Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Follow-Up Question Brokaw Should've Asked

A commenter at GetReligion nails it:
If Brokaw had wanted to hit [Speaker Pelosi] with a real zinger, he could have said, “Your party claims to be the party of progress. But on this issue, you seem to be ignoring both scientific progress and theological progress and relying on a third-century understanding of fetal development. What gives?”
(emphasis added)

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3 Comments:

At 8/27/2008 12:16 PM, Blogger Jeff Miller said...

Only in an alternate universe would that one happen.

 
At 8/27/2008 1:08 PM, Blogger Fr Martin Fox said...

That's a good follow up, but I have an even better one:

"Madam Speaker, you say you want to reduce the number of abortions--why?"

Related, useful in other situations:

"____, you say you are 'personally opposed' to abortion--why?"

I actually did this with a candidate many years ago, and he said, "well, even a snake doesn't eat its own young." "So, you're saying it's murder?" I replied; he said, "well, yeah..." To which I replied, "so you're saying it's murder, but you oppose making it illegal?" At that point he wanted to move on--and I'd made as much of my point as I was going to.

 
At 8/27/2008 4:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Exactly, Padre.

If it is the case morally that a fetus is a non-person and if the necessary underlying facts are true, then there is absolutely no reason why reducing the number of abortions is all that desirable a goal.

Obviously a society with X abortions is better, all else being equal, than a society than X+Y abortions. But only if abortion is somehow something really bad.

As a political position, "let's reduce the number of abortions" is an evasion and an excuse. (Plus an attempt to shift the public subject to contraception, where the Church's teaching is not as popular or as secularly defensible.)

 

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