Random Things You Just Have to Wonder About

1.  When you hear them tossing around terms like ‘draft,’ when you look over at the men in your house who you love, or the boys who are just in high school now, does it also make you want to ask why a ‘draft’ is on the table, but rethinking our goals in Iraq doesn’t seem to be?

2.  In Illinois, unless you went to the University of Illinois or lived near the University of Illinois, you just didn’t get that excited about the University of Illinois.  It’s different here in Tennessee.  I’ve been to four weddings in which they played ‘Rocky Top’ at the receptions, and, apparently, even when you move out of the state, nay, the country, Tennesseans will still keep the Orange alive. (I don’t even want to know what’s going on with that cat.)

3.  The neighbor was out with his Staffordshire Terrier and the neighbor was throwing a frisbee and I was all like “What the hell?  What kind of person can train a pit bull to fetch?!”  But it turns out that the dog, though very interested in chasing the frisbee was not that interested in catching it and sure as hell not interested in bringing it back.  Hurray!

Mrs. Wigglebottom, for the life of her, cannot understand the point of fetch.  If she’s going to go to the trouble of chasing something, she’s not going to turn it over to you for fun.  She’ll hand it over if it’s a direct order, but not as a part of some game.  If she had to work for it, so do you.

I’m glad to see it’s a family trait.

I should have taken a picture of him smiling.  I swear, if you’ve seen a pit bull smile and can still hurt a dog like that, you have no soul.  Who can see something that enjoys life that much and set out to break that?

4.  The littlest nephew started kindergarten–in Georgia–on Thursday.  Unlike every other man in our family, when asked what he learned in school, rather than answering “nuthin'” or just shrugging, said that they had learned how to draw lines, which he already knew, but still liked doing.

Let us keep our fingers crossed that his mom will leave him in kindergarten in Georgia.  It makes me very happy that he likes school.

It’s Late, We’ve All Been Drinking, Let’s Go Watch the Anti-Abortionists Backtrack!

Y’all, I come home to find that the anti-abortionists no longer believe that abortion is murder.  I’m so stunned I almost don’t know what to think.  Is the worth of a human fetus tied to the stock market–the market plummets and suddenly a human life just isn’t worth what it was before?

Because I could have sworn that Ned Williams was all “Abortion is Murder!  Abortion is Murder!” and tonight he’s all

So, yes, I would have likely stammered if pinned down for an answer to the question, “How much time should she do?” I and most Americans think that abortion, like suicide, is something we ought to try to deter. I think that reality is lost on the folks at NIRH.

Oh America, how the tide has turned!  Suddenly, abortion isn’t murder–something a woman does to someone else–but it’s like suicide–something a woman does to herself.  A woman who has an abortion isn’t a cold-blooded killer who needs to be stopped.  She’s just a misguided waif in need of our compassion, and our reassurance that it really isn’t as bad as all that.

Can I take a moment to laugh?

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Whew, okay.  I’m done.

Why the change of heart?  Williams claims it has nothing to do with the whole “How Much Time Should She Do?” campaign and yet is it not that very campain that has caused Mr. Williams to redefine his stance from one of “abortion is a vile evil a woman does to her baby by killing it” to “abortion, like suicide, is a tragedy a woman commits against herself.”?  The folks who’ve run around my whole life screaming “baby killer” and “murderer” in women’s faces now decide they’re on the side of compassion and caring for those women?

That’s rich.

The article Williams links to is even richer.  Shall we take a look?  Come on, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The author, Ericka Andersen, is a hoot.  You’re going to love her.

Let’s start with her “Why can’t we just only arrest the doctors?”

Historically, women were not imprisoned for having abortions — the doctors who gave them were. From a moral standpoint, there were two victims — mother and child.  Why should it be any different now?

Yes, America, somehow Andersen wants you to believe that an adult woman who has gone through the trouble of discovering that she’s pregnant and come up with the money to pay for an abortion and showed up at the doctor’s office on her own is somehow the victim of the doctor.  You see, because women are idiots who need to be protected from ourselves in case we make a difficult decision we might have mixed feelings about later. 

You see, having mixed feelings or coming to regret having to take a course of action, those are adult situations and, historically, women haven’t really been legal adults and so we’re just not capable of handling those situations and so we need our daddies–in the form of the State or some other manly man to protect us from those mean old abortion providers who have been all tricksy with us.

Never mind that, in reality, historically, if there was a victim, it was conceived to be the father of the unborn child, since he had legal ownership of both his wife and their children.

She goes on:

A woman does ultimately decide, but that choice is often made under stressful, misinformed circumstances, which seem to make the woman as much a victim as her child. 

As much a victim?  Y’all, I thought these pro-life people believed that abortion is the taking of a human life.  Is Andersen really equating being under stressful, misinformed circumstances with being as much of a victim as a person who’s been killed?  Does she really think being stressed out is so vile or is she just being unguarded about how even she can’t quite bring herself to believe that a murder is being committed?

If abortion is murder, the doctor is a hitman.  Who’s ever heard of making  a equal victim of the person who hired the hitman as the person the hitman killed, just because she might have been stressed out and misinformed about what he was going to do?

She speculates that pro-lifers may not really believe abortion is murder because they won’t say that those who receive abortions should be punished as if it were. In reality, whoever commits the act of murder bears the punishment specified under law. In the case of abortion if the law properly labeled that murder — the individual to be punished would be the physician.

I can’t decide if she’s being deliberately obtuse or not.  But it makes me feel like the whole “How much time should a woman get?” is a good campaign precicely because pro-lifers either have to say that she should go to prison (or get the death penalty) or they have to look like they either think women are incapable of making adult decisions and thus can’t be held responsible for their actions or they reveal that they don’t actually think abortion is murder.

But wait!  It gets better.  Andersen brings in an expert:

Dellapenna notes that a legal focus on the abortionist rather than the woman is necessary in these causes because the law does not allow the conviction of someone on the basis of uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice.

“Courts even in the nineteenth and twentieth century justified continuing to treat a woman as a victim rather than a participant in the crime on the basis that one cannot consent to a crime against oneself,” he wrote in an email message. “This is akin to allowing a drug user to go free in order to convict a drug dealer.”

Dellapana said it is a better likely a better policy for abortion opposers to reject criminal punishments for women who undergo abortion.

This part is a lot of fun because you get to watch the backtracking in real time.  Check that first paragraph.  Dellapenna doesn’t actually believe that women are victims, just that treating them as such is more politically expedient than trying to treat her as an accomplice.  Well, so much for compassion for the “victim.”

Second paragraph, we can justify treating women like victims because one cannot consent to a crime against oneself.  But I thought that abortions were crimes against a fetus.  Isn’t that why it’s got to be illegal?  Because abortion is murder?  Because a fetus should be treated like a legal person with rights?  No, forget the fetus now that it’s inconvenient to conceive of abortion as a crime against said fetus.  It’s women, idiot women who can’t think for themselves, who are the victims.

Why?

Because lord knows if they started rounding up women and putting them in prison for having abortions the pro-life movement would become the least popular movement on the planet.  It’s one thing to say “abortion is murder.”   It’s another thing to start locking up moms and grandmas.

So, the backtracking begins.  “Oh, we didn’t mean murder murder.  We just meant that abortion is very wrong.  Oh, it’s not women who are the problem.  No, no, we didn’t mean to make you feel villified.  It’s those evil abortion doctors.  We’re not about punishing women; no, we love women.  We’re all about making women’s lives better, by treating them like children who can’t be held responsible for their own decisions. You’ll love being treated that way. We swear.”

It’s pretty funny.