I ask because it is my belief that if you speak fully and truthfully, it will reveal that your
opposition to abortion at any stage is solely a product of your religious beliefs, and that
you are working from that starting point to build a non-religious sounding rationale for
forcing your religious beliefs onto atheists and others who don't share them, and
proposing to get the government to help you do so.
I try to avoid getting into the specifics of the abortion debate, but your point is broader than that. You seem to suggest that it is wrong for a person or group to try to impose laws based on their religious beliefs on people who may not share those beliefs.
I prefer the term moral to religious, since you would probably object to the suggestion that you have religious beliefs but would probably accept the suggestion that you have moral beliefs. True?
The problem with your objection is that virtually all of our substantive laws (as opposed to procedural laws, such as whether you go on green and stop on red or vice versa) are based on moral beliefs. In every case, they represent the imposition by one segment of the population of their moral beliefs on another segment of the population. Laws against theft, murder, rape, spousal abuse, etc. all represent one set of moral beliefs, and impose those on people who do not universally share them. (If everybody truly followed the same moral principles, there would be no need for a law because nobody would do the wrong things. Laws are only needed where at least some people have or can be expected to do something the government thinks they shouldn't or not to do something the government thinks they should.)
It is perfectly possible to imagine, for example, a society where there was no such thing as theft because there was no such thing as property ownership. It is perfectly possible to imagine a society where might truly did represent right -- where the stronger had every right to take what she wanted from the weaker. Many parts of nature work this way. It is also perfectly possible to imagine a society where killing any life form, including spiders and mosquitos, would be illegal.
Our society does not impose these moral values through law, though it could.
What's the point? The point is that the whole principle of substantive law is the imposition by one faction of its moral beliefs on another faction. To go back to your post, then, if Neocon's moral belief is that abortion represents murder, whether that comes from his religious beliefs or not he is perfectly entitled to try to enact that belief into law and impose on you and others who may disagree with it. That's the function and process of law, and to shrink from it is to be false to (and dishonest about) what substantive law is all about. |
