I would like to live in a world where a woman's freedom and her having children are not diametrically opposed.
I would like to live in a world where women do not have to sell sexual services. And I would like to contribute to articulating a political program that is concerned with creating that world.
If this makes me a person to be feared and loathed, well, so be it.
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Fear and loathed?
Ai Dios Mio!
That's a bit over the top since I don't recall anyone (certainly not me) saying you should be shunned or despised. You command precisely zero Panzer divisions so I'm surely not fearful. And I can't remember any loathe-worthy actions.
Although your declaration is lovely it's completely off-topic. I wasn't talking about abortion or sex work - for or against - or visions of the ideal world. I was focusing on your apparently gender-based judgments of moral fitness as exampled by the way you often frame your positions on those topics.
Reasonable people can disagree on a variety of subjects. But if disagreement is subtly fashioned as being the result of your debating opponent's moral failures we're leaving the zone of simple contention and entering a murkier area. This, I insist, is what happens when you make one of your (usually) cryptic statements on sexuality.
Indeed, Bill Bartlet leaps in to turn up the moralizing volume and provide us with a perfect example of what I'm on about:
The idea that we should accept prostitution as OK is getting the whole thing backwards.
The same as abortion.
It is entirely reasonable to rail against economic and social pressure to terminate a pregnancy. Let's not kid
ourselves about this. Its a symptom of our oppression, not a form of emancipation. It is scary that people see it as some kind of symbol of emancipation, such people are so deeply enslaved that they can't even conceive of freedom.
[...]
Which implies that the publishers of $pread magazine (GOOG, if you're unfamiliar) and like-minded folk are not merely on the other side of a question, but unable to "even conceive of freedom" (it also implies they lack knowledge of the world's insufficiencies). Good lord, that sounds very final! We're inspired to ask: well then, who IS able to conceptualize freedom? I suppose it must be people who hold the most strenuously opposed views to the ideas $pread and co. espouse.
Again, the point here is not that Joanna/Bill are necessarily wrong and $pread and co. are absolutely right. Rather, the point is to dissect and reveal the assumptions of greater moral vision which are tightly helixed with Joanna/Bill's dramatic pronouncements.
...
But listen, there's a super computer waiting in a very cold room for my skillful attentions . It's been patient, as is the way of silicon beasts, no doubt entertaining itself with international currency flows. Still, she may go HAL 9000 at any moment. I must hurry.
I'll leave things here for others to churn.
.d.