Here, from Newsweek's illuminating cover story on Mike Huckabee, is why (Ron Paul excepted), Huckabee is the most interesting and challenging of the current crop of GOP politicians:
D
emocrats expected the worst of their new evangelical, Republican governor, who welcomed anti-abortion activists to the mansion and tried to pass a law outlawing gays and lesbians from adopting children. But they discovered that Huckabee's "do unto others" world view also led him to push for more money for schools and a health-care program for poor children that became a model for other states. When he took office, he found that the state's roadways were falling apart. Huckabee supported controversial legislation that would raise gas taxes to fix them. Some of his fellow Republicans were furious, but voters went along. Huckabee served out his first term and was re-elected twice by wide margins. Even as a Republican in fractious Democratic Arkansas, he maintained approval ratings in the high 50s.
Huckabee screws up the categories we've become accustomed to over the past 30 years. He's fairly progressive on economics, while very conservative on culture. This is pretty close to where many Democrats used to be, before cultural issues began to dominate American politics. The Huckabee campaign challenges both liberals and conservatives. For the left, it raises the question of whether it's worth giving on cultural issues to get more of what they want economically; and for the right, it raises the question of whether the culture war that so many conservatives have embraced as a political cause is really what they care about, or if, in the end, it was just a useful set of slogans and attitudes to mask a pro-business agenda.
Read the data on the most recent Pew Center study on American political typology -- especially the section on "shifting coalitions." You'll find that most Republican voters identify themselves as socially conservative, but more favorably disposed to economic progressivism. And you'll find that conservative Democrats are there too (their conservatism, in other words, is cultural). Huckabee may not win, but it seems that his version of populism hits a sweet spot in the emerging American political order. His rise is not just about his folksy personality.
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Just a few more questions for you, Rob G., if you feel like answering them. Because I'm not sure that I have understood what you meant to say. You give two reasons why men should have equal jurisdiction over pregnancies.
A] 50% of the unborn children in question are male You seem to be saying that, if I have conceived a male fetus, you, as a completely unrelated male adult, have some kind of stake in this process simply because both you and the fetus have a Y chromosome. That makes no sense to me, so I'm thinking that maybe this is not what you really intended to convey. Could you perhaps explain this?
B] the unborn children in question most of the time have fathers. This makes slightly more sense, if one assumes that the pregnancy occurred via cooperative effort with a man who was committed to creating and supporting the resulting child. However, in such a case, it seems to me that a man would not have anything to fear from the woman's decision. She would want a child as much as he did. And if she did have second thoughts about continuing the pregnancy, it hardly seems that the correct response from him would be "Well, you're stuck with it because abortion is illegal and I'll have you thrown in jail if you won't bear my child! So HA!" Hardly a good foundation for a happy family life.
More commonly, a man has sex with a woman with no intention or wish to have a child, no intention or means of supporting one. Should he then have control over the woman's actions because he irresponsibly made her pregnant? You seem to be saying that he should--indeed, that men in general rightfully have the final say in whether a woman bears a child. That doesn't seem reasonable, so I invite you to explain how I've misread your statement.
Now I realize that neither of these facts mean anything to a lot of feminists and their self-loathing male fellow-travelers
Again, you haven't made your thoughts altogether clear. Are you saying that feminists don't love 50% of their children? Or that feminists by definition have little care for the fathers of their children? That would surprise my husband and sons . . . . You also seem to be saying that all male friends of feminists hate themselves. Again, that would be rather puzzling to most of my friends. I'm trying to put a charitable construction on this and imagine that you are actually trying to convey meaning here, rather than being gratuitously insulting. Perhaps you spoke hastily and meant something different from what has come across to me . . .?
[abortion is murder]
"Because it's actually a belief derived from misunderstandings and paganism, from plant fertility cult religion."
But why would that make it a false belief? I'm sure plant fertility cult religious practitioners know a lot more about plants and fertility than the average stock broker.
No doubt. But this isn’t a gardening question. And because the fundamental analogy is wrong- last I checked, human beings are not part of the Plant Kingdom, whose reproduction and role of reproduction in their adult lifespan differs qualitatively from that of animals. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Jillian's biblical argument has been responded to ad nauseum. In fact, I did so myself in a 1991 piece: "A Critical Appraisal of the Theological Arguments for Abortion Rights," Bibliotheca Sacra 148 (July-September 1991): 337-355.
You can find it on my website at the bottom of this page:
Oh boy. I’m glad you term your writing a “response”. I do have sympathy for the motivation, and I agree with your general Biblical exegesis and its deeply pious character. But that attempt to explain away the Numbers 5 problem by parts… frankly, I’m embarrassed for you and the scholars from whom you took it. That can’t even stand up to the original Hebrew text, its logic, or context.
I've had occasion to see with my own eyes on 2 occasions,the ultrasounds of 5 week old human embryos (aka beating grains of rice).
I've also had the chance to see those little beating grains later at their 1st birthday parties. Choose to accept it or not. Abortion extinguishes a human life.
The less magical thinking-based interpretation of your experience is that of the ultrasound machine used as a crystal ball, to see a Higher Plane in which all is preformed and already known/made.
Then there’s the doctrine of analogy, that the person you see before you is the same thing as what you saw in the crystal ball.
And then there’s the doctrine of willpower, of assertion creating reality and certainty.
Hmmm. You’ve illustrated rather well all three doctrines of occultic belief systems of Eliphas Levi. No wonder you know things no one else can claim certainty of.
In my opinion, your last sentence should properly read “Abortion extinguishes a potential human life”.
You sound so off the wall that I'm not even sure where to start with you. First, I would argue that abortion is murder irrespective of religion. It doesn't take religion to see this, just basic observation of what goes on.
No it isn’t. You have to have a magical belief of personhood of a few cells to pretend that.
If I was an atheist, I would still believe abortion was murder (as indeed a few atheists do), though I wouldn't care since if I was an atheist I wouldn't care about morality.
Trust me, atheists consider this belief of yours insane- that's declaring yourself a deity and becoming an immoralist.
From experience and study, every group that sustains itself over time develops a moral code. You may want to learn a few basics of what anthropologists have made firm knowledge.
But since I am a Christian I do care.
I wish you cared about things because you have a heart, a mind, and a soul. Which I'm sure you do, but perhaps they need some work to work together again.
Christians oppose abortion because they oppose murder. But maybe you think that comes for plant cult fertility religion or some such nonsense as well.
Thank you for the obloquy, but in fact everyone of sense opposes murder. Whether abortion is murder is opinion, not a fact.
As for your comments about social conservatives, demonic possession?! Sorry, you're completely in outer space on that.
Well, maybe you can explain to me why the social conservative belief is that homosexuality can be contracted from TV, or magazines, or the Internet, or physical proximity to gay people, or the wrong parents. And why social conservatives believe homosexuality can be suppressed or destroyed by enough prayer and study of the Bible. (Check out those Christian outfits that supposedly make people ex-gay.) And why in the past homosexual people were commonly killed when discovered in most Christian lands, which was only otherwise permitted for homocidal maniacs, witches. Now compare that to exorcism.
Likewise, have a look at the beliefs underlying the (oh so Christian) death penalty.
And why do social issues have to be settled first? Why do economic issues have to take a backseat? Sounds to me like a change of priorities.
Because when, as demonstrated in 1993/94, too many white people object to their money and more limited hospital resources being spent on unworthy poor black or Latino or gay people, you can’t get agreement to universal health care, and you keep the inefficient and easily abusive class-segregated kind we still have.
Because when employers bring in illegals to work for less than local citizens, the problem isn’t minimum wage laws. It’s that we allow for an inferior class of worker to exist.
Sigaliris, would you also favor a national referendum on welfare and only allow taxpayers to vote? Call me crazy, but I think there'd be some constitutional problems with that.
DavidTC, did it ever occur to you that maybe abortion will prove to be its own undoing? After all, tribes that kill their young tend not to survive (see http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005277).
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