles of noncombatants would appear on its face to be spitting on those lives as if they are expendable as accepted losses or collateral damage. Even soldiers, willingly putting their lives on the line, make such twisted choices in order to justify their own warped psyche’s perspective, radically changed by experiencing threats from every side and trained not to have mercy on the enemy. How does this ensure any kind of pro-life position in the general sense: that is, protecting life at all stages, whatever that might specifically be, whether it starts at birth or at conception (however questionable the latter may be). Even if I might disagree with such a a pro lifer on the abortion issue, I am more than amiable to the anti-war and anti-capital punishment positions we may both hold nonetheless.

One might say, with some backing to the argument, that Democrats are fast becoming one of the more consistent on the pro-life platform. It’s hard to find many Republicans that advocate the many things that reflect an overall pro-life policy that no doubt has cemented the appeal of the Democratic party in the wake of what might have been considered one of their weaknesses: the issue of religion and values in politics. With Democrats supposedly leaning more towards privatization of religion and separation of church and state, one might have seen them as an anti-God party, or to be fairer, a pan-religious party in that they welcomed everyone moreso than Republicans who tolerated Jews and reluctantly allowed Catholics and eventually Mormons into their fold, mostly because of shared values. But Catholics might be said to be an interesting balancer for politics and religion for Republicans against Democrats in that they were among those who criticized the Republican budget as not being truly pro-life and protecting life at all stages. The fixation on the abortion issue might be said to have hurt the present Republican Party’s support from Catholics, not to mention the fixation on fiscal policy over more imminent social issues that plague the country and the world. Then you throw in the issue of the war in the Middle East and you have a group that slowly appears to be more pro fear as opposed to pro life.

You make people afraid they’d abort a world leader or a great scientist, paranoid they’ll lose their freedoms to gun control stealing their weapons, hostile to the terrorist and motivating people to fight in wars. All this really focuses on guilt and regret over everything one does and never really affirms that we make choices, for better or worse, and that as long as we reflect on those choices, we can improve. If a woman decides to abort and then later thinks it was a bad idea, she can share her story without being obnoxious to all women who have to make those difficult decisions in those situations. If a soldier is patriotic, he can salute the flag, but he has no right to condemn someone who uses their Constitutional right to burn it just because it offends them and makes them afraid there are terrorists in their midst. And even the control of guns doesn’t mean that everyone is trying to take away all your force, but merely moderate it so we don’t have backwoods hicks using military grade equipment, thinking that martial law will be instated in 2012 or some such nonsense. If we are to be pro life, we should also be pro choice to a great extent, even if those are still polarized in popular mediums as being polar opposites. Luckily, as I blogged previously, TV stations have at least been trying to use more precise language, saying pro or anti abortion rights instead of pro choice and pro life, as if the inverse applies to each opposite. But in fact not every pro choice is pro death, and pro life is not anti choice, though sometimes it can imply anti choice in that people are afraid of the liberties people have or are afraid of them going into excess. And that’s not an unjustified fear, if you try to moderate choices yourself instead of outright suppressing everyone else’s. So pro life and pro choice people may have more in common than pundits and talking points make them think. Think for yourself, like a skeptical American should. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Palin Pathetically Pleads Persecution

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/12/palins-use-of-blood-libel-invokes-ancient-myth-about-jews/

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/12/palin-criticized-for-using-blood-libel/


http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/12/my-take-sarah-palins-bogus-persecution-complex/

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/laurilebo/4021/new_theory_for_tucson_tragedy:_blame_the_atheists/

I can’t say I’m surprised that Sarah Palin has gotten into my blog again after half a year of nothing since Christine O’Donnell took her place for inept female politicians (and there are adept ones, don’t misunderstand me). And now she’s painting herself into a corner with her ignorance on Jewish-Christian issues. In particular, she thinks the term “blood libel” can be separated from the history it has of Christians slaughtering Jews; since many thought that the Israelite descendants kidnapped and killed Christian children and used their blood for various occult rituals. Any appropriate use of the term would have to involve actual persecution of Jews. But Palin says she, a good Christian woman, is the target of a blood libel against her since she can’t admit she might be somewhat guilty in using decidedly gun heavy rhetoric in rallying Tea Party members to fight against big government, by any means necessary, I imagine. And this rhetoric persisted in using what appeared to be target signs on various politicians in Arizona, including Gabrielle Giffords, nearly killed by a shot to the head from Jared Lee Loughner, who killed at least 6 people in his rampage in Tucson. Some claim Palin’s use of the targets may have motivated Loughner to the act against Giffords by association the target with a gun and Palin’s own phrase that she throws around of “Don’t retreat, reload,”

There’s a tragic irony in this, since Giffords herself was a Reform Jew, so it’s like twisting the knife in her parent’s wounds. Saying you’re the victim of a “blood libel” from people accusing you of influencing a maniac to make an assassination attempt on a Jew is like a Christian using the term “witch hunt”, which I imagine might not be uncommon in some areas today even with Wicca becoming more popular (though Wiccans are NOT witches, I must clarify). The Anti Defamation League strongly objected to Palin’s use, along with scholars of religion, such as Stephen Prothero and Mary C. Boys, who concentrates on this area of religious studies. While it has become part of English parlance, not unlike the phrase witch hunt, to use “blood libel” with a meaning separate from its historical context of Christian anti Semitism; which I admit is a minority today, since it is popular in Christian circles now to pray for Israel and such; it seems unfair to Jews in some way to use that term in such a nonchalant fashion, as if the Jews have just forgotten it, like the Holocaust, or just silently accept that people will always indirectly use anti semitic phrases in new unrelated ways. The medieval paranoia that might have just been a cover for anti Semitism under the similar hysteria around vampires; the Jews allegedly used blood in their rituals, therefore in the medieval mindset, they were kin with vampires. Makes as much sense as any other conspiracy theory.

I don’t think anyone is going to outright criticize Palin for her attempt to defend herself against these accusations, which, while plausible on some level, seem no different from scapegoating that has happened throughout times of crisis, creating someone to be the one to take the blame and otherwise become a pariah. Palin’s rhetoric might have only been a slight factor alongside Jared Lee Loughner’s alleged favorite books, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He may very well have been unstable from the beginning and the outside environmental influences may have triggered what was already somewhat genetically predisposed. There’s little reason to place the blame completely on any one person for even triggering Loughner’s insanity or his behavior, since he might have been behaving in what he believed to be a rational course of action, even if everyone else around him would have thought otherwise. There’s a justified criticism of sorts by Democrats of Republicans, Tea Party supporters especially, of the ease with which the assassin got a weapon with which to commit his crime, since they’re all for gun rights being increased (right?). The fact that Jared Loughner had no previous mental health evaluations or even any significant crimes on his record eliminated any difficulties that would’ve been clues from the start that he was someone that probably should not have gotten a gun at all. His belief in conspiracy theories was one of many manifestations in recent years that he was unstable, though the reason he was never forcefully taken for evaluations was because his erratic and outright insane behavior was nonetheless regarded as not posing any direct danger to anyone else around him. He was expelled from community college for this behavior, only allowed back in if he got a certified examination demonstrating his sanity. Later on, the military rejected his application on the grounds that he was mentally unfit. I would think at this point the military might’ve suggested that Loughner get evaluated by a psychologist/psychiatrist, but again, by this point, he may’ve been so far gone that it didn’t register.

And one last irritant in this whole terrible incident are claims that Loughner’s actions were motivated by his alleged atheism. There are already issues with this, since his reading list varies from theistic to atheistic authors, Plato and Hitler both having theistic tendencies and Ayn Rand and Karl Marx atheists of one stripe or another. The picture showing what appeared to observers to be a shrine with a skull doesn’t seem to show anything of atheism, since an atheist wouldn’t probably feel any need to erect any kind of area of worship, since it would be unnecessary to make pleas to divinities to dole out rewards or punishments. Not to mention that, regardless of whether you believe or disbelieve in the divine, when you’re stark raving mad, I don’t think you’re going to rethink that existential question so quickly when you take a Glock and starting firing wildly into a crowd. It’s pretty clear that the individual is the primary agent of responsibility in committing a crime, but there’s always room for considering a secondary agent as responsible by negligence. If you suspect someone is a danger to others by their behavior and thought patterns as far as they indicate them and you don’t do anything about it, then one can say you are nearly as culpable on some level as the person who takes a box cutter to a stranger’s throat. All in all, the blame game everyone’s playing is a start, but with Palin’s particular term being used outside of actual Jewish persecution, it’s no wonder that she’s spiraling down into mediocrity both politically and culturally to the level of Michael Jackson still being used as the punch line. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

No True Tea Party

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tea_party_concerns

With the Tea Party’s favorite day of the year for protests today, I’m reminded of the alleged racial slurs and even violence that may have been associated with Tea Party sympathizers. Admittedly, that poses a potential error of correlation versus causation (i.e. I may just be connecting Tea Party extremism I see with the violence even though it may have just been perpetrated by whack-jobs that have no life outside of saying how angry they are at big government) but onto more relevant consideration. The organizers are worried that the protests might show a bad image of the Tea Party. I find this funny since even without the alleged connections of violence against supporters of the recent healthcare reform to the Tea Party that I blogged on a few weeks ago the Tea Party still seems like disgruntled ill educated citizens that are frustrated at being a minority group. Though another article I’ll note (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html) suggests through a poll (though we know those aren’t always the best indicators of overall thought from my blog post on the Meaning(s) of Easter) that Tea Party members are actually relatively wealthy and educated. That doesn’t mean they’re not a minority, since the poll notes only 18% of the people polled identify as Tea Party affiliated.

Back to the Tea Party Day celebration, some of the more controversial speakers that were invited (like Mike Huckabee?) have now been politely declined, security has been enhanced and people were asked to bring cameras to catch interlopers in the act. Some have suggested that the protestors that drew attention at Tea Party protests were agents placed to make the Tea Party look bad. I can’t validate this one way or another, but if we’re talking about a relatively small group of citizens that are commonly white, Republican, over 45 and married, you can’t put it past them to feel defensive, however well educated and wealthy they might be. Put another way, imagine you put an otherwise mellow domestic housecat (say a Persian) in a cage for a week with minimum food and water and I guarantee you’ll find that pussy will be less than happy to see people when you set it free. Similarly, I imagine these people feel underrepresented, marginalized and more than a minority, if not a silent majority as one image I found while searching through Google suggested. In this way, the message is communicated quite differently. Instead of being a minority that’s oppressed, they’re just the majority that’s being silenced by a minority that holds more power. I’m not even going to get into potential conspiracy theories about the Jews in politics or the NWO (New World Order).

The thing I find most amusing about this is the allegations from Tea Party members that the people who use offensive language or in some cases, imagery such as President Obama depicted in the style of the Joker from The Dark Knight are not representative of true Tea Party members. This shows what is called a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. The gist of this problematic argument form is that it refuses to admit that its initial premise is wrong because of a counterexample; instead they modify their original position and suggest that “true” members of their group are not like the counterexample offered. In the case of Tea Party activists, they insist that people that use offensive language or imagery or extremist rhetoric are not associated with their group. Problem with this is that they would suggest that people only pay attention to their status quo and ignore what is a demonstrable problem in their ranks as a grassroots movement. If they have no structure to speak of in arranging and managing their members, then it’s no wonder people think of them as little more than a fringe group that poses little to no threat except their bomb threats or the suggestion of some states (Oklahoma in particular) to start state militias. Now a counterpoint would appear in the form of a Latin phrase abusus non tollit usum, translating roughly to “misuse does not remove use”. A sincerely progressive Tea Party member (if it exists, and it may) would argue that excessively emotionally charged speeches and rousing of the masses to change being the common mantra of even non extremist Tea Party members does not suggest that the Tea Party ideal is not something with merit. Historical comparisons to the original namesake of the present movement aside, conservative ideals are something I respect, along with liberal ideals, so even the Tea Party has merit in some sense. The difficulty comes in the form of how it presents itself. A group for the common people is one thing, but a group maintained by mob rule and pure majority dominance is only going to survive for as long as people remain uneducated and willing to be ignored or dismissed. And I sincerely doubt that’s going to continue to be the case for longer in either case. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

Palin Versus Peter, or How Family Guy Makes Fun of "Retards" (Not Really)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100217/ap_on_en_tv/us_palin_family_guy

After having gotten up surprisingly early and checking Yahoo News as is something of a religious habit, I noticed Sarah Palin has been hogging the spotlight again. In this case, it may last longer than when David Letterman made a joke about her daughter Bristol, since this has more relevance (and I use that loosely) to her youngest son, Trig.

A Family Guy episode, Extra Large Medium has a subplot where Chris, after having survived with Stewie in the wilderness for almost 4 days (gasp!), decides to get up the courage to ask a girl in his math class out on a date. It just so happens that Ellen, the girl in question, has Down Syndrome, although I'm skeptical of that. Her portrayal starts out innocent enough, but then she takes a drastic turn towards outright bitch. She constantly derides Chris for not reading her mind and doing all these things during the date to pamper and otherwise treat her like a queen (pulling out her chair is one thing, but giving her a freaking shoulder massage; this is a date, not a spa visit). And at the end of it all, she is indistinguishable from a selfish whining brat who just wants people to treat her differently because she has "special needs" (and apparently make her an ice cream sundae at the end of a probably expensive date at a fancy restaurant).

And Chris' point seems to stand strongly against Palin's apparent desire to make her son so "special" that anyone else is not even close to his level. As he put it, they're the same as everyone else (though admittedly he uses stronger words, which I'll choose not to use, since I like to limit myself to “curse words” in my blog). Overall, the offensive nature of this episode seems excessively overstated by Palin, since the only thing that has any tinge of a personal insult is quoted in the Yahoo News article. That is, Ellen notes that her father is an accountant (which last I checked, Palin's husband isn't) and her mom is the former governor of Alaska (which while Palin fits that description, I imagine that she isn't the first former governor of Alaska).
Stewie, as per his musical character, does have a song that would appear to have some amount of offensive references towards the mentally handicapped, but his overall tone suggests that she is a good person, even if she has flaws that he brings up. The last lines before he concludes the song with its title "Down Syndrome Girl" are indeed "happiness and joy creating", which I imagine Palin can agree her son and all her children are examples of.

To say that this is the first time Family Guy has made jokes regarding the "retarded" is to be too lazy to make even a short Google search. The episode Petarded brings up that Peter Griffin, the main star, is special needs himself. Though admittedly, Palin hadn't had Trig at that point, so she couldn't make such a stand that she's supporting the rights of the mentally disabled. And I doubt she'd care about a joke towards Grimace from McDonald's franchise being "Ronald's retarded (or in some edits) autistic friend". And any jokes regarding a retarded horse would be least in her horizon of defending the human children with special needs.

My biggest gripe overall would be why Palin takes it upon herself to try to protect her son and all such people affected by Down syndrome by association. Considering there are plenty of organizations that do the same thing and make a similar effort to confront issues of people misusing or otherwise using the term "retarded" or "retard" in a context that is less than hospitable and benevolent to the special needs community. Though from what I recall, she didn't make a gripe about Rush Limbaugh calling "liberals" the same term that she had a problem with Rahm Emanuel using in what was apparently a not-so-closed strategy meeting over healthcare. But her political issues would be another thing entirely that I don't feel entitled to speak on.

Overall, I would think that like Focus on the Family, maybe Sarah Palin could deal with a secondary "kick in the gut" and align herself with Special Olympics or the Burton Blatt Institute in Syracuse University in order to promote what I find to be an otherwise respectable agenda. But if she uses her son as the only motivation to advance the rights and standing of the mentally handicapped, then she almost doesn't deserve to paint herself as a defender of the community at large. But she wouldn't be the only parent to overestimate how "special" her child is. She just has a failsafe to fall back on that few people would call her on initially. Because no one would bring up hypocrisy in a person who has a child that has Down Syndrome, oh no... That's just not right. But seriously, this is Sarah Palin, she's just digging herself into a bigger hole by the day.