Tuesday, January 20, 2009

A Life of Choice

Regarding Abortion I would like to point out that the opposition to Pro-life is not Pro-abortion, it is Pro-choice. According to Pro-life, life begins at conception. But, just because an organism lives, it does not immediately mean that it has a heart and a brain, or even a soul.

But, let’s say that it does. Consider the surprisingly all too common spontaneous miscarriage. It is also, by definition, an abortion. Perhaps we should expect the government to do something about unplanned abortions. We could petition for mandated funeral services or force women before a tribunal, or criminal court, to determine if they contributed to a potentially negligent loss of life.

If the government can force a woman to carry an unwanted child to term perhaps they can also do something to force parents to love that child. For physical or mental disabilities, we should not sleep until a government that forces a woman or couple to knowingly enter a life of pain and sacrifice, be mandated to more adequately assist those families. Or, perhaps it does not matter what happens to those lives as long as they are forced to exist.

Demise of Democracy

There is a basic flaw in Democracy where people are permitted to debate each other’s right to exist. The conflict in Israel is rooted in one side’s love of life and their belief that they have a right to exist and the other side’s disagreement on both points. One of the founding ideas of the Democratic process is that all people have a right to life. So, what we must really be debating here is if Jews are people.
All Israeli offensives are attempts to control random acts of terrorism against its people. Supporters of Hamas say they were firing rockets into Israel to protest an impossible situation created by the blockades. How quickly they disregard that the blockades were a last resort against both voluntary and involuntary martyrdom of civilians through suicide bombing attacks against Israeli heavily populated areas.
Traffic in and out of Gaza, including food and aid supplies, was being used to smuggle suicide bombers. Anti-Israeli supporters’ tolerance of the “Kill All Jews” doctrine, their condemnation of Israel’s efforts to guard against it, and world-wide tolerance for Hamas is nothing new. Democracy, by comparison, is fairly new. If we continue to condone and debate any group’s right to declare and attempt to carry out genocide, the struggle in the Middle-East will continue long after North America has ceased to be a place of equal rights for all.