Ask Lemmy

The dilemma being that anyone who acts this way probably shouldn't own guns.

Placing gun ownership over all other personal freedoms is an unhealthy obsession.

People who think they need weapons in case are not so different than those who think the rapture will occur in their lifetime.

They are unfortunately correct. I can’t count how many failed attempts I’ve made to try to convince many of my liberal peers that trying to kill the 2nd Amendment or functionally prevent people from buying guns is doing more harm to our collective efforts than good by alienating independents who are otherwise liberal-leaning, but staunchly support 2A. Many liberals have terrible views about gun violence in general IMO, and a serious lack of comprehension of the problem. Conservatives aren’t much better, unfortunately, and they’re three times as stubborn, so here we are.

single issue voters are fucking willfully braindead. Selfish short-sighted fuckers doing the opposite of their civic duty

I agree.

I asked this question because I really want to try to understand people who are different than me and hold other opinions than me. Broaden my horizon. Maybe help people question their own reasonings.

So, I asked a question on a topic I don't understand. I hope people will answer honestly and that people who disagree will avoid persecuting that honesty.

We all need to find common ground somewhere.

Banning abortion doesn't stop abortion, it just shifts it to a black market where women are far more likely to die.

What does demonstrably reduce abortion to effectively insignificant levels is better sex education and easy access to contraceptives.

Prohibition has never worked. Education always has.

Honest question. How do you reconcile your claim about not being anti-lgbt when the GOP is very vocally and openly pushing anti-lgbt messaging and legislation.

think murder is abohherent, baby murder especially so. I don't know when the right to life begins, so I err on the side of caution

Why stop there? You have no idea, right? So why do you masturbate or use condoms? You're killing millions of potential babies!

If you don't know, you should err on the side of caution for the rights of the people who you do know are real.

Or maybe you should just stay out of it, because as you say, you don't know. Leave it to the scientists and doctors who DO know and who almost universally support abortion access.

Thank you for your response.

I'm on team "glad you responded" but I still wanna respond to 2 things you said.

First, a lot of anti-abortion people want the abortion conversation to end at "this is murder", but how do you address the bodily autonomy argument? Even if I accept any and all abortions as the full death of a complete person, why are women compelled to donate their bodies to save another person? I don't support forced organ donations to save lives, and by that logic I also do not support forced pregnancies. Any opinion on that perspective?

Christian nationalism isn't complicated in what it is, it is just the desire/push/beliefs from the people that want a nation with an explicitly christian government, a christian theocracy. If it completely took over everything, freedom of religion would be dead, everything would be christian. To try and rephrase it bluntly, Christian nationalism is the desire for and work towards a Christian nation. Some people take it seriously, some people don't, some people outright support it, others deny it even is a real concept.

Edit to add: if you aren't anti-lgbtq, will you call your representatives that you vote for and emphatically tell them so? The difference in opinions between conservatives and their politicians about lgbtq is something I hear from most conservatives I've talked to, but it makes me sad to see they don't really care beyond saying "I'm not anti-lgbtq". If you vote for an anti-lgbtq politician because of other policies they support, please at least tell them you don't agree with their anti-lgbtq stance. It is literally the least amount of help I can think of to ask for.

Unfortunately, many Republican elected representatives are, to varying degrees, anti-LGBT and do support Christian encroachment into non-religious people's lives.

Right on. I don’t share your values but I’m glad to see you here participating and sharing.

On the science side it's a human from the moment of conception.

Citation needed

This basically underpins the whole thing and is pretty hand waved away

Not that you're asking for an argument, but I do want you to know why I, and many like me, find this whole life-from-conception argument totally ethically unpersuasive. And it's not the usual nonsense of "it's just cells" because, as you well know, that's an unimpressive and pointless debate. Whether a fetus is a human or not is fundamentally subjective. And so I'll grant that it is, because I have total confidence in my pro-choice position even then.

The issue with the pro-life position is not that it asserts that abortion is bad. Frankly, I don't give a crap if you or anyone else thinks it is bad. Again, that is subjective. A personal preference. The issue with the pro-life position is that it always seems to assert that abortion must be banned and even criminalized. That's what pro-life is. It doesn't mean "I think abortion is bad", it means "I think abortion should not be allowed."

My position isn't that abortion is good. Mine is that the pregnant person has a right to choose. I think the moral calculus on when and whether it is good or bad is FAR too complicated to form a rule, and so we must leave it up to the biggest stakeholders to figure that out privately.

I think a lot of things are bad, but having a preference against something is different than justifying use of the state's violence to prohibit it.

A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson, PDF - 1971. Hardly new, and I doubt you've never seen it, but ultimately it is still the line of argument that I do not think has been convincingly rebutted. This essay is still probably the most sound and straightforward work of philosophy that shows that banning abortion is impermissible in an ethical society, and it presumes life from the moment of conception just as you do.

My extreme summary of the point it is making: at the end of the day, you have two competing human rights. You have the right to autonomy of your own body against another's right to life. Both are undeniably rights a person has -- and highly related ones, at that. When these rights are in tension, we need to make a choice as to which is supreme. And the consequences of giving life supremacy over autonomy are disastrous compared to the consequences of giving autonomy supremacy over life.

Rather than empower the state to take any and all actions necessary to protect life, we instead must impose a limit on the power of the state -- it may not violate someone's ability to make choices about their own body functions, even if to protect the life of another.

I'd prefer to be in a world that has no abortions at all. Just as I'd prefer to be in a world without contagious disease. One way to get rid of all contagious disease is to systematically euthanize every sick person at their first sniffle. Problem solved! Such is an abortion ban.

We get rid of disease by investing in research and healthcare and doing our best to use it maximize efficacy with fair triage, vaccination programs, etc.. We get rid of abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies from the get and by creating a world so supportive and safe for pregnant people that they do not want to terminate it.

So don't fuck with other people, unless they're fully grown women making decisions about their own bodies, or underage victims of rape.

I won't mention the rest of the text because I'm not interested enough on the discussion to do so. I'll focus on a single thing.

On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.

What should be considered a human being or not is prescriptive in nature, because it involves ethics. Science - i.e. the scientific method - does not give a shit to prescriptive matters; science is descriptive, it's worried about what happens/doesn't happen. For science it doesn't really matter if you call it a human, a tissue, a wug or a colourless green thing sleeping furiously, as long as you're unambiguously and accurately describing the phenomenon being studied.

As such, no, science itself doesn't really tell you "when it becomes a human being".

[From another comment, after being asked for source] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33620844/

The only thing that it "proves" is that the author (not "science") is referring to foetuses (from nine weeks after conception [not zero] to 16 weeks) as "children". And it certainly does not back up your claim that [ipsis litteris] "On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception."

And no, "The growth and development are positively influenced by factors, like parental health and genetic composition, even before conception." does not prove it either, given that the author is solely mentioning conception as a time of reference.

Sorry to be blunt but the way that you referred to science sounds a lot like "I'm ignorant on science but I want to leech off its prestige for the sake of my argument". If you don't want to do this, here's a better approach:

• Show how certain actions generate certain outcomes. Science will help you with this.
• Explicit the moral and ethical premises that you are using, to judge said outcomes as good/bad. Science will not help you with this.

It's also a nice way to avoid a fallacy/stupidity called appeal to nature (TL;DR: "[event/thing] is natural, so it's good lol lmao"), that often plagues discussions about moral matters like abortion.

I tried to word it as non-biased as possible. How would you word it to make it less biased in your opinion?