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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Yeah, I fully endorse this approach. This is why I added the "earnest" qualifier when I talk about the pro-life crowd, because I can't who exactly supports abortion restrictions because they genuinely believe it's akin to murder, and who supports it for other less defensible reasons such as wanting to discourage sexual promiscuity. The argument against promiscuity gets undercut severely the less risk sex has, and it's a big tell about the true motivation here given how much Christian groups opposed the HPV vaccine for example.

Promiscuity can't be bad and undesirable regardless of risk?

The promiscuous shouldn't be ashamed because they're syphilitic, they should be ashamed because they're whores. It's not the risk it's the depravity.

I didn't say it can't be bad, just that the argument against it gets cut severely. It's much more convincing to much more people to say "don't have sex because you'll get pregnant or get painful disfiguring warts" versus "don't have sex because it's depraved"

Sure, the whore is concerned with the negative impact of their behavior on them. I wouldn't expect them to be particularly moved by the argument that tolerance of the behavior is bad for everyone.

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I don't think that's the correct framing of how pro-lifers view these issues. Pro-lifers generally believe abortion is bad because it's murder, and also, and on an unrelated note some believe that things like the HPV vaccine and free contraception are bad because they encourage or enable or normalize sexual promiscuity. They're two separate issues, and they approach them from different perspectives.

Yes, I understand that. The problem is that the tension between the two issues will remain. If they somehow were presented with the hypothetical of eliminating all abortions but all women transform into insatiable sluts, I gather that some people will accept the bargain, but maybe for others it falls beyond their relative elasticity preference. I don't think either is an incoherent or inconsistent position to hold. But because of the correlation between "anti-abortion" and "anti-promiscuity", it also makes it hard to tell when specific objections are genuine and when they are just a pretext serving cover for the other.