My Late Reply to the Uncle and Kleinheider

My god. I leave the continent for five seconds and return to find that Say Uncle and Kleinheider both have used the time to argue against me and remain unrefuted by me. Well, I’m back and, boys, I’ve got some questions.

For the Uncle:

1. Tubal pregnancies can’t be carried to term. Is ending those pregnancies “heinous, disgusting and deplorable”?

2. Is it “heinous, disgusting and deplorable” for a doctor to abort one fetus in order to give its twin a better shot at making it to term?

3. Is it “heinous, disgusting and deplorable” to abort a fetus with disabilities that will mean that it will die a horrible and painful death shortly after being born?

For Kleinheider:

1. You say

However, abortion is violence. It is murder. Once you have established that, as Uncle seems to, the negotiation must stop. At that point you must stand on principle and find a way to accept and/or alleviate the consequences of a prohibition that is morally and ethically necessary.

What is the proper punishment for women who have abortions? Life in prison or the death penalty?

2. You still have not addressed my concern that you don’t believe that women can have full citizenship. So, I’ll bring it up again. If a fetus has a right to life that ALWAYS trumps the right of the woman to do with her own body what she likes–including not carrying a pregnancy to term–you are saying that women have rights only as long as they don’t infringe on the rights of the fetus. There is no other group of people singled out by the law and told that their rights can ALWAYS be curtailed by another group.

Your position leaves no room for the woman’s rights to ever trump the rights of the fetus, therefore making me a different, lesser kind of citizen than you.

Maybe you believe this–that the state has such a compelling need to control what happens in a woman’s uterus, that women cannot be citizens to the extent that men can, but I’d appreciate you saying this out loud.

If you believe that women are equal under the law to men, how can you abide by the state controlling one of her internal organs?

I Did Fly through the Bermuda Triangle…

Orlando is some kind of hell, where parents and bratty children go to spend an eternity crammed into a small basement at the airport waiting to be herded onto a small plane and, then, hopefully, home.

For those of us who are childless, it’s not quite so hellish, more like a terrible seemingly-endless heck.

But finally, I got settled in my seat on the plane, and just as I was wondering if the woman who had been screaming at her son, blaming him for losing their tickets, would make the plane, one of the baggage handlers came up to me and said, “Ms. Pants? Ms. Pants. There’s no easy way to tell you this.”

And, World, I’m sorry, but I come from a land where the phone ringing after 9:30 or officials with worried faces means only that someone is dead. And so my heart leaped into my chest and I grabbed the arm rest, ready to hear that my life was ruined, that I had lost the Butcher.

So, when she said that my suitcase had been run over by something, possibly a plane, all I could do was laugh. “That’s all?” I asked.

“It appears everything is there.”

“Well, then,” I said, “what can you do? That kind of stuff happens.”

It’d be something if that were the weirdest thing that happened on my trip, but I called Sarcastro on Friday to see how the Wayward Boy Scout’s visit was going. They were busy punching each other in the head.

In traffic.

Driving down Charlotte, punching each other in the head. Grown-ass men.

I am sorry I missed that.

The Wayward (or Semi-Reformed, I guess) Boy Scout offered to meet me at the airport today. Of course, he did not.

Odin in the Havamal gives a long list of things one should not trust, including “the bed-talk of a woman, or a broken sword, the playing of a bear, or a king’s child, a sick calf, an independent-minded slave, a seer who prophesies good, a newly killed corpse.”

To that, we’d be wise to add “the suggestions of a drunken married man.” Shoot, if you could rely on the suggestions of any drunken man, I’d be married myself four or five times over.

That’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to give our semi-reformed Boy Scout a little trouble, as I have two new boob freckles and I’ll probably only get to show them to Sarcastro’s sugar momma before they fade.

Anyway, where were we?

My suitcase. Clearly, it was run over by something. But the only damage was to my deodorant, which was decimated. Everything else seems fine. And they gave me a snazzy new suitcase, so who can complain?