leavethesky (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
leavethesky) wrote2006-02-19 05:59 pm
leavethesky) wrote2006-02-19 05:59 pm
OT -BSG 'choice' rant
A lot of people are using the latest ep of BSG as an entre into political discussion about choice. Actually, that's not true. They've taken the opportunity to sermonize me and other LJers with anti-choice rhetoric. So let me just get this out there so you people can de-friend me if you like:
You will NEVER convince me (not even the tiniest bit) that abortion (or birth control) should be illegal or even regulated. You know how important the Bible was in your household when you were growing up? That's how important a woman's right to control her own body is to me and my family. In my childhood home, a woman's right to choose was the holiest of Holy, right up there with First Amendment rights and that whole "separation of church and state" thing. Nothing you could possibly say or do would convince me otherwise.
So, please, defriend me if you must, just understand that I don't agree with you and simply writing more and more on the subject in angrier language really isn't going to change my mind. In fact, it'll just make me defriend you because I know I'll never change your mind either and I'll just end up getting pissed off and stressed out and really I can't be bothered. If we can agree to disagree and know that our love of femslash transcends all of our differences, great. If not, see ya! [/rant]
You will NEVER convince me (not even the tiniest bit) that abortion (or birth control) should be illegal or even regulated. You know how important the Bible was in your household when you were growing up? That's how important a woman's right to control her own body is to me and my family. In my childhood home, a woman's right to choose was the holiest of Holy, right up there with First Amendment rights and that whole "separation of church and state" thing. Nothing you could possibly say or do would convince me otherwise.
So, please, defriend me if you must, just understand that I don't agree with you and simply writing more and more on the subject in angrier language really isn't going to change my mind. In fact, it'll just make me defriend you because I know I'll never change your mind either and I'll just end up getting pissed off and stressed out and really I can't be bothered. If we can agree to disagree and know that our love of femslash transcends all of our differences, great. If not, see ya! [/rant]
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Okay, LJ is getting screwy so who knows if this will actually post.
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what i find most frustrating, i think, is the idea that in holding pro-choice ideals, one must somehow be overcoming an essential morality that assumes anti-choice is the more moral stance. that is, that i need a way to excuse my pro-choice beliefs, but that anti-choice advocates do not, as their position is hardly even in need of defense.
if that makes ANY SENSE AT ALL.
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However, this was not something I grew up with in my home, as it was for you. I myself developed this sensibility later in life when I escaped the confines of the small town where I grew up and against everything that I was (and still am) told by the right wing, bible-thumping-when-convenient family that raised me. My only reason for telling you this is to let you know (as I am sure you already do, but I want to make this clear just in case) that this later development of my own pro-choice stance, before which I pretty much just didn't take a position at all, is no less an integral part of who I am as it would have been had I grown up in a different context, and is also not malleable. It is not simply intellectual, nor is it academic, even if academia is where I learned best to defend my position on the matter. It is a matter of morality, of love, of what makes me the person I am. And what sickens me along with the anti-choice flame wars that arise around this issue is the domination and entitlement of the anti-choice right over the word "moral". Fuck that shit.
And one other thing I should mention is that I do think that some regulation is needed around abortion, insofar as it is a medical procedure that must first protect the health and welfare of the person seeking the abortion. In other words, regulation to make sure people aren't forced to get cheaper or more readily available abortions by dangerous means. You get what I am saying.
Anyway, yeah, you rock and I agree with you wholeheartedly.
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Exactly! I think it's time to retake that word 'moral' because it belongs to us as well. They've used it to beat us black and blue for years and I'm fucking tired of it. And for what it's worth, I think it's even more remarkable that you can come to your beliefs despite your upbringing. My parents were raised by racist, homophobic, anti-choice fundamentalists and I thank ghod every day that they managed to break away and raise me in a home full of queers, pro-choice freaks and minority lovin' liberal intellectuals.
Also, my fear of regulation comes from the fact that regulation typically equals restriction. But I'm all for a Choice Amendment.
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And for what it's worth, I think it's even more remarkable that you can come to your beliefs despite your upbringing.
Heh, it is so strange to hear it put that way. I mean, yeah, people say that all the time, but I didn't really experience my politics on this matter as a choice, much in the same way I didn't experience my being queer as a choice, although now I do the latter. But for me it just became a necessity, you know, a need to take a stand on something I saw so clearly. In fact it probably had much to do with my simultaneously emerging queer identity, this awareness that I was being told I could not be something that I felt so deeply, and that that all of these other oppressions, racism, sexism, anti-choice, everything, were coming from that same place and although different in their own way, were also affecting people in very similar and destructive ways. So yeah. I didn't overcome some restrictive upbringing to come around to the way I see things. Things just felt really wrong for so many reasons and when I started to look at them carefully I could trace the patterns so clearly. Pro-choice is part of who I am. Heh, the more I try to explain this the more abstract I sound. Forget me.