This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You're still not taking the abortion-is-murder worldview seriously enough.
Try to imagine that you are sincerely convinced that abortion is murder. Suppose further that, as you say, the pro-abortion position is so popular among women that the only way to have a non-negligible chance of winning a national election is to stop being publicly anti-abortion.
A natural followup question is, why is the pro-abortion position so popular among women? What explains this fact? The way I see it, you have two main strategies for explaining this fact:
One is to accept the popularity of abortion as evidence for the claim that abortion is not actually murder after all. If we accept as a starting point that most people (including most women) aren't particularly morally heinous, then the widespread popularity of X is evidence that X is not isomorphic to "murdering lots of innocent people for no good reason".
Alternatively, you can go the route of claiming that most women (or at least a large enough number of women to matter for a national election) actually are morally heinous, because they support the unjustified murder of innocent people. In which case, that's a problem, and you have bigger issues to deal with than who wins the next election. That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.
The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.
(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)
This is, for what it's worth, the line that I think I most often see from pro-life organisations and activists. This might be just a factor of mostly encountering it in Catholic contexts, but the line is usually not that we just need to change this law, but rather that abortion is a symptom of a wider 'culture of death'. This sort of idea. However, evangelicals also make a similar argument (see parts three and five), emphasising the importance of shifting the moral vision of the country and building a culture that values life as such.
This would also be the argument against meduka's claims about eugenics - that is, even if we were inclined to believe the claim that abortion is eugenic, life is life, and we don't believe in killing people over a few points of IQ or a skin colour or a genetic disease. Human life qua human life is sacred, and the fact that there are people who would see to quantify and judge the worthiness of any particular life on criteria like these is just evidence of how far we are from a true culture of life. The rot runs deep.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a really good and concise treatment of the issue. @Goodguy's post to me (a pro-life right winger) reads like saying;
"It's justifiable to rob a bank if you're definitely then going to give the money to charity." Leaving aside some literary inclined young people, anyone can see the quandry that comes up. And that's how a lot of pro-lifers feel. "Just a little bit of abortion" is literally "Just a little bit of murder" to us.
But I will agree with @Goodguy on the issue of the centrality of the abortion issue. I think it is talked about too much. You can be morally resolute without always talking about how morally resolute you are. I'm in favor of never using the "A" word in politics. Simply say, "I want more stable families and more babies." If a pundit asks "How do you feel about [route into Abortion topic]" you respond with "Comply with the laws at you state level. I want more babies!"
More options
Context Copy link
And to me the answer when I see murder isn’t “let’s do something that won’t reduce murder” but “let me do what I can to reduce the number of murders.”
So I take wins where I can get them and then try to work on changing hearts and minds.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure how you land at the conclusion that uncompromising activism is the natural course of action. It's certainly one plausible course of action, but so is trying to dishonestly and cynically win elections in order to gain power to enforce one's intentionally hidden agenda, but neither strikes me as more natural than the other, and more importantly, it strikes me as even less likely to work than trying to win elections. If winning just one election isn't enough, then surely that calls for winning even more elections, rather than pivoting to uncompromising activism, which has a rather questionable track record. I think this primarily points to politicians, activists, campaign managers, etc. are really just not all that rational or competent and tend to follow what makes them feel good in the moment rather than what increases the odds of bringing about a future that they prefer.
More options
Context Copy link
Uncompromising activism, to the point of bombing abortion clinics, has been tried in the US and it failed. There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote. And in this context, the only thing one can do as a pro-lifer is to use convincing arguments and electoral politics. If a strong anti-abortion position prevents one from winning in electoral politics, it stands to reason that one should a adopt a less strong anti-abortion position, since it is better to win an election and then do at least something against abortion than it is to lose an election and merely imagine what strong measures one would have taken if one had won it.
And yet there is a whole arena of lawfare around protesting / demonstrating outside of abortion clinics, and a second one around crisis pregnancy centers.
It only takes a few hundred to a few thousand truly dedicated activists to do that though. The Westboro Baptist Church has under a hundred members and was able to grab national headlines and led to tons of lawfare.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link