Classism

I was thinking about Reclusive Leftist’s post on feminists’ hatred of Sarah Palin and told her that my reason was simple, and equally applies to anyone who deserves it: Palin is an anti-choice Republican. I have a serious problem with anti-choicers, and with Republicans, and those who are both. They enrage me.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize there is a tinge of classism in my dislike of Palin.

Which is not to say that I wouldn’t feel very differently about her if she was a pro-choice Democrat, or even a pro-choice Republican. I would. I quite like and admire Sandra Day O’Connor, for instance. The classism alone isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s there. I am very class-conscious; yes, this is ironic, given my pretensions to communism. It’s one of the things I find un-progressive about me, but which I haven’t made much of an effort to change.

What makes my class-consciousness resilient is that it has nothing to do with money. That gives it that sheen of respectability, as if what is being measured is some more objective characteristic of a person than how much money their parents had, but it’s really just as arbitrary, since class for me is a matter of taste.

I was raised poor, but that was an accident of my parents’ circumstances when I was a child. My parents, despite periods of poverty, are indubitably middle class. Solidly so. Yes, my dad only has the American equivalent of an Associates degree and my mother never went past high school. But where I have one aunt who literally had to subsist on charity, I have another aunt who was a Rhodes Scholar. Where some of my relatives have lived out lives of poverty in rural Pakistan, others have immigrated and done well in a western country. The lives of my mother’s five sisters couldn’t have been more materially different from each other and for them, what determined their destinies more than any other single factor was the families they married into. Therefore, when two of my aunts married into the Pakistani equivalent of “white trash,” they lost class prestige accordingly, even though one of them had a graduate degree and was a high school teacher. I grew up watching my mother be classist toward her own sisters.

One of the bigger class-markers for me are seemingly trivial things like taste and style. The way I approach home decor, for instance. Or the fact that I wouldn’t be caught dead in certain styles of clothes, hair, shoes, handbags, sunglasses and make-up, for instance. And when I mentally size up other people, their class as exhibited in their manner of dress or something equally superficial, gets automatically catalogued in my head. This goes for men too, but since women have a lot more accessories with which to advertise their taste (and therefore their class), they are often more easily sized up.

It’s horrible and anti-feminist in a certain mild sense, but there it is. I would find it morally reprehensible to think and feel this way, to judge people like this, if it was money I was looking at. But since it’s something more subjective and less dependent on naked privilege for its acquisition, I bury any guilt I feel. It’s as if judging people for lack of money is the equivalent of judging them for lack of good looks, but judging them for lack of good taste (as defined by me, natch) is the equivalent of judging them for lack of intelligence. [money:intelligence::good looks:good taste.] The end result is, I avoid making friends with people as much for reasons of their class as their intelligence, quite frankly. This sort of class is way more insidious than a mere money-marker would be.

Sarah Palin screams white trash, without getting any pity-points for being as disadvantaged as most white trash folk are. I hate that term. It’s a terrible term. But I can’t get away from it in my head. Her hairstyle! Even her glasses. That lipstick. The too much makeup, especially on the eyes and cheeks. She never looks wholesome, natural, dignified. The way anything she wore would immediately look tramp-ish, even if it was a business suit. OMG, did I just say that out loud? But forget the personal style. She has five children. Count ‘em. FIVE. In my extended family which belongs to a third world country, a country in which women don’t traditionally work (and most of my female relatives certainly don’t), where birth control isn’t openly discussed and in previous generations, wasn’t used much, hardly anyone has more than 3 or at most 4 children, my mother’s generation onward. In fact, my two “white trash” aunts are the only ones with 4 children each. It’s a very classist thing to look askance at big families (and to have babies at a young age), and I plead guilty. My own simple mother felt her family’s class-status was lowered because her parents kept having daughter after daughter in the hopes of a boy (they got my crook of an uncle on the 7th try, and much good it did them). My mother had her first child in her 28th year and she stopped at three. Remember, neither money nor education nor career had she, so strong are the dictates of class.

There’s also religion. Palin’s type of religiosity is just not done in the upper classes. That is also why Bush, who is an east coast elite if there ever was one – an old-fashioned rich Republican – lost class points through his evangelicism. There are two styles of Republicanisms, and one is dying out (the old-fashioned socially-neutral, secular, moneyed Republicanism) and the one that is growing is a lower class Republicanism that doesn’t keep fundamentalist religion where it belongs – in your heart.

Sarah Palin lacks class. In the most literal and the most figurative sense. And I have contempt for her for that.

Terrible, but true. She just ain’t my kind of woman.

ETA: This is partly why it strikes me as so ridiculously funny when a certain type of woman accuses us Palin-haters of disliking Palin because she’s too good looking or because she has kids. As if.

Second edit: Just to clarify, I don’t dislike Palin because she’s “white trash.” I dislike her for her politics, but her class makes her easier to other. Thinking about disliking Palin inspired a meditation on my classism; this isn’t a post *about* Palin, per se.

I have no doubt I would feel very differently about Palin – whatever her perceived class – if she were a liberal politician. I would then probably find her “white trash” quirks adorable, so ridiculously grateful am I for liberal politicos.

Americans and walking

I find it very odd that Americans will put on special clothes and set aside an hour or two every other day, just to devote to “working out,” whether at the gym or to go running. But they will never walk anywhere that is farther from their abode than half a mile. Hell, they’ll drive shorter distances even than that.

I’ve been guilty of “going running” an awful lot myself. Don’t get me wrong. If you don’t get exercise in your day to day activities, if you have a desk job, pretty much the only way to maintain some lung and muscle strength is to seek some intensive and pointless exercise. On the other hand, if I can get my exercise in the pursuit of some purpose or task, rather than pointlessly running in place, I much prefer it, and will skip exercise-for-its-own-sake.

Of course, if you live in the suburbs, there aren’t a whole lot of places you can walk to.

But I am living smack-dab in the middle of a big city right now, in an apartment so noisy that my husband and I paused electrified with shock when there was once a whole minute’s worth of break in traffic noise. Living here means there are tons of places to eat, shop and hang out within walking distance. Here’s the thing – for me, “walking distance” extends up to two miles one way. I don’t mind walking. In fact, i enjoy it. Today, I went to my massage appointment, which is a mile and a half away, on foot. It was a lovely walk. But even so, I saw hardly anyone walking. Lovely day, perfect for having a coffee on the sidewalk, and people were doing just that – but they drove there.

One of the things that made Europe so enjoyable was the proliferation of pedestrians everywhere. Sure, these were small cities, but even in big cities like Paris, people walked everywhere. I walked everywhere. For two months, I walked and walked, soon discovering that the best way to see a city was to walk it. And it felt safe, because you were almost never the only one walking.

I also soon discovered that I had underrated walking as exercise, since I’d never done enough of it to discover how it builds muscle and stamina. You walk for a whole day so that you can hardly stand up at the end of it? You’ll come home at the end of two months with a leaner body on stronger legs.

That’s what happened to me. Quite unexpectedly and without trying, I lost 15 pounds. This was the extra 15 pounds I’d been carrying around ever since I moved to the US and started slaving for corporate America. No matter how much I tried to work out or eat right, that 15 pounds stayed with me. I tried to not let it bother me – especially since, even with it, I was well within the “normal” range of weight for my height, but it felt wrong. And two months of walking everywhere in Europe – while eating entire jars of Nutella – melted the weight right off.

Of course the biggest reason Americans don’t walk is because we’re so fucking busy that we can’t afford to put in the extra time it would take. It’s one thing to set aside an hour every other day for focused exercise. But to walk whenever possible? Preferably for several miles per day? We just don’t have the time.

Which is just another thing that’s fucked up about our lifestyles.

Palin’s Plan

She is going to run for president as an Independent candidate in 2012. Running without the support of the Republican party is going to require work, so she wants to start early.

Any extra executive experience she may have acquired if she’d served a full term as governor would not have benefited her with the support of a base that is already in her pocket and certainly wouldn’t have caused those to respect her (like me) who never would. She’s bored and wants to be in the news all the time. Going after Letterman gave her a taste for political skirmishes that will yield easy victories. She is going to be the new Newt – sit on the sidelines and point at the still-languishing economy.

Why Independent? She knows the Republican establishment is embarrassed by her and doesn’t like her. But she already has the Christianist base tied up. She also has all the recognition she could possibly want. As an Independent, she could also more credibly try to sweet-talk the feminists and try and get more of the women’s vote.

She’s going to get Ann Coulter to be her VP and get the drooling shit-for-brains American male vote by being the hottest conservative ticket ever to have been thought of. She may get Coulter to marry Andrew Sullivan so he can legally stay in the US, which would also prove that homosexuality can be cured, if only you find a hot enough member of the opposite sex. (Here, I will resist the Coulter-as-transsexual joke, even if it’s uppermost in my mind, because the feminist blogosphere has schooled me in how wrong that stuff is, at least to say out loud. And not funny after the thousandth time it’s been repeated. Being one who is easily amused, I’m still chuckling. Hell, the idea of Sullivan being married to Coulter is fucking funny enough.) By absorbing Sullivan into her force-field, she will also neutralize her most vociferous media critic AND hire Obama’s former campaign publicist to be her champion, all in exchange for him getting to stay in the US. It’ll be a brilliant move.

So that’s my analysis. Well, except for the parts about Coulter and Sullivan. Those are bad jokes.

Her rambling weird narcissistic resignation speech contained too many allusions to future greatness to assume she is gone for good. And I’m piecing this together from her hints (well, except for the part about Ann Coulter). I’m good with hints, always ending up in relationships with passive aggressive people.

Happy 4th

Happy 4th, y’all.

I’ll spare all my leftist readers the header change to the US flag, although I am tempted. Laziness wins.

Hope all the US readers are out barbecuing. I myself am heading out to an art festival.

Profound insight of the day

When a man falls for a bitchy but good looking woman, they don’t say men like bitchy women. They say men like cute women.

When a woman falls for a good looking asshole, they don’t say women like attractive guys. They say women like assholes.

Double standard much?

(Yes, I’ve been known to find good looking assholes attractive. No, I’ve never liked an ugly asshole.)

Women, being the sexual creatures we are, are susceptible, just like men, to sex appeal, and sometimes liable to focus on that to the exclusion of all other characteristics. When we like “bad boys” they’re not just any bad boys – they’re sexy motherfuckers.

But men are threatened by women’s sexual agency and women applying to them the same shallow standard by which they often judge us, so they pretend women don’t care about looks. They also want to paint women as irrational, which is the only way to explain why women fall for jerks. Never mind that the jerks are sometimes sexy. We’ll just pretend women don’t know what is in their own best interests.

I didn’t think I could love Krugman any more

But now I do.

Not only does the guy have a cat, but he named her Doris Lessing. My crush just intensified ten-fold.

Picture via his blog.

Converting on paper

Natalia wrote about people’s conversion “on paper” to a particular religion in deference to community wishes, usually in the case of interfaith marriages.

She has an interesting take on why likely-hypocritical conversions are important for communities:

Conversion, instead, is important because it addresses the “warm bodies” issue. It gives the impression that the religion is striving and strong, that it won’t be taken over by infidels of whatever stripe. It’s addresses a security concern.

In Islam, men can marry Christians and Jews, but not Hindus, atheists, polytheists, etc. Muslim women, on the other hand, can marry only Muslim men. This is because of patriarchal lineage, which is seen as the natural order, so all else needs to fall in line with a system in which the children “belong” to the father, as the wife “belongs” to the husband. When a Muslim male takes ownership over a Christian or Jewish woman, he has increased the ranks of the Muslims, and their children will necessarily follow his religion. When a Muslim female sells herself into non-Muslim male ownership, she is a member of the tribe lost to Islam. Her kids will also be lost.

Natalia’s analysis applies very well to the reasoning behind the rule.

My parents knew early on that I had major issues with Islam’s veracity but they held out the hope that I was merely misguided and would find my way back. My mother finds my apostasy so distressing that I feel forced into telling her a few white lies about the present state of my beliefs. I deflect and I reassure, without coming right out and admitting either to belief or to lack of it. She is right there with me, wanting to fool herself because she desperately doesn’t want me to go to hell, and I allow her to hope that I am not completely lost. (I’m more honest with my father; he still sends me occasional “proofs” of Islam’s truth, but I always write back my real opinion; he worries, but isn’t as heartbroken over it. My father isn’t the type to break his heart over too many things.)

Because my husband is not a Muslim, and my mother naturally believes I couldn’t be an independent entity while married, she is less inclined to believe my lies. My apostasy became more “permanent” with my marriage. And this causes her immense distress.

She has hinted more than once that she would be thrilled if I were to bring another into the fold of the true religion. Larry, sweetheart that he is, is ready and willing to lie about converting to Islam if it will make me feel better, for my family’s sake.

I feel for my mother. She genuinely believes all this nonsense about hell and whatnot. But for the life of me, I can’t perpetrate such a gigantic public fraud. White lies to reassure my mother about my fate in the afterlife is one thing; committing a lie to paper for the sake of other people’s consciences? It’s beyond me. Especially as I can’t help but be irritated that my useful and responsible lifestyle counts for nothing. All that counts is what I believe about invisible beings in the sky.

I frankly don’t understand how anyone does it. I think the difference is between the starting point of the beliefs of the people involved.

To explain: Many years ago, I met one of the authors of Thailand’s Lonely Planet guide. He was a white guy, a westerner, who was engaged to be married to a Thai woman. The woman was one of the small minority of Muslims in Thailand, and he was converting on paper for her community’s sake, and they were set to have an Islamic wedding ceremony. But she was wearing a miniskirt and was out drinking with him – in other words, only a cultural Muslim, a very liberal one.

My parents and family aren’t like that. For them, Islam is a rigid set of rules and laws. It is not something you can pay lip service to. Hence, any conversion on paper is not just that to them – it’s a commitment to really be a Muslim. My mother doesn’t want to merely do it for the sake of the community (and her status in it, since I have brought shame on the family), but much more for the sake of the fate of my soul, because her religion is not very personal and cuddly; it’s all about fear of Allah (and brings her very little spiritual comfort – fear is not the basis of anything comforting).

Funny that the gesture of conversion on paper should matter only where it really doesn’t signify much, and where it would have real meaning – as in our case – we can’t bring ourselves to do it. I can’t disrespect Islam enough to pretend to believe in it. As a set of ethical laws, I take it seriously as a worldview. And having grown up in the traditions of it, I am unable to forget what it really means, unable to act as if it’s anything less than that.

There is also pride. I actually believe the teachings of Islam are inferior to the humanistic values I hold dear. It goes against the grain to publicly call myself anything but an atheist, because that, to me, is the mark of a more thoughtful and just person than the title “Muslim.”

Then there is integrity and the disinclination to be dishonest about my true beliefs and lifestyle. I didn’t leave so I could go back to living the half-truths lifestyle so many Pakistanis are content to live. I would lose self-respect were I to subscribe, however nominally, to the religion of Islam. And one of the ways in which Islam comes up short on the values scale is that it – through the way it is set up, socially speaking – can facilitate something less than the full and free acceptance of it in a person’s life and conscience. I find that contemptible.

Love and being in love

Sanford said a fun thing recently:

He also told The A.P. that he believed Ms. Chapur was his soul mate, but that he was trying to fall back in love with his wife.

He’s asking to be fired and divorced. The man is in LOOOOOVE and wants out, but doesn’t have the courage to take entire responsibility for his decision, so he’s hoping other people will “force” him to run away with his mistress.

I guess it’s one way to do it.

Most of us fall in love at some point in our lives. If we’re “lucky,” we marry those we are in love with. But most of us who have been in love and have seen a continuation of that being-in-loveness in a long term relationship have also seen it transform into mere “love.” I was once in love with my husband. There are many moments when I still feel the “in-love” feeling, but mostly, I just very deeply love him now.

Many people don’t seem to realize the difference between the two sorts of feelings. In-loveness feels awesome, it takes over your world, it converts the two people involved into a mutual admiration society, it opens up new vistas, it expands your horizons. It’s like ingesting a drug. You feel heady, euphoric. You smile for no reason. You want to be with your lover all the time. You can’t imagine ever not liking them – even for ten minutes – or not wanting to be with them or wanting to fuck other people.

Then some time passes, newness turns into habit, you move in together, she has to smell his farts, he has to adapt to her taste in furniture, after fucking a thousand times they are no longer hot for each other every minute of every day, and they have their first fight about housework. In short, real life intervenes.

It’s all downhill from there.

(Apologies for the hetero nature of the preceding paragraphs. It’s all I know.)

Most of us, being human, miss that being-in-love feeling. Many of us like novelty in sex. Marriage endures because it isn’t risky. It isn’t set up to deliver that sort of thrill. It’s a partnership for more pragmatic ends, even if it starts out a lot of the time because the people involved don’t want to ever be apart. I actually still don’t want to be apart (much), but in the fifth year of my marriage, I was finally able to spend physical time away from my spouse, not without missing him, but at least with a certain degree of equanimity. Prior to that, we had been inseparable to the point of finding a day-long business trip a hardship. But yes, marriage endures because soon, a relationship grows in practical, comfort-related, security-related, love-related, friendship-related reasons. It wouldn’t endure if all that held it together was that being-in-loveness because that does fade. Good thing it does too, because few people can carry on at that pitch forever. It’s emotionally exhausting.

My partner still delights me and he’s still my favorite person. But I have very few illusions about him, and he has seen me both at my best and at my worst. We are entirely ourselves with each other. We have inevitably disappointed each other. That we love each other anyway – for who we are – and give each other the freedom and the space to be autonomous human beings not joined at the hip and capable of experiencing life separately from each other as well as together – this is better than heady euphoria. This is real life as it is lived.

Not that I would discount the joys of being in love. Not at all. But adult and experienced people should be able to distinguish between enduring love and euphoric in-loveness, and be able to appreciate each for what it is and not look for one in the other. On the marital end, since I don’t place such an enormous expectation on a relationship of over 7 years, I am not as disappointed. People are afraid that facing up to the real nature of their marriages will weaken them. But by not demanding more from it than I can realistically obtain, my marriage is stronger, not so brittle.

Mark Sanford has done a public service by saying such outrageous things out loud and in public. He has provoked an interesting dialog on love.

Let’s hope it will spark some insights, teach hopelessly romantic and Puritanical Americans that unrealistic expectations of maintaining a pitch of love between people married for long years is an uncalled-for romanticization of an institution that was not meant for that purpose, that indeed, it might be harmful for people’s individual identities to become so wrapped up in another and never recover from it. That there is more to life than falling in love, although it is justly valued enough that everyone should have the right to seek it and experience it, but that it’s still in-loveness even if it dies or turns into “mere” love. That mere love has its place and its own deep consolations.

If more people recognized these realities for what they are, they would be able to balance the claims of in-loveness against those of love. And come up with the right way to evaluate and sustain their relationships.

Thoughts on suicide

Are there many thoughtful high-achieving people who have everything going for them who frequently (but casually) think it would be a relief to put an end to it all? It’s just the sheer effort of living that wearies me at times. To stop striving and worrying would be a relief.

The older I get, the more complicated life seems. I’m an obsessively moral person, always thinking about right and wrong, good and evil, decent behavior and the converse, and the evil in the world weighs heavily on my spirit. When it’s very personally important to you that the right and good prevail, all evil behavior strikes you as offensive in a quite personal way. There is also a sense of responsibility, to make the best use of one’s talents and abilities, to benefit one’s fellow human. But if you’re smart enough, you know how limited in effect the efforts of any one person are, no matter how able and talented they are. To fight the cynicism while not succumbing to hopeless idealism is a balancing act that I can’t always maintain. Rather, I end up tipping heavily to one side and then the other.

I see the humanity of error, and yet I find myself impatient and unforgiving of it.

Unfortunately for people like me – as with religious folk – moral ambiguity is simply not an open option. I am well convinced of the rightness or wrongness of certain things. I also see the complexities of human experience and the demands of various complicating contexts. This makes life difficult.

The effort towards a “good life” is vital in my worldview. The way I figure it, we have only one chance at life. I am simultaneously persuaded that life – my life – is extremely important and full of meaning, and that it’s entirely pointless and nobody would be worse off were I to not exist. This is actually quite a rational paradox. Think about it: A favorite saying of my husband’s is, “In a hundred years, none of this will matter.” He says this about ordinary day to day things to quell my fretting, but when life is made up of those ordinary day to day things and for many people, never becomes more than that, that’s how little one’s life could mean. On the other hand, we can and many do make so much of the chance they’re given. At the same time, one doesn’t want to undervalue an ordinary life either.

Being ambitious, I want my life to matter. Being realistic, I know it probably doesn’t matter that much. But the urge to live the best life possible remains.

My urge to make the most of this chance is not only applicable in the sense of wanting to do the greatest good I am capable of. It also goes for wanting to absorb all possible joy out of life. Some people have this longing more than others. We love life. We want to live it to the fullest. It does turn us into risk-takers, determined to live as we feel and think because anything else does not live up to our expectations of what life “should” be. There’s an all-or-nothing attitude here. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, sort of thing.

But paradoxically, the more we love life, the less willing are we to live it if it isn’t joyful.

The idea of death does not scare me in itself. More than anything else, I see it as an unfitting and too early end to my life (were it to happen now) only because of the obituaries that fly unbidden into my head when I think about it. It’s quite comical. Think, for instance, of the recent murder in Iran of Neda Agha Sultan. She was my age and beautiful. Something about that captures people’s imaginations and makes such untimely deaths a great tragedy.

I’m uncommonly privileged in all sorts of ways and have “my life ahead of me.” I’m bright and cute and healthy and seem to have some potential to do wonderful things. At the least I have no excuse not to enjoy life. My death would be a tragedy. It’s funny to say this about oneself, but that’s honestly the only thing that makes my death (and therefore suicide) seem “wrong.” The natural order of things demands that I live, and live joyfully.

But these are conflicting imperatives: does one max out on joy or does one feel humanity’s pain as it were one’s own? I do both, usually finding my joy tempered by knowledge of pain and the pain of humanity – and my own pain – ameliorated by all the things that are great and good about life and the universe.

Apathy is not an option.

And I tell myself…

keep walking

and break into a run every now and then.

Visceral morality – pain and suffering and abortion

I believe morality is subjective and dependent on external factors that vary. I don’t think abortion is a moral question in the sense that it has one right or wrong answer, which is why I want the law to stay out of it and let individual women make their own moral and medical choices.

But there is a moral aspect to the debate, of course, and while thinking about the position of anti-choicers, I finally figured out why I find their position so morally repugnant. It has to do with visible pain and suffering.

Humans are emotive creatures. We react to other people’s pain and have the ability to empathize with it, and we derive our moral laws in part from what we can see and what reactions it provokes in us. It is “natural” – as in, unassisted by science or art, spontaneous, intuitive – to worry when we see another creature in pain. Be that creature human or animal. We cannot see the suffering of insects, therefore we quash them without much thought to their pain. We can see the suffering of cows, therefore (if we’re meat eaters) we avoid watching undercover videos of slaughterhouses.

A lot of our morality is built on this ability to see suffering and pain. Normally, we stick to what we can see and not what we can imagine. This is useful, time-honored and a decent guide to right and wrong.

I can see a pregnant woman’s pain and suffering, either if she continues the pregnancy or if she tries to end it (perhaps dangerously). This is not that hard to picture or empathize with, because she’s a person who is similar to me in emotional and physical makeup. I cannot see an embryo or fetus’s pain and suffering, if there is any. I can’t actually even imagine it.

But “pro-lifers” came up with this video that is very popular with them, called The Silent Scream, which is all about the pain and suffering of a fetus. They mourn these fetuses. They teach young children to become emotional about fetuses. They focus on the fetus as if our moral sense should be more engaged where we can’t see the pain and suffering, rather than where we can.

I am skeptical, I’m afraid. I don’t believe “pro-lifers” are blessed with a finer moral sense in the way of Jains, or are in possession of keener imaginations. For one thing, they wouldn’t be able to get away from the visible distress of the pregnant woman, no matter what they felt about the fetus. Focusing on one, for a truly compassionate person, wouldn’t disappear the other. For another, they don’t exhibit this fine morality in any other case. The death penalty is frequently the counter-example cited by pro-choicers, but it’s not an apt example because they can wriggle out from under it insisting they only care to defend “innocent” life. But set aside the death penalty. Think of war. War necessarily and always takes innocent lives and arguably serves no higher end. Why aren’t all “pro-lifers” anti-war? Why aren’t they absolute pacifists? Because in the US, by and large, they aren’t.

They hold a morally incoherent position if you examine it from a base-level, gut-instinct type of visceral morality, where the emotions are engaged and the conscience is shocked by the suffering or distress visited upon a being we can empathize with. They are trying to go for this type of emotional response, but they are working it for something we cannot even see, something that is microscopic in the early stages, something that, if it dies, will never have corporeally occupied more of a spot in space than if it had been a blood clot. Looked no different to the naked eye, either.

This is why I believe them to be disingenuous. Truly compassionate people just wouldn’t be able to hold up a fetus as an excuse to ignore, sidestep, dismiss and be callous about women’s suffering. This is why my moral sense is so outraged by them. Their moral position is unnatural. They are not only wrong, they are dishonest. They not only ignore massive suffering and pain of fellow creatures, they do it while pretending to be more morally sensitive to pain and suffering. They not only dismiss women’s lives as unworthy of consideration, they do it while calling themselves “pro-life.”

It’s beyond enraging.

(Don’t even try to defend the pro-life position in this thread. I have had it. I will not publish your comment or seek to show you the error of your ways.)