Thinking Unenslaved

So, last night’s show was a little different than the shows have been for quite some time. You could even say it got a bit acrimonious from time to time when a theist caller offered no more than spurious, callous, judgments as opposed to anything resembling reasonable discourse. I let that portion of the show continue on for about an hour, and I probably should have cut it short. It should have been no surprise to anyone that she was inclined to respond with dogma and the conflation of belief with fact.

Important Links To Important People:

Angie Jackson: youTube | blogspot

Laci Green: website | youTube

After the show, I stayed up for quite some time. I actually listened to it in its entirety again, despite hating how my voice sounds on the air. Having done so, I have some observations I’d like to share. Feel free to denigrate me in the comments, as I have no doubt I will piss off people on both sides of the argument(s) here. Call it my insipid, unreasonable need to attempt to be objective.

1. Regarding Raissa‘s input: The conflation of belief with fact clearly does not serve her cause. She was asked on several occasions to provide evidence to back up (or prop up, as the case may be) her assertions, and willfully resorted to the exclusive expression of her faith. This is unfortunate, because the operative definition of “faith” is “belief in something which can likely be, or has already been, disproved.” There are reasonable, factual arguments which would sustain her position on adoption, for example. Refusing to research (let alone even so much as attempt to reference) the available material, deferring instead to religious dogma while declaiming its inherent “rightness,” made for sadly shallow and dispassionate listening. Unfortunately, she managed to relegate her entire thesis to irrelevance.
2. Regarding what Angie said on the issue of “making a rape victim carry to term is a form of rape.” I’m getting a lot of shit for this one from some acquaintances who happen to be rape victims who chose not to abort. The operative word being missed in the lectures I’m getting is “making” or “forcing” the rape victim to carry to term. The pro-choice stance is about choice. That my friends who happen to have gone through this scenario had the right to choose not to abort is exactly what people like Angie and myself are fighting to sustain. Bringing a child conceived in this manner to term is not being vilified as a perpetual rape. Being forced to do so, however, is.
3. Sciolism, to me, is kind of a cross between the Argument from Ignorance and False Equivalence. Raissa positioned herself as knowledgeable on the entire subject of the subsequent pregnancy of a rape victim. However, her friend’s experience only makes her familiar with her friend’s experience. A woman who is raped (or is the victim of forced incest if you don’t care to apply the term “rape” to that), can a) independently elect to, b) be forced via authority to, c) be shamed/coerced into, d) be encouraged via peer-pressure to carry the fetus to term. Obviously, Raissa’s friend can only fall into one of those categories, thus making Raissa’s experience a mere 25% of the whole, and second-hand at that. Most certainly (and obvious to all), her “experience” as a mere observer is dubious at best, and the argument from presumed knowledge and insistence upon that “knowledge” as “fact” (even though it was really “belief”) was sciolism in its most nefarious form. She was unwilling to listen to very persuasive arguments to the contrary.
4. At its most basic level, I respect the desire to preserve “life”, which presumably sits at the foundation of the pro-life side of the argument. The problem with it is exactly what Laci so brilliantly pointed out: By more than a factor of ten, people throughout the world are starving. By more than a factor of a hundred, people die needlessly, victims of the changing climate, government/nationalist conflict, failure and lack of local resources, and exploitation. If the debate is truly about preserving “life”, the continual focus on one of the relatively smaller contributors to “death” is woefully misplaced. Moreover, as a condition of individual choice as opposed to the results of hegemonic intervention, the anti-abortion manages to undermine its own moralistic basis. In her short time with Raissa, Laci managed to lay bare the oft-ignored hypocrisy of the pro-life movement: It’s not really about “life” at all, per se. It’s about the enforcement of one group’s definition of “rightness” over the populace for the rather petty purpose of possessing the self-referential invocation of the word “right”.

That all having been said, I must also say it was very difficult not to get caught up in Angie’s passion, Raissa’s sanctimonious presumption of precedence was beyond offensive, and Laci stole the show with a perfectly executed reduction of the anti-choice mission to control individual action under religious pretense.

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