Wednesday, February 21, 2018

The Bill of Things They Thought Were Important in 1791

The United States has an odd relationship with its Bill of Rights. One might say a fetishistic, nigh-sexual obsession with it. Not everyone's obsessed with the same amendments, sure. Hell, you almost never find a hardcore third amendment supporter. Except us. NO SOLDIERS QUARTERED! GET OUTTA MY HOUSE, YOU SOLDIER!

Aww...
But that ol' Bill of Rights, what a thing! What an important thing to wave around! So important that we need to constantly argue about the intent of the Framers! What they thought about these ten sacred amendments should determine what we do now, in the 21st century! Their thoughts were so important!

I guess we just need to ignore the fact that the great majority of them just didn't even want the damn thing in the first place.

No, really. At first only George Mason and Elbridge Gerry (the guy they named Gerrymandering after) wanted a Bill of Rights. Everyone else wanted them to shut up so they could get this damn Constitution thing over with.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

You're Not Alone

"No man is an island" is a common, if somewhat sexist, truism.

(Come on, those ladies? All islands. The lot of 'em. Can't stop 'em from shopping or being islands, amirite, fellas?)

Ahem.

As a truism, most of us kind of just take it for granted. Of course we're not islands. There are people everywhere, and we have friends and families and social interactions all the time. And yet the very fabric of our society (and when we say "our" we mean "American," cause that's where we live) seems to belie this fundamental and obviously empirical truth about humanity.

We'll explain.

Monday, January 22, 2018

Happy Roe v. Wade Day

Let’s set up a scenario:

We have a two year old child who, for medical reasons, requires another person to be hooked up to them via an IV to survive. If the child goes longer than several minutes without being hooked up to another person, it dies.

We didn’t say it’s a happy scenario.

Is it moral to force someone to hook themselves up to the child? The child’s mother, for instance? Should it be legal to force a mother to let her child use her body for survival? Why should it be the mother and not the father?

These are the questions we want the Fetal Supremacists, heretofore the pro-life crowd, to answer.

You see, the abortion issue amounts to people who think fetuses have special rights versus those who think fetuses have the same rights as everyone else. Yet it’s the Fetal Supremacists who frame themselves as the ones who want equal rights!

Confused? Fuck yes, we are.

Fetal Supremacists say that everyone, including fetuses, have a right to life. We agree on that. Where we disagree is when the fetus requires the use of another person’s body to survive.

If a fetus can survive on its own and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that fetus (now called a “baby”) should be removed (at the woman's discretion) and the baby gets to live.

If a fetus cannot survive on its own and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that fetus should be removed from the mother’s body.

If we can’t force a mother to be hooked up to her two year old, we shouldn’t force a mother to be hooked up to her fetus.

What the Fetal Supremacists are doing is this:

If a fetus is not viable and the mother no longer wishes to be pregnant, that mother must be forced to maintain the fetus against her will until such time as the fetus is viable.


Fetal Supremacists support granting special rights to fetuses, and they need to demonstrate why that is fair.