I’ve been trying to spiff the joint up a bit. I know IE still doesn’t render it properly; I’ll keep working on it.

I got my first trackback spam on that last post. I guess that’s what happens when you put the word “sex” in the subject.

I’ll just come out and say it: I’m not really that keen to see Roe v. Wade overturned.

It’s not that I’m wavering in my belief in the humanity of the unborn child, or the injustice of committing violence against her. It’s that the movement to overturn Roe isn’t about the unborn at all.

Let me explain, lest I come across as one of those people who claims to know other people’s “true”, sinister motivations (I hate that). I am well aware that most people who favor overturning Roe believe in and are concerned about the humanity of the unborn child. But what is the going legal strategy for overturning it? Appointing judges to the Supreme Court who would rule that there is no Constitutional right to privacy.

Now, if abortion is an issue of sexual morality, this makes perfect sense. In that case, the real problem with the current state of the law is that the government is constrained from regulating the private lives of individuals, including who they sleep with and when, and whether they should be allowed to attempt to separate sex from reproduction.

But if you believe that abortion is an issue of violence, as I would bet most of the people reading this do, then privacy has nothing to do with it. Violent acts aren’t private, even when they take place in one’s own home or one’s own body, if there is non-consenting person involved. They are something the public has not only a right but a responsibility to stop.

This is why I say we need to move forward to end abortion instead of backward. Overturning Roe v. Wade on privacy grounds would put us right back to the state of the law in 1973 — and in so many ways, that wasn’t pro-life. Restrictions on abortion weren’t based on human rights (though a belief in the human rights of the unborn animated many supporters of the restrictions). How could they have been, when the unborn child wasn’t legally recognized as a human being? They were based on the power of the government to tell people what to do in their personal lives — the same unjust power that allowed the government to arrest doctors for dispensing contraception and gay couples for having consensual sex in their own homes.

Overturning Roe on anti-privacy grounds would not end the injustice of an entire segment of humanity being classed as non-persons. It wouldn’t establish that a human being has human rights over his/her entire lifespan. It wouldn’t establish grounds for opposing the destruction of embryos in IVF clinics or research labs. In short, it wouldn’t do a single thing to address what is really wrong with abortion — that it is the destruction of a human being. And yet, somehow, support for this strategy is considered the most important litmus test for being pro-life.

When was the last time you heard of a court nominee being asked if s/he believes that the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment applies to all human beings? I can’t recall this ever happening, but that’s the kind of justice (in both senses of the word) we should be looking for.

I have a mildly terrifying amount of schoolwork due on the 18th, and thus naturally have been taking my mind off of it by reading the comments over at Making Light. In the “Why I Blog” thread, a commentor complained that his non-standard package of views on guns, free trade, stem cell research, war, etc. means that for all practical purposes he doesn’t exist in our political discourse. (As an atheist who opposes war and abortion and is for single-payer health care and gay rights, I can relate.) Teresa responded by pointing to her own views on guns. One paragraph in particular jumped out at me:

Then there’s the NRA. You know, those guys are no help at all. If I were a conniving right-wing strategist, I’d funnel lots of money to the NRA because their spokesmen are always coming off like such dangerous loonies. I’ve never known one single non-gun-using person who was persuaded by listening to the NRA that there’s such a thing as sane, reasonable gun ownership and use. Instead, they stampede in the opposite direction, which causes sane, reasonable gun owners to stampede rightward, and next thing you know there’s a culture war going on between people who otherwise would be sympathetically inclined.

Substitute “Radical Religious Right” for “NRA” and “abortion opponents” for “gun owners/users”, and a more concise summation of the sad state of “pro-life” politics could hardly be sought.

The Air Carrier Security Committee of the Air Line Pilots Association investigated the case of the six imams who were kicked off of a US Airways flight a couple of weeks ago after other passengers became nervous about having them on board. I’m sure you’ll be as relieved as I was to learn that they’ve concluded that there was no discrimination involved:

“The decisions made by all the parties were made as a result of the behavior of the passengers and not as a result of their ethnicity,” the report concluded.

The suspicious behavior cited in the report included “changing seats, stating anti-war, anti U.S.-Iraq involvement, negative comments concerning the president of the United States.”

Good news, everyone! The imams’ treatment had nothing to do with religion or ethnicity! Anyone could get kicked off a plane for suspicious behavior like criticizing the war!

(Or should that be: mathematics, represented as a human form?)

I’ve had this one bookmarked for an age, just waiting to have a place to post it! I was doing a Google image search for spirals, because I knew I wanted a spiral logo for this site (more on that later), when I came across this gorgeous piece of fractal art. I was immediately struck by the likeness it bore to an unborn human child — you can see shapes resembling the large head, the ribs, and tiny little legs. It’s too bad there’s no record of who created the artwork.