When Pro-Life is not Pro Life
This article applies to the Conservatives in Canada too:
Excerpt:
Yesterday, I pulled up to a drive-through ATM, and sitting in front
of me in the line was a car with a license plate that simply stated,
"Choose Life".
Who can argue with that? I support life, don't you?
The problem, of course, is the relationship between that phrase and
the US right wing. You know, the ones who are petrified of everything
from black presidents to black helicopters to Black Sabbath.
Yes, they piously claim to be "pro-life", but it is a simple
platitude, for - to paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride - I
do not think that word means what they think it means.
To those not steeped in US politics, being pro-life might seem like
it means what one would expect - to oppose policies and endeavours that
duly result in a loss of human life. But, in the US political arena, it
means something quite different. Generally, it is a way of telling
everyone that it's your business to give a woman her marching orders -
that she must eventually carry a three-day-old embryo to term, even if
it's the result of rape or incest.
Or its corollary, that you're some kind of Nietzschean Superman for
ensuring that 91-year-old patients in terrible pain due to pancreatic
cancer must stick a tube in any empty orifice to force themselves to
stay alive and suffer, even against their own wishes.
The sad reality is that, to be pro-life in the US today, which is to
be conservative in almost all cases, is to love thy enemy by supporting
illegal wars - or just plain stupid ones - that kill hundreds of
thousands of innocents, cutting health-care benefits and nutrition
programs for children and the poor, and turning the other cheek … of the
person you're torturing.
Click the top link to read the whole article.
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