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Anti-intellectualism, appeals to morality, and other Right-Wing asshattery
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
So, the Texas State House with its supermajority passed a bill today that would criminalize abortions, via revokation of licensure, if the doctor refused to offer the mother sonographic images of the fetus and to hear fetal heartbeats. The mothers are allowed to turn down the offer, but the bill would not allow the doctor to not offer first.
The bill is expected to die or be severely altered once it hits the State Senate, as Senate Republicans have already admitted the bill has no chance of passage until it contains provisions for victims of rape or incest, which the House bill currently does not contain.
Due to the wellspring of such anti-choice in America's heartland in the last few years, Katha Pollitt of The Nation wrote this in response: Why Are Republicans Such Dicks? She makes a good point;
Regardless of median national sentiment, the electoral trend of this century has distinctly been one of restrictive social policy. What's to be done to reverse this? Or is it too late?
The bill is expected to die or be severely altered once it hits the State Senate, as Senate Republicans have already admitted the bill has no chance of passage until it contains provisions for victims of rape or incest, which the House bill currently does not contain.
Due to the wellspring of such anti-choice in America's heartland in the last few years, Katha Pollitt of The Nation wrote this in response: Why Are Republicans Such Dicks? She makes a good point;
Not content with depriving women of reproductive healthcare, House Republicans want to starve them and their children too. Their budget cuts the Women, Infants and Children Health and Nutrition program by $750 million and Head Start by $1 billion. It cuts $50 million from a block grant that pays for prenatal healthcare for 2.5 million low-income women and healthcare for 31 million children each year. As Charles Blow writes in the New York Times, proposed cuts to medical research strike directly at efforts to roll back the US infant mortality rate, now the highest among advanced economies. The Republicans seem bent on proving the truth of the bitter joke that “prolifers” care about children only before they are born.
Regardless of median national sentiment, the electoral trend of this century has distinctly been one of restrictive social policy. What's to be done to reverse this? Or is it too late?
Atomika on
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I guess it's a problem when an "appeal" becomes "forcing others to do what we want by law . . . just because."
That's his exact reasoning, too.
This makes me want to punch someone.
Preferably the person who you're talking about.
When you say policy maker, I assume you mean an elected official? If so, give his (or her) name. I'd be interested in hearing who it is.
The United States is in desperate need of angry liberals to call this shit out.
Which is exactly why I want to know who it is. I happen to live in Maryland.
While we definitely are something of a conservative state once you get out away from the cities, i've never met anyone sane who was in favor of this sort of bullshit.
You may think i'm over-exaggerating, but i'm not. We are, at least, in the county I live in, not prone or tolerant to fits of asshattery amongst the sane, even the Republicans.
To give you some idea of what I mean, the only tea partier I have ever met (And the only one that seems to be in this area.), was a pedophile who had regular incestual sex with his daughter...And had just stopped living with her a few months ago. She's an adult, now, too.
Pretty much everyone was physically disgusted with him, and his family. He was also a truther, and was convinced Obama had no legal birth certificate. Which further disgusted the many, many, people he came into contact with.
He made a wonderful advertisement for why people shouldn't support radical fringes, during a time when the tea party was gaining popularity, and probably did more to turn Republicans he came into contact with off of their cause, then any horrible advertisement or media stunt on TV could have.
Hell, my parents pretty much take whatever any republican slanted media source or official says as the word of god, and I know something like that would have at least my mother hard pressed not to track the person down and give them a good strangling.
So yeah. I'm surprised, if that's true, that it hasn't gotten more media attention.
I still want to know who it is, though. If it's someone who is elected into office, I may go on a nice little campaigning spree, to make sure that quote circulates a bit amongst my family and friends.
The goal is to get the people you can't reach to shut up while not alienating the ones you can reach. I've found often the best way to get someone to close their mouth is to trick them into saying something important they believe which directly contradicts something else just as important they've also said publicly they believe. It's sort of like asking "When did you stop beating your wife?" to counter constant-soundbytes. It's childish, but it works.
Then the people you can reach, well just try and find as many opportunities to find ways to relate their lives to the subject in question. Empathy leads to understanding, leads to cooperation, leads to harmony.
I don't disagree, but we're not dealing with rational people here, so catching them in logical fallacies isn't going to divide them by zero, so to speak.
They've taken the same blind approach one needs to be unquestioningly religious and applied it to their politics. Natural, in some ways, as there's a lot of related motivation and interconnectivity.
There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility. - President Theodore Roosevelt
"Abortion-rights supporters fume that the new rules really have nothing to do with protecting consumers and are, instead, part of an ideological campaign to "get" their industry. The same might be said about other industries fighting other regulations — e.g., payday lenders. Many people also find those operations morally odious and want to regulate them out of existence as well. Ditto the production of silicone breast implants, genetically modified crops, factory farming, and so on. That people with agendas exploit government power for political ends is not exactly news. Want to stop them? Limit government power in the first place."
Whole thing here: http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/mar/04/TDOPIN02-hinkle-clinic-controls-could-create-conve-ar-881930/
Link via Reason
Neither do I.
Good thing the GOP isn't doing any of those things.
source
anyway
I have a pet theory of social conservatism that ties in broadly to my intuitions on economic policy, but my own skepticism about grand social theorizing is encouraging me to think more carefully about it...
"Morals" are not an end unto themselves, legislatively speaking. This isn't Iran.
'Don't be evil' is a pretty moral position in my opinion and is, I think, a pretty good legislative goal. Many of the actions of the GOP in the last, oh, decade or so have been what I could categorically call evil. (Though this may not be on topic?)
The distinction you're looking for is between formal and substantive notions of the good. In a liberal society, the goal of the government is not to impose any substantive concept of the good on its population--e.g. Christian asceticism, communal living, fly fishing, or whatever a particular person might think leads to a good life. Instead, the government promotes a purely formal notion of the good, centered around guaranteeing each individual the ability to, as far as possible, pursue whatever substantive concept of the good that they happen to have.
But it is a mistake to frame this in terms of "morals" versus "no morals." It is certainly a "moral" claim to say that the government should promote freedom, and it is an appeal to (and imposition of) "morals" when we define government powers so as to match that liberal tradition in political thought. It's just that they happen to be the morals of Locke and Mill rather than Muhammad or Moses.
how on earth does anyone get from
"oh no, we keep electing governments who do X"
to
"if only we would elect a government that would prohibit X and Y and Z, that'll learn them and surely no future government will attempt to do X again"
The limitations on elected government power are generally enforced by... government. You can't escape organization via the democratic process, o armchair libertarians. You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
I don't see why not, so go ahead.
Obviously, defense against personal harm is the first brick laid in any founding society, because the trust in one's government to not retaliate against their person for acts or thoughts has to be established first and foremost.
The problem is that in the GOP's pet issues, the issues they spend most of their time and resources litigating, are rhetorically meritless, and worse, serve no measurable purpose or achieve measurable benefit. Pro-life? Good, don't get an abortion. Anti-gay marriage? Good, don't have a same-sex marriage. Otherwise, how does this affect you?
"Don't be evil" is completely meaningless because "evil" is entirely subjective. A country needs to have concrete goals that aren't subject to reinterpretation by ideologies, like "ensure all members of the population have food, water, and shelter in amounts adequate according to the prevailing observations of medical and psychological research conducted using the scientific method."
By and large, the "morals" of Locke and Mill are founded in reason and consistent logical implementation.
The morals of Muhammed or Moses are based in ghost stories and appeals to mythology.
Certainly, the term "morals" isn't consistently applied when discussing the two, no?
Obviously, they think it harms people, or fetuses and families, in this cases. However defined. In good faith, we could take their word for it. We could also speculate more darkly about the real underlying motives here, material or otherwise, but since you did ask, there is a rhetorical defense against harm being invoked, and often.
It is consistently applied, because in both cases we are discussing how society should be run. Claims are about morality by virtue of their content, not their method of production. In any case, there are secular theorists who are just as hostile to the liberal tradition as the prophets; for instance, Hobbes or Marx.
If you're saying that "Locke and Mill are reasonable, so they can't be talking about morals" ... well, that's a pretty silly view.
I'm not sure that we can, regardless of whatever insidious motive may or may not be motivating those positions.
Our version of democracy strives very hard to ensure equal protection. This means appeals to restrictions in the vague name of morality must be defended with more than just emotional or ecumenical appeals.
What I'm saying that the definitions for secularly-motivated appeals to behavior don't use the same rules to construct themselves (and their subsequent rhetorical appeals) as do religiously-motivated appeals (or whatever analog).
Secular appeals are arguments based upon measurement and understanding, employed with reason and consistency.
Religious appeals are not appeals at all, but instead mandates without rationalization or explanation.
At risk of pointing out the obvious - the vast majority of Americans don't believe that the morals of Moses are based in fictitious mythology. You can dispute that the validity of their moral claims, but I don't think you can reasonably dispute that they think they are making moral claims, or that we generally - regardless of opinion on abortion or gay marriage - make moral claims about the role of government.
Well, as you have thoughtfully shown in your original post, restrictions in the vague name of morality don't actually have to be defended with more than just emotional or ecumenical appeals, and your version of democracy doesn't strive very hard to ensure equal protection. Perhaps you meant "our vision of democracy strives very hard to ensure equal protection", but I'm not sure that's true, either.
It is worth noting that Locke extensively appealed to religion. Like, the most basic foundation on which he builds his Second Discourse is the idea that God gave man the world for his common sustenance. There is nothing mutually exclusive at the conceptual level between religion and the activity of doing political philosophy.
I mean, I agree with you that it's not the place of the government to promote religious understandings of the good life. I'm just pointing out what that claim is: an ethical claim distinguishable from other (religious or not) ethical claims only in terms of its correctness. The argument should be over which ethics are correct, not over whether something counts as "morals" and is therefore on or off limits.
Right. That's also why they keep defunding programs to help the children once they leave the womb.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
As an aside, I find it conceivable that this sort of semantic distinction fuels religious stereotypes of atheists as immoral or amoral. A secular voice saying "don't force your morals on me" makes us seem kind of libertine.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well I guess that's the long and short of it really. There's a large and avidly-voting bloc of the American population that simply doesn't believe in equal protection or the necessity of reason in legislation.
That's a gigantic problem.
Do you honestly think there's an electorate anywhere on the planet that reliably does? Even in, say, secular protest-the-Pope urban London? I think institutional deference to technocratic judgment plays a larger role here, really.
Edit: I'm going to suppose it's for abortion doctors since it would otherwise be silly.
Well it's obviously not a patient's rights issue. It's not like a bunch of people went to their representatives and said "hey my doc didn't offer to show me a sonogram of the fetus that I had aborted and I'm darn mad about that."
Edit: It may have been a fetus' rights issue? One thing you got to give conservatives is they sure know how to take control of the national conversation, as well as put the opposition on the defensive. "Framing" the conversation I believe it's called.
The reality is that this seems to be what Republicans are claiming the bill is for. This seems more like making the doctor make an appeal to morality rather than actually informing the patient of actual risks with performing an abortion.
Edit: To your edit, that is definitely what this seems like even if they would claim it isn't.
I'm fairly certain that it's just pertaining to the doctor performing the abortion.
So, in order to protect the right to an abortion, we create a government that's no longer capable of stopping, say, slavery? Great.
Also, anyone who uses the words 'abortion industry' in seriousness needs a slap. Convincing women to carry their fetuses to term is several orders of magnitude more lucrative, especially if you can get the woman to give up the born child for adoption.
So, Arizona is attempting to criminalise even teaching abortion in OB-GYN courses in the state, which would effectively shut down that part of their medical school and make it impossible for a doctor training in-state to get qualified nationally. I have to question the reasoning skills of anyone who still denies that the anti-choice movement doesn't hate women and want them to die.