The Great Debates We're Not Having
One of the ways leftists turn themselves from idealistic naifs into fascistic McCarthyite thugs is by convincing themselves there is only one side to every argument. There is their opinion and everything else is "Hate." The bullying brownshirts who engineered the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich were probably perfectly decent people when they were three- or four-years-old. They became the jackbooted blacklisters they are today when they taught themselves to believe in their own impeccable virtue and the evil of the opposition.
For the instruction of these aspiring tyrants then and as an aid to our own memories, let's remind ourselves for a moment of what we're actually arguing about when we argue about social issues.
1. Abortion. The debate over abortion has nothing to do with women's rights. There is no constituency in America (except maybe in parts of the Muslim community) that has any interest in limiting women's rights. Think of a politician running on the platform "Less rights for women." The number of votes he'd get would be vanishingly small. The debate over abortion is over one thing only: whether a fetus should be given protections as if it were a human life. If it should, a woman has no more "right" to kill it than she does anyone else. A debate on the complexities of this issue would be educational. Screaming about women's rights, wars on women or pregnancies by rape and incest (about one percent of abortions) are simply means of deceiving oneself and others.
Article printed from Klavan On The Culture: https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan
URL to article: https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2014/4/7/the-great-debates-were-not-having