Re: Pronouns & sexuali
| From: | Sai Emrys <saizai@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 26, 2009, 2:45 |
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On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> Slight neutrality fail. I think even the staunchest
> pro-abortion-rights activist would take umbrage at an insinuation that
> they believe abortion to be no more serious than a root canal. IME,
> that sort of casual attitude exists mostly in pro-life depictions of
> their opposition.
As I said, I intentionally gave the most disjoint views that people do
have. Someone who *completely* buys the 'fetus is just part of your
body' view would not consider it any different than any other part
except in pragmatic considerations; as such, I think a root canal
(which is a bona fide operation) is inappropriate.
Your description is of someone who does at least partially value the
fetus more than generic other parts of their own body. Certainly this
view exists, and I did not mean to imply that people don't actually
mostly lie on the gray areas of a spectrum of opinions.
In any case, this wanders off topic (by going into what people
specifically believe and why). My examples were meant purely for
illustrative purposes to explain what I meant about framing, which is
meta to this.
> More generally, it is an error to equate a belief that something
> should be legal rather than illegal with an endorsement of that
> something. The law is a blunt instrument, and it's at least as much
> about who gets to choose as about whether any particular choice is
> right or wrong.
Let's not talk about what things should or shouldn't be legal here.
Linguistically meta is on-topic; law and politics isn't.
- Sai
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