I find myself strangely happy. I’m not sure why. I have been growing a lot lately, and slowly sleeping better.
One thing that is clear, but needs to be said, is that this decision was BRAVE. Courageous. A victory of good legal judgement in the face of largest violent counterwind perhaps in American history. Kudos to these brave men and woman.
Who knows? Maybe more spines will start showing up. A nation denuded of generalized courage is a nation failing. Its not enough to have a few brave people here and there. You need to be able to pick nearly anyone off the street at random and find someone capable of difficulty and risk. That is how America historically was.
And I an abortion moderate. I think it should be safe and legal, but that after the baby has roughly the awareness of a puppy, killing it for anything but a REALLY good reason should be illegal.
And it occured to me yesterday that the argument that a baby only becomes a “life” if the mother wants it—placing it in a mutable Schroedingers Cat limbo of being either “biological tissue”, to be disposed in the garbage, or a precious life, to be buried with tears—is analogous to saying the murder of an adult person should only be illegal if someone LIKED them. If no one liked them and no one misses them, then they were not a “life” either.
Philosophically, sprcifically ethically, this is a highly unsatisfactory argument.
And of course this argument is made implicitly by policy demands made by pro-abortion zealots. They do what they want to do, then call it good. There is no true debate or principle involved. It is only people like me who do that, who point to the necessary assumptions for a chain of logic to be valid.
And of course logic itself can be and often is a METHOD OF IMPROVING PERCEPTION. It provides a trail of bread crumbs leading both back to assumptions that were hidden, and forward to necessary behaviors, if your stated aim is your true aim, and effectiveness in that something you perforce value.
As I have often pointed out, you can deduce peoples TRUE aims from their behavior. Its simple. Everyone always acts logically. They simply often lie to themselves and others about their true assumptions and true aims.
As I say, I like a solution in the middle, personally. I do not know what life is, or where the souls of babies come from. I do not feel I have a scientific understanding of matters called spiritual. As I have often said, I think every university should have a well funded Department studying these topics, like the one they have at the University of Virginia.
But OBVIOUSLY if our only ideas on all this come from religion—or the rejection of all metaphysics outside of dogmatic Materialism—then religion will and SHOULD play a part.
Many of our States were founded specifically as safe places for ideosyncratic religious practiced and beliefs. This nation was FOUNDED both to protect the public exercise of religion (no hiding in caves, or fear of persecution), and to avoid any one group getting the power yo say to all THIS IS WHAT YOU MUST BELIEVE AND THIS IS HOW YOU MUST ACT.
In fact, if you view Leftism as a secular Church—which is really what it is, complete with priests, a catechismof required beliefs, and of course congregations everywhere, particularly universities—then what it is trying to do is become what the Pope was to Christendom for many centuries. They want their doctrine declared infallible, and heretics arrested and imprisoned and/or murdered.
This ascension of such a Church to a de facto throne is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent, particularly the 10th Amdndment.