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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (677754)	3/31/2005 3:19:30 PM
From: DizzyG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

More disingenuous posting from you, Kenneth... You state: you wish to make every issue a matter of right versus left or liberal versus conservative. And yet your very own posting history shows one and all that you can be accused of the very same thing: My conservative, Republican friends at church are all members of ARRP. They join for the travel and insurance benefits. Message 21186032 You could have simply stated: "My friends at church are all members of ARRP. They join for the travel and insurance benefits.". Alas, you decided to a partisan comment instead. Perhaps you should pay more attention to your own words: Issues are usually more complex than that but simple minded people like to simplify things. Just more disingenuous posting from you, Kenneth. Diz-

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (677754)	3/31/2005 3:24:18 PM
From: DizzyG	Respond to of 769667

BTW Kenneth, when are you going to admit you lied about this: Message 21162704 Alas, it appears that you lack integrity. Why am I not surprised. Diz-

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (677754)	3/31/2005 6:29:19 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769667

Why? Part of it surely has to do with abortion politics. In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, as we've argued, American liberals have supported ever-more-extreme pro-abortion positions (and we say this as someone who is moderately pro-choice on the issue). Defending such practices as partial-birth abortion entails the dehumanization of unborn life, and the dehumanization of other "incomplete" forms of life follows logically from this. As Carol Stahl argues in the Amarillo (Texas) Globe: Because they are not persons, fetuses are not entitled to the same extensive rights as persons. Pregnant women are persons. And, as bioethics professor Andrew Johnson wrote in the February/March issue of Free Inquiry magazine, "Persons cannot rightly be forced to make their bodies available as incubators to unwanted nonpersons for nine months, especially considering the physical dangers, emotional trauma, and drastic life-changes pregnancy often entails." Johnson also stated that "(t)he vast majority of human beings are persons, because they exhibit the qualities generally thought to be characteristic of persons: intelligence, autonomy, self-awareness, emotion, future-regarding intentions, and moral responsibility, among others." But Johnson reminds us that not all human beings are persons. Brain-dead humans sustained by life support are one familiar, tragic example. Mrs. Schiavo was neither on life support nor brain-dead; she was unable to swallow and in a persistent vegetative state, which means she lacked higher cognitive functions, but her brainstem was not substantially damaged. But for many, that's enough to declare that she was no longer a person. As we've noted repeatedly, advocates for the disabled worry--to our mind, quite reasonably--that they may be the next to be defined out of "personhood." In a fascinating essay for The Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen argues that what went wrong in the Schiavo case was that "procedural liberalism"--the respect for Mrs. Schiavo's right to make her own decisions--gave way to "ideological liberalism"--the presumption that because she was unable to make such decisions, her life was worthless: Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person's dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all--everyone else is "life unworthy of life." This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe--whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism's betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for. Opinion on the Schiavo case did not split along traditional left-right lines, of course; libertarian-leaning conservatives tended to side with those who wished to pull her feeding tube. Autonomy and compassion are both important values, and there are dangers in overvaluing either at the expense of the other. It does seem, though, that the "religious right," for better or worse, has supplanted the liberal left as the political faction that most strongly and consistently advocates compassion in social policy.