(08-04-2022 11:12 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-03-2022 10:22 PM)scorpius Wrote:  The devil is in the details. And you're completely missing those details. The evil is the attempt to empower government to meddle in our private lives. Doesn't matter what it is. Abortion, pot, marriage or whatever, if it doesn't effect anyone significantly except the person at hand, government has no business to meddle.

Well, that's not exactly right in the case of abortion. Abortion does significantly affect one other person--the unborn child that it kills. The quandary is how much right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that unborn child has, and how and when those rights vests. I am of the opinion that abortion up to a point in time during the pregnancy (equivalent to "quickening" in the old common law) and after that in cases of extreme urgency such as rape, incest, or legitimate health concerns for the mother/child, is an approach that fairly balances the equities. Absolute bans go too far in one direction, and abortion up to the very moment of live birth go too far in the other. And I do think that use of tax dollars to fund abortions violates the religious freedom of those who are pro-life.

So in terms of partisan politics, I disagree strongly with both parties on this.

Just declaring something is murder doesn't make it so. It has to have enough support from the population for such definition to hold. And at least in the case of 1st trimester abortion, there is definitely not enough support for a sustainable murder definition even in the reddist areas of the country as proven in kansas the other night. So trying to declare it as such is all about an invasion of the right to privacy. What part of it is not? It's clear and convincing.

And as far as government funding of it somehow being a violation of religious liberty, that's a bunch of horse crap. If you declare that the case, then there's nothing stopping using the same logic to say government can't fund war because it violates the religious liberties of those who oppose it. Or really anything the government funds could arguably be against a religious point of view somewhere. So it's totally illogical to cherry pick abortion just based on religious grounds. In fact when you do, it arguably even violates the separation of church and state more than any notion of granting religious liberty. The government decides how it operates, not religion. That's a fundamental principle of democracy.