If you get pregnant, McCain wants to force you to have it. No matter your interest in or ability to care for it. No matter the devastation to your life and its. No matter whether the inseminator has vanished. No matter what you think.
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one doesn’t have to visit any website of John McCain’s to learn the truth about his record. The above video says it all….in a nutshell.
McCain is an unusual presence in our polity. The press loves him. A surprising number of Democrats like him or admire him. Conservative Republicans dislike him.
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p>I’m guessing that Democrats (present readership excepted, of course!) have no idea how conservative McCain is. Too many probably think that his mavericky goodness extends to being neutral on reproductive rights — after all, that would be a maverick position for a Republican. It just isn’t his position. His jingoism, too, is a worthy target especially as the Bush Administration has given mindless jingoism a bad name. McCain’s carefully coiffed moderate image puts his jingoism in too soft a light.
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p>I’m wondering what other misperceptions exist among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.
have invariably been vets. they seem willing to put a lot of reservations about him aside because of that one commonality. i’m sure that there are non-military McCain-friendly dems, but i’ve never met one.
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p>btw, my local repub friends were both giuliani supporters. when he konked out, one went for paul, the other for mccain. the mccain supporter actually chose to work on caucus day rather than caucus. she didn’t really need the money… the paul supporter vows to vote for anyone other than mccain, and said of the dems he prefers obama because of his intial anti-war stance. i think it is significant that 2/3 of republicans are voting against mccain. i feel that the remaining gop candidates represent true, mutually exclusive factions, and that they will not unite cohesively. whereas the dems will unite into a very large, very tight voting force.
McCain supports abortion in the case of rape or incest, and says the state should take the woman’s word about whether she was raped or not.
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p>He certainly is opposed to Roe v. Wade, but that in itself doesn’t mean he is anti-choice. Many people think Roe was a bad decision because the Supreme Court legislated rather than decided a court case. They support laws by Congress to make abortion safe and legal. Indeed, one argument is that Roe was the worst thing that ever happened to the pro-choice movement, because it in many ways took the issue of abortion off the political table.
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p>In any event, you can find details of McCain’s position on abortion here. He got a 75% rating from the National Right to Life Committee, which according to them means his record is mixed.
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p>This is what his website says:
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I’m not sure a statement that includes the line
However, the reversal of Roe v. Wade represents only one step in the long path toward ending abortion.
counts as evidence that McCain isn’t 100% antichoice.
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p>One must also keep in mind McCain’s right-left-right shift as documented by Yglesias. Look at information from the last three Senates:
Yglesias guesses that McCain was annoyed at Bush after the 2000 election, thus the shift to the left. Whatever the reason this is a remarkable ideological swing. By contrast, one sees that Senators Specter, Cochran, and Imhofe maintain a stable position in these rankings.
to put financial and material supports in place for the women he wants to force to give birth? i’ve seen no indication of it, which tells me that he doesn’t want to support women through and after unwanted pregnancies, he just wants to force the birth. so most of that big quote you have above is warm ‘n fuzzy crapola.
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p>and what i said above is accurate. i never claimed that he didn’t have an exception for rape or incest. but now that you bring that up, i wonder why he devalues the life of a fetus made through rape or incest but not ones created by accident through consensual, non-consanguine sex. i’ve never understood that gray area some forced-birthers hold. either you value fetal tissue above all else, or you don’t.
Per Lakoff, the conservative narrative is that competition, punishment, and negative consequences have a morally purifying effect on the body politic. Women having enjoyable, consensual, non-procreatve, heterosexual sex is possibly sinful or socially harmful. So maintaining the negative consequence is morally upright. Making an exception for rape and incest fits with this moral perspective. It certainly does not fit in with some desire to save human life: after all, the product of a rape is still a human life. It fits the punishment frame much better.
mccain is on record saying abortion providers, but not women getting abortions, should be punished under the law. i’m not sure what this means in terms of lakoff’s theory, except that perhaps mccain is not a conservative’s conservative.
Yeah, it’s not necessarily about the fetus’s rights at all, but about equal reproductive rights and ensuring consent. Rape takes away a person’s right to control their reproduction, forcing one person’s will on another person and forcing them to become a parent. Abortion in the case of rape is OK because it restores a person’s right to control their reproduction. On the other hand, legal abortion takes away men’s rights to control their reproduction, giving women 100% control over men’s reproduction. So, outlawing abortion in cases of consensual sex also restores every person’s equal control over their own reproduction.
you are saying that both people having consensual sex should have a vote in whether an ensuing pregnancy is carried to term. but what if the two individuals involved disagree? who breaks the tie?
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p>if, under your line of thinking, a man should be able to force his wife to carry through a pregnancy, what other aspects of her physical life to you think he may legitimately control?
carry through. Neither one would force the other to carry through, if the law were the one forcing them both to carry through. The last possible equal legal decision point, where both have full control of their reproduction, is when they decide to have sex. After that decision, they should both be bound to it, because any decision after that is one person controlling another person’s rights, who may not want to reproduce with that person. But tough, because that is what is consented to when a man has sex, but not, with legal abortion, when a woman has sex.
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p>Now, the situation of both the man and woman desiring an abortion is interesting. I think it is because we can’t assume that that would happen that we can’t let people hope or assume that that is what would happen, back at sex time. Allowing for that possibility is a false hope of equal reproductive rights and itself creates the actual situations of coercion and unequal reproductive rights. The only time when each has full control without either taking control of the other is when they agree to have sex together. After that, its too late for there to be an equal decision.