Rambling post
Garth George: Abortion at the heart of all abuse
Predictably, the convictions for the inhuman torture and murder of little Nia Glassie have generated the usual outrage, breast-beating, anger, criticism and demands for something to be done.It is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Because child abuse, sometimes fatal, is here to stay. And the same goes for violence against women.
Violence against women, you say? Here to stay? Because men (largely) can't--under their own power as autonomous beings capable of independent thought (one hopes)--own up and...stop beating on their wives/girlfriends/whatever? And child abuse is meant to be a constant too? Humans can't rise above the level of dumb animals because...why? Exactly?
We have brought it on ourselves. We have bowed to the blandishments of liberalism,
In other words: We actually care that other members of the human race are treated as human/people and equipped with the same rights as those in power (older, "straight," white men). Gotcha.
immorality,
Translation: Anyone who doesn't share my exact views is a blaspheming godless devil worshipping heathen
materialism
I think you're using that word in a context that has a meaning which only you know...
and hedonism and have set aside most of the moral and legal strictures which for centuries formed the mortar which held societies together and kept them from self-destruction.
Fairly sure all ancient societies had self-destructive tendencies... Rome fell, after all. That's the cycle of things. Something falls, something else replaces it. And I'm seeing an "OMG, guize! When we give other people legal rights and autonomy look what happens! The world goes to pot!"
For nearly 50 years, we have presided over the gradual unravelling of the fabric of our nation through the breakdown of the traditional family unit upon which community cohesion has always depended.
O.K. You're in New Zealand. Don't know much about the family unit there, but I'm assuming it's nearly identical to what I'm familiar with. And since you're a conservative, I'm getting the impression we're talking mum and pop and a couple of rugrats. Mum, of course, stays at home and does all the (thankless) work while dad runs off to the office day in and day out and gripes about his lazy wife and ungrateful children who he has to slave away to take care (because, of course, women shouldn't work outside the home).
And we have allowed the wondrous differences between men and women to become so blurred that we no longer know whether we're Arthur or Martha.
Sex is a pretty fluid thing. Those chromosomes can be damned interesting. Anyone who has a base interest in science can tell you that. Oh, I forget, your only science comes out of an old book...
So now we are beginning to pay the price. No matter what we try to do, the price will get ever steeper in misery, pain, terror and despair for the victims, and frustration, anger and shame for the nation.
The best we can hope for is that Government agencies, voluntary and self-help groups and others in the "helping professions" can save one or two children or women from harm along the way and, if they're lucky, minutely stem the tide.
They will treat symptoms, rarely with success, but the fundamental causes, which are now so firmly embedded in our way of life that they are irremovable, will continue to fester and erupt and spew out their poison.
Nice purple prose there. You want to make with a point?
I have said it before and I say it again: The number one cause of abuse against women and children is abortion.
Here I was thinking the number one cause of violence against women was violent, misogynist, fuckwads who treat women as objects rather than people. Silly me! It's been the medical procedure known as abortion all along.
And isn't it interesting that, statistically, the leading cause of death among pregnant women is murder. Generally by her spouse. Hmmm.
Listen to the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Never mind that she was a Catholic nun; her views are held by scores of thousands of New Zealanders, and their logic is inescapable.
Mother Teresa was no saint. Logic was a far cry away. She supported the pope's line against abortion, contraception, divorce, women as priests. (Generally had a shitty idea about women.) Believed a woman's highest virtue was to her church and husband... (Oh, sorry, forgot who I was responding to for a moment.) Got off on playing "saving grace" to the dying but wasn't actually interested in curing anyone through even the simplest of means such as a round of antibiotics.
But when she got sick? She took herself right to the heart specialist in New York.
How's hypocrisy taste?
"... the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion," she said, "because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
Why don't you tell it to women and men who murder their born children? Who starve them, beat them, rape them, torture them? Oh, that's right, they don't rate as high as fetuses.
"... The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.
Mine seems to be just fine. Maybe it's the vasectomy...
"It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts - a child - as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.
Really, bringing a strange person into the world is not an intrusion or an inconvenience in both the mental and physical health of a woman? Not to mention the financial well being of her and her family?
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want ... It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish."
No. I'd think any country accepting abortion sees it as a matter of women's health care, and sees women as (I hope) intelligent and thoughtful and capable of making their own choices rather than being patronized by some Sky-Being.
But, of course, it's always better to raise children in poverty. To risk your life to birth them. To ignore whatever violence might be happening to you at the hands of your spouse/partner and bring that kid into the world (because, of course, a kid will set things straight in the family--make the man become stalwart and a provider and make the woman nurturing and everyone will dance and sing in a field of daisies while rainbows arc across the sky). What color's the sky in your little fuckwit world?
It was never intended that the law should provide open-slather abortion, but it was framed with at least one loophole so big that the pro-abortion protagonists were through it in a flash.
I keep hearing about this "pro-abortion" movement. And you know...I can't find any evidence of it. Sure there are individuals (like me) that are "pro-abortion" for ourselves.
I think the word you're looking for here is "pro-choice." But, of course, that doesn't sound nearly as wicked. It's harder to demonize a cause that invokes the word "choice," and works hard at making every child a wanted child, getting women and men access to contraception and sterilization, health care, child services, etc.
Better to side with the "pro-life" movement that gets the woman through 9 months, decides it's a job well done, then ignores the needs of mother and child to go back to heckling women who are trying to get into a clinic for their annual pap smear (you know, so they don't develop cervical cancer and die) or for refills on their birth control so they can continue to afford to take care of the kids they already have or properly plan for the ones they want.
The second major cause of violence against women and children is the belief held by too many women that they should not just be equal to men but, in all but physical appurtenances, are the same.
Translation: Shut the fuck up and make me a pie. Also: Quit thinking, you're making my brain hurt trying to keep up with you.
This is an illusion: men and women are different physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It astounds me that in this age in which knowledge of the makeup of the human being is greater than at any time in history, we will not concede that men and women are
genetically programmed for differing roles.
We are different but then we are not so different. And here he comes with evo psych bullshit (and he's likely someone who has little to no interest in actual science [especially the evils of evolution] or human behavior but simply glomps onto a few arguments that hold up his sexism).
Evolutionary biology is one thing, psych quite another.
Matt Ridley (The Red Queen, Sex, and the Evolution of Human Nature) argues: "The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savanna-dwelling ape. It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.
Neither men nor women are evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day...or to sit at a factory bench tightening screws....
The fact that "work" became a male thing and "home" a female one is an accident of history."
[...]
"Therefore there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks.""
Human behavior and motivation are complex. You can't just reduce us to a series of impulses or "genetic programming." We're far more than that. On average men and women may be more suited (psychologically) to one profession or another but there's no support for sexism about careers. It varies from person to person.
Further: I resent being relegated to little more than an animal acting on instinct. I have a large brain. Opposable thumbs. The ability to logic and reason.
Maybe your evolution is just not complete yet?
The assumption by so many women of the roles traditionally exclusive to men has left many men in confusion, frustration and anxiety, and more are lashing out because they feel their maleness is under threat.
Translation: Waah! I can't compete with women (and Asians, and African Americans, and Indians and...eek!).
Look at that word you keep using. "Tradition." An inherited pattern of thought or action, a custom that's long been practiced. It has fuck all to do with someone's sex chromosomes. It's a societally constructed concept: men do this, women do this. But, perhaps, you're not evolved enough to understand that.
And if the poor widdle mens feel their "maleness" is under threat, perhaps it's time for them to look at the patriarchal gender role bullshit and start questioning the status and norms of "masculinity."
I find that inordinately sad. You can call me a sexist until you run out of breath, but I believe that God left creating woman until last because he wanted to make sure he got it right. The result was the creation of the most perfect and wonderful creature in the world.
O.K. Sexist.
"Most perfect and wonderful creature." Oi. It's the classic element of the "Nice Guy." Put women up on pedestals, herald us as "angels in the house"; and pure and frail and all that is good. And what happens when we fall (and we will, pedestals are narrow places)? You get pissy. Disillusioned. Violent, even, when we don't live up to your high and mighty expectations because (oh shit!) we're people too.
And Gods forbid a woman decide to have a mind and a life of her own--you'll have to send her back to the factory for errors in her programming.
Sounds a lot like the profile of an abuser, doesn't it?
There are other reasons for the violence that riddles our society
I bet.
- multiculturalism,
So, the recognition of people of different races, ethnicities, faiths, etc and the welcoming of them into society as equals is a problem?
Do I need to Godwin my post?
greed generating poverty
Corporate bailouts? Global Gag Rules? Cutting funding for family planning?
and a growing deprived underclass,
Who might not be such if we would stop cutting funds for education (including sex education), and things like child care, among many other things.
television and the internet, for instance. They, too, present insoluble problems.
The internet? (Hallo Irony.) Yes, the Internet is truly evil. Because it allows people to get together in droves and find their commonalities and express their damned liberal opinions and motivate and mobilize and get factual information (after weeding through the trash) out at times when falsities and embellishments are running rampant (like, say: abortion causes breast cancer, or Mother Teresa is a saint).
So we will continue to reap what we have sown. Be assured that the harvest will be bountiful.
Oh, I look forward to it.
Just one more thing: Could we possibly get something more creative than the old "Blame the women" rhetoric?
I mean, it gets really boring after a while, you know?
But what do I know? I'm just a uterus, with legs, waiting to be filled up with some man's noble seed, right?
Because I've seen it several times (and someone posted it in a comm with this article).
Predictably, the convictions for the inhuman torture and murder of little Nia Glassie have generated the usual outrage, breast-beating, anger, criticism and demands for something to be done.It is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Because child abuse, sometimes fatal, is here to stay. And the same goes for violence against women.
Violence against women, you say? Here to stay? Because men (largely) can't--under their own power as autonomous beings capable of independent thought (one hopes)--own up and...stop beating on their wives/girlfriends/whatever? And child abuse is meant to be a constant too? Humans can't rise above the level of dumb animals because...why? Exactly?
We have brought it on ourselves. We have bowed to the blandishments of liberalism,
In other words: We actually care that other members of the human race are treated as human/people and equipped with the same rights as those in power (older, "straight," white men). Gotcha.
immorality,
Translation: Anyone who doesn't share my exact views is a blaspheming godless devil worshipping heathen
materialism
I think you're using that word in a context that has a meaning which only you know...
and hedonism and have set aside most of the moral and legal strictures which for centuries formed the mortar which held societies together and kept them from self-destruction.
Fairly sure all ancient societies had self-destructive tendencies... Rome fell, after all. That's the cycle of things. Something falls, something else replaces it. And I'm seeing an "OMG, guize! When we give other people legal rights and autonomy look what happens! The world goes to pot!"
For nearly 50 years, we have presided over the gradual unravelling of the fabric of our nation through the breakdown of the traditional family unit upon which community cohesion has always depended.
O.K. You're in New Zealand. Don't know much about the family unit there, but I'm assuming it's nearly identical to what I'm familiar with. And since you're a conservative, I'm getting the impression we're talking mum and pop and a couple of rugrats. Mum, of course, stays at home and does all the (thankless) work while dad runs off to the office day in and day out and gripes about his lazy wife and ungrateful children who he has to slave away to take care (because, of course, women shouldn't work outside the home).
And we have allowed the wondrous differences between men and women to become so blurred that we no longer know whether we're Arthur or Martha.
Sex is a pretty fluid thing. Those chromosomes can be damned interesting. Anyone who has a base interest in science can tell you that. Oh, I forget, your only science comes out of an old book...
So now we are beginning to pay the price. No matter what we try to do, the price will get ever steeper in misery, pain, terror and despair for the victims, and frustration, anger and shame for the nation.
The best we can hope for is that Government agencies, voluntary and self-help groups and others in the "helping professions" can save one or two children or women from harm along the way and, if they're lucky, minutely stem the tide.
They will treat symptoms, rarely with success, but the fundamental causes, which are now so firmly embedded in our way of life that they are irremovable, will continue to fester and erupt and spew out their poison.
Nice purple prose there. You want to make with a point?
I have said it before and I say it again: The number one cause of abuse against women and children is abortion.
Here I was thinking the number one cause of violence against women was violent, misogynist, fuckwads who treat women as objects rather than people. Silly me! It's been the medical procedure known as abortion all along.
And isn't it interesting that, statistically, the leading cause of death among pregnant women is murder. Generally by her spouse. Hmmm.
Listen to the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Never mind that she was a Catholic nun; her views are held by scores of thousands of New Zealanders, and their logic is inescapable.
Mother Teresa was no saint. Logic was a far cry away. She supported the pope's line against abortion, contraception, divorce, women as priests. (Generally had a shitty idea about women.) Believed a woman's highest virtue was to her church and husband... (Oh, sorry, forgot who I was responding to for a moment.) Got off on playing "saving grace" to the dying but wasn't actually interested in curing anyone through even the simplest of means such as a round of antibiotics.
But when she got sick? She took herself right to the heart specialist in New York.
How's hypocrisy taste?
"... the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion," she said, "because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
Why don't you tell it to women and men who murder their born children? Who starve them, beat them, rape them, torture them? Oh, that's right, they don't rate as high as fetuses.
"... The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.
Mine seems to be just fine. Maybe it's the vasectomy...
"It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts - a child - as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.
Really, bringing a strange person into the world is not an intrusion or an inconvenience in both the mental and physical health of a woman? Not to mention the financial well being of her and her family?
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want ... It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish."
No. I'd think any country accepting abortion sees it as a matter of women's health care, and sees women as (I hope) intelligent and thoughtful and capable of making their own choices rather than being patronized by some Sky-Being.
But, of course, it's always better to raise children in poverty. To risk your life to birth them. To ignore whatever violence might be happening to you at the hands of your spouse/partner and bring that kid into the world (because, of course, a kid will set things straight in the family--make the man become stalwart and a provider and make the woman nurturing and everyone will dance and sing in a field of daisies while rainbows arc across the sky). What color's the sky in your little fuckwit world?
It was never intended that the law should provide open-slather abortion, but it was framed with at least one loophole so big that the pro-abortion protagonists were through it in a flash.
I keep hearing about this "pro-abortion" movement. And you know...I can't find any evidence of it. Sure there are individuals (like me) that are "pro-abortion" for ourselves.
I think the word you're looking for here is "pro-choice." But, of course, that doesn't sound nearly as wicked. It's harder to demonize a cause that invokes the word "choice," and works hard at making every child a wanted child, getting women and men access to contraception and sterilization, health care, child services, etc.
Better to side with the "pro-life" movement that gets the woman through 9 months, decides it's a job well done, then ignores the needs of mother and child to go back to heckling women who are trying to get into a clinic for their annual pap smear (you know, so they don't develop cervical cancer and die) or for refills on their birth control so they can continue to afford to take care of the kids they already have or properly plan for the ones they want.
The second major cause of violence against women and children is the belief held by too many women that they should not just be equal to men but, in all but physical appurtenances, are the same.
Translation: Shut the fuck up and make me a pie. Also: Quit thinking, you're making my brain hurt trying to keep up with you.
This is an illusion: men and women are different physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It astounds me that in this age in which knowledge of the makeup of the human being is greater than at any time in history, we will not concede that men and women are
genetically programmed for differing roles.
We are different but then we are not so different. And here he comes with evo psych bullshit (and he's likely someone who has little to no interest in actual science [especially the evils of evolution] or human behavior but simply glomps onto a few arguments that hold up his sexism).
Evolutionary biology is one thing, psych quite another.
Matt Ridley (The Red Queen, Sex, and the Evolution of Human Nature) argues: "The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savanna-dwelling ape. It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.
Neither men nor women are evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day...or to sit at a factory bench tightening screws....
The fact that "work" became a male thing and "home" a female one is an accident of history."
[...]
"Therefore there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks.""
Human behavior and motivation are complex. You can't just reduce us to a series of impulses or "genetic programming." We're far more than that. On average men and women may be more suited (psychologically) to one profession or another but there's no support for sexism about careers. It varies from person to person.
Further: I resent being relegated to little more than an animal acting on instinct. I have a large brain. Opposable thumbs. The ability to logic and reason.
Maybe your evolution is just not complete yet?
The assumption by so many women of the roles traditionally exclusive to men has left many men in confusion, frustration and anxiety, and more are lashing out because they feel their maleness is under threat.
Translation: Waah! I can't compete with women (and Asians, and African Americans, and Indians and...eek!).
Look at that word you keep using. "Tradition." An inherited pattern of thought or action, a custom that's long been practiced. It has fuck all to do with someone's sex chromosomes. It's a societally constructed concept: men do this, women do this. But, perhaps, you're not evolved enough to understand that.
And if the poor widdle mens feel their "maleness" is under threat, perhaps it's time for them to look at the patriarchal gender role bullshit and start questioning the status and norms of "masculinity."
I find that inordinately sad. You can call me a sexist until you run out of breath, but I believe that God left creating woman until last because he wanted to make sure he got it right. The result was the creation of the most perfect and wonderful creature in the world.
O.K. Sexist.
"Most perfect and wonderful creature." Oi. It's the classic element of the "Nice Guy." Put women up on pedestals, herald us as "angels in the house"; and pure and frail and all that is good. And what happens when we fall (and we will, pedestals are narrow places)? You get pissy. Disillusioned. Violent, even, when we don't live up to your high and mighty expectations because (oh shit!) we're people too.
And Gods forbid a woman decide to have a mind and a life of her own--you'll have to send her back to the factory for errors in her programming.
Sounds a lot like the profile of an abuser, doesn't it?
There are other reasons for the violence that riddles our society
I bet.
- multiculturalism,
So, the recognition of people of different races, ethnicities, faiths, etc and the welcoming of them into society as equals is a problem?
Do I need to Godwin my post?
greed generating poverty
Corporate bailouts? Global Gag Rules? Cutting funding for family planning?
and a growing deprived underclass,
Who might not be such if we would stop cutting funds for education (including sex education), and things like child care, among many other things.
television and the internet, for instance. They, too, present insoluble problems.
The internet? (Hallo Irony.) Yes, the Internet is truly evil. Because it allows people to get together in droves and find their commonalities and express their damned liberal opinions and motivate and mobilize and get factual information (after weeding through the trash) out at times when falsities and embellishments are running rampant (like, say: abortion causes breast cancer, or Mother Teresa is a saint).
So we will continue to reap what we have sown. Be assured that the harvest will be bountiful.
Oh, I look forward to it.
Just one more thing: Could we possibly get something more creative than the old "Blame the women" rhetoric?
I mean, it gets really boring after a while, you know?
But what do I know? I'm just a uterus, with legs, waiting to be filled up with some man's noble seed, right?
Because I've seen it several times (and someone posted it in a comm with this article).