An open challenge to Amicus

[rgraham666]

Another thing.

I regard Ms. Dowd and Ms. Dworkin as excellent examples of that favourite aphorism of mine, "What you resist, you become."

 

[Le Jacquelope]

*sighs*
You have your right to whatever ground you stand with on abortion. I'm just saying I dont do it but I wont prevent others from doing it. Its not my place nor my right. If they decide to for most women there is a reason and I wont be the one yelling at them for it.

No, I havent read those books. I did say this before in my reply to amicus...I have not met any myself. So maybe I'm naive and stupid for fucks sake, but seriously I dont see that many here on the boards and thats what I gathered was being said. Chivalry?? So what I treat men with chivalry as well and I dont expect it from them and very rarely have I seen much. I dont trade up men and I dont have any friends who do either. I never said it doesnt happen just that I dont know anyone personally who has. And male bashing is not quite the same as 'man hating' in my book. On the same hand what about all the female bashing that goes on. And I'm not saying there arent man haters out there, as there probably is. Same as there are plenty women haters out there.

You have a solid point here.

I just don't go in for the whole women have their place so if a few radical women had to step up and fling shit at men to get the other women in a better place then so be it. I for one don't fit the whole domestic goddess wash the fucking masters feet scenario.

The problem with just flinging shit at men is when you hit innocent people, the rest get angry.

This is a general human nature thing. Allow me to present an analogy - America's behavior in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, we hit the Taliban with cruise missiles. Wiped out a Taliban HQ on the third floor of a building while the family below didn't even know what happened. We were going out of our way to hit the culprits without killing innocents. We dropped aid packages over the country as well.

We gained the respect and admiration of the world as a result of that. Afghan citizens loved us.

Then we started going apeshit in Iraq. Torturing people, butt pyramids, kidnapping suspects' wives, killing and raping, etc., and that bombing of that wedding in Afghanistan. That's when we started alienating everyone.

Also, look at the backlash that's coming from those black people who fling shit randomly at whites. Jesse Jackson's "Welcome to Hymietown" and all that.

Fling shit, but be sure to fling it at the person who is offending you.

And I'm ranting now and not being polite as I have had enough of today of men trying to put me in my place and tell me what I can and cannot do. And for one in the area I live in it seems most of the men want the women to be doormats and I'm just about to loose my patience with the whole thing. So I apologise if I came in the thread and said I didnt know any feminazis myself.

edit~ no offence meant but its been a really long day and my patience has run thin.

Have you also considered being pissed off at women who encourage this by allowing these men to push them around? I don't know what the female equivalent of an "Uncle Tom" is, though.

 

[Chantilyvamp]

Have you also considered being pissed off at women who encourage this by allowing these men to push them around? I don't know what the female equivalent of an "Uncle Tom" is, though.

Honey right now I have considered being pissed off at a lot of people.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Her friends and family did what?

That's really fucked.

Why, oh why, do people put the consequences of an action on the victim? It's a facet of humanity quite beyond my capacity to understand.

Ah, but rights are beautifully convoluted things. She had the right to have an abortion and not embarass everyone by making what happened to her public and saddling them with a child they don't know how to deal with emotionally (given its parentage). And so, in their minds, they had a right not to have to deal with this. It's not the rape they couldn't forgive her; it was the decision not to abort.

There are interesting new frontiers in rights ahead of us. Already men are contesting child support judgements based on that fact that the mother could have chosen to abort. If the man supplied the money necessary for an abortion, why should he have to supply anything else?

 

[Recidiva]

Ah, but rights are beautifully convoluted things. She had the right to have an abortion and not embarass everyone by making what happened to her public and saddling them with a child they don't know how to deal with emotionally (given its parentage). And so, in their minds, they had a right not to have to deal with this. It's not the rape they couldn't forgive her; it was the decision not to abort.

There are interesting new frontiers in rights ahead of us. Already men are contesting child support judgements based on that fact that the mother could have chosen to abort. If the man supplied the money necessary for an abortion, why should he have to supply anything else?

I do believe men should have the right to decide before a child is born, whether or not they want to support that child.

Men should be able to put his rights to an unborn child "up for adoption" in the same way a woman can put a newborn up for adoption.

If men can't say a thing about whether or not a child will be aborted, they should have that choice.

 

[Stella_Omega]

the abortion issue is pretty complicated and confusing, that's for sure. Here is one place where I am probably as radical as it's possible to be; I am pro choice. I believe that a woman has the absolute right to do anything she wants to with the blastocyte, embryo, fetus, nascent child that is growing within her. Embryos are not human yet. They are potential humans, in the way that a piece of metal is potentially a car. The "soul" enters the fetus at the moment the mother feels it to be true. This could be three days before conception-- three days before birth, (Mostly unknown to happen that late, but some women are psychotic as we know). When there is a conflict between the rights of a living woman and an unborn fetus-- go with the living woman.

Now, I am certainly including the input from her family and friends in this. If, for instance, her husband can convince her that he wants and will love the kid-- all well and good.

The head scratcher here is that "pro-choice" is a perfect match for Conservatism and its defense of absolute greed at the expense of everything in its path. I completely refuse to believe it's about "preserving life" for them, and their attitudes towards women's rights and their apathy towards the suffering of born children and their mothers, continually confirms that. Conservative fathers threaten to throw their daughters out if they get pregnant. What kind of crap is that?

Omigod, that is so fucking true! It isn't about preserving life at all, is it-- it's about punishing wrongdoers. I believe in giving the "wrongdoer" a second chance. And I also believe that if a woman really wants to abort, that child is not going to have much of a chance once it's born and in her unwilling care. And I don't see many anti-abortionists willing to adopt babies-- especially not, for instance, black, born-addicted, troublesome babies... Cute little blue-eyed babies, of course, born to an innocent teen mom-- that's another story


I started talking about feminazis and it turned into a major essay-- I'm going to start a new thread about it.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

I do believe men should have the right to decide before a child is born, whether or not they want to support that child.

Men should be able to put his rights to an unborn child "up for adoption" in the same way a woman can put a newborn up for adoption.

If men can't say a thing about whether or not a child will be aborted, they should have that choice.

*smacks forehead* I must be hallucinating again. That idea is so not sane. Let's just let everyone be equally irresponsible, eh? Someone please tell me I'm hallucinating.

 

[Recidiva]

*smacks forehead* I must be hallucinating again. That idea is so not sane. Let's just let everyone be equally irresponsible, eh? Someone please tell me I'm hallucinating.

Do not adjust your Internet Screen.

I doubt anybody will accuse me of being sane. Just opinionated.

 

[Stella_Omega]

*smacks forehead* I must be hallucinating again. That idea is so not sane. Let's just let everyone be equally irresponsible, eh? Someone please tell me I'm hallucinating.

That's one of those things which will have to be threshed out.

I knew one woman who got pregnant via a one-time fuck out back of a bar. She chose to have the baby, and she chose to let the guy know about it. These two people were at odds from the get-go, and at one point the father kidnapped the infant-- who was about four months old and breast-feeding-- and told her that she would have to repent of her "folly ways" She treid to get a court injunction against him from coming near her and the baby again. I asked her why she had even told him about the pregnancy-- she said he should share the blame.

 

[Quiet_Cool]

That's one of those things which will have to be threshed out.

I knew one woman who got pregnant via a one-time fuck out back of a bar. She chose to have the baby, and she chose to let the guy know about it. These two people were at odds from the get-go, and at one point the father kidnapped the infant-- who was about four months old and breast-feeding-- and told her that she would have to repent of her "folly ways" She treid to get a court injunction against him from coming near her and the baby again. I asked her why she had even told him about the pregnancy-- she said he should share the blame.

That's what you call a series of bad decisions...

Chances are, it'll be one fucked up kid.

Q_C

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Do not adjust your Internet Screen.

I doubt anybody will accuse me of being sane. Just opinionated.

So since she has a right to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption if she wishes, he has a right to do something completely wrong and refuse to support the baby financially.

Uh huh.

A totally wrong and irresponsible act in retaliation for what again? Being asked to take responsibility for a child he willfully sired?

Be still my spinning head...

 

[Le Jacquelope]

That's one of those things which will have to be threshed out.

I knew one woman who got pregnant via a one-time fuck out back of a bar. She chose to have the baby, and she chose to let the guy know about it. These two people were at odds from the get-go, and at one point the father kidnapped the infant-- who was about four months old and breast-feeding-- and told her that she would have to repent of her "folly ways" She treid to get a court injunction against him from coming near her and the baby again. I asked her why she had even told him about the pregnancy-- she said he should share the blame.

In my court he'd be denied visitation and have his wages garnished for child support. Kidnapping might land him in prison but I'd want him to support the kid. That's where I'd be befuddled.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Good for your wife and you, L. T. I respect a person who dedicates his own time and resources to his principles.

Like you, I find one of the most frustrating things about the abortion debate the way in which so many of the main political forces seem to fly in the face of their own principles when this issue comes up. I think I understand what's driving it; because abortion can involve so many other hot-button issues (religion, science, economic / class structure, women's rights, medical care, privacy / free choice rights), it often pushes people into unlikely places on one of them because they're strongly attached to another. Still, it's hard to know what's more unsettling - listening to someone who will defend a dolphin's right to life condemn a living human, or finding oneself standing next to a rabid anti-feminist who really just wants women to suffer as many limitations on their actions as possible.

You're trenchant on the need to involve men in any solution, and on the traditional unwillingness of the right to address that issue. I'd have much more faith in politicians who want to talk morality if they spoke with any regularity about moral decisions that would require sacrifices from themselves or their supporters. I think it's reasonable to observe that the main issues around which fundamentalist political groups have coalesced - gay rights, abortion, and the teaching of evolution - all involve restricting other people from activities that they themselves have already chosen not to participate in. I admire the conscience of some of the new breed of Christian leaders who want to bring issues like poverty, racial equality, and torture to the table, but they've been shunted aside by the established folk, who I can't help but see as cynical so long as they ask nothing of themselves and everything of others. Similarly, so long as the message is that women have a life-long penance to do in the form of child-raising while men can start anew unencumbered, it's hard to see their anti-abortion stance as free of inherently patriarchal weighting.

Chantily, the difficulty I have with open choice on the matter is that I perceive there to be another person involved, and cannot see how, given that that individual has his or her own unique DNA, there could possibly not be. If there's another person there, this isn't something like gay sex for which one might argue that there's no direct affect on anyone but the willing participants, and so it's rightly a matter of individual choice. It's more like slavery, in which the choice of the slave owner to own slaves directly affects the right of another person (the slave) to have liberty. Abolitionists were not willing to allow the decision to own or not own slaves to be an individual one on the part of the slave owner because they believed that the slaves were human beings with rights, and that therefore the slave owners were not the only people whose rights and desires should be consulted. Similary, many who believe that abortion kills living human beings feel that the presence of a third person who will lose his or her right to life means that the rights and desires of the mother are not the only rights that have to be consulted.

I say that only to show the logic of that position. I think it's just as logical to regard abortion as a matter of individual choice if one is strongly convinced that no human being is killed by it. I'd question the root assumption, but the logic leading from it works. My point is that to many who believe that abortion kills a human being, "let everyone choose for herself" is not a compromise position for the same reason that "let every slave owner choose for himself" would not have been. It only works if you've already assumed that there's no other person with rights involved in the process.

 

[Recidiva]

So since she has a right to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption if she wishes, he has a right to do something completely wrong and refuse to support the baby financially.

Uh huh.

A totally wrong and irresponsible act in retaliation for what again? Being asked to take responsibility for a child he willfully sired?

Be still my spinning head...

I don't blame a woman for having an abortion or putting a child up for adoption.

I wouldn't blame a man for doing those things either. Since I don't think he has any control over the abortion thing, declaring ahead of time that he does not wish to have a child will give him back his wallet the way abortion rights have given women back their bodies.

I think men are unnecessarily stigmatized and penalized in ways that women aren't on this issue.

 

[Quiet_Cool]

So since she has a right to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption if she wishes, he has a right to do something completely wrong and refuse to support the baby financially.

Uh huh.

A totally wrong and irresponsible act in retaliation for what again? Being asked to take responsibility for a child he willfully sired?

Be still my spinning head...

Um... NOt to make the topic oversimplified (though that's what I'm doing here ) but in terms of the rights of the individuals, why doesn't he have that right if she does? Wasn't she willing in the act as well? Basically, we're talking the "Pro-Choice" viewpoint here, yes? Why is it she has the choice to have fuck "out back of a bar" and to abort the pregnancy, whereas he can unzip or not unzip and that's it?

I mean, yeah, things change when the child is added in, but in terms of simpl the adult male and the adult female (I hope they are adults, since a bar was involved) how is this representative of equality?

Q_C

 

[Recidiva]

Um... NOt to make the topic oversimplified (though that's what I'm doing here ) but in terms of the rights of the individuals, why doesn't he have that right if she does? Wasn't she willing in the act as well? Basically, we're talking the "Pro-Choice" viewpoint here, yes? Why is it she has the choice to have fuck "out back of a bar" and to abort the pregnancy, whereas he can unzip or not unzip and that's it?

I mean, yeah, things change when the child is added in, but in terms of simpl the adult male and the adult female (I hope they are adults, since a bar was involved) how is this representative of equality?

Q_C

I believe women are still socially regarded as "victims" of pregnancy. Whereas men are "perpetrators" of pregnancy.

I think women need to know if or when they will bear the entire weight of raising a child on their own. They have access to birth control and rights over their own bodies.

I think giving men the attendant rights would even out the social issues and result in more responsible parenting choices on the part of women, and give men back the "choice" to be fathers.

Really good parenthood is always voluntary.

 

[Stella_Omega]

So since she has a right to have an abortion or put the baby up for adoption if she wishes, he has a right to do something completely wrong and refuse to support the baby financially.

Uh huh.

A totally wrong and irresponsible act in retaliation for what again? Being asked to take responsibility for a child he willfully sired?

Be still my spinning head...

Recidiva said it right!

Who says he wilfully sired the kid any more than she wilfully got pregnant? Men are as ignorant as women, regarding contraception and, dammit, safe sex.
In a society where contraception is openly talked about and endorsed as a moral decision, that would be true.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Another thing.

I regard Ms. Dowd and Ms. Dworkin as excellent examples of that favourite aphorism of mine, "What you resist, you become."

Resist anyway.

 

[Quiet_Cool]

I believe women are still socially regarded as "victims" of pregnancy. Whereas men are "perpetrators" of pregnancy.

I think women need to know if or when they will bear the entire weight of raising a child on their own. They have access to birth control and rights over their own bodies.

I think giving men the attendant rights would even out the social issues and result in more responsible parenting choices on the part of women, and give men back the "choice" to be fathers.

Really good parenthood is always voluntary.

Agreed. I was aiming for a response from Loving Tongue, on the off chance I misunderstood your reason for responding.

In a society where contraception is openly talked about and endorsed as a moral decision, that would be true.

Don't be too sure. Do you honestly believe we follow our moral virtues? I believe infidelity, from within the confines of a conventional marriage of course, is still considered immoral. I'm not so naive as to believe, however, that said infidelities aren't as common, if not more common, than not.

Perhaps you give society too much credit.

Resist anyway.

Yes, that's it. Better to die by your own sword, henceforth making its fought battles meaningless and empty.

Dunno if that's the type of respect I show my values, but if it works for you...

Q_C

 

[Stella_Omega]

I should have said; "More true" I suppose.

As for your second comment-- what, so no one should resist that which they abhor, for worry of the possible consequence that some people won't like you any more?

But this;

Um... NOt to make the topic oversimplified (though that's what I'm doing here ) but in terms of the rights of the individuals, why doesn't he have that right if she does? Wasn't she willing in the act as well? Basically, we're talking the "Pro-Choice" viewpoint here, yes? Why is it she has the choice to have fuck "out back of a bar" and to abort the pregnancy, whereas he can unzip or not unzip and that's it?

I mean, yeah, things change when the child is added in, but in terms of simpl the adult male and the adult female (I hope they are adults, since a bar was involved) how is this representative of equality?

I do hope you understand that I agree with you; this Is very well stated!

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Recidiva said it right!

Who says he wilfully sired the kid any more than she wilfully got pregnant? Men are as ignorant as women, regarding contraception and, dammit, safe sex.
In a society where contraception is openly talked about and endorsed as a moral decision, that would be true.

They both had sex willingly and took the risks involved.

 

[Stella_Omega]

They both had sex willingly and took the risks involved.

Heard the term-- unwanted pregnancy before? How on earth do those happen?

They happen because remembering the risks is not sexy. We are supposed to give in to the heat of the moment-- fueled by that last sixpack, if need be. Passion and contraception are natural enemies.

But if contraception was considered a natural part of fucking the risks would have been lessened, at least-- one or the other of them might have been okay with stopping for the condom.

 

[rgraham666]

But if contraception was considered a natural part of fucking the risks would have been lessened, at least-- one or the other of them might have been okay with stopping for the condom.

I've never had a problem with it. I have a hard time understanding people who do.

But then again I find find most human behaviour inexplicable.

 

[Le Jacquelope]

I've never had a problem with it. I have a hard time understanding people who do.

But then again I find find most human behaviour inexplicable.

And they say you are crazy? I think we should re-evaluate the brain cells of whoever handed down that diagnosis.

 

[cloudy]

Just to add to the confusion...

then there's those pregnancies where both parties were responsible, did what they needed to do, and pregnancy still happened. What then?

Don't tell me it doesn't happen - I have two children that, by rights, shouldn't have been conceived. I adore them both, wouldn't give them up for anything, but birth control was very much in evidence.

Should their fathers be absolved of any fiscal responsibility? I don't think so, although, with my oldest, I absolved him of that responsibility myself.