What a strange country this is. We have a political party, whose members claim some sort of inside track to God. They speak in moral absolutes, yet they are, at times, oddly willing to "defer" to someone else's moral (if one can call it that when speaking of Romney) position. Consider Paul Ryan:
Ryan, of course, is against the exceptions for rape and incest, but says he’ll defer to Romney's views — which are frankly bizarre in light of the fact that he’s in favor of "personhood" which would render any abortion murder. But then he’s not exactly known for his philosophical consistency.
(via Hullabaloo)
Deferring to another’s views. That sounds like “compromise”, an anathema to Republicans when dealing with a large (the major, actually) portion of the American populace. Ryan has insisted on imposing his views on everyone, no exceptions, but seems to feel it is perfectly proper to defer to, and even adopt, the views of a single person, when it suits his purposes. Last I heard, the Randian Ryan was calling himself a devout Catholic. What, one must ask, do the Bishops think of this craven outsourcing of his moral convictions to a feckless Mormon?
The fact is that Ryan’s former position was at least intellectually coherent, even if it was Medieval. The exceptions for rape and incest make sense only if one rejects the “personhood” of the fertilized egg. Once one accepts that premise, the “no exceptions” policy follows as the night the day. If one adopts the “rape and incest” exception, than one implicitly rejects that premise, and implicitly accepts that the question of whether an abortion is proper in a given circumstance is a matter of judgment, and the argument for individual judgment is compelling.
On a related point, this entire controversy does illustrate that on these issues, due to our weird media, even when the right appears to be losing, it is actually winning.
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