The Dobbs Decision Unleashes Rage and Revisionism
……this is fairness and balance in plain sight. Yet again the far right and the far left are specialists at striking symbols and beating drums to drown out rational discussion.
A determined effort must be made to alert the ear and sharpen the mind to separate sound and fury from actual meanings and precise comprehension.
The belief that all human beings are created equal is a matter of faith, a one size fits all proposition that facilitates the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
It is axiomatic that equal rights are inseparable from human nature but given the terms and conditions to which that nature is temporally subjected it is a logical impossibly to apply and enforce those rights to each and every one simultaneously. The right to equality is universal but the application of rights are hierarchical, one is essential, the other is accidental, which taken together defines the human condition on earth.
The tension between “ the right to life and the right to choose” is one of a myriads of competing rights in which absolutes are inimical to fundamental fairness and must be resolved with the full respect due to each.
Human rationality, existence itself, are more complex propositions. Over time, reason and experience have extracted something more akin to truth by the exertions of observation and the testing of hypotheses.
Revelation, according to some whose opinions are not to be peremptorily dismissed or disparaged, is a concoction of fear, wishful thinking and over wrought imagination. They conclude Revelation is an inferior substitute for science in the search for truth, a mindset fraught with error and muddled by “certainty”, a relic of the distant past that is rebutted by the history of hard-won ideas, tested in the crucible of disputations, aka, once known as heresies.
Countless victims have been tortured on the rack and burnt at the stake as punishments, or to obtain recantations, for what are now perceived as commonplace verities. Rivers of blood were shed not so others would act better, but to subordinate their thoughts and speech to enforced power, however transient.
All life has value ( based on rights, universal or hierarchical ) whether entirely sentient, or completely dependent, but all lives are not equal in the hierarchical sense. Still, all lives matter.
One life, therefore, is not entitled to act capriciously in deciding the fate of another, but must exercise its choice, not as an Empress precipitously, thumbs up or thumbs down, but thoughtfully, in accord with the precepts of right reason and with acute discernment. And this is particularly an obligation when the temporarily dominant life was an active agent and willing participant in creating the other.
Whether or not it brings that life to term may, depending on the timing and circumstances, remain an individual right and personal decision, but, given the precept that all life has value, it cannot be based merely on personal preference, nor can it be absolute.
Those who are possessed by a belief in the intercession of an Invisible Father at the instant of fertilization are entitled to their faith and to place trust in those prolific miracles. However, they should not impose that “faith” on the incredulous, or on the manifesto of secular humanists, or use it to incarnate Divinity within the deliberative processes of legislators or the adjudications of courts.