Is Congress that subservient?

 

I saw part of a speech by Kamala Harris, talking about abortion. According to the VP, if Donald Trump is elected, Congress will pass a bill outlawing abortion coast-to-coast, which Trump will sign. But if Harris is elected, Congress will pass a law mandating abortion access in all 50 states, which she will sign. Does she really think that Congress passes whatever legislation the president wants?

I can see a Congress pushing or not pushing a piece of legislation, depending on who the president is.  For instance, let us say that the majority of Congress wants to shut down all oil drilling in Alaska.  If Trump is the president, they would be wasting their time, as he would surely veto it.  If Biden or Harris is president, a presidential signature is likely, so the members would try to pass it if they had the votes to get it past a Senate filibuster.  But the same Congress that would vote for a nationwide abortion ban if they thought they would get the president’s signature, would not pass a bill that does the opposite, just because the president would sign that one.  Everyone on this website already knows this, but any voters who were hoping they would hear less ridiculous BS from Harris than they have heard from Biden or Trump is in for disappointment.

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  1. OmegaPaladin Coolidge
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Complicating Trump’s problem is JD Vance, with his past comments about childless women and no rape exceptions regarding abortion.

    They need to drop all of this and set it at 12 weeks or something.

    24 weeks is viability. Expect no retreat from that for national abortion rights.

    Post-viability it may remain for the states to legislate, although the recent SCOTUS Idaho case showed even Justice Barrett had concerns about women’s health being impacted by a hard ban. There are many health concerns for women with problematic pregnancies, some of which can impact future opportunities to procreate. Laws which intimidate doctors create dangers for us all.

    I understand that you despise those filthy religious nutjobs who make up most of your party.  I would argue that there is a solid case for a heartbeat bill base on medical science.   Having a pulse is one of the most well known vital signs – if you don’t have a pulse, you are dead or close to it.  The fetal heartbeat is independent of the mother’s in pacing, and is easily detectable.  That assumes that you consider any fetus to be a person with legal rights.   I suppose you could be arguing for a pro-infanticide stance akin to many ancient cultures, but that seems a little extreme for the standard village atheist.

    One problem with poorly written health exceptions is that heath becomes quite elastic, and includes  mental well-being, so being unhappy is a qualifier.   There is fairly solid legal ground for saving a life at the cost of another, or not demanding someone to die for another person.  You just have to write it well.

    I do not see why doctors are specifically immune from intimidation by laws.   I’m sure you can think of all kinds of evil things one of the horrendous religious doctors might do.  I’m not sure if you are into the trans religion, but I think doctors should be intimidated out of altering a child’s biological sex or other such quackery.

    • #31
  2. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    I hope nobody here has a superstitious fear of religious people. 

    But it’s a big tent, with room for a lot of variety. 

    • #32
  3. Jim Kearney Member
    Jim Kearney
    @JimKearney

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):
    I understand that you despise those filthy religious nutjobs who make up most of your party. 

    If you’d take the trouble to read my profile you’ll see that I am not a member of the Republican Party.

    I’ve had it with the exclusionary attitude of the GOP towards pro-choice voters. Trump didn’t have one pro-choice contender for the VP job, and Vance was as intolerant and uncompromising a pick as there was out there. It was one thing to form broad voting coalitions before Dobbs. Now, all bets are off. All donations, too. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Others just don’t bother keeping Ricochet up to date on thinking outside its increasingly inconsequential little bubble.

    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults. Even most of the major organized religions aren’t listening to the fundamentalists anymore. 

    • #33
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults. Even most of the major organized religions aren’t listening to the fundamentalists anymore. 

    Society isn’t. The Democrats are. They aren’t satisfied with murdering babies, they also want to be free to mutilate children. I suppose we should shut up about that too.

    • #34
  5. Steven Seward Member
    Steven Seward
    @StevenSeward

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    I’ve had it with the exclusionary attitude of the GOP towards pro-choice voters. Trump didn’t have one pro-choice contender for the VP job, and Vance was as intolerant and uncompromising a pick as there was out there. It was one thing to form broad voting coalitions before Dobbs. Now, all bets are off. All donations, too. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Others just don’t bother keeping Ricochet up to date on thinking outside its increasingly inconsequential little bubble.

    Then I take it you will be voting for Kamala Harris.  This is disappointing.

    • #35
  6. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults. 

    If politics someday magically obeyed your wishes, I’d wonder if I woke up on the wrong planet.   

    • #36
  7. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    I’ve had it with the exclusionary attitude of the GOP towards pro-choice voters. 

    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box.

     

    • #37
  8. Steven Seward Member
    Steven Seward
    @StevenSeward

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults.

    Isn’t the reverse truer?  Democrats are much more known for imposing their values and putting strictures on their fellow  man than are Republicans.  They are also much more prone to hurling public insults, name calling, and shaming of their fellow man than are Republicans.  They are the purveyors of the “Cancel Culture.”

    • #38
  9. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):
    I understand that you despise those filthy religious nutjobs who make up most of your party.

    If you’d take the trouble to read my profile you’ll see that I am not a member of the Republican Party.

    I’ve had it with the exclusionary attitude of the GOP towards pro-choice voters. Trump didn’t have one pro-choice contender for the VP job, and Vance was as intolerant and uncompromising a pick as there was out there. It was one thing to form broad voting coalitions before Dobbs. Now, all bets are off. All donations, too. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Others just don’t bother keeping Ricochet up to date on thinking outside its increasingly inconsequential little bubble.

    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults. Even most of the major organized religions aren’t listening to the fundamentalists anymore.

    Abortions aren’t healthcare but birth control, and a horrendous form of birth control at that. It is an abortion, not pregnancy, that could make a woman sterilize. Abortion isn’t done to save a woman’s life, but to make her life more convenient. Doctors could always end an unviable pregnancy , like tubal pregnancies. I’m happy the party is biased towards pro life. Some of us aren’t into killing babies. 

    • #39
  10. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    The Trump campaign’s narratives outside that one issue are strong. By her former statements on many issues, Harris is the most radical left wing major party candidate to ever run for President. Trump will try to expose that, and suppress talk about what his SCOTUS picks did to take half-century old abortion rights away from poor women in red states.

    Why should he suppress it? The Court sent it back to the states where it belongs. Maybe in the future the court will have a majority that can hallucinate about emanations of penumbras (or was it penumbras of emanations?) long enough to scribble out sufficient legal twaddle to reverse the reversal, but in the meantime Trump will not sign legislation for a national ban.

    Now that I’ve fed, watered, and curried your hobbyhorse, do you feel better?

    Trump continues to change the topic off abortion because he knows Dobbs is his weakest point. That’s why his GOP platform purged 40 years of anti-abortion rhetoric. His political radar is strong enough to see that social conservatism could destroy the GOP.

    People use the arcane language of Roe to discredit and obscure the central finding: privacy rights are unenumerated rights protected by the 9th Amendment. The present court excluded abortion rights by 6-3 but there’s no way that lasts half as long as the Roe/Casey. The strong underlying foundation of the 9th Amendment remains (with contraceptive rights still protected in Griswold remaining so, probably unanimously as soon as the Court’s oldest members retire.) Future justices will also consider women’s reproductive rights implicit in the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

    Don’t even think about a national abortion ban. I hope and predict the voters will eventually have their say and pass federal legislation re-establishing the rights until viability per Roe/Casey. Congress will weigh in on numerating rights. I expect the filibuster will be suspended, just as it was suspended to add that anti-Roe justices to the court. If such a national abortion rights bill is signed into law by a Republican President, the anti-abortion movement will reach its effective end point.

    At that point private persuasion, support for adoption services, and perhaps pre-natal gene therapies will become the focus of “pro-life” advocates as the subject moves out of the legal realm entirely.

     

    If the country caters to the baby killers over the pro life folks and passes a law legalizing abortion, it deserves to decay away. I would hope Bible Belt states would sever ties with Gomorrah. 

    • #40
  11. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    DonG (CAGW is a Scam) (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Vance’s attacks on the childless is on the way to 5,000 comments, more than double the top number I’ve seen there for any editorial.

    The childless cat ladies are really upset about being called childless cat ladies. There were always going to vote Democrat/Socialist. The question is how will normal women react? Will they vote to improve the lives of families and future generations or will they vote to improve the lives of the cat ladies? Let’s find out.

    It’s insane to repeat Vance’s horrible words as if to defend them. Don’t you see the campaign and the conservative media realize what a blunder it was? Thousands of responses in the WSJ say so. Even Special Report on Fox did a piece on it today.

    Try not to live in a bubble. It was a weird thing to say and either the vetting team made a huge blunder or it was blithely insensistive to a huge voting demographic.

    It’s not about the three Democrats (one male) who Vance called childless cat ladies in 2021. It’s about every person in America with no children, including many of us angry enough with Vance to reconsider our voting plans so long as he remains on the ticket.

    I find nothing wrong with the statement in the context it was made. No species could survive for long if it failed to procreate at replacement rate. The western Europeans no longer procreate at replacement rate and now we have joined them.

    • #41
  12. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Complicating Trump’s problem is JD Vance, with his past comments about childless women and no rape exceptions regarding abortion.

    They need to drop all of this and set it at 12 weeks or something.

    24 weeks is viability. Expect no retreat from that for national abortion rights.

    Post-viability it may remain for the states to legislate, although the recent SCOTUS Idaho case showed even Justice Barrett had concerns about women’s health being impacted by a hard ban. There are many health concerns for women with problematic pregnancies, some of which can impact future opportunities to procreate. Laws which intimidate doctors create dangers for us all.

    Beating heart, brain, and ability to feel pain happen long before “viability”

    • #42
  13. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    DaveSchmidt (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Randy Weivoda: a speech by Kamala Harris, talking about abortion … (she says if she’s) elected, Congress will pass a law mandating abortion access in all 50 states, which she will sign

    This is the honest, if overly optimistic, part of her campaign promise premised on the Democrats winning Congressional majorities and eliminating the filibuster at least temporarily, to restore abortion rights.

    It’s an unlikely combination, but the strongest case for a Harris win rests on reproductive rights favored by a strong majority of voters. You may not want to think that’s the case, but you should consider the possibility that it is.

    A substack I get, Arnold Kling’s In My Tribe, posted an interesting Dan Williams essay link this week which applies here. Williams says self-serving (and alliance-reinforcing) narratives have widespread demand. Rationalizations create social rewards within a tribe and are more difficult to refute, especially in one’s own mind, than outright lies. We all have them. Political thinking is aspirational and powerful. Willing something collectively can help make it so.

    On the question of the abortion rights fight, the Democrat tribe expands to its broadest contours. So the hope that Dobbs will be overturned, either by changes in SCOTUS or by a new federal law which the present SCOTUS doesn’t have the political will to block, gives the (D) side an ideal narrative. That tribe’s good will is certain to shower down on Kamala Harris in the form of loyalty (including that of ballot harvesters in swing states), donations, and broad acceptance she might not otherwise deserve.

    She doesn’t expect the current Congress to pass a national abortion rights law. She hopes the issue will save her party some Senate seats and win close House races (as it did in 2022), and give her an edge toward the Presidency.

    The Trump campaign’s narratives outside that one issue are strong. By her former statements on many issues, Harris is the most radical left wing major party candidate to ever run for President. Trump will try to expose that, and suppress talk about what his SCOTUS picks did to take half-century old abortion rights away from poor women in red states.

    Complicating Trump’s problem is JD Vance, with his past comments about childless women and no rape exceptions regarding abortion. A WSJ editorial J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables this weekend on the topic of Vance’s attacks on the childless is on the way to 5,000 comments, more than double the top number I’ve seen there for any editorial. In 2024, social conservatism is political poison.

    If social conservatism is political poison, then the Republic is near death. Time for palliative care?

    Wrong. Our population is just getting over religious superstition slower than some cultures (and faster than others.)

    Oh, goodness gracias. Why is it always the atheists who think abortion is great?

    • #43
  14. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    If we do not stop the WEF’s great re-set, abortion rates might skyrocket.

    The WEF is not simply proposing a famine: they are implementing it.

    A starving populace will lack the ability to bring about healthy pregnancies.

    Every single day, it is possible to read about another food processing plant or some chicken farm or else a cattle herd that has been done in either due to a catastrophic fire, or due to the bird flu plandemic meisters. Amish farms in Missouri have recently become the latest victims in  a war on food producers.

    In 2011, there was a decline in America’s birth rate. At that point, some 12 million households had been foreclosed on while those who had caused the economic collapse were ordering up gold plated bidets.

    I do not know if that birth rate decline was due to fewer pregnancies or due to abortion. I think most likely the situation involved a combination:  there was both a decline in the number of pregnancies as well as an uptick in abortion.

    The Democrat nominee, at least the one with whom the party is aligned this week, has been called to task regarding her accepting “The Build Back Better” Guide to Economic Empowerment. She can’t explain it except to those who somehow find some meaning in her usual concoction of word salad. Most people who have analyzed this guide believe it to have been written by the WEF forces.

    It will also be hard to track over the coming months whether abortion is up or down. The COV jabs have impaired the ability to conceive. They have caused more miscarriages, and those occur even into the 8th and almost 9th month of the pregnancy. Still births are also spiking higher.

    Add in major  shortages of nourishing foods  that traditionally have allowed for American babies to be born larger, healthier and happier and we end up another few steps closer to the Deagle predictions for 2025.

     

     

    • #44
  15. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):
    I understand that you despise those filthy religious nutjobs who make up most of your party.

    If you’d take the trouble to read my profile you’ll see that I am not a member of the Republican Party.

    I’ve had it with the exclusionary attitude of the GOP towards pro-choice voters. Trump didn’t have one pro-choice contender for the VP job, and Vance was as intolerant and uncompromising a pick as there was out there. It was one thing to form broad voting coalitions before Dobbs. Now, all bets are off. All donations, too. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Others just don’t bother keeping Ricochet up to date on thinking outside its increasingly inconsequential little bubble.

    Society is telling social conservatives to go back into your box. Cease and desist trying to impose your values on others by force of law and public insults. Even most of the major organized religions aren’t listening to the fundamentalists anymore.

    Abortions aren’t healthcare but birth control, and a horrendous form of birth control at that. It is an abortion, not pregnancy, that could make a woman sterilize. Abortion isn’t done to save a woman’s life, but to make her life more convenient. Doctors could always end an unviable pregnancy , like tubal pregnancies. I’m happy the party is biased towards pro life. Some of us aren’t into killing babies.

    Hand out free Plan B pills instead of having abortions.

    • #45
  16. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    The Trump campaign’s narratives outside that one issue are strong. By her former statements on many issues, Harris is the most radical left wing major party candidate to ever run for President. Trump will try to expose that, and suppress talk about what his SCOTUS picks did to take half-century old abortion rights away from poor women in red states.

    Why should he suppress it? The Court sent it back to the states where it belongs. Maybe in the future the court will have a majority that can hallucinate about emanations of penumbras (or was it penumbras of emanations?) long enough to scribble out sufficient legal twaddle to reverse the reversal, but in the meantime Trump will not sign legislation for a national ban.

    Now that I’ve fed, watered, and curried your hobbyhorse, do you feel better?

    Trump continues to change the topic off abortion because he knows Dobbs is his weakest point. That’s why his GOP platform purged 40 years of anti-abortion rhetoric. His political radar is strong enough to see that social conservatism could destroy the GOP.

    People use the arcane language of Roe to discredit and obscure the central finding: privacy rights are unenumerated rights protected by the 9th Amendment. The present court excluded abortion rights by 6-3 but there’s no way that lasts half as long as the Roe/Casey. The strong underlying foundation of the 9th Amendment remains (with contraceptive rights still protected in Griswold remaining so, probably unanimously as soon as the Court’s oldest members retire.) Future justices will also consider women’s reproductive rights implicit in the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

    Don’t even think about a national abortion ban. I hope and predict the voters will eventually have their say and pass federal legislation re-establishing the rights until viability per Roe/Casey. Congress will weigh in on numerating rights. I expect the filibuster will be suspended, just as it was suspended to add that anti-Roe justices to the court. If such a national abortion rights bill is signed into law by a Republican President, the anti-abortion movement will reach its effective end point.

    At that point private persuasion, support for adoption services, and perhaps pre-natal gene therapies will become the focus of “pro-life” advocates as the subject moves out of the legal realm entirely.

     

    If the country caters to the baby killers over the pro life folks and passes a law legalizing abortion, it deserves to decay away. I would hope Bible Belt states would sever ties with Gomorrah.

    There is no intelligent public policy to get the birth rate up. 

    • #46
  17. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    DonG (CAGW is a Scam) (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    Vance’s attacks on the childless is on the way to 5,000 comments, more than double the top number I’ve seen there for any editorial.

    The childless cat ladies are really upset about being called childless cat ladies. There were always going to vote Democrat/Socialist. The question is how will normal women react? Will they vote to improve the lives of families and future generations or will they vote to improve the lives of the cat ladies? Let’s find out.

    It’s insane to repeat Vance’s horrible words as if to defend them. Don’t you see the campaign and the conservative media realize what a blunder it was? Thousands of responses in the WSJ say so. Even Special Report on Fox did a piece on it today.

    Try not to live in a bubble. It was a weird thing to say and either the vetting team made a huge blunder or it was blithely insensistive to a huge voting demographic.

    It’s not about the three Democrats (one male) who Vance called childless cat ladies in 2021. It’s about every person in America with no children, including many of us angry enough with Vance to reconsider our voting plans so long as he remains on the ticket.

    I find nothing wrong with the statement in the context it was made. No species could survive for long if it failed to procreate at replacement rate. The western Europeans no longer procreate at replacement rate and now we have joined them.

    We could employ some intelligent public policy to get the birth rate up. We don’t. 

    • #47
  18. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    If we do not stop the WEF’s great re-set, abortion rates might skyrocket.

    The WEF is not simply proposing a famine: they are implementing it.

    A starving populace will lack the ability to bring about healthy pregnancies.

    Not exactly my point, but pretty good. 

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):
    In 2011, there was a decline in America’s birth rate. At that point, some 12 million households had been foreclosed on while those who had caused the economic collapse were ordering up gold plated bidets.

    100% Dead-on. 

    I could think of a half a dozen things to get the birth rate up, and they aren’t considering any of them. 

    • #48
  19. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

     

     

    Red Herring (View Comment):
    No species could survive for long if it failed to procreate at replacement rate. The western Europeans no longer procreate at replacement rate and now we have joined them.

    We could force it at gunpoint. 

    • #49
  20. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Steven Seward (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    It’s insane to repeat Vance’s horrible words as if to defend them. Don’t you see the campaign and the conservative media realize what a blunder it was? Thousands of responses in the WSJ say so. Even Special Report on Fox did a piece on it today.

    Try not to live in a bubble. It was a weird thing to say and either the vetting team made a huge blunder or it was blithely insensistive to a huge voting demographic.

    Vance’s comment, while not advisable for a politician, is nowhere as bad as hundreds of the things Donald Trump has said. Do you think it was a blunder to nominate Trump?

    It’s not about the three Democrats (one male) who Vance called childless cat ladies in 2021. It’s about every person in America with no children, including many of us angry enough with Vance to reconsider our voting plans so long as he remains on the ticket.

    I think Americans (mostly democrats) have generally become too sensitive to perceived personal slights. That’s why so many comedians lament that they cannot ply their trade for fear of offending some minority group. If this one comment by Vance makes you angry enough to reconsider your voting plans, what about when Biden suggested that Republicans were going to put Black people back in chains? Or any number of Kamala Harris’s “word salads” where she displays the verbal IQ of a bunch of spinach. Do those cause you any reflection on your voting plans, too?

    On top of what you are expressing Steven, once a person takes the time to read the entire statements Vance made, there is nothing in them that is upsetting. When his words are taken out of context, sure they smack of 1940’s paternalism. (1940’s Excuse for a Preacher: “Now you fine lil ladies need to remember that God put you on the planet to bring forth babies and if any of you  were meant to have a brain, he’d have given you gals one.”)

    But his top supporters say when they have read his statements inside  the context of his full  remarks, he is simply advocating for everyone in the family, from mom and dad to the kids, to be aware of the necessity of structuring a family life so each person can achieve the most.

     

    • #50
  21. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    How much decent prenatal care can the government force? 

    Nobody asks the question. 

    • #51
  22. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    If shelter affordability got 80% worse, which it did since Biden got into office, why should you have a baby? 

    Etc.

    • #52
  23. Steven Seward Member
    Steven Seward
    @StevenSeward

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Abortions aren’t healthcare but birth control, and a horrendous form of birth control at that.

    Jim Kearney is into that leftist game of making up pleasant sounding names for things they support that are disgusting to the average person.  That’s why they call killing babies “reproductive health care” and “a right to choose.”  Even using the original word “abortion” is a cowardly ploy meant to obfuscate the fact that it is taking an innocent human life.

    He also clarified that a “fetus” is not a baby, as if anybody in the English speaking world has ever asked a pregnant woman about her “fetus.”

    • #53
  24. Randy Weivoda Moderator
    Randy Weivoda
    @RandyWeivoda

    Red Herring (View Comment):
    Oh, goodness gracias. Why is it always the atheists who think abortion is great?

    It’s not as black-and-white as that.  I’m not going to name names, but I know multiple Ricochet members who are atheists or agnostics who oppose abortion.  And outside of Ricochet, I know people who are church-goers who think abortion should be legal.

    • #54
  25. Steven Seward Member
    Steven Seward
    @StevenSeward

    Randy Weivoda (View Comment):

    Red Herring (View Comment):
    Oh, goodness gracias. Why is it always the atheists who think abortion is great?

    It’s not as black-and-white as that. I’m not going to name names, but I know multiple Ricochet members who are atheists or agnostics who oppose abortion. And outside of Ricochet, I know people who are church-goers who think abortion should be legal.

    I’m an agnostic who opposes abortion (though not fully 100%).  Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are supposedly practicing Catholics and fully support abortion up to birth, and possibly thereafter.

    • #55
  26. Painter Jean Moderator
    Painter Jean
    @PainterJean

    Steven Seward (View Comment):

    Randy Weivoda (View Comment):

    Red Herring (View Comment):
    Oh, goodness gracias. Why is it always the atheists who think abortion is great?

    It’s not as black-and-white as that. I’m not going to name names, but I know multiple Ricochet members who are atheists or agnostics who oppose abortion. And outside of Ricochet, I know people who are church-goers who think abortion should be legal.

    I’m an agnostic who opposes abortion (though not fully 100%). Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are supposedly practicing Catholics and fully support abortion up to birth, and possibly thereafter.

    They are emphatically not “practicing Catholics,” regardless of how they choose to self-identify. A practicing Catholic accepts the teaching of the Catholic Church – the acceptance of that is part of being a practicing Catholic, and her teaching is accepted because we believe the Church was founded and given her authority by Christ. 

    I know of atheists who oppose abortion. The pro-abortion types like to dismiss opposition to abortion as merely a religious curiosity, but that’s certainly not the case.

    • #56
  27. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):
    The Trump campaign’s narratives outside that one issue are strong. By her former statements on many issues, Harris is the most radical left wing major party candidate to ever run for President. Trump will try to expose that, and suppress talk about what his SCOTUS picks did to take half-century old abortion rights away from poor women in red states.

    Why should he suppress it? The Court sent it back to the states where it belongs. Maybe in the future the court will have a majority that can hallucinate about emanations of penumbras (or was it penumbras of emanations?) long enough to scribble out sufficient legal twaddle to reverse the reversal, but in the meantime Trump will not sign legislation for a national ban.

    Now that I’ve fed, watered, and curried your hobbyhorse, do you feel better?

    Trump continues to change the topic off abortion because he knows Dobbs is his weakest point. That’s why his GOP platform purged 40 years of anti-abortion rhetoric. His political radar is strong enough to see that social conservatism could destroy the GOP.

    People use the arcane language of Roe to discredit and obscure the central finding: privacy rights are unenumerated rights protected by the 9th Amendment. The present court excluded abortion rights by 6-3 but there’s no way that lasts half as long as the Roe/Casey. The strong underlying foundation of the 9th Amendment remains (with contraceptive rights still protected in Griswold remaining so, probably unanimously as soon as the Court’s oldest members retire.) Future justices will also consider women’s reproductive rights implicit in the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

    Don’t even think about a national abortion ban. I hope and predict the voters will eventually have their say and pass federal legislation re-establishing the rights until viability per Roe/Casey. Congress will weigh in on numerating rights. I expect the filibuster will be suspended, just as it was suspended to add that anti-Roe justices to the court. If such a national abortion rights bill is signed into law by a Republican President, the anti-abortion movement will reach its effective end point.

    At that point private persuasion, support for adoption services, and perhaps pre-natal gene therapies will become the focus of “pro-life” advocates as the subject moves out of the legal realm entirely.

     

    If the country caters to the baby killers over the pro life folks and passes a law legalizing abortion, it deserves to decay away. I would hope Bible Belt states would sever ties with Gomorrah.

    There is no intelligent public policy to get the birth rate up.

    If is a cultural problem

    • #57
  28. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Steven Seward (View Comment):

    Jim Kearney (View Comment):

    It’s insane to repeat Vance’s horrible words as if to defend them. Don’t you see the campaign and the conservative media realize what a blunder it was? Thousands of responses in the WSJ say so. Even Special Report on Fox did a piece on it today.

    Try not to live in a bubble. It was a weird thing to say and either the vetting team made a huge blunder or it was blithely insensistive to a huge voting demographic.

    Vance’s comment, while not advisable for a politician, is nowhere as bad as hundreds of the things Donald Trump has said. Do you think it was a blunder to nominate Trump?

    It’s not about the three Democrats (one male) who Vance called childless cat ladies in 2021. It’s about every person in America with no children, including many of us angry enough with Vance to reconsider our voting plans so long as he remains on the ticket.

    I think Americans (mostly democrats) have generally become too sensitive to perceived personal slights. That’s why so many comedians lament that they cannot ply their trade for fear of offending some minority group. If this one comment by Vance makes you angry enough to reconsider your voting plans, what about when Biden suggested that Republicans were going to put Black people back in chains? Or any number of Kamala Harris’s “word salads” where she displays the verbal IQ of a bunch of spinach. Do those cause you any reflection on your voting plans, too?

    On top of what you are expressing Steven, once a person takes the time to read the entire statements Vance made, there is nothing in them that is upsetting. When his words are taken out of context, sure they smack of 1940’s paternalism. (1940’s Excuse for a Preacher: “Now you fine lil ladies need to remember that God put you on the planet to bring forth babies and if any of you were meant to have a brain, he’d have given you gals one.”)

    But his top supporters say when they have read his statements inside the context of his full remarks, he is simply advocating for everyone in the family, from mom and dad to the kids, to be aware of the necessity of structuring a family life so each person can achieve the most.

     

    As many times as the left takes comments out of context, the republicans still fall for it.

    • #58
  29. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Steven Seward (View Comment):

    Red Herring (View Comment):

    Abortions aren’t healthcare but birth control, and a horrendous form of birth control at that.

    Jim Kearney is into that leftist game of making up pleasant sounding names for things they support that are disgusting to the average person. That’s why they call killing babies “reproductive health care” and “a right to choose.” Even using the original word “abortion” is a cowardly ploy meant to obfuscate the fact that it is taking an innocent human life.

    He also clarified that a “fetus” is not a baby, as if anybody in the English speaking world has ever asked a pregnant woman about her “fetus.”

    I just assume guys love abortion because it absolves them of responsibility for what their behavior causes.

    • #59
  30. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Randy Weivoda (View Comment):

    Red Herring (View Comment):
    Oh, goodness gracias. Why is it always the atheists who think abortion is great?

    It’s not as black-and-white as that. I’m not going to name names, but I know multiple Ricochet members who are atheists or agnostics who oppose abortion. And outside of Ricochet, I know people who are church-goers who think abortion should be legal.

    You are right. I should have written “mostly” instead of “always.” 

    • #60
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