CC:
One argument which is frequently used against the death penalty
*could* in principle be used against abortion. I can't locate the
exact passage in Wendy Lesser's *Pictures at an Execution*,
but it goes something like this: "I can just imagine a crime so
horrible that it deserves the death penalty -- but I cannot
imagine anyone so horrible that they deserve to impose the
death penalty."
>>
mbs: suggests a poverty of imagination, but of course this statement is not an argument, but an effort to avoid one . . .
The real seamless garment here is not the lives of fetuses and condemned murderers, but innocent victims in both settings.
>>
We have always known, though only materialists admit it out
loud, that death is a tragedy not for the dead but for the living.
The dead don't know they are dead. The death penalty, then,
is ultimately to be condemned because of its corrupting
effect on the working class, not because the condemned
do not "deserve" to die.
>>
mbs: this looks like a circular argument. Death penalty is bad because it corrupts the w.c., who becomes accustomed to the death penalty, which is . . . bad. By contrast, the killing of political enemies of the revolution, for which you have indicated tolerance, for some reason has no such adverse side effects.
Or even worse, this could be interpreted to mean that the
murder of someone whose death provokes no empathy of any sort is not a tragedy.
>>>
Now the right-to-lifers *might* argue that abortions brutalize
the public --
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mbs: What about regret for the loss of lives, potential lives, or lively appendices? How could you overlook this most obvious of motives? The actual methods employed and whether the fetus feels pain is only the province of the most lurid pro-lifers who carry around fetuses in pickle jars. It's a straw man.
>>
but they can't make that argument in good
faith because it is so obvious that the advocates of abortion
are, on most issues, far less brutal than the opponents.
I wonder how many right-to-lifers supported the humanitarian
bombing in Yugoslavia?
>>
mbs: Actually I would wager that a poll would find that more pro-lifers opposed the intervention than pro-choicers. For the most emphatic denunciation of the Balkans affair by a national political figure, we (you) have Pat Buchanan to thank. On the other side is the author of that policy and your compadre in the pro-choice struggle, William Jefferson Clinton.
mbs