Something that presidential candidate John Kerry (thank God it stopped at just candidate!) said sometime in the weeks leading up to the election was that while he held the belief that certain things were right or wrong (I forget whether the context was abortion or gay marriage), that he did not feel that he could legislate his beliefs on others.
This is a very scary statement to me. When did it become wrong for our laws to have some basis in morality? Is it merely because the belief is question came from his religious beliefs, rather than from beliefs that he arrived at through other influences? Why is it OK to legislate enforcement of some things that are right/wrong, like murder or stealing, but not other things, like abortion or gay marriage?
To narrow the focus, take abortion (no, I mean it, take it please – I don’t want it in my country!) Very few people would argue that it is not OK to force others not to commit murder, or at least to punish them for doing so after the fact. (Some will argue rehabilitate, but that is a whole other discussion that I am not going to take on here.) But when it comes to abortion, we are not supposed to say that it is wrong, because it is the woman’s right to choose. Right to choose what? To take another’s life because in doing so it will make one’s own better, or not as bad? What about the right of the baby to life?
I used to think that the argument must be that about when life begins, because that was the only thing that made sense to me. I mean, sure, if you feel that life does not begin until birth, then I can understand how you would feel that abortion was OK. I could not agree, but at least I could understand and have a place to start a discussion from. But the more people that I have talked to, the more I have realized that this is not the right argument, because most people that I have talked to don’t believe that life begins at birth, that it begins earlier.
But this leaves me out in the cold, because this seems to be very inconsistent. I mean, how can you say that the baby is a human, that it is alive, but purely and solely because it lives inside another person, that person somehow has the right to take away the life of the baby. But somehow, at the magical instant that the cord is cut between mother and child, the child achieves the right to life? What am I missing here? So many people that I have talked with hold strongly to this set of beliefs, but are unable to verbalize why this is a consistent viewpoint.
When I am involved in a discussion about political/moral issues like this, I am usually able to take into account the other beliefs and feelings and starting points, and be able to understand why the person feels the way that they do. Then at least I have a starting point from which to discuss. Two people just throwing their viewpoints at each other is a waste of time and never going to change anyone’s mind unless you can somehow understand each other. At least for me, because I do not enjoy an argument just for the sake of the argument. But I can just cannot understand the thought process that allows you to come up with contradictory beliefs, and somehow be OK with this.
Can anyone explain how this set of beliefs (murder is wrong, murder is taking the life of a human for personal reasons, an unborn child is a human, abortion is OK) is consistent?